I coordinate all the volunteers that come in to St. Alban’s, and the biggest part of that job is the youth volunteer program. It’s a training ground for young people interested in working in the field. On the communication side, I manage our website, social media channels, newsletter and all the printed material that promotes our services.
After high school I went to York University and graduated with a bachelor of arts in women’s studies. I tried a couple of different fields until I found what I love: working in the non-profit sector. I started taking continuing education courses a number of years ago at George Brown College. At first I mostly took one-off courses for personal interest, like web design and grammar. Then I got the social media certificate.
My first job was at a bond-trading desk in a bank, which was a huge leap coming from a women’s studies background. It was a great first job and exciting in many ways, but after a couple of years I realized banking wasn’t really for me. I was interested in working for a charity, although I didn’t know exactly where. Once I got my current job, I realized that I loved it.
Social media wasn’t really a part of my job at St. Alban’s when I started. I’ve been here for 10 years. It wasn’t a part of anyone’s communications back then, and slowly we introduced it as Facebook and Twitter became popular.
If you’re using social media only for personal reasons, there’s a lot you miss out on, particularly in strategy and analytics. For a brand or business, you need to find a way to manage your time without sacrificing other areas of your work. In a non-profit, social media isn’t likely to be a full-time job but only one aspect of it.
At George Brown, the material we learned around analytics and strategy was the most important. You have to really define what you want to do on social media as an organization, and that helps you prioritize your time and what platforms you’re using. We’re investing time and effort into using social media, but what’s happening with that? Are people reading our posts? What are people commenting on? Is anything coming of this? That’s something school helped open my eyes to: the “so what?” of social media.
Since we’re a small organization, a lot of us do a lot of different things. I get involved in administration, registration and operations. When there’s a lot to juggle, you can feel overwhelmed. I do look at our feeds when I’m not at work, but I would say it’s a small part – maybe 10 or 15 per cent – of my job. I’m getting more out of that 10 or 15 per cent than before I took the courses because I’m better able to schedule posts or use tools to organize myself when working with social media.
I would advise people who are specifically interested in social media to get a communications background, because social media is just one facet of communications. It’s a tool you need, but the standard communications strategy is the same.
