Solidifying your digital strategy and seeing results

I had the opportunity to talk with one of the Fellowship’s Northeast-based groups about the impact of the Fellowship on their work. The Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance is an organization dedicated to organizing for thriving Asian-American communities across Pennsylvania.

I talked with Caitlin, their digital organizer and 2024 Kairos Fellow, about a lot. But the thing that most stood out to me was how the Fellowship content has helped her pivot strategies and evaluate her organization’s online efforts not just based on likes and views, but through other metrics like comments that help them identify people to build relationships with online and offline.

Take a read through below for the full story.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Will you introduce yourself and tell us about what you do at the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance?

I’m Caitlin, my pronouns are she/they, and I work for the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (APIPA). I'm their Digital Organizer. It's been really exciting. I do a lot of digital and design work for social media. 

Who are API PA's communities and what issues are you fighting for? 

Since we're the Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance, our biggest community that we're targeting is the Asian-American community and Pacific Islanders. One of our biggest campaigns right now, since we're based in Pennsylvania, is the Save Chinatown campaign. Developers announced plans to build an arena for the 76ers in Center City, which would be right outside of Chinatown. It would have a big impact on that neighborhood and the community opposes the plan. 

We also have the Justice for Christian Hall (J4CH) Campaign. Christian Hall was an Asian-American teen who was killed by police while having a mental health episode. So we're doing a lot to fight for Asian-American mental health rights and mental health rights in general. We also do political endorsements for people who say that they will support the Asian community of Pennsylvania. A lot of our work is focused on Philadelphia since that's where most of the people who we work with live, but we are trying to expand more into the Pittsburgh area and Western Pennsylvania area.

I'm curious about what you've been learning in the fellowship and how you've been able to apply that to the work that you do. 

The workshops or sessions that stuck out to me the most were the one about digital metrics, and then the one about the engagement ladder to get more community members. In the beginning of our year, we were talking about how we wanted to engage more community members and people who are members of our organization.  

We've been doing a lot of social media like Reels and TikToks. One thing I noticed was that when we would post a video on TikTok, it wouldn't get that much engagement. But when we would post it on Instagram, it would get a lot more engagement. So we decided to be super consistent, posting [on Instagram] once every day for five days, as a series. And pretty much all of [the videos] got over 10k views and then 100-something likes. 

I think what helped was being consistent in posting and we were able to get a lot more engagement on all of them with not just likes and views, but also comments. We got a lot of reposts, a lot of shares. To make our metrics more consistent, we have to post more consistently.

The last question here is just to finish the sentence: the internet is good for ______. 

I've always used the internet to find a community. I was on Tumblr when I was younger. So that's where I found my community first and learned about social issues like feminism and Black Lives Matter. And when I was in college, we had a lot of people use Discord to talk to each other during the pandemic. There's so many ways now to be able to find a community of people who have the same interests and who care about the same things. And I think that's something that we as organizers should really like to tap into because a lot of people already care about these issues and we can always bring new people in to care about them. 

In talking to Caitlin, it was clear that the Fellowship has had an impact on the ways that she thinks about her work and about organizing online. Digital organizing is not just about putting out content and hoping people will see it and engage with it. It’s about making strategic choices about who you want to reach, where they live online, and what you will do to engage them. And like Caitlin said, there is a huge opportunity for organizers to do what we do best — which is to grow movements, even online.BODY