Agency Managed and Personal Social Media Accounts

Social Media Policies – Agency Managed and Personal Social Media Accounts

You are a group of Human Resources consultants.  A social impact (nonprofit) organization that provides social work services to clients is considering hiring you to deliver training for a group of aspiring supervisors, but first, they want to see a work product that you have developed.  In this case, the product is a report that you have published.  For this assignment, you will develop a report

The total length for the report is not to exceed 8 pages, single-spaced.  Margins must be no smaller than 1 inch, and font no smaller than 11 points, spaced normally.  You can, but are not required to, include graphics to reinforce concepts.

There are 5 sections, and I have suggested a length for each section, but those are not “hard and fast” page limit rules:

1. Background of the use of social media in social impact (nonprofit) organizations (~1-2 pages, single-spaced)
2. Brief description/examples of the types of social media platforms that social impact organizations might use, what the features are, how the features are used and how the platforms differ from one another.  If feasible, it will likely be helpful to group platforms into categories  (~1-2 pages, single-spaced).
3. Recommendations for developing policies and procedures for using the organization-owned accounts: what the purpose of the account should be, what type of content should be posted by the organization, what type of feedback/response (if any) the organization seeks from users of social media, what type of content should NOT be posted, who should have authorization to post, how often posts should be made and whether there are any different procedures across platforms, etc.. (~1-2 pages)
4. Recommendations for policies and procedures that govern employees’ use of their personal social media as it relates to the organization and their employment.  (For example, under what, if any, circumstances should an organization prohibit employees from listing themselves as employees and/or discussing anything related to the organization?). (~1-2 pages)
5. Recommendations for how to ensure policies are comprehensive enough to capture new social media platforms that might emerge over time.  In other words, you don’t want to have to go back and update this policy for every single new platform that comes up, so be sure to address how to make a policy flexible enough. (~1/2-1 page)

**For the purposes of this assignment, do not consider crisis chatlines or crisis textlines as social media.  Those will have vastly different policies and procedures.**

Include a reference sheet at the end. **At least 2 references must be recent (no more than 5 years old) and come from scholarly publications OR you can include examples from organizations that have social media policies. This means you will need to do a little research on the topic.  We have a fabulous social work librarian, Darlene Nichols dpn@umich.edu who can help if needed.

This resource is not sufficient, but I have included it because I hope it will help you get started to think about some of the complexities of this topic.  “I Thought We Were Friends!” Can Nonprofits Terminate Employees for _Their Social Media Posts_ – Non Profit News For Nonprofit Organizations _ Nonprofit Quarterly.pdf