Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights (RFKHR) operates at the forefront of human rights advocacy around the world. I joined the RFKHR team as a Digital Marketing Fellow in 2020, and worked across the organization’s and its President’s social media channels, as well as its website and SEO program. I later rejoined the team in 2022 as the Communications Associate, working hand in hand with the Senior Marketing Communications Manager to lead content creation, produce live events, and collaborate with program leads to construct persuasive digital campaigns.
CAMPAIGN:
#FREERUSESABAGINA
The case of Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of Hotel Rwanda, once again made headlines when he was illegally kidnapped by the Rwandan government in August 2020. RFKHR became involved in this case in 2021 to bolster its mainstream attention in the U.S. and nudge D.C. policymakers who were in a position to advocate for his immediate release. Alongside Freedom House and the , this campaign centered the voices of multiple high profile stakeholders featuring a virtual panel presentation with actor Don Cheadle, Hotel Rwanda director Terry George, Kerry Kennedy, and Rusesabagina’s legal team. As the RFKHR lead on this project, I liaised with Don Cheadle’s team to produce the livestream, provide live event coverage, and launch a T-shirt campaign.
DIGITAL EVENT
Don Cheadle, Kerry Kennedy, and Terry George invite you to a panel discussion in support of Paul Rusesabagina, the real-life hero of Hotel Rwanda.
SOCIAL MEDIA
To promote this digital event, I created internal social media toolkits for RFKHR and Kerry Kennedy and external kits for actor Don Cheadle and partner organizations Freedom House and the Lantos Foundation. I also provided day-of event coverage on YouTube and Twitter, culminating in the official Represent T-shirt campaign launch with celebrity ambassadors Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo, and NBA coach Doc Rivers.
529
New audience members gained across RFKHR’s social media platforms during the campaign.
RESULTS:
21,013
Social media impressions - a figure that is 9x higher than RFKHR’s overall average at the time.
12
Media mentions that were shared 221 times and reached more than 28.3 million readers.
View the full post-event communications report here.
EXECUTIVE VISIBILITY:
KERRY KENNEDY
Sometimes being a Kennedy isn’t enough. And as the Digital Marketing Fellow, I began writing for Kerry Kennedy’s social media channels in 2020 with the expressed goal of increasing engagements with her posts. Though each channel played a slightly different role, they all served to promote the work of RFK Human Rights, offer her personal reflections on the world and key issues, and to post relevant personal content related to her family and father. With this in mind, here are some tactics we used to increase engagement on her posts:
Craft snappy and contextualizing copy that features Kerry Kennedy’s distinct voice
Focus on Kerry’s stature as a human rights expert and continue to amplify her op-eds and LTEs
Focus on posting content that is both political and personal, the true sweet spot for Kerry’s channels
SOCIAL MEDIA AUDIT
Entering 2021, we set out to achieve these three goals in descending order of importance:
Increase engagements across all our channels
Grow our RFK Human Rights audience
Drive higher traffic to our website via our social media platforms.
We’ve continued best practices that were proven in 2020 (i.e. maintaining posting frequencies, cultivating strategic partnerships, prioritizing Facebook and Twitter) and experimented with new tactics to increase cross-channel engagements.
Alongside the team at Base, we created new social media templates to reflect our refreshed visual identity, which also aided our content creation process. We created a communications rubric—with heavy emphasis on social media— to probe the plans of programmatic leads, and we orchestrated follow-up review and planning sessions. These meetings reinforced our need for a social media project management tool, which led to the launch of Airtable in early August.
In 2021, we’ve launched our new video rapid response capacity. The clips feature our in-house issue experts weighing into the national conversation with their POV and referencing our work at RFK Human Rights. Finally, we’ve experimented with social media advertising to varying degrees of success (Book and Journalism Awards promotion vs. subscriber acquisition campaign).
Read the full 2021 Semi-Annual Social Media Audit here.
VISUAL ID TEMPLATES
In 2020, RFKHR teamed up with the creatives at Base Design to reimagine the organization’s visual identity. As the Digital Marketing Fellow, I contributed to the creation and implementation of new social media graphic templates that allowed us to both create content quickly and reflect the organization’s bold, new visual identity. This was the first time the digital team at RFKHR had a suite of templates like this which included formats for breaking news and rapid response, exhibiting thought leadership, marking key human rights dates, and so much more. See below for a few of my favorite applications of this visual system:
