The final week of October presented a welcome break from the event planning of the last 2 weeks; I would finally have an opportunity to begin a review of our traffic, Marketing processes and online presence. In terms of the National Meeting we were hosting and promoting, I advised our CCO that we should relax our social media push, share content from others and review our efforts to date. Although our priority was increasing awareness and attendance of the event, we had to protect against the creating a perception of over-advertising and frightening away our base of support. Although we continued to monitor and plan internally, I was given an opportunity to begin my review.
Looking in on an organization from the outside provides a valuable perspective in terms of launching an online
outreach campaign. I was able to act as a member of the online community seeking information on the services we offered. As such, I launched an effort to determine our search engine ranking, keyword and tag ranking, links flowing in and review of our traffic. To my surprise, our organization and centers were often buried in the search results. In addition, I started to map out our online presence including websites, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other profiles.
Our Online Map
Primary Website: The Hope Institute for Children and Families
Center Sites:
- The Hope School Learning Center
- Hope Health & Wellness Center
- Hope Center for Residential Services
- Noll Medical Pavilion
- The Autism Program of Illinois
- TAP Service Network
- The Hope Institute Learning Academy
- The Hope Institute fan page
- The Autism Program fan page
- Noll Medical Pavilion fan page
- Hope Institute Learning Academy (HILA) fan page
- TAP Facebook group
- Easter Seals/Tap Facebook group
- HILA group
- @HopeInstitute
- @AutismProgramIL
- @NollMedPavilion
- @HILAChicago
I had assumed, when I took my position that I would be able to focus directly on the creation of engaging content and expanding our base of support. However, I found that our online presence had neither the search engine ranking nor were our websites interconnected. Simply put, our centers were difficult to find online, seldom connected to each other, and there were just too many organizational profiles.
As part of the development of a social marketing strategy, the first step was to assure that our current websites were both functioning (technical) and functional (design layout). A comprehensive, page-by-page review determined that our website vendor had rushed to go live with our websites leaving a legacy of dead links and errors in coding. Pictures were not displayed, web pages were riddled with dead links, menus were ordered backwards, and a host of other issues were outlined. Knowing the nature of many web developers, I outlined the most critical issues and started to focus on those.
With an action plan for repairing and my initial thoughts outlined, I focused on our FB and Twitter presence. Everywhere I turned on FB, I seemed to find new pages or groups of fans tied to our centers. As I added up the numbers I quickly realized we seemed to have 7-9 pages and groups scattered throughout FB and 4 Twitter accounts. In terms of online marketing, that is simply too much (without appropriate staffing and plan). I quickly moved toward abandoning the FB groups. I did not delete them, but rather posted a direct link with a message to group members to move to our FB pages. I would monitor these groups periodically to assure that my redirect post was the top message. In terms of our remaining four pages, we would begin implementation of plans to develop each page individually, increasing fans and followers while developing a manageable content strategy.
The good news is that I now had a better understanding of the entire online outreach platform; the bad news, however, was that it appeared that an aggressive upfront marketing strategy would take a backseat while we worked to assure that our online presence was both functioning and functional.
