Earlier this week Facebook unveiled “Shared Photo Albums,” new functionality that allows multiple users to contribute to the same album. While the immediate applications show real promise – imagine creating a wedding album and inviting friends and family to upload photos that they’ve taken – the advocacy play looks just as promising.
Specifically, what if we could harness the power of social photo sharing to tell your organization’s story, bringing together the visual power of your groups’ stakeholders to show the real effect of specific rules and/or regulations?
Quick Background
Photos on Facebook drive engagement. It’s that simple.
In the time it took you to read these last lines, roughly 12,000 photos were uploaded to albums within the system. Reasearch shows that posts on Facebook with images or albums attached are opened at an exponential rate higher than those without. Up until now though, users could only upload photos to albums that they had created. This made for great personal storytelling, but involved hours of extra work when trying to gather photos from those involved.
New Functionality
Developed at a recent Facebook Hackathon, Facebook’s new shared photo albums set out to bridge that gap between personal and group storytelling. Group trips, weddings, family reunions and more are great examples of where this new functionality will be a great fit. No longer do organizers have to track down photos, then go outside of Facebook or figure out a workaround to merge them all together into a single album.
With only a few clicks, Facebook’s removed that need for users to leave the application, while making it easy to bring together the various perspectives and viewpoints of the same, hopefully cherished, event.
Advocacy Angle
Thinking in advocacy terms, the new functionality provides a great new outlet for advocacy organizations to tell their story. That is, by inviting advocates / stakeholders to share their experiences in a unified setting, organizations can amplify their voice through one of the most powerful mediums out there – imagery.
For this example, let’s turn to the National Tooling and Machining Association. Imagine a bill that threatened the jobs of thousands of workers. A tax bill, an overly stringent regulation, whatever it might be. Now think of their response. Why not create a shared album inviting a select group of users to contribute their images and captions as to how this bill would affect them? You might see images of family, of a worker doing his job, of a kid going to school — all under fire because of the proposed legislation.
Moving forward, shared photo albums provide organizations with yet another tool to educate and engage users, both strengthening bonds with current stakeholders while also providing quick entry to new users who can quickly and easily visually grasp their issues and their impact.
