Femina Hip Uses HealthCOMpass to Develop Social Media Strategy to Reach Youth Throughout Tanzania

by Catherine Tusajigwe and Lynn O’Rourke

Femina Hip is a multimedia platform and a civil society initiative working with youth, communities and strategic partners across Tanzania. Since 1999, our aim has been to promote healthy lifestyles, sexual health, HIV and AIDS prevention, and gender equality. With our new Strategic Plan 2013-17 our agenda also includes citizen’s engagement and economic empowerment with a focus on entrepreneurship, financial literacy, and livelihoods in agriculture.

Femina Hip is a multimedia behavior change communication initiative that gives youth a voice in Tanzania through media channels like magazines, TV and radio. We also use the web and social media to reach our audience. The online space is slowly growing in Tanzania, and while our audience is limited to mostly urban youth based in Dar es Salaam, we are seeking ways to expand our online presence and to build the capacity of young people throughout Tanzania to engage with technology.

In November 2013 we were excited to meet the HealthCOMpass team, who came all the way to Dar es Salam, to tell us about their new website and the resources that might help us make a plan for the future. It was a good match for Femina Hip because, like HealthCOMpass, we focus on behavior change and health.

Our dynamic social media team has spent some time test-driving the HealthCOMpass website and looking for resources that can help us develop our social media strategy for the next four years. Through the process of searching, reading and analyzing we found good resources, and we also realized that we had something to contribute.

We are now working on documenting our own process for interacting with youth through Facebook and Twitter and will post this on the HealthCOMpass site for others to learn from our experience. Our staff had the following to say about the Health COMpass:

“This is the best resource centre, it provides useful, quality tools as well as project examples to build capacity in Social Behavior Change Communication.”

“The website has a lot of searching information, it is clear and easy to navigate. For example if you have questions, you can ask and be answered.”

“The website has a lot of useful information, and we can recommend it to any individual or organization who wants to work on developing a successful Social Media Strategy and Policy. There are also many different tools on developing a Strategic Plan, which can help anyone achieving their results.”

The team selected six resources to review, and at the end of the process these resources were chosen to guide the social media strategy workshop:

• The Health Communicator Social Media Toolkit
• Family Planning Goes Social
• 7 Steps to a Successful Social Media Strategy

The Health COMpass site has helped Femina Hip to find the tools that will guide us through our assessment of our social media work. During our workshop will be asking questions like

Are we conducting our social media processes optimally?

Are we good at monitoring?

Do we have a common organizational-social media goal?

Who is our target audience? and,

How do we engage our audiences?

We are looking forward to our upcoming workshop and to putting an exciting and innovative strategy in place that will carry us forward into the next four years.

Stay tuned for our next report!