Outreach & Community
Outreach is an important component of grunt's pubic-facing digital presence, and currently, grunt's primary methods for digital outreach include an email newsletter managed using MailChimp email marketing, an Instagram page, a Facebook page, and an X.com page.
grunt also manages the Mount Pleasant Community Art Screen Instagram page.
grunt's outreach and social media channels are updated somewhat regularly, however, at the time of writing grunt's X.com account has not been updated since October 4, 2023.
INFO
Out of all of the sections in this report, this section is perhaps to be taken with a "grain of salt". The methods described here depend on the person carrying out the tasks, their outreach style, and the quickly changing ways that we communicate digitally.
Consistency across outreach methods
A goal for grunt's digital outreach and social media strategy can be to aim for consistency across digital platforms and to minimize the labour required to make social media posts.
Content writing and social media updating is incredibly time-consuming, therefore efforts need to be directed to where they may carry the most impact and reach the widest audience.
Utilizing tools such as Chat GPT, Readable, and Grammarly may help to ease the workload of writing image descriptions, text summaries, and translations. If these tools are leaned upon heavily, it would be transparent to flag the use of these tools as providing support within the context of Accessibility.
There is a case to be made for consolidating grunt's social media into fewer channels that reache the largest audience, so that staff efforts do not need to be duplicated across multiple platforms; or, if maintaining a presence across multiple platforms is important to grunt, the benefits of post automation software such as Hootsuite can be explored.
A benefit of using automated social media software is that it provides feedback data for building a social media strategy. A not-for-profit discount on social media software is offered through TechSoup. Gathering data is possibly the single most important component of building a social media strategy, to assess if efforts are worthwhile.
It is unclear as to why the MPCAS Instagram account is necessary when grunt is the organisation that coordinates the MPCAS programming and has a larger audience on the @gruntgallery Instagram account.
It might make sense to channel the MPCAS content through the grunt gallery Instagram account to reach the widest audience, and not maintain the MPCAS account.
Making an online store that links to Instagram shopping can give you extra content during slow times, and possibly lead to more sales.
Writing for social media
Writing and content generation workflows can be established for long, medium, and short-form content. Establishing a social media style/writing guide can formalize writing workflows to distribute the responsibility across different people.
For example, lengthy texts are less likely to be read on social media and the character counts on social media platforms limit long-form content. When curatorial texts are being constructed, they can include short-form descriptions that can be adapted to social media, which can alleviate the content-editing task of adapting a long-form text.
Persistency across time
Email newsletter send-outs can be scheduled to go out regularly rather than being event-driven. Sharing some new information while repeating some is totally ok because not everyone reads email newsletters fully or on time.
Creating a consistent relationship with a readership is important to build a sense of community. Monitoring open-and-click statistics can check if the efforts and experiments are effective.
Attempt to become low-key data-driven
Check the website stats provided by Google Analytics on the primary grunt webpage to see if redirect efforts from social media actually amount to click-throughs.
Check the archive website stats as well.
Check the social media stats if you use a paid service or Instagram insights.
Check the grunt website hotjar account to see anonymized data and heatmaps of where people click and scroll on the website.
Wherever possible, create "feedback loops" to confirm that digital outreach efforts are going to the right places. Use the stats you collect in grant writing to quantify social media digital outreach efforts.
Consider installing an attendance tracker at the front door to digitally record anonymized attendance. Compare IRL attendance with the digital outreach efforts to look for correlations. Ask questions such as, "does advertising an event with more lead time bring higher event attendance?", for example.
These digital tools can all pipe real-time data into a private dashboard-style webpage to give grunt's managers a snapshot of digital and IRL activity levels.