Against a backdrop of a sharp rise in online hate, the spread of disinformation, and an increase in online fraud and scams, organisations face the ongoing challenge of finding ways to protect their communities online. This situation can be difficult for charities, who can find themselves and their audience a target for trolls and abuse. When you consider the fact that charity communities often include vulnerable or at-risk members, online safety must be at the heart of community management.
Here are some key steps every charity can take to help protect their supporters and community members online.
1. Nominate a Trust and Safety Team
Establish a team of colleagues tasked with trust and safety for online communities, ideally comprising communicators across fields such as marketing, social media, Information Technology (IT) and Press Relations (PR) managers. Allocate the responsibility to keep informed with the news cycle and report on relevant online conversations that will impact your work or members.
2. Don’t forget about employees
Remember that your community includes internal stakeholders, too. Every team member, from the CEO to fundraising officers, can fall victim to online harassment and doxxing. Share online safety tips and tools with employees so they know how to lock down their personal channels and keep themselves safe.
We’ve collated a list of trusted online safety sources on our website.
3. Protect your community members’ privacy
Advise community members and supporters against sharing identifying information on social media. Work with your community manager or moderator to ensure social media comments and posts don’t contain personal and identifiable information that might put individuals at risk of the ‘jigsaw effect’. This unsettling phenomenon involves criminals piecing together personal data from various online sources to target and harm vulnerable individuals and children.
As community managers, it’s crucial to raise awareness about the personal content that we share online and equip our online communities with the tools they need to stay safe.
— StrawberrySocial (@StrawberrySoc) September 13, 2023
Download and share our infographic to help spread the word.https://t.co/G2kgZkSmoU#OnlineSafety pic.twitter.com/lwxEWUK19d
It might come as no surprise that you should behave responsibly when engaging with community members online. However, it can be challenging to keep up to date with the latest best practice in community management.
A key point of responsible community management includes never asking for users’ details to be shared publicly. If more information is needed, ask them to send a direct message or email with the necessary details instead. Explain why you need the information so that they know your charity values their online privacy and safety.
4. Manage risks proactively
Charities must identify potential risks for their communities online. Does your audience include high-profile individuals, vulnerable adults or children? Mind map problematic topics relevant to your organisation and plan responses for each one.
Work with the designated safeguarding lead to ensure everyone understands how to keep people safe and develop clear escalation procedures for responding to online abuse.
Don’t wait for something to happen before acting. Review past online safety incidents and capture your learning. Log what response you posted and use that to inform the team for future occurrences.
5. Embed online safety at the campaign planning stage
Make sure to risk-test new content and campaign ideas. Ask around the office and have your Trust and Safety team sense check new marketing messages before they go live. They can share any potential concerns or how to best support users, so you can prepare for any incoming comments.
Monitor reactions after launch and note if something provokes a response you weren’t expecting. You should brief high-profile charity supporters and ambassadors on the topics that are likely to receive negative comments. As part of your briefing, clarify what support is available in the event of any personal attacks online.
6. Learn the language to monitor
Keep a live list of keywords and phrases of concern around key issues, such as suicide, self-harm, scamming, hate speech, profanities, misinformation, violence, sexual harassment, and illegal activity.
You could tap into the vast knowledge within your organisation to crowdsource suggestions and phrases for your list. Don’t forget to search sites such as Urban Dictionary for acronyms, slang and code words.
Set up alerts to monitor daily or upload them to your chosen social media management tool. If you need help spotting the more subtle signs of grooming, suicide or self-harm risks, work with a professional moderation agency with online safety expertise.
7. Set community guidelines
Set rules for behaviour and enforce them consistently. Be clear on what help your charity can provide and at what point you will signpost community members to support elsewhere.
If you have policies around removing content and/or community members, follow through on these policies. Explain your reasons for removing harmful content and be transparent with both your community members and those removed.
8. Publish your online safety policy
Develop a clear and concise online safety policy. Make sure it is visible, accessible and written in plain English. Not sure where to start? Check out this template from the NSPCC.
9. Build your online safety hub
Keep all the above online safety documents, resources, agreed messaging, safeguarding procedures and policy, guidelines and key contacts easily accessible in a central digital hub internally. Ensure there is a named colleague, ideally in the Trust and Safety team, responsible for keeping the hub up to date.
Ultimately, prioritising online safety in your charity’s communication strategy creates a welcoming, inclusive and secure online environment. It is through creating online communities with these qualities that lasting engagement comes.
StrawberrySocial is an agency that support charities with content moderation, community management, engagement, risk management, due diligence and strategy. If you’d like to access more social media and community management tips and trends, you can sign up to the StrawberrySocial SMOSLetter.
We host regular sessions for comms professionals working in social media for charities and not-for-profit organisations. You can browse previous social media network sessions to get a flavour of the topics they cover. If you’d like to hear about these events before they get fully booked, please email [email protected] so you can be added to our mailing list.
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