Content of the week #21: An interview with the National Trust’s Social Media Manager

A few years ago nobody would have said the National Trust had ‘Fight me, bro’ energy.

But then their Director of Communications Celia Richardson started clapping back in response to Daily Mail hit pieces on social media. And the official NT account quote-tweeted her with this:

That was the beginning of a shift in the Trust’s approach to social media, led by Danyele Higgins and their team. The motto of the Trust is to “care for nature, beauty and history for everyone, for ever”, but for Danyele that doesn’t mean everything they post is for everyone, but that they do have something for everyone.

It reflects their wider effort to shake off the ‘traditional’ image by exploring more complex stories on its sites, fighting climate change and (shock) having things for kids to do in historic houses. But keeping this gargantuan organisation nimble, human and funny on social media is no mean feat – so I gave Danyele a bell to ask how they managed it.

Social media is awareness, not conversion

When I asked her what she was most proud of, it was: “being able to show the shift from ‘Marketing First’ to ‘Even If You Don’t Get It Right, At Least Be Social Media First’…a lot of my time is spent going into meetings and saying Social is an awareness space, not a conversion space.”

What that means in practice is convincing colleagues of what social media is good for rather than treating it as a village notice board. Her most repeated phrase is ‘audience-first’, alongside the swearier ‘who gives a shit?’ – the ultimate test of whether something is worth posting.

The journey is illustrated by Danyele’s campaign to make the ‘all-channel post’ as welcome as a turd in a cup of tea.

Their aim is to never copy and paste on all channels if it can’t be helped, as it should be targeted at the channel and audience the message is suited for. And that’s partly down to how the team is organised – splitting channels between them based on their demographic.

One person gets TikTok and YouTube Shorts (under 25); another gets Instagram, Threads and Pinterest (35-44); another gets Facebook (Baby Boomers) and they all share Bluesky – the only channel where press releases are allowed. This means if a message is aimed at a particular segment, it goes to the channel/s where that segment is most concentrated.

It’s also partly achieved by proving that all-channel posts don’t even do what the people asking for them want them to. That requires running the campaign as requested but then collecting the data on how much time it took, what that means in terms of salaries, how the posts performed and then bringing that data to the next Brief to say ‘This won’t work on this channel, but it does on this one’.

For this kind of culture shift, having someone in senior management fighting your corner is an absolute must. It takes internal backing, data and strong relationships to persuade people. Speaking of which…

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve overcome?

“Probably the fact that social media is constantly changing, so the stakeholder engagement part is constantly changing.”

Social media is scary to anyone who is used to rigid project timelines, budgets and having any sense of being in control. And conversely, social media is scary to the people who do it as a job because not only is your work publicly visible but so are your failures, and just for good measure everyone also thinks they know how to do your job because they, too, use social media.

To get the space, reassurance and trust you need requires constant communication and strong relationships. You need to find the bit in the middle of the Venn diagram of what your Key Stakeholders want to achieve and what social media achieves, then focus your messaging relentlessly on reporting that. It means managers of teams and directors of departments understand what social media can and cannot do for them, reducing friction when you have to say ‘no’ because they understand why.

But there’s also the rest of the Trust. The NT’s strength is where all the stories happen: its huge variety of properties and landscapes, the people who work in them and the people who visit them. 

Danyele’s team have a three-pronged approach: leading by example, which encourages regional teams to have the confidence to try similar content; reaching out to teams directly, attending their story sessions, speaking at regional conferences and leading training sessions; and being open to ideas and stories by having a monitored social media inbox.

The confidence and trust between the central and regional teams takes time to develop, but it’s resulted in more staff approaching them with ideas, sharing stories and content, to ask for training in specific areas and passing content by them as a sense-check.

How do you manage your team?

“We try to challenge each other and create constantly. We try to respect failure – to try things and so reduce that failure.”

In the tradition of all good managers, Danyele sees herself as the protective umbrella that allows her team to cook. The relationships built with regional teams allow the stories to roll in, the protection from JFDI (Just Fucking Do It) requests allows time to be spent on social-first content, and a healthy embrace of failure has built a culture of experimentation.

There are constant messages on internal chats for BAU content, inspiration from elsewhere, and campaign-specific channels. All content is drafted into Brandwatch, allowing the team to comment on and adapt each other’s ideas, and regular reporting keeps everyone learning. 

And then there’s the Northern Star question that guides everything they do: Who gives a shit?

The result is a team that largely runs on vibes, but that’s exactly how the constantly changing, organic and chaotic social media landscape runs too. The vibes work because the work’s been put in to build relationships, provide the evidence and create the ways of working. Individual staff own channels, failure is socialised and the Trust’s leadership know what’s being achieved.

Last thoughts

I’ve worked in large organisations and I’ve seen first-hand the stifling effect of lengthy approval processes, unhelpful briefings and institutional confusion about what social media is good for. I’ve also experienced siloed social/content teams, not being honest enough about failure and creating irrelevant content.

The fact is that almost all organisations are run on relationships. Strategy gives you direction, but the people on the ground need to be given the safety and space to achieve that strategy (so long as they have a good editor). You need to earn trust not just by being good at your job but by constantly communicating and working with the key people in your organisation.

What Danyele and her team show is that a social media team’s philosophy can’t just be ‘trust us and leave us alone’ but nor can it be ‘just tell us what to post and we’ll do it’.

The result is having something  for everyone, but not doing everything for everyone.