Social Media Coordination for Youth-in-Agriculture’s empowerment

Two YPARD members were waived the registration fee for participating to the Social Media Coordination Bootcamp of the Global Landscapes Forum, Warsaw, Poland, organized by the CGIAR. This enabled two social-media experienced young professionals to benefit from a capacity building’s opportunity in refined Social Media Coordination for youth-in-ag’ s empowerment. I was one of them as YPARD Web and Communications officer of YPARD Global Coordination Unit.

The bootcamp put together communications officers from various organisations in the field of agricultural development and was designed in a way to help participants to strengthen their organisational social media activities and coordination. It included sessions on Social Media strategies, ROI (return on investment) and the art of measuring and reporting, Social Media campaign management, reach out on Social Media, reach out via traditional media, how to better involve different stakeholders in communications with generating better content, and how to handle organisational communications within organic/decentralized structures.

The sessions were based on very dynamic facilitation and sharing of cases studies from the participants who were all bringing different expertises/experiences in the topics covered.  One would learn that no one can be expert in everything.

Would there be a social media bootcamp without tweet reporting? Check the storifies of the 3 first days, by Pete Shelton from IFPRI. We tried tweet as much as possible as a way to expand the knowledge sharing opportunity to online followers, particularly our YPARD members, always eager to learn new things.

Social Media Bootcamp DAY ONE: http://storify.com/pbrolley/social-media-bootcamp-day-one

Social Media Bootcamp DAY TWO: http://storify.com/pbrolley/social-media-bootcamp-day-two

Social Media Bootcamp DAY THREE: http://storify.com/pbrolley/social-media-bootcamp-day-three

This fruitful experience of knowledge and experience sharing is now helping us to design stronger internal documentation for communications guidance (strategy, procedures, plans, project design). As for YPARD, the main challenge and objective is not only to boost our global activities and outreach but also to structure better communications activities at all levels with our regional, national and local representatives. The bootcamp made me realize that this is a common challenge with other organisations – we are not alone and, from this learning experience, we are now building up stronger collaborations with other participants to tackle this together. All set for improvements in 2014 in these regards!

Read also the feedback from Keron Bascombe, the other YPARD participant selected for the GLF Social Media Bootcamp, also sponsored by GFAR.

Picture based on Kari Wozniak's graphic work and tweet