Paying it Forward: Social media Training for Kwale Arts Troupe

A Section of some of the participants

Kwale Arts Troupe is a very active youth group that uses arts/acting to pass various messages to the community. They have been in active collaboration with Plan International Kwale WASH program and the Ministry of Health especially on issues of reproductive health.

Just recently they produced a movie called KIZA and even performed a poem during this year's Madaraka Day. Looking at the potential they have and the data I got from them during the APPR process, I sought to help profile their presence online.

For two days, (27th and 28th June, 2013) I led them through the social media training whose objectives were:

• To expose the trainees on various social media tools at their disposal.
• Learn how to open and operate a various social media channels (Blogs, Twitter, Facebook page and YouTube)
• To come up with a social media strategy to aid their activities online.

The first day was mainly introducing them to social media. We delved in to the objectives of the training, their expectations from the training and what social media is general is. The group expected to gain insights as to the use of various social media tools.

One of the powerpoint slides

Later on, we set on a step by step illustration on how to open a gmail account as none actually had before delving on how to create blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts and YouTube accounts. My choice for these tools was for the reason they are most used platforms online. For instance there are more than 126 million blogs on the internet, we have over 2 billion views on  YouTube videos, Facebook has over 500 million users and at least 50% of these make a log in daily and over 65 million tweets are sent daily. Hence maximizing on these four channels is of paramount importance. More so, I realized they are very green in to the world of online media and hence a step by step usage of these tools was important.

On the second day, we delved in to the social media strategy meant to help pave way for their online engagement. This was in a detailed process looking at their social media goal/objective, their target audience, sample work plan, monitoring and evaluation, measuring impact and risk control process.

Achievements
By the end of the training, the participants were able to:

• Operate their twitter accounts. In total 9 all of them created their accounts. I encouraged them to experiment with their own accounts before embarking on their institutional one.
• They were able to upload videos on YouTube and foster conversation and engagement on the already existing ones.
• They were able to create a Facebook page “Kwale Arts “though new and modification is ongoing. Feel free to drop a like on the same page.
• They learnt how to create a blog using blogger.

Projections
After a week deliberation, the group will come up with a social media strategy which will help them in their engagement online. I will step in to help them get on their feet as pertains all these social media channels.