Harnessing the power of conventional and social media: How Doctors Without Borders made the best of two worlds to create great awareness
In today’s world, do you even exist if you are not on any social media platform? This question can be understandable for a business, which aims to make a profit by selling its services or products. Still, the same question applies to any organisation regardless of their service, including non-profits. Yes, even if you work for a greater good of the public, fighting against climate change, helping people in need or ending world hunger, you do still need to exist on social media to raise awareness and to reach potential donors and volunteers. With a highly strategic approach on social, supported by the conventional media, NGOs can make great differences like making the headlines, igniting protests to make pressure to the policy makers and even leading policy changes in your favour; like Doctors Without Borders has done during their Aquarius mission. They brought a new context to the migration crisis in Europe and started a vast public discourse about the topic, which resulted in governments and the European Union to change their approach. As an editor, who was in the ‘conventional media’ part of this campaign, I’ve witnessed it firsthand and seen how the organisation harnessed the power of two media worlds successfully. Let’s dive into their story in details.
How can an NGO work like a newsroom?
Between February 2016 to December 2018, MSF Sea, the arm of Doctors Without Borders which organising migrant rescue missions in the Mediterranean, was publishing original and impactful content from their rescue operations done by the Aquarius vessel, on Twitter. At the same time, they were calling out European politicians and campaigning in full force to push for a policy change. While countries like Italy and Malta weren’t giving permission to dock, The Aquarius became a symbol of how governments are imposing restrictions on aid groups helping migrants trying to reach Europe, and European Union and its members were under hard pressure by online and offline protests as you see in these news reports. It was a huge opportunity to show to the public that this wasn’t just plain politics; on the ground, hundreds of men, women and children were dying day by day.
How they made the headlines and created this impression? Because they’ve successfully taken the best of the two worlds: The world of operational NGOs and journalism. While as the organiser of these missions, only they had the possibility to report from the vessel, therefore they profited from being the only source of the original content. The organisation did this in two ways: First, they cooperated with prominent media outlets like Euronews. They gave exclusive access to the Euronews correspondent to report on the board while the humanitarian situation was deteriorating day-by-day, and the whole public was anxious to learn the latest from the vessel.
I’ve witnessed this in first hand, from Euronews side when I was an editor on the news desk. The public interest was huge, and we were anxiously waiting to hear from our reporter on the board to feed our audience with the latest. While we were broadcasting on TV the exclusive content of heart-wrenching stories, interviews with the crew on the board and experts from the organisation, MSF Sea was publishing these stories and the latest on their social media accounts. With this comprehensive media approach, they build a massive audience by raising awareness on the traditional media. They had a vast exposure from the TV broadcasts, which lead people to search for them on social media, and they hooked these audiences with more engaging content on their owned media.
The organisation continued this kind of cooperations with other TVs and newspapers, which has given them huge publicity and recognition while engaging with their audience. But besides these cooperations, Doctors Without Borders, and MSF Sea in particular, work like a media outlet itself, while creating their original content. They have their reporters, cameramen, photojournalists, experts even a news and picture/ video desk. They are a total newsroom themselves and their own content provider.
Journalists are not the only gatekeepers to reach mass audiences anymore
MSF Sea didn’t make do with the reporters or experts of other media; they created their own screen personalities out of their staff. This is another key point to attract media attention, because most of the times when a breaking story goes on, a ‘ready-to-talk-on-TV expert’ is the first thing that all news desks search for. Since most of their content is video reports, which is the top content receives the best engagement, we can see in these videos that one of their expert is explaining a subject, or their staff is talking about their duty or sharing the latest from the ground. Journalists are not the only gatekeepers of reporting and reaching great size of audiences anymore. With the support of social media, we’ve seen that MSF was taking this role from the traditional media, providing journalists with original content and influencing them on headlines. We can see this pattern, in their usage of ‘#news’ and ‘#breaking’ hashtags, usually media outlets use. Their content varies from short news reports to long, documentary-like videos.
All of the above enabled them to manage their content, building closer relations with their audience and presenting ‘media-ready’ content to the other media outlets, which significantly raised their chance to be covered, as happened during the Aquarius mission. After building up a well-aware audience base, supported by conventional and social media, with strong ‘call-to-action’ messages, these audiences started to protest online and in the streets, against the policymakers to change their migration policy. While the public pressure mounted up to the point that can’t be ignored, governments like Malta, had to step back from their decision to ban the Aquarius to dock and opened their ports to the vessel to welcome the migrants saved from the Mediterranean.
Reaching to the key stakeholders with engaging content on social media
Another thing MSF Sea has done very well is to reach directly to the key policymakers on social media platforms with smart and tailored content which generated high engagement from the audience. On 14 December 2016, European Council has published a video on their Twitter account that shows what would be in the agenda of the upcoming summit, regarding the migrant crisis. MSF Sea Twitter account answered this tweet with a remake of that video by correcting the ‘false information’ the council was giving. The video created great conversation and discussion around the topic, including some prominent accounts on this area.
With this campaign, Doctors Without Borders has demonstrated an excellent lesson to all organisations and brands: Whilst social media is a ‘must-have’ place to be, the ones who can add the traditional media successfully into their communication strategy mix, can harness the best of two worlds by engaging bigger audiences and creating great public awareness.
