#connect4climate

Eminem & TS1 - Join the Movement - Connect4Climate & Artist Project Earth

Beautiful but SCARY: video uses #timelapse to document toxic CO2 smog above Provo, UT

//player.vimeo.com/video/95786812?title=0&byline=0

Through a series of hikes into the mountains, we set out to document through time-lapse, the Haze (CO2 Emissions) that plague our home town of Provo Utah.

A video by Jesse Myrick (USA) – Age Group 18-35

-Connect4Climate on Vimeo

New Post has been published on http://www.learn-digital-marketing.com/how-to-win-the-facebook-engagement-game/

How to Win the Facebook Engagement Game

Since we first observed the downward trend in Facebook pages’ organic reach, community managers have been in a panic. The number of users who see the average post from your Facebook page is half of what it was a year ago.

For most Facebook users, that’s good news because they’re likelier to see higher quality posts in their Facebook feeds. But, for charities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that can’t afford to buy attention for Facebook posts, it’s a worrying trend.

There is all the more pressure, then, to maximize your supporters’ engagement on each and every Facebook post. When we ask, “what’s engaging”, we’re really posing this question:

What content earns the most likes, comments and shares on your page?

I first wondered about this in 2012, and answered it by ranking the engagement of 1000 Facebook posts by prominent environmental NGOs. In my current work with the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC), I had the chance to repeat the study this summer. This time I focused on organizations in the UNFCCC’s orbit—NGOs, other UN agencies and foundations. On average, these pages had about 450,000 likes, and none had fewer than 40,000.

With the help of some diligent interns, I collected data on the 50 most recent Facebook posts from 20 organizations. I then calculated an engagement score for each post and an overall engagement score for each organization’s page. This allowed me to rank all 1000 posts and to understand not only which posts were most effective, but also which organizations are winning on Facebook. This latter observation is more valuable than it sounds, because it’s always helpful to have successful pages to learn from and emulate.

Having done the same research twice, it was also illustrative to understand how user engagement had evolved over time.

Old Habits Die Hard

When I compared my 2014 data with the analogous 2012 results, I found many similarities. For example, the breakdown of content types for the pages was very similar. I found a preponderance of links back to organizations’ own websites and plenty of images as well.

There’s a strong correlation between organizations that ‘link out’ to other sites more often than they link to their own. In essence, the less selfish an organization is, the more engaging it’s likely to be.

Web Postcards are So Hot Right Now

One area where I did find a disparity between 2012 and 2014 was the explosion of web postcards. Also known as image macros or memes, those are the now ubiquitous images overlaid with text. In 2012, only 25% of all the picture posts we looked at were web postcards. In 2014, 45% of all images were web postcards.

  Not only that, the top 31 posts overall, and 68 of the top 100, were web postcards. That shouldn’t come as a surprise, because web postcards were also the most engaging type of content, nearly four times more engaging as images without text.

Post 5 to 7 times a week

Nineteen of the 20 organizations I evaluated posted an average of 5.7 times a week, or roughly once every weekday and once on the weekend. The outlying organization—an international body whose name you’d recognize—posts 35 times a week.

I can imagine their thinking—there’s a sports cliché about missing all the shots you don’t take. However, as a rule of thumb, spammy behavior on the web tends to get published.

On a related note, mid-week posts were most frequent and received the most engagement.

Emulate Oil Change International, They Won By a Landslide

One organization I looked at was a superstar. Oil Change International’s fan page received 12 times the engagement as the average page in the project. I asked David Turnbull, Campaigns Director at Oil Change International why he thought his organization was tearing it up on Facebook:

When big news hits we try to be first out of the gate with an image if possible. Images do best and need to look polished but not overly so. We’ve got a good style to our images, I think, and people seem comfortable and excited to share them. We’re also a bit snarky at times, which I think people like on Facebook. Lastly, we have a few great partner organizations that like to share our stuff that helps with getting more engagement.

Oil Change’s posts dominated the upper echelons of the project’s rankings. Here’s the top post overall:

95% of Oil Change’s posts were web postcards, more than any of the other organizations I looked at.

One very reasonable critique of this project is that I can’t know if any of these organizations are spending money to ‘boost posts’ and reach more fans. I did check with Oil Change and several other participants, all of whom confirmed that they don’t regularly make a practice of buying “boosts”.

The runner-up was 350.org. This was their top-ranked post:

I expect that you’re curious, so here’s the lowest ranked post in my project:

If your page’s declining organic reach is keeping you up at night, take a page out of Oil Change International’s playbook.

Excerpt:

The World Bank initiative Connect4Climate has partnered with MTV Voices to celebrate youth climate action documentaries, exhibiting a 30 second compilation of Action4Climate competition submissions on two massive Broadway displays on Times Square. The short video is part of Action4Climate, a global documentary competition that inspired more than 230 young filmmakers in 70 countries and gave them a platform to discuss their concerns about the future.

ACTION4CLIMATE TRAILER (by Connect4Climate)

An explanation of Connect4Climate and Action4Climate, taken from the Vimeo explanation of the video (sort of a trailer), Action4Climate:

Youth in 70 countries are calling for climate action with more than 230 documentaries. The response to the Action4Climate competition has been overwhelming.

The competition closed April 1, and the Connect4Climate team worked hard to compile a trailer of some incredible entries received from around the world, from Kiribati to Uganda, Brazil to the Netherlands.

Lucia Grenna, Connect4Climate Program Manager, explains, “It is a story of drought in Sub-Saharan Africa, floods in Southeast Asia, extreme weather and regret from the Philippines. It is a story of advancing climate solutions. There is a face to be shown and a story to be told. Our commitment is to empower youth, share their experience and solutions, and bring local stories to a global audience.”

The winner of the Action4Climate competition will be celebrated in October 2014 after the renowned Action4Climate jury, led by Italian film director and screenwriter Bernardo Bertolucci, has reviewed the films. Winning entries will receive up to $15,000 and thirty finalists will receive Vimeo Plus accounts.

Leaders of the World Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations, and finance ministers for various governments watched the trailer at the meeting on Climate Change Economics during the Spring Meetings at the World Bank. “We are here all together because we know that the world needs to fight climate change with much, much greater seriousness,” World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said at the meeting.

In the Action4Climate trailer, Kim adds, "We have got to get serious, we have to connect on an emotional level. The young people here today know that they are going to be living in a time that's unrecognisable today. We have to listen to them; we have to listen to the scientists. But we have to connect."

I am still surprised by how much climate change denial we come across.

Recently Connect4Climate ran the iChange competition, challenging students to present the climate challenge in a 30-second video. We received great responses from around the world and compiled a video with some of the best for MTV.Posting this on our YouTube channel quickly resulted in more than 7000 views, a hearty discussion, and this comment: “lol i havent even watched this video. but ive read some of the comments. global warming is a MYTH!“

iClimate Connect4Climate Competition

What? Such outright denial! How can this be when the science is so overwhelming clear, when world leaders have shown their support for climate action, when reports left right and centre highlight the dire impacts of climate change, not least the World Bank’s own 4°C report?   I couldn’t let such comments go without responding.

Sustainability Media Lab's entry into the Connect4Climate's iChange video competition, a World Bank initiative. 

"Meet Rebecca"