Anshul Tewari

Most times stupid. Unimportant. Judged. Unnatural. Questioned. Uncool. Not fun. It sometimes feels like you wish you were just the same. Just so that you’d fit in. Just so that others would treat you the same and not like an outcast. Sometimes it feels annoying yet suffocating being told how odd you are. When people start giving you tips and suggestions on how you can change.

But sometimes when you sit back, relax, be with yourself you feel proud. Proud for being odd. For not succumbing to what others did. It’s sometimes an unparalleled feeling, and a terrific privilege.

I get a ton of emails from people, non-profits talking about an issue they’ve been working on, or about a new project they’ve just started. While at the outset it is a great strategy to email your network about the same - where these organizations fail is the length of the email.

Good communicators know well that lean, vibrant writing is any day better than verbose rambled commentary.

When you send an incredibly long email, you leave very little space for your call to action, or for the person at the receiving end to respond back on time - or respond at all, for that matter.

I am sure all of the content in that email is extremely important - but you need to understand that long emails represent failure of communication - unless they are the only way in.

But here’s a rule: A long email is never necessary. NEVER!

No matter how you use email, or for whatever purpose, no one you’re emailing wants to read long emails - they are long, they take too much of the reader’s time, you don’t get to the point, you ask too many questions, I won’t respond.

Email Rule #1: Keep your email to 5 sentences.

I know you just said “Are you crazy!!!??!?!11 I have so much to tell” but trust me, keep it to 5 sentences and see how things roll in your favour - how you start getting responses and how your call to action becomes more effective.

How do you achieve a 5 sentence email - stick to the following questions:

1) Who are you?

2) What do you want?

3) Why should you get it?

4) When do you need them to act? — in this order.

Email rule #2: Figure out, and stick to your main agenda.

Best way to figure this out is to understand whether you need more than 5 sentences to complete your email or not. If you do, then you haven’t figured out your agenda.

Email rule #3: No more than one question.

Ask only one question. Don’t fluster the person with multiple answers that s/he might have to give.

Email rule #4: Link it. If there is much much more information you need the reader to know, then add a link to it on the web. Make sure your email is concise and effective to get them to your link.

If you do not have a place to put information on the web to link up to - go get a blog or put it up on your website - if you don’t have one - get one.

Email rule #5: The best way to learn how to write short emails is to become an active user of Twitter. Twitter gives you lesser space, thus you have to work harder to prioritize your thoughts.

A bit of courage, a lot of sacrifice. The realization that you have more to look forward to than what others do. The feeling that you either make it or break it, but even if you break it you will try again and win.

Being a little conventionally anti-social but strategically social. Embracing ideas that are not mainstream, that at first look impossible. Ignoring the ones who pull you down and standing up for yourself, because no one else will. Because no one else is as passionate as you are!

Back in 2008, when I founded Youth Ki Awaaz, social media was not given enough importance at all. I remember walking into offices of big corporates, non-profits, and youth-focused brands to talk about how they could benefit through social media and blogging, and how Youth Ki Awaaz could fit in - and being ridiculed for making Facebook sound so important.

Times changed rapidly. 5 years since, social media is on everyone’s mind, and everyone is trying their best to make sense out of it - and our focus remains highly towards helping social good orgs and non-profits create a niche for themselves on social media.

Most social media experts are not really experts, as their understanding level, more often than not, is restricted to the number of likes and followers you get, and the amount of cheese you can create on your social media hubs - and not essentially on virality of your cause, the ideas that you want to propagate, and building emotional recognition for your brand.

Non-profits in specific struggle the most with social media. With a lack of communication budget, and organizational will, social good orgs are loosing out on a lot. I remember an argument with a friend who ran a rural development focused NGO and believed very strongly that social media is of no good to him since his audience was not the “type” that visited Facebook - which as he described as urban, middle class, careless, young, and people who he did not need as his focus was rural. He was wrong!

No matter how much stereotype you’d like to attach to the kind of people who live and breathe on social media, you cannot ignore that an NGO cannot work in isolation. If you are on ground and trying to have an impact, you have to be online and try and drive viral PR for your work, which helps you get a larger representation, supports you during your grant writing initiatives and helps you engage a larger section of the society. This stereotyped audience is the very audience that will help you take your cause to millions, and let the world know about what you are doing. They are the influencers, and the exciting challenge is to get these people interested in your cause.

That same friend now recruits 40% of his volunteers through his Facebook page and posts, and runs a blog that talks about rural economy and micro-lending - which has helped him create himself as an authority on the subject. His blog recently got him invited to an international conference in Sri Lanka to talk about micro-lending.

Till now, social media has only been seen as a place to promote yourself at. It has been thought of as a space where you can put up a status, a link, a tweet and hope that you will get shares, likes or whatever!

We believe that social media for social good is a much bigger concept. It is about creating a niche online, a support system that you can piggy back on. A network that helps you create a space where your good is advocated far and wide, and sensitizes people about your cause more than you think it would.

This, is what we call social media advocacy, a concept that Youth Ki Awaaz came up with to help social good organizations use social media to create a lobby for their rightful cause.

In the coming days, I will be posting more about the various things that social good organizations could do on social media to advocate for their issues and causes rightly, and more actively.