Social Media

General Guidance

From Flannery Winchester, VP of Marketing and Communications at CCL:

Understand your goals: With social media activity, you’re not necessarily trying to go viral - you’re mainly trying to accomplish two things: 1) drive more people toward CCL’s actions (which ultimately drives more outreach toward Congress and helps advance climate policy) and 2) show that your community has active climate advocates, so others can join you if they want to.

Understand your audience: Your posts should usually be appropriate / relevant for members of the general public who are not deeply involved in CCL. Keep in mind that members of Congress or their staff could look up and find your chapter's posts at any time, so keep them in mind as a potential audience too, though you may not always be talking directly to them. Your posts should always be nonpartisan in content and respectful in tone.

Content areas to focus on:

• CCL actions - share the opportunities that CCL national puts out for people to contact Congress. You can find these on the action page of our website and often in our monthly action sheet. Feel free to grab and use any graphics that we've created for specific actions.

• CCL events and activities - post info / invitations to your local CCL activities and meetings. During and after the events, post photos and updates. This can include everything from chapter meeting photos, lobby meeting photos, pics and video clips from tabling events, screenshots or real photos of media hits the chapters generate, etc. You're also welcome to post about CCL national events like our conferences (this is especially true if any Tennesseans travel to DC to lobby!)

• Climate news - Post about any local climate impacts that are going on - heat waves, unusual precipitation, extreme weather, wildfire smoke, etc. Also watch CCL's national accounts for timely climate news or political news relevant to climate, and feel free to share that too, either by actually retweeting or sharing national posts, or by using them as inspiration to make your own post about the same news.

Training and Resources on CCL Community

• Social Media Basics: a core volunteer training

• Social Media for Volunteers and Chapters: A community page with links to trainings, resources and templates. 

• Spread the Word Page: Recent CCL posts that you can share on your own social media accounts

• Social Media for Media Relations: training on Community

• Social Media for Lobbying: training on Community

• Social Media Toolkit for Energy Innovation Act: Recommended resources, sample posts, and step-by-step instructions for how to use your social media accounts to celebrate the Energy Innovation Act. 

• Social Media Action Team: Links to a private facebook group "CCL Social Media Action Team".