Community-Based Influencer Marketing: How To Uplift Voices Supported by Your Nonprofit

As the digital space becomes both crowded and more fragmented, we are seeing audiences increasingly prioritize authenticity and trust in their social media landscapes. This focus on authenticity is an extraordinary opportunity for organizations seeking to bring together people with shared interests in curated digital spaces – elevating the voices, experience, and values of their communities. At MissionWired, we do this through focusing on cultivating relationships with influencers across our portfolio. We’re also seeing an increase in mission-based organizations engaging with influencer marketing to grow audiences and inspire action.

For the Teacher2Teacher and Principal Project networks (originally funded by the Gates Foundation and managed by MissionWired, now part of the Edutopia family), engaging with educators is at the very core of their missions. Both communities were founded to create spaces for educators to connect with one another, share resources, learn from one another in digital professional learning communities, and solve problems in collaboration. To realize this mission, these communities rely on co-creation and content sourcing in all of the resources they share.

The power of elevating the voices of teachers and education leaders can’t be overstated: Organic influencer marketing allows Teacher2Teacher and Principal Project to stay right at the forefront of innovative content, creating collaborative spaces and always connecting educators with the next great idea to strengthen classroom experiences and environments.

We’re excited to share how we worked with these two incredible organizations to help them develop meaningful relationships with leaders in the education space, elevate their voices, and build community around their expertise.

Read on to learn why organic influencer marketing is an effective tool for mission-driven organizations, how we connect and deepen relationships with new voices in the field, and how you can start a program from within your nonprofit community.

Co-Creation & Organic Influencer Marketing

In education, which can be such a heavily siloed profession, digital community holds an especially high value: Educators turn to and prioritize content that’s been validated by their fellow practitioners, because no one “gets it” like teachers do. Co-created content from fellow educators reflects the unique questions, pressures, and possibilities educators are navigating today.

For Teacher2Teacher and Principal Project, co-created content offers educators access to new ideas, support and inspiration, and the chance to participate in collaborative efforts and creation. These digital resources can take the form of:

Social media graphics and carousels

Infographics featuring educator quotes

Blog posts authored by educators

Video and audio content

To bring the insights, tips, and ideas of fellow educators to life in these community spaces, our team has developed a streamlined process of community management to identify new influencer voices, initiate connections, and deepen relationships through collaborative co-creation:

Step 1: Identify Voices From Within Your Community

During our time managing Teacher2Teacher and Principal Project, nearly every partnership we built with educators began with a simple outreach over social media or email. In these spaces, we stayed attuned to the conversations that were happening between educators, identified engaged practitioners whose approach aligned with our organizational values, and built relationships through digital outreach and live conversations.

We think about our outreach and relationship development with our network of co-creators in a way that’s familiar to many nonprofits and mission-driven direct marketing: Education influencers move through stages of engagement with our work and communication with our teams. These interactions will vary from one influencer to the next, but we often find there are three core stages of engagement:

  1. Familiarity and connection: The educator follows our pages and content.
  2. Social engagement: The educator likes, replies, or retweets our content.
  3. Direct communication and collaboration: We connect with educators through social channels to discuss resharing content or co-creating something new.

When our team discovered a voice in the education space sharing valuable insights that aligned with Teacher2Teacher or Principal Project’s mission, oftentimes we engaged directly with their post and asked for a follow, which enabled us to send a DM. From there, we solicited permission to amplify their messaging by resharing it with our audiences. In these communications, our aim was to offer recognition and a larger audience for the insights they were sharing.

Step 2: Establish Partnerships With Influencers

Once a direct relationship between an educator and Teacher2Teacher or Principal Project was established, they joined a community of education influencers and were invited to share more collaborative content in their voice.

In many cases, this content took the form of an authored blog post. To maintain clear lines of communication, respect for the time and insights of our collaborators, and a supportive process, our team leveraged a few key strategies to co-create content with education influencers:

Email introductions: After connecting over social channels through DM, we requested the educator’s email address and sent an introduction to find a time to connect.

Appreciation for participation: To express our gratitude for education influencers taking time and sharing insights with our communities, our team offered a gift card to all of our collaborators.

Connection over live calls: We held calls in pairs and transcribed our calls with educators to capture their voice and expertise with accuracy and ensure no detail from our time with them is missed.

Predrafted authored content: We drafted the blog or other content piece in the voice of the educator and sent it to them for edits and approval before publishing.

These collaborations also resulted in other types of content aiming to deepen community engagement online – from video series to chat moderations to educator-introduced campaigns.

Co-Creation in Action: Partnership Spotlights

To see how organic social media connections can be cultivated to form collaborative connections – and how working together can create powerful content as a resource for the wider community – we’re sharing a look at how our partnership with two of many teachers grew from outreach to co-creation:

Step 1: Outreach

These educators followed Teacher2Teacher and engaged with our content. When they shared specific strategies that we knew would resonate with the large community, we reached out for permission to reshare their quotes. Shortly after, we reached out again to ask for their email addresses so that we could deepen our work together.

Step 2: Collaborative Co-Creation

Over the following few years, we met with these educators over multiple calls to learn more about their practice and work together on a range of co-created content. In our partnerships, we created social media posts, blog posts, and voiceover for Teacher2Teacher campaigns together. Throughout this collaboration, we maintained our relationships with these education influencers over email, social channels, and phone conversations.

 

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Let’s work together!

At MissionWired, we’re dedicated to helping nonprofit, education, and other mission-driven organizations grow their communities and deepen their relationships with their audiences. If you’re interested in discovering how organic influencer marketing can grow your program, our team would be happy to help. Connect with us to chat about how we can build a comprehensive approach unique to your specific mission, audience, and goals – or let us know how we can support you! Reach out to us at [email protected] to get the conversation started.