Fab Lab Barcelona at IAAC is dedicated to design, research and innovation for citizen-driven, productive cities. We use a range of digital fabrication, tech and communication tools to up-skill people with the powers to design and make impact in their own city. This guide has been compiled by Big Font (the communications and outreach team at Fab Lab Barcelona.) It is based on our experiences working in design, dissemination, communication and outreach for education, research and innovation projects.

You may be here as a collaborator, student or interested by-stander. You are welcome to give feedback, suggestions and add your own knowledge. This is intended as a basic, helpful guide for projects that engage communities, stakeholders and audiences in projects for purpose. It is under constant development.

How to use this Handbook

Use this handbook to develop your own skills in communication and outreach or those of your collaborators and stakeholders. It can help you to:

• Define your brand

• Create and curate a narrative

• Define, reach and engage an audience

• Know more about possible communication channels and actions

• Make your content accessible

• Monitor and evaluate your actions

Questions or input?

Comment here in the book by signing into Gitbook. Or tweet @fablabbcn

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

WHAT: YOUR BRAND

What's a Brand

Brand Elements

Visual Brand Identity

Brand Narrative Brand Development Tools

WHO: YOUR AUDIENCE

Define your audience

Reach and engage your audience

HOW: MEANS OF COMMUNICATIONS

Channels and actions

Make your content accessible

Goal → An exercise to get to the essence of your lab and help you establish mission and vision.

Time it takes → 1 hour sprint

When to do it → At the beginning of your journey. Make a habit to ask yourself if your daily lab activities are connected to your project’s essence.

Who participates → Do it within your lab team initially. In a more advanced version, each stakeholder completes one. Then stakeholders come together to share ideas, particularly focusing on similarities. The dissimilarities provide an opportunity to understand stakeholder differences.

Template → Link

Introduction

Your project, deployment, intervention, pilot or lab needs a brand.

Why? A brand is not just the visuals that promote your product, service or project. It is the experience and connection you want to convey to your audience. It's vital to be aware of how your offer is communicated and what messages are being portrayed to potential stakeholders, customers, audiences or collaborators.. A clear and articulated brand can bring more people into your story and activate them.

In most cases at Fab Lab Barcelona, we don't brand products for sale, but we communicate ideas and engage communities in action. We'll use this experience to talk about how to develop a brand. An example from Distributed Design Market Platform Year 1.

Goal → Establishing your project vision. Creating a clear, shared image of what your project and its impact will look like in years.

Time → 30 minutes

When → At the beginning of your journey. You can repeat periodically throughout the project journey to understand if you’re on track or if you need to modify your mission to meet your vision.

Who → Do this yourself or within your team to create a collective newspaper header. In a more advanced version, each stakeholder completes one regarding their participation in the project. Stakeholders can then share their individual newspapers and work to create one all together. This also provides an opportunity to understand how stakeholders’ interests interact.

How → Using the template below, create a lead headline for the newspaper, which is dated on the final day of the project. The headline could announce the achievement of the project goal, attainment of the mission or resolution of a problem. If working in a group - share your headlines!

Template →

Horizon 2020 Projects

Creative Europe Projects

See here (page 26) :

🧰 Audience Engagement Tool

🧰 Audience Engagement Tool

A communication strategy can be as complex or as simple as your project requires. Remember if you aim to engage stakeholders in joining your project, your communication plan may be different to selling a product to customers. Most importantly is to communicate your brand in a clear, targeted and consistent manner.

To build a communication strategy we put a few things together:

• Who are we talking to?

• Why are we talking to them?

• How are we going to tell them?

• What are we going to ask them to do?

• Where are we going to connect to them?

• When are we going to connect to them?

There is a difference between the level of interest of each media outlet. Diversity of audiences means targeting your communications to meet diverse needs. Identifying actors in a local, regional and project level media landscape is crucial. The media actors can be organized on three levels:

• News Agencies → News agencies have a huge impact on setting the global media agenda and telling the rest of the media what's newsworthy. One gateway to many media at the same time with global reach. They provide a baseline of reliability. But if your content is on regional and local topics, then news agencies are not your media actor.

• Traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers) → Generalist media satisfy the citizen basic information needs. They play between the daily news agenda and some outstanding information. If you want to reach some success when reaching them, pitch them concrete and framed stories.

• Digital media → Digital media mean content specialization. Find the best digital magazines and blogs for your content, take into account their content quality (specialized, well written, verified and trustfull information). Check where your competitors, stakeholders and theme-aligned projects have already been published.

Think of your brand as a story you tell. This story covers where you’ve been, where you are now and where you want to go in the future. These are points you’re going to need to share with your audience. You may share them on your website, in a presentation or in the communications that you target to them to garner their interest. By doing so in a clear, targeted and consistent manner you are creating the opportunity to bring more people into your story and activate them.

Brand talking points

Describing your motivations or project using Topics, Values or Themes can help tell the story in simple, global terms.

An example from B Corp:

Key messages

Key messages are the core messages you want your target audiences to hear and remember. They are quick and catchy ways to explain the and identify the project to target audiences. They can work to mobilise stakeholders by helping them find ownership and belonging in the overall project narrative.

An example comes from the EU H2020 project FoodSHIFT 2030:

• The future of food is low-carbon, circular and plant-based!

• Collective action to future-proof the food system for environmental, social and economic sustainability.

• Radical innovation is required to accelerate food system transformation.

• Innovative food system transformation to achieve Paris Agreement targets and UN SDGs.

• Empowering citizens to influence how food is produced, distributed, consumed and recycled.

Key words

Distilling your project into key words can help ensure your communications are consistent and clear. Key words can cover not just a description of your project, but also the motivations.

Short and long description

Short description or concept statement Very short covering the key message of your project.

• You could use your .

• Or an elevator Pitch ()

Long description 1-2 paragraphs contextualising the project. A good summary focuses on the important aspects of the project. The Five W's of Communication are five words/questions we should consider: the Who, What, Where, When and Why of the project.

We also want to communicate our activities to a wide audience beyond the project to bring attention to the awesome work being done. Often the intention here is to promote a specific discourse or idea, particularly when we approach media.

Accessibility guide for design

Inclusive communication

The attached documents can serve as a reference to ensure actions are inclusive.

UNICEF Inclusive Education Module:

Guidelines for using gender-sensitive language in communication, research and administration developed by Reutlingen University

Introduction

Audiences have to be addressed through different channels. To be efficient, communication also has to be coordinated and monitored. Communication channels and actions enact the multiplier effect and reach target audiences with the key messages. Actions are both delivered on and offline in different ways and formats (written, visual and live).

Online and offline channels

To ensure the effectiveness of communication activities, it is important to use a combination of online and offline channels. The selected target group will determine both the channel and the key message of that specific action.

Online channels Website, social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram), forums, content delivery platforms, etc

Offline channels Local media, printed media (posters, flyers, brochures, etc), press releases, presentations, events (meetings, conferences, workshops, etc)

Written, audiovisual and in-person actions

Written content We can distinguish between short and long written content depending on the selected channels to disseminate our communication. The most common type of short contents is copy text, mostly used for social media. Some appropriate formats to deliver long written content are website, press releases, blog post, interviews. Also, we can find newsletters, written length in between copy and large content.

Audiovisual content Digital content includes photos, videos, animations and podcasts... Being able to produce good media/visual content is a key in connecting with audiences. While it always helps to have a professional, you can still produce good content on your own.

In-person actions Events (conferences, festivals, meetings, workshops, etc) can be organized with communication purposes. Each type of event has a different aim. Whatever your event is, make sure to set a clear goal from the beginning and remind yourself of it throughout the planning process.

Introduction

The goal of communication actions is to ensure that the work we're doing within the project incorporates and engages the appropriate audiences. After thinking about your brand, which is what you’ll communicate, you will need to understand who you will communicate to.

Who needs to know about this project to ensure I fulfil my vision?

Target groups

Your project, deployment, intervention, pilot or lab needs to identify different target groups.

Why? Different people are interested in your project for different reasons and each receive and understand information in different ways. Your communication has to be presented in a variety of ways to ensure the audience you are targeting can not only read it, but can also understand and action it.

In general, we can differentiate between three types of audience based on their relation with the project.

Stakeholders

Those actors that are really important to delivering on the ultimate purpose of your project. They take a direct part in the project.

Each type of stakeholder will have different channels for being communicated to.

Organisations, experts

They create and collect information about the field related to your project. This may include policy experts on that topic, groups of people that have a stake in your project, people working on the field related to the project, etc.

Not directly involved in your project, these experts use public or specialised channels to be communicated to and often receive information via networks or professional bodies

General public, citizens

End users who benefit from the project outcomes, civil society. Wider audience.

Public channels, publicity and media to meet a wider and diverse audience.

Events promotion on Social Media

Objective → Learn how to narrate the life of the project in real time, emphasise project landmarks, which anchor the other types of communications and raise awareness of best practices and resources from the project.

Content → Writing for events promotion on social media should differentiate between upcoming events, happenings and past events. Some examples on the below:

• Upcoming events - Make sure to look for us [on X program][at Y conference/fair] - Join us on [date] at [platform] where we will be discussing [topic]! - [Tomorrow/next week/etc] we will be at [conference/workshop/etc]. Tickets are still available at [link]. We hope to see you there! - Are you coming to [event]? Let us know and sign up here[link]!

• Happenings - Today we’re at [event/activity]! Stay tuned for live updates - We’re currently talking to [person/industry leaders/group] about the [pilot] industry. Join the conversation! - Stop by our booth at [conference/event]. We’ll be here [time period]! - Share your questions about [topic] with [person/industry leaders/group] by using #

• Past events - Yesterday, we talked with [name] about our organisation’s participation in [event]. Check it out here [link to page/content] - Did you miss our workshop on [topic] yesterday? Find the recap here [link] & follow us on social media to find out about future events. - Thank you to everyone who joined us yesterday at [event]! Tell us what you thought in the comments :)

Recommendations ↴

• Tone → Don’t deliver the same copy through all the platforms. Use the adequate tone for each platform:

  • Instagram: Informing, catchy, welcoming and empowering

  • LinkedIn: Informative and expert

  • Twitter: Informing, exploratory and curious

  • Facebook: Friendly, welcoming and encouraging

• Tags ↴

  • Hashtags (#) to get more engagement

  • Mentions (@) to get reposts and reach a wider audience

Legal Considerations → When sharing images of live events or past events, make sure you are not violating copyright laws and attendees have signed off their image use rights. See for further info.

Instagram

IMAGES - grid 1-10 images per post. square 1:1 ratio or 4:5 aspect ratio

VIDEOS In the Grid: Up to 60 seconds. square 1:1 ratio or 4:5 aspect ratio

STORIES Images or video Vertical 9:16 ration

IGTV videos Can last longer and have the same dimensions as stories.

Focus on sharing high-impact images and short (15 sec) video.

Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Youtube

The statistics of a Twitter account can be found in the Analytics section. In this case we will use an example from Open 2 Design for Distributed Design Market Platform

Step 01 Visit your Twitter "Analytics" page

Step 02 Export your Tweet activity

Google Analytics can be connected to a Web Site or an Application and consulted at

Step 01 Enter Audience overview

Step 02 Choose duration for insights

Step 03 Export data set

Creating and using a forum

There are other forums available, but this one will use Discourse as an example.

Objective → Knowledge or information dissemination through a channel which encourages internet discussions among others. Often internet forums focus on the element of community and self-moderation to defend itself from trolls, bad actors, and spammers.

Content → You can use forums as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and more! Make sure to set some form of 'community rules' to direct the users on what and what not to do with the forum - be civilized!

Recommendations ↴

• Tone - Learn from other forums! If you have seen a forum that you like and inspires you, understand what it is about that forum and why the forum has inspired you.

• Tags - You can tag specific people in forums to start, or continue the conversation.

• Forums are built on trust - This is, in the end, a community - so keep that in mind and help any new comers join and use the space effectively!

Troubleshooting → This uses Discourse external links as an example, although you can use other forums.

The universal rules of civilized Discourse. About Discourse. Discourse features. Adding emojis and emoticons to your discourse.

Legal Considerations → When sharing images of live events or past events, make sure you are not violating copyright laws and attendees have signed off their image use rights. See Pictures page for further info.

Objective → Provide updates on the project through personal commentary. Give the reader the feeling that if they keep the reading they will overcome a challenge or be able to add value to someone else by sharing.

Content ↴

• Approach: Blogs should generally be written for all audiences; if the blog is for a specific public, it should clearly be stated in the introduction or through tags. Blogs should use tags, like the lab’s and project’s keywords and the audience the blog is meant for. Blog posts discuss updates on project activities, findings and events. Topics should not be over-explained, the reader only gets the information they need.

• Lengths: 350-600 words posts, which means between 2 and 5 minutes reads. Paragraphs should be short, maximum of 100 words approximately. Sentences should be short and easy for the reader to digest

• Structure: Start with a catchy headline (surprise factor, clear benefit, SEO keyword, etc) Second, write a hook or answer a big why for the reader. Then, the body post should split the ideas into sections preceded by subtitles. Conclude summarizing key points of the post or highlight something the reader can put into action.

• Other: Include at least two or three high-resolution free (or original) visual resources. Include links to external sites.

Recommendations ↴

• When brainstorming blog posts, imagine you are outside of the project and think of the information you would like to learn if you were your audience.

• Ask project members and stakeholders, and even experts outside the project, to contribute.

• Material will be updated regularly.

• Make sure you have permissions to use the visuals resources you chose to your blog post. Read some legal considerations in the Pictures Page.

Tools → This is a selection of useful tools to check while writing a blog post.

• Uber Suggest → Here you can check suggestions for keywords related to a topic, see the websites ranking in search engines for that topic, and get ideas and insights from popular blog posts related to the topic.

• BuzzSumo → Here you can check the most viral articles regarding a certain topic, this is very useful for inspiration, to see what works best and understand why they’ve been so popular. Normally the idea is to try to make it better than #1, so we can gain some traffic.

• Similar Web → Discover similar websites to a reference you already like.

• Feedly → Discover new articles on the topics you choose.

• Social Animal → Find and analyze top-performing content for any topic or competitor.

Insights from LinkedIn can be found on the Analytics module page which is located on the left side of the Page tab in your admin center. However the insights from LinkedIn are limited, in case you want in detail information you will need to upgrade your LinkedIn plan to a paid version.

Post Impressions

Step 01 Click "Post impressions" and you'll be directed to the "Update analytics" page.

Step 02 Information about your post's impressions can be viewed in the "Update metrics" and "Update engagement" sections.

Step 03 View trends for your "Post impressions" over time:

• Locate the "Update metrics" section.

• Click the "Metric" dropdown.

• Select "Impressions" or "Unique impressions".

Step 04 View the number of impressions for individual updates:

• Locate the 'Update engagement' section.

• Click through the "Update title pages" to view "Impressions".

Learn more about your Page's Update analytics.

Canvas tool for audience engagement

The audience map identifies and describes each of the project’s target groups while also noting their potential and proposed interests and participation in the project, as well as the best communication channels through which to reach them.

What is it → A chart to organise communication channels based around a stakeholder group’s interest and participation in the project

Time it takes → 1 hour

When to do it → At the beginning of your journey

Who participates → The communication’s point person on your team

Template →

Tips to engage communities and citizens on social media

You can take advantage of social media sites to connect directly with audiences. Some tips to try include:

• Follow → Follow local actor’s accounts. Scan through some of their posts to see how they use social media and what they tend to focus on.

• Comment → Begin an online dialogue with key players by responding to a comment or post they made or just introducing yourself and what you might have in common.

• Respond → Follow up on mentions. Though gratitude about re-posting is nice.

• Join → Show interest in joining Facebook or LinkedIn groups or set up your own Facebook group. Look for local events or groups of interest on Meet Up or Eventbrite.

Here is an example taken from the H2020 research project . 'REFLOW is an EU H2020 funded project, from 2019 to 2022, that seeks to understand and transform urban material flows and to co-create and test circular and regenerative solutions at business, governance and citizen levels.' The example identifies who may want to be communicated to about the project and why. It covers Stakeholders, experts and citizens.

Audience Definition

Step 01 View your "Manage Events" Page

You will find this after logging in and creating an event. Click or tap on your event from the " Manage Events" and then select "Manage"

Step 02 Select "Analytics" in the dropdown menu "Analyze"

Step 03 Choose how to view your data

With Analytics you can view your data in relation to: Sales, Attandees, Traffic (Shows you the number of page views your event listing had), Sales Channels (Shows you where your sales originated from)

Step 04 Select a time period

Step 05 Select the events you want to see the data for

Step 06 Group your data

You can group your data to costumise your view. The options will differ based on what data you"re pulling.

Step 07 Filter your data

Step 08 Choose how to show chart data

You have a view options when showing your chart data. For example, when viewing "Sales" you can show "Quantity sold", "Gross sales" or "Net sales". When viewing "Attendees" you can show "Number of attendees" or "Number of orders"

Sharing pictures: some legal considerations

Objective → Understand briefly what the law says about sharing publicly images. Not only pictures taken by others (copyright), but pictures taken from others (image rights).

Content ↴

• Copyright → It is a protection that gives every author the exclusive right to use or reproduce their work. Every image obtains its copyright upon creation. Only images that grant a free license, such as creative commons, or offer them in the public domain, can be freely used.

• Image Rights → People that are in a photo don't have any rights to it in terms of photo publication and use. However, images of people (smalls groups and individuals) are likely to constitute personal data and you will need to establish a legal basis for processing personal data.

Recommendations → Use only:

• Original visual resources created within your organisation and/or project team.

• CC-licensed materials by following the license conditions and attributing sources (image title, image author and image license code).

• Free stock photos from, for example:

  • Pexels

  • Burst

  • Picjumbo

  • Pixabay

  • Unsplash

• Photos taken within an event context in which you have provided the participants with privacy information, making sure that they are aware that their image would be taken and the context in which their image would subsequently be used by signing a consent. See consent agreement template to share with your event participants.

Image sizes For social media image sizes see here. A general rule when dealing with image sizes:

Print Hi-res images are at least 300 pixels per inch (ppi). This resolution makes for good print quality, and is pretty much a requirement for anything that you want hard copies of, especially to represent your brand or other important printed materials.

Online The standard resolution for web images is 72 ppi (often called “screen resolution”). Images that are between 1500 and 2500 pixels wide are recommended for use online. Images smaller than 1500 pixels may appear blurry or pixelated when they stretch to fill larger online surfaces, such as banners. You do not need 300 ppi images online - these will be heavy and may take a while to load. 72 ppi is best.

Check the size of your image file:

Open the image in Windows Explorer to check dimensions and file size.

1. Open Windows Explorer.

2. Find the image you want to check.

3. Select your image. The dimensions and file size appear at the bottom of the window.

Open the image in Mac Finder to check dimensions and file size:

1. Click Finder on your Dock.

2. Find the image you want to check.

3. Control+click (ctrl+click) your image. A menu appears.

4. Click Get Info. A window appears.

5. Expand the General: section to see your image's file size.

6. Expand the More Info: section to see your image's dimensions.

See image file formats and their differences here.

Tips to make video to share on social media

Objective → Being able to produce good media/visual content to connect with your audiences. Digital content includes photos, videos, animations, infographics, visual essays, etc. We'll focus on recorded videos.

Recommendations ↴

• Starting point → As with written content, start by building your visual content around the identified needs or interests of the target audience.

• Materials → It is always better if you use a professional camera, but nowadays you can also get outstanding photos and video on most phones.

• Shots → It’s better to use different angles and shots, instead of recording the whole thing in one position.

Content → Non-professional videos require humane content.

Technical specs ↴

• Duration ↴ Facebook: 2 min. length Instagram: 1 min. length (30 sec recommended) | IGTV 1 to 10 min length Twitter: 30 sec. length

• Dimensions ↴ Facebook: 1280 x 720 (landscape aspect ratio 16:9) Instagram: IG 600 x 315 (16:9), 600 x 600 (1:1) or 600 x 750 (4:5) Twitter: max. 1280 x 720 (16:9) or 640 x 640 (1:1)

• Formats → .MP4 and .MOV

• Light → Natural better than artificial. Harsh lighting will create dark shadows. The window should be in front of you when filming in the interior with natural light.

Tips to add subtitles and closed captions

Objective → Adding subtitles, or closed captions, make your videos more accessible to a wider audience.

Recommendations → The easiest way to add subtitles to a video is by using YouTube. If your video is on YouTube (or you are willing to upload it there), YouTube can automatically create your subtitles.

How to add subtitles in the same language as the video audio → Make sure the video and your YouTube channel are in the same language. Then, follow the step by step provided by YouTube help:

1. Sign in to YouTube Studio.

2. From the left menu, select Subtitles.

3. Click the video you’d like to edit.

4. Click ADD LANGUAGE and select your language.

5. Under subtitles, click ADD. Play the video and enter your captions. Don't forget to add text describing other sounds happening in the video, like [applause] or [thunder] so viewers know what's going on in the video.

6. Repeat step 5 for additional captions, then click PUBLISH.

How to add subtitles in a different language → You need to download the automatically generated subtitles as text, then translate into the desired language (use Google Translate), edit and correct any mistake, and upload the file again. See our step by step guide:

1. Click the three vertical dots (⋮) on the fourth column. See previous image.

2. Click Actions on the top right and download the .art file.

3. Open the file, copy the text and translate with Google Translate. Copy into a new text file.

4. Click “Add New Subtitles” and select “Upload a file”.

5. Select “Subtitle File” from the popup menu. Upload your file.

6. Adjust your subtitles

7. Publish

To acces the insights for Instagram your account has to be set to "Business" In case you have already done this you can jump to "Step 02". What follows are the step by step instructions:

Step 01 Set yout account to "Business"

Step 02 Enter the "Insights" of your account

Activity

Under the Activity tab, you’ll find two sets of Instagram insights: Interactions and Discovery.

Interactions In this subsection, you can see the total number of actions taken on your account in the past week, followed by a list of other metrics

Here’s what these Instagram insights mean:

Profile Visits – The amount of users that have visited your Instagram profile Website Clicks – The number of users who have clicked on the website link in your bio Email – The number of times users have tapped on Email on your profile Call – The number of times users have tapped on Call on your profile

Discoverability The next subsection displays the overall performance and influence of your Instagram account using two key metrics: Reach & Impressions

Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen any of your posts Impressions – The total number of times that all your posts have been seen

This week-by-week information is highly valuable, as you can compare your reach depending on certain campaigns or social activity. Tracking these metrics is important to know whether your efforts to promote your Instagram account are successful, and should be a key part of any social media strategy.

Content

Under the Content tab you will find Instagram insights relating to individual posts on your profile. This includes photo and video content, Stories, and even any promotional paid posts you may have published. The Content tab is split into: Feed, Stories & Promotions

Feed Here you’ll find all the important Instagram insights of the content on your feed from the past 2 years! You can sort your insights by content type, metric and time period. These are the Instagram insights you can filter by and what they mean:

Calls – The number of unique accounts that followed the CTA to Call Comments – The number of comments on your post Emails – The number of unique accounts that followed the CTA to Email Engagement – The number of unique accounts that Liked, Commented or Saved your post Follows – The number of accounts that started following you because of your post Get Directions – The number of users who tapped Get Directions because of your post Impressions – The total number of times your post has been seen Likes – The total number of likes on your post Profile Visits – The number of times your profile was viewed Reach – The number of unique accounts that have seen your posts Saved – The number of unique accounts that saved your post Website Clicks – The number of times your website was clicked because of your post

You can also delve deeper into each post to get more information. Clicking on each post then tapping ‘View Insights’ will open the in-depth analytics.

Under this section of Instagram Insights, you can see the total interactions from each post, the breakdown of the engagement, and also most interestingly, the breakdown of the discovery of your post. This includes where all your impressions came from: be it hashtags, directly through your profile, home feed or other.

Stories

Stories is another subsection under the Content tab where you can view the Instagram insights of your Stories. These metrics shed light on how users view and interact with your Stories, which can help you shape and plan Story content for the future.

Impressions – The number of times your Instagram Story has been seen Reach – The number of unique accounts that viewed the post on your Instagram Story Exited – The number of times a user swiped away from a specific story Replies – The number of replies to a particular photo or video in your story Viewers – The specific users that have seen a particular post on your story Forward – The number of users that skipped this Story post Backwards – The number of users that went back from this Story post Next Story – The number of taps to the next account’s story

Using Instagram insights for Stories can derive conclusions on the type of content that works best. The Navigation section offers key performance indicators such as Forward, Back and Next Story you can gage your audience’s interest in your Stories.

For example, from a large proportion of Forward clicks you could derive the Story wasn’t captivating enough. Equally, Back clicks would indicate the previous Story was highly relevant to your audience as they re-watched it. Next Story could imply your Story went on too long or became repetitive/uninteresting. You can also learn which Stories help promote the most follower interaction with the Replies insights! These are really enlightening metrics, and can help you cater your Instagram Story marketing according to your audience preferences.

Audience

The final tab in Instagram Insights is Audience. This is where you’re able to get a better understanding of who your followers are and where they live, as well as see how your follower number has varied from the previous week.

Within the Audience tab of Instagram Insights, you’ll find 4 key sets of information about your followers:

Gender – The percentage split of your followers Age Range – The age brackets of your followers Top Locations – The locations of your followers based on City and Countries Followers – The most active times of your followers, by hour of the day and days of the week

Engaging and communicating with Stakeholders

The purpose of communicating with stakeholders is to engage them in the project, not sell them something. Be mindful of establishing sustainable long-term relationships with Stakeholders you wish to involve and setting up clear communications channels and approaches from the start.

Purpose

The reason that your project, pilot, lab, intervention exists. The now and forever.

• What do we value the most?

• What are we most passionate about?

• What drives us as?

• What do we provide that the world really needs?

An example from Nike: 'Our purpose is to unite the world through sport to create a healthy planet, active communities and an equal playing field for all.' 🙃😉

⚠️Purpose can be shared as a statement to inspire, engage and activate people to join your project.

Vision

The final destination of your project, pilot, lab, intervention. The future.

• What change do we want to make?

• For whom?

• What problem do we want to solve?

• What would success look like?

An example from Habitat for Humanity: 'A world where everyone has a decent place to live.'

Mission

The roadmap of your project, pilot, lab, intervention. The present.

• What you’re going to do

• How you’re going to do it

• Whom you’re doing it for or with

• What values are driving your actions.

An example from NPR radio in the US: 'to create a more informed public, one challenged and invigorated by a deeper understanding and appreciation of events, ideas, and culture within the United States and across the globe.'

⚠️A mission statement can be updated to meet your vision and purpose - like Patagonia has done.

🧰Tools

• Mission and vision distillation tool

• Newspaper vision tool: collective speculation for your project's future!

Communication

Aims to raise the project profile and bring awareness to the problem and solution posed by the project. It aims to position the project in public context as an expert approach and increase the potential for stakeholder engagement.

This guide explores communication processes and tools for and retention. It isn't a guide for Stakeholder identification or mapping.

Dissemination and Outreach

Aims to provide project results, findings and outputs to interested target groups and stakeholders through knowledge sharing mechanisms and appropriate forms of communication.

Exploitation

Focuses on developing, making accessible and useful the project outputs that can be taken-up by stakeholders and target groups and sustain the impact of the project beyond the project funding.

The following section will guide you step by step on how to gather metrics of engagement and audience details of your Social Media Accounts.

✋ There are five essentials which are key for monitoring your SoMe accoounts: Average egagement rate, social share of voice, conversion rate, response time and sentiment.

Average Engagement Rate

It’s important that you know how many people are reacting to the content you post on social and to do that, you need to track the engagement metrics. By tracking the engagement metrics, you will be able to identify which content type drives more engagement and which don’t.

To say something meaningful about how many people like, share, or comment on your posts on average, you need to track your Average Engagement Rate. Use this as a benchmark for your next few social posts to determine whether you’ve hit home with your target audience, or if you need to tweak your content for next time.

How to track it:

• Decide on a reporting period

• Add up the total number of engagements across all posts

• (Total engagements/number of posts) x 100 = average engagement rate

Social share of voice

How many people are talking about your brand compared to your competitors?

Share of voice metrics gives you a definitive look into how much your brand dominates on a social network compared to your competitors. With the share of voice metrics, you will be able to tell how your brand stacks up against your industry competitors and what you can learn from your competitors’ successes on social.

How to track it:

• Use an analytics tool to measure the number of mentions you’ve received

• Use the same tool to track the number of mentions your competitors have received

• (Your mentions / total mentions) x 100 = share of voice

Conversion Rate

Do you measure social media success based solely on how many people clicked “like” on your latest post?

Sure, it’s nice to know that your social media posts are getting a ton of engagement, but that’s not quite enough if your audience didn’t take action the way you wanted them to. To gauge the success of your social media campaigns, you need to measure the conversion rate, which tells you what percentage of your users convert into leads/sales.

How to track it:

• Determine the total amount of traffic you’re driving from social

• Determine how many conversions resulted from the traffic

• (Number of conversions/total traffic) x 100 = conversion rate

Response Time

Customers are less patient these days and they’re expecting a speedy response on social media. So, how do you know if your brand hit reply at lightning speed or if it took its own sweet time?

To clear that doubt, you need to measure your brand’s response time on social media.

Response time metrics help you measure the average time it takes your brand to respond to a post or a tweet on social media. By measuring your response time, not only do you help improve your social media response time (and get a fancy badge), you also make your customers happier.

How to track it:

• In Facebook, consistent responsiveness will be displayed as a badge on your page

• To earn the badge, you must have a response rate of 90% and a response time of 15 min

• Consider incorporating chatbots to automate customer support

Sentiment

How do your customers feel about your brand? Happy? Unsatisfied? Neutral? You can’t really tell based on a few likes and shares now, can you?

How to track it:

• With social monitoring tools (like Falcon.io), you can gauge the sentiment surrounding your brand.

• See: An overview of Social Sentiment Analysis

If you don’t have a tool in place, it will require some manual work to assess sentiment. That said, it might very well be worth the effort to take your audience’s temperature once in a while. It’s invaluable feedback for your social strategy, your product team, your sales department

🧰 Mission and Vision Distillation

🧰 Newspaper Visualisation Tool

A visual brand identity is the look and feel of your project, deployment, intervention, pilot or lab. It can include fonts, colour, tone of voice, graphic elements, photography style. An example from FoodSHIFT 2030 project that was developed by the team at Fab Lab Barcelona:

Developing a visual identity

Developing your own visual identity requires a design team. You can collaborate with a designer to develop a visual identity with you, or use some of the tools below to help develop the visual elements of your Brand.

Implementing a visual identity

Sometimes, often in EU projects, a brand and visual identity is supplied and your task is to apply the brand locally to reflect your local pilot or lab. Implementing a visual identity locally can be achieved by following the brand guide carefully.

Tools 🧰

• Design tools that can help make great graphics

Objective → Communicate the project to the media.

Content ↴

• It should be suitable for journalists including key text and high-resolution visual resources about the project, the events, actions and happenings, and results.

• It should be focused on a concrete and framed story. Choose one topic that is of public interest.

• Catchy and short headline

• Introductory paragraph answering the 5 W’s of communications.

• It should use the project’s keywords and key messages.

Recommendations → Written in the local language with translation to English.

References → Project owners should build a list of media contacts, to whom all publications should be sent by email, it can be built collaboratively and should be maintained constantly.

Sharing ↴

• Write the email in the language you are writing the press release.

• Try to send a personalized email (addressed to the name of the receiver) to each contact.

• Write a catchy, not standard email subject.

• Add the most important link/s (website) to the email body.

• Attach images to be downloaded.

• Attach one editable version of the press release (Word) saved with editing restrictions; and one PDF version.

Template

The statistics of a Facebook page can be found in the Insights section. In this case we will use an example from Make Works, what follows are the step by step instructions:

Step 01 Visit your Facebook page and click "Insights"

Facebook statistics can usually be viewed by day, week or monthly (28 days), so viewing/exporting all the statistics might require a bit of work:

Step 02 Export your data and save it on your local device. You will be able to choose from "Page data", "Post data" and "Video data".

• Option 1: Export "Page data" to get the "Key page metrics for engagement, such as sources and audience details"

• Option 2: Export "Post data" to get the "Key post metrics for reach, impressions and feedback"

Step 03 Choose and use your exported data

You will be able to choose the data sets according to your needs after dowloading the .xls file to your local device. Metrics about reach, impressions and feedback are organized in daily, weekly and monthly tabs.