A Facebook Playbook for Fraternal Organizations - Overview

Greetings All... In an effort to build a Facebook playbook for the Murat Shriners while sharing best practices across Freemasonry, I decide to create this ever-evolving document. I have had the opportunity to lead the Indianapolis based home of Shriners International efforts as it relates to public relations for a number of years now. I have been frequently challenged to determine how best to both attract new members into the Shrine and communicate activities to existing members. Please feel free to comment below with questions and other topics you would like me to discuss in order to communicate with your potential and current members. In my normal vocation, I sit as a consultant with Eli Lilly and Co.'s consumer social media team.- Andy

Many fraternal lodges are interested in developing websites in order to communicate with current and potential members but many organizations lack the creative muster and experience to write an insights based creative brief in order to achieve an adequate value proposition (the reason a client would want to use a service.) While websites are great for fraternal parent organizations, implementation begins to fall apart as each individual lodge, club, or unit begins to create their own version of of an interface for their members. These websites lead to a number of unforeseen challenges including:

• A limited number of users with the capacity to edit and add content leading to dated content.
• Poor transition plans as leadership changes within the lodge, unit, or club.
• Ongoing costs including hosting, domains, graphic design, user interface updates, etc.
• A frequent inability to adhere to an organizational brand book. This causes a disjoint user experience as a potential member moves from top-level sites to local lodge, unit, club sites.

Website Misses (things most lodges, units, clubs can't afford or don't consider)

• Usability testing
• Conversion testing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Cross-platform functionality

While conventional websites are a mess of pitfalls, we find that social organizations are a natural fit for social media platforms and when it comes to platform fit, Facebook blows the others out of the water. Facebook provides an easy to manage interface that allows organizations to feature locations, upcoming events, stories, sub-groups, photos, and videos. The user experience is fully baked; even digital marketing novices find the administrative interface simple and straightforward to use. The ability to specify multiple types and multiple individuals as content providers / administrators is also a great advantage to sharing the responsibility of quality content creation.

Table of (Potential) Contents

Writing a value proposition for your page.

Setting up your Facebook Page

• Page vs Location vs Group
• Claiming a Location
• Creating Admins and Editors
• Creating a brand page covering multiple locations

Get Your Members to Join

Creating Wall Content

• Editorial Calendar / Post Frequency
• Add Asset

Creating an Event

Using Facebook Ads Manager

• Grow your audience
• Drive Conversion

Measure, Measure, Measure

Setting up a Transition Plan

As I mentioned earlier - I want to know what I am missing... Comment below...