Why trustees should be your charity's social media champions

The Code advises that Leaders and boards need to be exploring new ways of working and communicating, including the use of social media, and looking at how peers and similar organisations are already successfully using these tools.

Despite this, most charities (68%) rate their board’s skills as low or having room for improvement, according to the 2019 Charity Digital Skills Report.

If you don’t already have some digital skills representation on your board, you need to be strategic in your recruitment of new trustees and make well connected, social media savvy trustees a priority.

A first step is to ensure you are asking specifically for social media skills as part of your trustee recruitment advertising, and looking at their social media presence. Using social media itself to recruit will help attract people who are already active on those channels.

Working with Trustees

As well as showing that your charity is the authority in its area and the leaders in your particular field, leveraging the wider social media network of a trustee can be a win-win for them, helping them to fulfil their role better and be more connected with what’s going on in your community.

Charities should encourage less digitally-minded trustees to get involved by reminding them of this, and by making it clear how their involvement plays a key role in the charity’s social media strategy.

To enable your existing trustees to be social media champions:

• Be as transparent as possible with them about your social media strategy and exactly how you want them to like, share, retweet and repost your charity’s content.
• Make sure their profiles such as LinkedIn and Facebook include information about and links back to your charity.
• Provide a social media policy: a clear set of social media guidelines that ensure they know what they can and can’t do and how they should word messaging.