Here is a transcript generated by otter.ai of The Content Mix podcast interview with London-based Valeriia Voshchevska, Amnesty International’s global social media manager:

Shaheen Samavati 0:13
Hi everyone, I’m Shaheen from The Content Mix, and I’m excited to be here with Val Voshchevksa, global social media manager for Amnesty International, the world’s largest human rights NGO, based in the UK. Thanks, Val, for joining us.

Val Voshchevska 0:25
Hi.

Shaheen Samavati 0:26
Hi. So first of all, can you just tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in social media marketing?

Val Voshchevska 0:32
Yeah, of course. So I, myself am from Ukraine, but I have spent the last 10 years in the United Kingdom. And I don’t know, perhaps a lot of social media managers say this, but it was never like something that I specifically wanted to do. But when I started doing it, it was definitely something I was straightaway interested in. So I started working for Newsweek, back in 2014. And at the time, I think it happens to a lot of social media managers, as the youngest person there, it was kind of the natural thing for me to pick up and lead on from that side. So I used to, as I said, work for Newsweek, and I was the social media editor there for a few years. And I actually grew to… I think a lot of people get into social media, kind of as a tool to get to something else. But for me, it straightaway became the one thing that I was super interested in and wanted to learn more about, which is how I decided to continue on that path. But I studied politics and international relations in university. And so working for Amnesty was always a very kind of big dream of mine. And so I decided to put together my knowledge in social media and use it for something more kind of value based and nonprofit. So I joined Amnesty International and I’ve been here for two and a half years now, running the social media strategy for Amnesty International.

So for those who aren’t familiar with Amnesty International, maybe you could just briefly let us know what the organization’s focused on, and also how social media plays into that.

Yeah, of course. It’s kind of a loaded question, but not really. Well, as you said, we’re the biggest human rights organization. So we’re kind of primarily focused as an organization at creating a community of like-minded people, who together mobilize for, kind of, certain specific causes. And from the beginning, it was releasing prisoners of conscience and petitioning and fighting for the release of people in a lot of, kind of, different regimes around the world. We also for a very long time campaigned against the death penalty, and various other human rights related issues. But I guess the one thing for me that really stands out in Amnesty is its global reach, and the ability to connect people around the world, and create a supporter base that is really engaged with what we do, and that actually translate some of what we do into their everyday local community life. And obviously, social media is a natural kind of fit into all of this in 21st century, and especially now with COVID-19 and everyone being more digital and less offline. It’s changing a lot for digital activism. It’s changing a lot for activism in general. And so a lot of people are kind of focusing on social media for a lot of their campaigning and a lot of their work. And so for Amnesty International, we actually have a specific kind of section within the digital team, digital campaigns, as well as social media, and we work together on different strategies for different campaigning goals, whether that is for release of Saudi women’s rights activists or other campaigns. But it’s basically mostly to either target specific individuals who we know use social media and kind of are quite obsessed with their public image, and also to show solidarity with others and… so from different tactics that we use on social media to make change happen we also then use it to show solidarity and connect people, as I said before. The global network kind of feel is really the main priority.

Shaheen Samavati 4:45
And what platforms are you most active on?

Val Voshchevska 4:48
Good question. Not TikTok. I know that is something that a lot of people are now discussing because obviously TikTok has a very large, young audience. And a lot of brands and a lot of NGOs obviously realize that that is the future for us. Those are our supporters in the future, you know, we need to develop, we need to grow. We need to get younger people on board. But at the moment, our main areas of focus are mostly Facebook and Instagram, and Twitter, obviously, for different reasons. Facebook is actually, as much as there’s been controversy and ethical questions around the way that, you know, Facebook does things, Facebook is still used by a large number of people, particularly in the Global South. And it’s actually like a really important tool for people not just to communicate with each other, but… I was talking to someone recently and like, for example, I think in the Philippines, Facebook is used to sign contracts, do different deals online. For businesses to be able to function or, for example, I know that in Georgia (the country), I think 80% of the population use Facebook, which means that it’s just such a powerful tool, even though with a lot of issues that we need to work on together, to reach people. So a lot of our marketing activity is still concentrated on Facebook, but we are trying to diversify. And depending on what markets we work in, and what campaigns we run, and what targets we go after, we will change our strategy. So for example, if it’s something more news oriented, PR focused, and if it’s a little bit more Western, then we would… or like if we’re targeting, for example, we targeted, we had a campaign against Google to drop their project Dragonfly last year, which was there were rumors that Google was going to launch a search engine in China. And so we did a lot of work together with some of the whistleblowers from Google and stuff like that. And that main priority for that was Twitter and actually LinkedIn, because we knew that a lot of people who would be interested and who would be able to make a change would be on those two platforms. And so it really depends on what we’re doing what we’re trying to achieve. And obviously, as I was saying before, it’s kind of like, since our supporters are our main priority, it’s also quite heavily dependent on what audience we’re trying to reach a lot of the time, and where our supporters and where our followers are. So it will vary depending on specific, kind of, things that we do. But basically, one of the main things that happened to Amnesty in terms of digital marketing in the past year is that we actually have now been… so we used to be in a model that was divided between different departments. So like, email marketing was separate to paid marketing, paid advertising was separate, social media was separate. And now what has happened, which kind of answers as well your question about which platforms we’re concentrating on, we’re now all in the same team with the same priorities, and really trying to focus on how we can reach people and how we can be useful to our audiences through all the channels that we have available, but with the same priorities and with the same kind of objectives in mind, if that makes sense.

Shaheen Samavati 8:29
Yeah, and I imagine with the kind of work you’re doing, it requires a lot of interaction and engagement. How do you manage that volume of interaction on a global scale? Like, is it all you? Or you have a team doing that?

Val Voshchevska 8:43
So I used to have a team, at the moment we’re a little bit in the middle. The great thing about now being in the same team with the people who do email marketing and who also, apart from doing email marketing, they do supporter engagement. So a lot of our supporters are both on our social channels, but also, we contact them via email, via specific groups that we run. And so we’re really focusing in the upcoming year, so I think next year, really focusing on how we can actually engage with our audiences together, with like a unified approach to be able to connect people and be useful to our supporters in whatever ways we can. But I guess the other thing to mention is that, so the channels that I personally run are the kind of brand channels, Amnesty English channels, but there is also a lot of different Amnesties in the world. You know, there’s Amnesty Norway, there’s Amnesty India, and we all experience similar kind of things and issues around our community engagement and audience development. And so a lot of the time it’s about really… there are different models, how people run it in different countries. So Amnesty Australia, for example, has a kind of group of volunteers who engage with the audiences and respond to questions, and some other people have it in completely different parts of the organization. So like, I’m trying to remember where exactly, which country office does this, but some of them like the, what are they called, customer service people, they would be the ones engaging with the communities. For me personally, at the moment, it’s me and another colleague of mine, who joined us from BuzzFeed news, helping on reactive production, but also audience engagement, at the moment. The way that we’ve been trying to run a lot of our audience engagement and community management is actually like, just trying to be relevant to what audiences want. So it’s not necessarily replying to every single comment, but it’s reading them and knowing what are the insights that we can take from our audiences and our supporters, and what can we make in terms of content that will be suitable for them, and make sure that they will find it useful, and especially that has happened a lot around our coverage on COVID-19. So it’s kind of been just listening to our audiences and then creating content that they want, and not just us trying to project a voice as Amnesty to them and force feed information that they don’t really need or want, so yeah.

Shaheen Samavati 11:19
So then those local Amnesties, are they coordinated at the global level at all? Or each one is like totally independent and might have different ways of handling social media?

Val Voshchevska 11:29
I think that we’ve made a lot of kind of useful steps in trying to exchange information. There’s a lot of knowledge; the whole point in Amnesty being a community is that it’s not just for our supporters, but it’s also for people who work here and the staff. And so there’s so many things that we learn from each other. Like, for example, just as an example, our top performing posts last year on the English channels were actually something that Amnesty Argentina did, and we just kind of took that, translated it, and we actually use, kind of, Facebook workplace for information exchange and kind of creative interaction between different local Amnesties, so there is a level of coordination. But I think for social media, what’s been super important is that we started a new reactive content process. Together with the media team, which is why I was talking about my colleague, Kassy Cho, who’s joined me to help with the reactive strand of work, it’s actually come from the local offices and the need for us to coordinate on reactive because that’s how we grow. Basically, that’s our main strategy for growing our channels, is being relevant to people. So we do coordinate that quite effectively, I would say. So every morning, from the international secretariat office, we will choose two, three stories that people suggest to us from different local Amnesties, and then we will create the content that people need, and then share it with all of the different Amnesties and people will adapt it based on their local kind of audience insights and what locally they think might work or not. And that’s been really great. And then there’s also a lot that we do in terms of actually like the digital infrastructure between different local Amnesties. So we have a product team who kind of lead on a lot of like digital infrastructure and trying to help people set up their digital marketing kind of funnels. And there’s a lot of that, that is now, through this new digital engagement team that I’m part of, we’re trying to kind of encourage information sharing, because, you know, people do cool stuff all over the world in all different Amnesties. So it’s just a matter of setting those channels of communication to be able to discuss these things, and actually be effective together.

Shaheen Samavati 13:49
I was curious if you have any example of a successful campaign or approach that you’ve had recently to point out, or anything you’re particularly proud of on social media recently?

Val Voshchevska 13:59
Good question. I mean, just because a lot of what we’ve been doing right now centers and focuses around COVID-19, and I will explain why, I think that is probably the best example of how we’ve been working together as like a global movement. And also at all the different marketing stages from organic social to paid advertising to supporter engagement, like the whole kind of strategy has been going quite well. So basically, I will try and explain this. Our main strategy is to fight apathy and isolation in times of COVID-19. So isolation, obviously a lot of people while being at home, while not being able to have any physical contact, go outside that much, all over the world—it’s not just you know, a specific problem for the UK or, you’re in Spain, right? It’s global, it’s everywhere. And so we’ve been trying to, as much as we can, connect people. And so that’s kind of one strand of our approach to COVID-19. And then the other one is fighting apathy. So obviously, because a lot of things that have now been brought up with coronavirus is that a lot of people who are in more vulnerable situations are more exposed to it, and governments around the world haven’t been able to address this before this happened, and also now, it’s, you know, it’s brought up to surface a lot of things that are probably hard for a lot of people to understand and accept. And so that’s kind of our more campaigning side of things. So, in relation to the fighting isolation, Amnesty is not an aid-giving organization. So whilst a lot of other NGOs are there to provide direct support, we are here to kind of connect people. And so one of our most successful things that we’ve been doing so far has been giving people free online educational courses on human rights. So we have Human Rights Academy, which has different courses from, you know, just general courses on “know your rights” to digital security to gender, to a lot of different things. And it’s actually been running for quite a while now. But particularly in this time, we saw as, you know, from a content side that we could really provide useful information and useful free resources to people. So we kind of started promoting the courses and just, we’ve changed our framing from the beginning of that to now, so before it was just genuinely like “We have all these free courses, why don’t you take one?” Because people were, as I said, experiencing, you know, staying at home, and stuff like that. But now we’ve changed it to how are we going to see the world post-COVID-19, and not post-COVID-19 but like, what is the new normal going to look like? And do we want to go back to, you know, letting all these people, the more vulnerable, continue suffering? Are we going to let climate change do its thing? Are we going to go back to a world that that doesn’t really respect people’s rights? Or are we going to actually learn our rights and be able to create a more value-based world going forward. And to do that, take our courses and kind of educate yourself and get the necessary tools to be able to make change locally. So it’s actually been like one of our best-performing campaigns on our paid advertising, on Facebook and Instagram, and organically it’s performed extremely well. I don’t know what other people tell you, but I think Instagram for us, it’s not always a volume kind of conversion platform, right. So it’s a lot about engagement and less about like actually taking people to take action on the website or whatever. But the human rights education course, we got in one day from one post 5,000 link clicks in our bio, which is the biggest number of link clicks we’ve ever had. So people were really really looking for it and like people were tagging each other in the kind of post that was promoting the course. And based on that we kind of developed the full campaign going forward through to marketing, paid marketing, etc, etc. So that’s one thing I think is quite cool. And then the other thing that we’ve been doing is, obviously, a lot of people who are freelancers, especially artists, illustrators, currently a lot of them are out of work. We are out of content because we’re all stuck at home and it’s very hard to find anything. You know, whereas before we could go out and take videos and photos and you know, create cool content, right now it’s very hard and we’ve tried a lot of things, but it’s been quite stressful trying to figure out what to do for certain topics. So what we’ve done is actually combining the fact that freelancers are now in more need of visibility and support, we’ve actually commissioned every week, two to three illustrators to illustrate one of our main topics of coronavirus. So everything from like solidarity-based messaging to calling out racism to whatever they wanted to choose. And we kind of gave them our channels to be able to express what they wanted to. And, obviously, it’s been one of the coolest things I’ve done, because it’s such an Instagram-friendly way of creating content. Yeah, it’s really really resulted in quite a lot of engagement and growth of our channels. So a lot of illustrators on Instagram are also influencers with a lot of followers. And so it’s quite nice to be able to kind of venture outside of Amnesty’s traditional audiences and actually be able to cross-disseminate some of this content with the audiences of these illustrators. So yeah.

Shaheen Samavati 19:57
Yeah, so this kind of goes back to what you were saying before about moving into news and going into the nonprofit world, like hoping to make more of an impact. I mean, do you think… it sounds like you’ve been able to do that. And I also read in another interview, you said that people often see social media as this kind of like fluffy thing that an intern can do, and that’s not the case. I’m interested, if you could say your opinion on that. The impact that’s possible to make through social media is what I’m getting at.

Val Voshchevska 20:30
Of course. I think my biggest pet peeve is unpaid social media work. I think it’s actually like, a lot of people don’t appreciate it for what it is, like, obviously, posting a tweet takes two minutes. But it’s not just about that. It’s about developing the audiences. It’s about creating the strategy. It’s about commissioning content. It’s about, you know, day-to-day kind of interacting with your audiences. It’s just so much more than just hitting send on Twitter, or Instagram or whatever. I personally, as I said before, like a lot of people, some people don’t value it, some people think that it’s super easy. And then others do it just to get into other parts of marketing or other parts of the organization. I actually think that the best social media professionals and people are those who are actually here for social media, and there’s a lot of people like that with a lot of skills, with a lot of professionalism in what they do. So I would say, yeah, it’s not this fluffy thing. A lot of the time, it’s actually quite effective. And some of my digital campaigning colleagues always say that obviously, like, a lot of movements around the world have been started through the use of social media, right. Like I’m from Ukraine, and in Ukraine during the revolution a few years back, the Euromaidan revolution, a lot of the organizing was done through social media. It’s connected a lot of people to each other, it’s given people the ability to kind of mobilize and share information. And there’s a lot of interesting things that have been done through social media. And I remember talking to one of the activists for March for our Lives, from the US. And he was saying that actually social media, why they were so successful in their campaigning against gun stuff in America was because they knew how to reach those audiences. And they knew how to use social media in a way to effectively do something. Obviously, there’s a lot of organizing behind it that is offline, but social media, nevertheless has allowed for people to kind of connect and exchange ideas, exchange plans and kind of be able to create a community of like-minded people, I would say. And moving from news to social media, I am so grateful sometimes that Amnesty takes such strong stances on certain things. So obviously coming from news when, including in social media, when you’re not really, your goal is slightly different, right? You’re here to give people information and provide it as well as you can without making any assumptions or judgments, which is an important thing to do in this world. But I think it’s also quite important and quite good for Amnesty, for other NGOs and organizations and nonprofits and campaigning organizations, to be able to actually make a stance and, on different kind of issues, be able to speak out and say actually what is right and what is wrong, because some things are really non-negotiable in terms of what we kind of want to highlight. So, I think, just as an example, again, just because it’s fresh in my mind, with coronavirus, and again with COVID-19 as it slowly spread from China, from Hong Kong, to Europe, there was a lot of racism, right? There was a lot of people discriminating against people of Asian origin. Our main goal at that time, and it’s still happening, you know, it’s still quite an ongoing topic, was actually to call that out and just say that that’s racist and it’s not okay. And it doesn’t give you an excuse to treat people the way that a lot of people were treating others. I don’t know if you heard there was a story about a Singaporean student in London who was brutally attacked on Oxford Street. So the main street in London in broad daylight, just because, you know, people were racist, and we were able to actually stand up against that and say, you know, this is not okay, and no one should be doing that. Which is why I think it’s, in my opinion, where I see social media having a lot of value, because it also gives other people in other parts of the world support. And some people it gives the understanding that this isn’t okay. And others it gives support that, you know, people are supporting them and are calling out these kind of horrific attacks.

Shaheen Samavati 21:19
Very interesting. So I wanted to bring it back, though, to the Europe topic. You know, one thing I am asking… our focus is on content and social media professionals in Europe, so just from your perspective as a European being based in Europe, any trends you see? And I mean, you work globally, of course. But yeah, just if you’ve seen any trends specifically in Europe or any challenges or opportunities in the European market compared to others?

Val Voshchevska 25:40
Yeah. I would say, I mean, this is not news for a lot of people in marketing. But I would say from the perspective of a lot of nonprofits and NGOs, I feel like Europe is a little bit more advanced, as well as the US, but Europe as well, in terms of influencer marketing and content creation through influencer marketing. We’re currently kind of discussing a few different campaigns with some content creators, and a few agencies that are helping us with that. But what we’re seeing is that the trend of just going to an agency, a normal creative agency, and just, you know, paying them to get content, without any kind of more personal touch to it, or distribution that is straightaway attached, if you’re working with influencers, is a little bit in the past. And so, as nonprofits, I think we’re still trying to find ways that we are able to take the great skills and value that a lot of these content creators with large followings can bring to us while staying true to our values and finding the people who actually long-term want to work with us, and potentially become our long-term kind of brand ambassadors, and it’s still a work in progress. And I think there’s a lot of, again, information exchange that needs to be done between different NGOs on how we do it, and how people approach it. Because, for example, I’m sure this happens as well in corporate world and other types of marketing, but like, how do you properly, you know, look into ethical screenings for these influencers, right? And how do you properly make sure that these people align with your values? And how do you kind of, because there’s this like trade off between good content, right, like, you need to make sure that they produce good content, but they also need to be aligned values based with you. So I would say the opportunity is that at the moment, we don’t have content because we’re stuck at home. So the opportunity is to actually push people higher up, management and stuff, to invest in us trying to do more of this and work with content creators who also will distribute our causes and campaigns and things for us, because they align with what we do moving forward. It’s very different from just like reaching out to a few celebrities, which I think a lot of people in in this kind of sphere still think is influencers and influencer marketing, which it isn’t. It’s a little bit broader than that. But yeah, as I said, I hope that this lack of content and people being at home is going to push people into different avenues to find more innovative ways for creating content.

Shaheen Samavati 28:19
So going to our rapid-fire questions, just wanted to ask you for a few recommendations. First, what’s an app or a tool that you can’t work without?

Val Voshchevska 28:30
Good question. I would say… I’m just looking at my phone to tell you. Actually, Telegram, and that is because it is the only, as far as I’m aware, messaging app that lets me transfer files of an unlimited size from my computer to my phone. I think a lot of social media managers struggle with like, how do you get stuff from your computer to your phone to post on TikTok or Instagram or whatever. So I think a good messaging app that lets you send really large files saves us on a daily basis.

Shaheen Samavati 29:06
I didn’t know that about Telegram, actually.

Val Voshchevska 29:10
Yeah, and you can send it to, you can send it to your saved messages. So you don’t send it to anyone else. But it’s just in your kind of database of stuff.

Shaheen Samavati 29:19
And then a marketing influencer in Europe who you follow?

Val Voshchevska 29:24
Matt Navarra. I think everyone follows Matt Navarra, who does social media.

Shaheen Samavati 29:30
Yeah, and he has a Facebook group, The Social Media Geek Out, right. And then a valuable European group or event or resource for marketers in Europe? You mentioned your own group, right?

Val Voshchevska 29:49
Yeah, so me and a friend of mine who works for the International Foundation for Red Cross and Crescent, Dante, we set up a Social Media for Nonprofits group on Slack, so it’s a Slack group with loads of different people from different organizations, from Greenpeace, to UNHCR, to Oxfam. You can find all the social media managers on it. It’s been the best tool for me and my work so far, the best group. I love it because it’s so easy to just ask people for help if you don’t know something. And a lot of the time social media teams are tiny. So there’s no one else in your organizations that you can ask for advice or help. But now we have this community of over 200 people that you know, you could just Slack and ask, what do you think about this campaign we’re running? And we’ve actually managed to run during, when COVID-19 first kind of badly started out with WHO, we all ran a mini campaign on all our channels. So from Transparency International, Red Cross, ICRC, WHO, UN, we all posted the same thing at the same time. So just, stay together in solidarity. And it actually was… a lot of people noticed it, which I think is just the result of this great connection and group that we made.

Shaheen Samavati 31:10
And how did you manage to get all those people to join your group, and if someone else wanted, for those out there who are social media managers at nonprofits, how would they join?

Val Voshchevska 31:19
They can message me or Dante on Twitter. Find me on Twitter. Actually, it’s my first tweet that is pinned. If you reply there, I will send you the link because it’s an invite-only group, just because we want to keep it kind of manageable. And how did we manage to get all those people in? You will not believe me when I say it just happened. We posted it on Twitter. And it just… more and more people started asking to join and requesting because I think people felt the gap in that, but in our work in nonprofits and social media, like there was no such thing. So it became popular quite fast and, and then people just, you know, invited other people. So I think within two weeks, we got to 150 people. And it’s still, anyone’s welcome to join who would find it useful. So get in touch with me on Twitter.

Shaheen Samavati 32:17
Excellent. So we’re reaching the end of the interview, just if you had any parting thoughts or wise words to say, main takeaways from the conversation?

Val Voshchevska 32:27
Yeah, I guess it’s what you kind of highlighted, that I think social media is actually, for those who are thinking of career choices going forward… it can be a tough part of marketing, because you are public facing, right. Everyone can see your work. Everyone can see what you do on a daily basis. If you don’t do it, then they will ask questions or if you do something they don’t like, they will also comment on it because everyone can see it. So it can be very challenging, but at the same time, it’s actually one of the, in my opinion, funnest and most engaging jobs you can do because you’re constantly talking to people. And you’re constantly kind of working at a fast pace. Yeah, just really being on top of news and knowing what people are talking about, which I find is one of the best parts of this job. It’s cool, and don’t let anyone tell you or anyone else that it’s a fluffy, not important part of marketing. It is. It’s one of the most, because it’s so public facing.

Shaheen Samavati 33:28
Yeah, absolutely. And I think people are increasingly recognizing the importance of social media for sure. Thank you so much, Val, for being on the podcast. Yeah, thank you for your insight.

Val Voshchevska 33:42
Thank you so much.

Shaheen Samavati 33:43
And thanks everybody else for listening in. For more perspectives on content and social media marketing in Europe, check out TheContentMix.com, and of course keep tuning into the podcast. We’ll be posting more interviews like these regularly in the coming days. Bye!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai