emilyytong-blog

[emilyytong-blog]

Transparency to Mitigate Risk

Transparency is one of the most important factors in the nonprofit world. It is extremely significant for the nonprofit organizations to be transparent to the public since it is operating under the publics’ money. The public would want to know that where their money was spent and how did it help the others and whether it is used under the original intention. Therefore, all nonprofit organization should be as much transparent as possible and let the public know every steps and movements the organizations take. A similar organization to MSF, American Red Cross was involved into a crisis two years ago because it declined repeatedly to disclose details on how exactly money was spent in Haiti and instead provided only broad categories of expenditure. Because of their attitude toward this problem, the brand image and credibility were highly damaged because of this crisis. Not that many people were willing to donate to American Red Cross after this issue. From this example, we can see how important transparent is to the nonprofit organizations and how it could simply damage a positive brand image that was built over years. Therefore, MSF should not repeat the same mistakes as American Red Cross, instead it should keep its information as transparent as possible.

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The Dark Side

Since more and more people start to use different social media as new platforms to share their lives with the online audience, cyberbullying has become one of the major topics that is being discussed by the public. For example, the picture above is a screenshot of cyberbullying on Facebook. It is true that social media has offered the public a platform to share their own opinions and perspective with others, however, it should not turn to a tool to target and bully strangers just because there will be less consequence than it will be in reality. When I was in college, one of my friend has post a picture of her in bikinis by the swimming pool. Below her pictures, there are couple strangers saying that she is not skinny enough and that she doesn’t look good in bikinis. After she saw those comments, she barely eat for a whole week because she wants to be skinny. The strangers who posted those comments may never thought how their perspectives can influence a twenty year old girl. The fact that people are not aware of the harm of cyberbullying brings to other people is the most poignantly part. In addition, cyberbullying not only affect the people around us, but also affect large organizations as well. For example, such as MSF, people may not bully on refugees, but on the governments and the organization. However, not matter where cyberbullying happens, it should be stopped and prevented because the only thing that cyberbullying brings to the online audience is pain.

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Marketing Toolkit — Instagram

The reason I uploaded this two pictures are because both of them tell the audience a story from different points of view. Unlike just events or mission statements, these two pictures have visual narratives and provide the audience another way to know the organization. A way that is more convincible and emotional, so that the audience are willing to know more about the organization and become more emotional engaged. 

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Creating Shared Awareness Using Social Media

MSF has used different social media platforms to raise awareness on the event of Mediterranean rescue, including twitter, Facebook, Instagram and etc. Moreover, they have post different sides of the event on different social media platforms instead of just repeating the same information on different sites. First, they used twitter to tell a story: a new born baby on board. 

Then they have posted a visual narrative, a video, on Facebook to give online audience an opportunity to see the facts and the other side of this event.

Last, but not least, MSF has posted a photo of a woman who was rescured by the MSF team to give the online audience another perspective of this event.

All these information on the different social media platforms have informed the online audience various perspectives towards this event to let them have a better understanding of what MSF is really doing right there. Moreover, MSF has used different photos and captions to avoid repetitive content, which provide the online audience opportunities to always seeing the new stuff. 

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Top 5 Insights

After observe MSF’s online activities on different social media platforms and interview with one of its communication department staff, I have come up with some recommendations that may help MSF become more engaged with its public online audience.

1) More Aware of the targeted audience Instead of just sharing general information of the daily activities, MSF can focus more on sharing specific information that targets a particular audience group to engage the more connection with this group. For example, they can use different social media platforms to profile stories about how doctors perform surgeries to the refugees in MSF for the targeted doctor online audience. 

2) More Storytelling Most of the MSF online activities and information are about an event or a recent campaign. In order to emotionally become more engaged with its online audience, MSF can add more stories into its social media activities to create an immersive online environment. For example, MSF can profile a story of a volunteer that participated in the latest campaign “Not a Target” to demonstrate everything he/she did in this campaign, so that the online audience can have a deep and fully understanding of what MSF is really doing in every campaign. 

3) More Proactive Even though during the interview, the MSF staff indicated that they have put a lot of people and resources to proactively interact with the online audience, however, based on the social media platforms, it seems that they can still try harder to build connections with its audience. In order to form a mutual communication with the online audience, MSF can hold online chat groups that encourage the online audience to participate and share their perception. For example, they can form a online chat group to talk about their latest campaign “Not a Target” and share our information with the online audience and to see if they have any other suggestions or advice regard to this campaign.

4) Brand Reputation MSF has build a positive brand reputation on all the social media platforms. Especially it has show a strong brand image on transparency and honesty by public all of its information online, such as annual report, financial statement and etc. According to the different social media platforms, it appears that MSF do not have enough transparency to allow the online audience to really understand what they are doing. To strength brand reputation, they should profile more individual stories online to share with the public. 

5) Disclosure ignorant impact  Most of the stories and perceptions on MSF social media platforms are about the organization or people who worked for MSF from developed countries. They barely shared any stories of people who live in the undeveloped countries that received the medical help from the MSF. The online audience have a limited understanding of how MSF have impact and changed their lives. Therefore, MSF should profile more stories and do more storytelling on people who they helped with to disclose the ignorant impact. 

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Why: One third of the worlds population lacks access to essential medicines, especially in Africa and Asia. Hundreds and thousands of people are suffering under infection diseases such as Cholera, Ebola, HIV/AIDS and etc. However, these are not the only medical problems we are facing right now. That’s why MSF is devoted to delivers emergency aid to people regardless of gender, race, political affixation, nationality, or any other factors that restrict people’s access to medical treatment.

How: MSF is committed to providing any medical treatment, ranging from basic vaccination campaigns, maternal and pediatric care, and fighting neglected diseases, to performing compelling surgeries—as well as treatments in any related medical fields.

What: By building more diseases research centers and providing emergency medical aid to more countries within more medical fields, MSF is also seeking to generate more attention and shine a spotlight on the phenomena of the lack of medical treatment around the world and to encourage more people to journey this philanthropic path.

Unlike the world we are living in, in the other side of the world, there are people that suffering under server diseases and lack of essential medicines to sustain their lives. The fact that one third of the worlds population lacks access to essential medicines, especially in Africa and Asia, is a major concern to our community. Médecins Sans Frontières, known as Doctors Without Borders, is an international, independent, medical humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to people affected by armed conflicts, epidemics, natural disasters, and exclusion from healthcare. We ask you, who agree with our mission, to support and join us to make this world a better place.

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Donald Trump, who was perceived as a “rogue” brand identity in his political career as the new president of the United States just had his Inauguration Ceremony this Friday. In his speech, he has constantly presented his “rogue” brand identity as a nonprofessional politician and did not successfully change and persuade public’s perception toward him. Although he was wearing a power suit in his speech, black suit and red ties, his body movements and eye contacts seems weak and unprofessional. He didn’t have appropriate strong hand gestures that match his speech content, indeed, he was just moving his hands around with random hand gestures. He would have been perceived more professionally and trustworthy if he can match his hand gestures with his talking points. His eye contacts with audience was not bad, however, he intended to only focus on just one side of the audience instead of the whole group. In his speech, he mentioned, “Together, we will make America strong again. We will make America wealth again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes, together we will make America great again.” This statement seems to be one of the most strong statements in his inauguration speech. It successfully generated the public’s attention and build his new identity as the president of the United States. Overall, even though Donald Trump did not had an inauguration speech as strong as president Obama had, we shall still expect something good from him and see how he would manage his brand identity in the future.

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Jie Tong's Bio

Hi everyone, my name is Emily(Jie) Tong. I come from mainland China and just graduated from Boston University’s School of Communication last summer. I have participated in a non-profit charity organization called “Children in DaLiangShan”over the past summers to help students who live in urban China. As I traveled widely within China, I came to observe that there were many people left in rural and unbar poverty who did not benefit from China’s economic modernization program, which made me think what more can I do in this organization in order to help more kids in the future. Therefore, I chose to study nonprofit management for my graduate school program in order to help more kids in the future. 

The two organizations I chose for my future Marketing and Communications Plan are: MSF(doctor with our borders) and The international Mountain Bicycling Association.