Hello
This sounds like a really timely and interesting project, one that it would
be good for museums to get involved in.

I have a quick response to your first question. I'd say you need to do a
bit of both. There should be some activity on the profiles of all the
consortium members, to engage their existing supporters and champions. That
said, it helps to have one dedicated place where all social media activity
can be found. You might choose to do this by creating regular Storifys, or
just have lots of social media feeds into a Wordpress or similar site.

Rather than creating a new Twitter or Facebook page for the project, I'd
argue for a more personalised approach. If there is going to be a project
manager or maybe a small team of champions they should use their own
profiles (either new project-specific or general existing accounts) to
generate discussion. They should use hashtags and links to drive traffic to
the central website - and that would be your main site to gather statistics
through. There isn't really a clear distinction any more between social
media and websites, given that they all feed content into each other.

In terms of describing reach, if possible, I'd focus on numbers of people
engaging around particular hashtags or online events, or numbers of
comments/shares etc, rather than the numbers of people reached per se.

Hope that helps
Bridget
www.flowglobal.co.uk




On Tue, Jun 9, 2015 at 12:46 PM, Asimina Vergou <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> Dear colleagues,
>
> we are a consoritum of 20 organisations across Europe (mainly botanic
> gardens) currently resubmitting a Horizon 2020 project proposal on engaging
> the public with food security issues through science cafes and outreach
> exhbitions and one of the ways to maximize the impact and reach of the
> project activities is through the use of the social media across 14
> countries. Botanic Gardens, partners in this project already have their
> organisation's social media platforms e.g. facebook, blogs, twitter
> accounts. I would like to ask for advice in relation to the digital
> engagement element of the project:
> 1.Is it better to use the existing organizations' social media (each
> botanic garden in their country will engage with their local audiences) or
> is it better to create new social media profiles focused only on the
> particular project? This will mean that the botanic gardens will need to
> start from scratch new facebook/twitter accounts and build the followers of
> the media.
> 2.More importantly, how to I estimate the people who will be reached
> through the social media? The idea is that people will be engaged through
> face to face interactions during the science cafes and outreach exhibitions
> and they will then take home challenges and competitions related to food
> issues and their participation will be on-line. The general public will be
> also encouraged to be part of this on-line engagement aspect of the
> project. The question is, how do I estimate the people who will be engaged
> through the on-line tools e.g. blog, facebook and twitter? Do you have any
> project examples I could look at where there is evidence of on-line
> engagement? When you write project proposals and you include different
> forms of on-line engagement how do you estimate the number of potential
> people you will reach? And how do you justify your estimates? On what
> grounds?
> I would be grateful if you would give me any advice on this by the 25th of
> June.
> very best wishes,
> Asimina
>
> Dr. Asimina Vergou
> Head of Education
> BGCI
> Descanso House, 199 Kew Road, Richmond
> Surrey TW9 3BW, UK
> Tel: 00 44 (0) 208 332 5954
> Email: [log in to unmask]
>
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