How the International Rescue Committee found success on Instagram
Audiences are increasingly turning to Instagram as a source of news and information, offering INGOs an excellent opportunity to use the platform as a space to share their expertise.
The International Rescue Committee has found an effective strategy to make the most out of Instagram. As a result, their number of followers increased by 92% in one year (June 2020 – June 2021). During the Euros, their post celebrating the diversity of the England team went viral and last year their posts explaining the Yemen humanitarian crisis were shared thousands of times.
Poppy Bullen, Senior Digital Communications Officer at IRC, shares her top tips for INGOs hoping to up their game on Instagram.
Be a source of reliable information
There was a really pivotal shift in Instagram last year. It has become a platform where people go to share and get their information. But I don’t think INGOs are necessarily making as much use of it as they could. In our world of information overload, I think people will be looking to organisations like ours to get reliable information, so it’s important that we’re putting it out there.
Swipable infographics are a great example. Last year, there was a lot of social conversation about the crisis in Yemen, so when we saw that trending we thought this is definitely something we should be sharing as well! It was around the time of our World Refugee Week campaign, but even though we had so much else going on we made the decision to be reactive and create a Yemen infographic. So many people shared it and added it to their stories. Since then we’ve been using that style of information graphic for subjects that we feel we’ve got the expertise on which has continued to work well.
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Get creative and find positive stories
With Instagram, for the majority of your content the tone still needs to be positive. It’s important for the audience and supporters to see stories and content they enjoy reading and sharing, whilst also seeing the IRC’s impact. So sometimes it’s about finding the creative flare for things.
Our Fish n Chips campaign did really well. We had a film with Gary Lineker talking to an animated fish voiced by Jo Brand, and she’s telling him about the history of fish and chips, and how it was brought to the UK by a refugee. That was a really fun piece of work, and allowed us to do other interactive things on Instagram like quizzes about refugee inventions. Being able to find that kind of quirky content is great. That campaign did really well – obviously partly because of Lineker’s huge following on Instagram!
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Keep on top of trends and be reactive
One of the main things we focus on is keeping on top of trends. Keep an eye on relevant accounts and hashtags, and look at what’s happening in the news. It’s so important to be able to react to what’s happening in the world on Instagram. Previously, we might have just reacted on Twitter, but it’s actually really beneficial if we can get our teams to quickly put a graphic together, or have strong images on hand to be able to talk on a relevant subject. That sort of content does really well.
For example, we saw great success with our ‘it’s coming home’ graphic which celebrated the England football team’s diversity. We shared it just before England played in the semi-final and the post went viral. In the same week visits to our landing page through direct or Google search increased by 130% compared to the previous week.
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Use a mixture of content
Another key part of our strategy is using a mixture of content, from engaging case studies to shareable infographics and reactive posts. And it’s important not to underestimate the importance of Instagram Stories. They are quite time consuming, so can be easily overlooked, but even just sharing the most recent post onto your Stories can really increase engagement. We find takeovers perform really well on Stories too. For example, we’ll have staff members talking about a situation from the field which allows people to feel a bit closer to the situation.
We’ve also experimented with Instagram Lives, and they seem to work particularly well with celebrities. We had the actress Siobhan McSweeny from Derry Girls talk to a women’s protection staff member in South Sudan and that was really successful.
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Poppy Bullen is IRC’s Senior Digital Communications Officer.
