Socia Media for Social Good

In 2013, I was an undergraduate and a part of AIESEC (A student run organization on campus), as the project director of the Lagos Chapter; I designed a campaign to raise awareness for women and girls rights. To achieve this, we mobilized over 150 students from the University and 60 women and girls in the community that the project was to hold in.

The presence of the youths, women and girls was overwhelming. People had told me that because my beneficiaries weren't on social media that I didn't have to go on social media because then it will be useless but we were only able to mobilize over 200 youths, women and girls with the help of social media. Since then, I have used social media to raise awareness about causes that I believe in and champion.

I have seen that a lot of campaigns fail because they failed to utilize a free resource available to them at their fingertips; Social Media. Social media is super easy and will make a huge positive impact on a campaign if properly used.

Grassroot movement building is very important because it gives the manpower you need to achieve your goals. I have learned that creating a simple volunteer form for sign up goes a long way in making the volunteers know that we are serious with our work. After registering, we email and text them to thank them for applying and email and text to thank them for attending. All this is possible with social media.

I recently started a fellowship program to recruit volunteers that can serve in the 9 public primary schools we are currently working with in Nigeria and as soon as we posted on our social media pages, we got a lot of applications that we probably wouldn't have gotten using a flyer.

My organization is small and still growing and two major challenges that we have are; volunteer retention and funds. We easily get volunteers on social media but we haven’t quite gotten what we can give as incentives to keep them. I appreciate the Personal Assets Map task as it has given me ideas that I will start putting to good use soon.

Funding is also a huge problem and we are working on using our resources and assets to make zero budget projects in 2016.

I am making a few connections here on World Pulse and I completely love this platform. I am looking forward to meeting some World Pulse members in Nigeria next week. I will like to challenge everyone here to get social because we can use social media for social good.

One thing I have learned from working with a lot of youths is; “Together we achieve more”