Eleshea Williams is social media specialist at Amnesty International, where she has turned what was once a jobs-board afterthought into one of the organisation’s most engaged channels, doubling its LinkedIn following in a year. She started out training to be an English teacher, then found her way into charity work via The Black Curriculum, the campaign group behind the graphic on race and the UK curriculum that went viral in the days after George Floyd’s murder. From there it was Shakespeare’s Globe, then UNICEF UK, then Amnesty. Here’s what she’s learnt.

Meet people where they are, not where you expect them to be. I once noticed a cluster of IT professionals engaging with our LinkedIn page and traced it back to a handful of colleagues who talked about human rights within their own professional communities. Their audience followed them over. People trust individuals more than institutions, so reaching a new audience often means going through someone else’s network rather than building your own from nothing.

Being prepared before attention arrives is what lets you use it well. At The Black Curriculum, we’d already spent a year building the case for teaching Black British history before one of our graphics reached a much wider audience than anything we’d made before. Having the materials and the evidence in place meant we could respond seriously and thoughtfully, rather than scrambling to catch up.

Don’t just state the problem, give people something to do about it. In the same campaign, a petition to Parliament and practical resources for parents gave an audience that felt shaken by the news somewhere to put that feeling. Timing gets people’s attention; what you ask of them afterwards is what keeps it.

Long approval processes are the killers of creativity. Necessary in an organisation with real reputational risk, but they need to be balanced with trust in the people closest to the work. By the time something overly cautious clears every stage, the moment it was meant for has usually passed.

Hope-based communication is not the same as hope-washing. I used to think being hopeful in the face of genuinely devastating news meant softening it, and dismissed that as fluffy. I see hope differently now: not telling people to feel positive, but giving them something to do that isn’t always a donation or a petition, just some way to act rather than simply absorb bad news.

Doom-mongering switches people off as fast as false positivity does. People don’t come to social media for news, most of them come to be entertained. Deliver the hard truth, but pair it with enough agency that the audience doesn’t simply scroll past to protect themselves from it.

A smaller charity with a phone and access to Canva can out-perform a much larger one. Institutional weight is not the advantage it looks like. Big organisations often move too slowly to stay relevant on platforms built for speed, while smaller ones can be more responsive precisely because they have less to get through before they publish.

Micro-creators beat celebrities when the issue is specific. A famous face with millions of followers who mention a cause in passing will rarely outperform someone with ten thousand followers whose entire presence is built around that one issue. Depth of engagement matters more than breadth of reach.

Your network is your net worth. When I decided I wanted to work in charity, I messaged the social media managers at every organisation I admired and asked for twenty minutes of their time. Each conversation led to another. My advice to anyone starting out: be specific about what you want, because people are far more willing to help someone who already knows the answer. Vague enthusiasm is much harder to act on than a clear direction.

The same platform means something different to every audience it holds. Our Instagram skews American, our Facebook page has a large Pakistani following, our LinkedIn is predominantly British and drawn there by the brand itself rather than any single post. Treating every channel as the same conversation, just resized, misses that each one is really a different room with different people in it.

Individual voices are becoming a factor in institutional decisions. I expect major donors to start weighing whether an organisation’s own people talk credibly about their work online, not just what the organisation’s official channels say. A team that is visibly engaged says something about the institution behind it that no press release can.

Ethical storytelling means the person whose story it is should lead the telling of it. I trace the charity sector’s long history of undignified, decontextualised images of suffering, particularly of African countries, and believe person-centred storytelling with informed consent is not only more respectful, but has been shown to be more effective for fundraising too.

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Cause & Effect is a series from Hope, a charity branding and marketing agency, in which leading figures who have been involved in building and promoting good causes tell us what they’ve learned from their experiences. Interview by Michael Isaacs.