Using Social Media to Keep Stakeholders Up-to-Date: 8 Expert Tips

Organizations in the healthcare safety net can leverage social media to raise their profiles, engage new constituents, and keep patients informed.

Inform stakeholders about your services.

Stakeholders can be current or prospective patients, funders, partners, or government agencies. Creating social media posts as new services are added helps your organization to seem dynamic and exciting and gets the word out to others who can help promote them.

Keep your organization top-of-mind.

In an environment that is competitive for funding and for services, maintaining a strong social media presence can prevent you from getting lost among many other organizations serving similar populations. Making sure that your social media is branded and consistent can help to define your organization in a particular area.

Invite the community to be part of your work.

You can post information about upcoming events, needed donations, volunteer days, and fundraising opportunities. Regularly communicating what you need and how others can help makes room for more participation.

Celebrate milestones.

Social media posts can be a fantastic way to acknowledge financial and in-kind contributions. Advertising when a volunteer has completed a one-year anniversary or a student intern has graduated allows you to highlight individuals. Acknowledging new grants, donations, and other support highlights how the community is coming together for your mission.

Promote health information and address misinformation.

Free and Charitable Clinics and Pharmacies are trusted by underserved community members to have their best interests at heart. Serving as a consistent and reliable source of health information and identifying other sources of reliable health information is important for maintaining the trust and keeping patients and community members informed about facts. State health departments, CDC, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, and other established health organizations often create high quality, factual social media posts that can be easily shared with your constituents.

Raise funds.

Social media posts can be used to build momentum toward fundraising and donations. As noted above, one way to do this is to recognize funders publicly. Social posts can directly link to your fundraising platform.

Enhance partnerships.

Sharing key partner posts can help your community learn about services and events available in the community. It increases the likelihood that your partner organizations will return the favor. To avoid diluting your voice and message, develop criteria for the types of partner posts that you will promote. Be open about the criteria with partners and ask them to send you information that is aligned.

Showcase the team.

Some free and charitable clinics have found that posts that feature their staff and volunteers are readily shared and achieve wide reach. As long as you assure that appropriate release forms have been signed, showing staff and volunteers at work can be informative to a broad audience and acknowledge personal contributions.

Put a face with a name.

By featuring staff and volunteers in social media, the organization can be recognized not just for what it does but for who does it. Keeping a few faces prominent helps to make an organization seem more approachable and personable.