Twitter. Facebook. YouTube. Blogs.
Last year, the foundation took a deep breath and dove into the tantalizing yet murky waters of social media with the launch of this blog. We followed up with the obvious next steps in the social media playbook: creating a Facebook page (the John A. Hartford Foundation) and a Twitter account (JHartfound). We urge any of you active on those platforms to follow us there, so we can share blog updates, important news relevant to health and aging, and pictures and videos from health and aging-related events. We have some great video up now, including Chad Boult and Diane Meier speaking at January’s Brookings forum, as well as Vin Sahney addressing the 2010 ADGAP meeting.
You may be wondering what we hope to accomplish by spending time twittering, blogging, and facebooking. (It’s remarkable how quickly those nouns developed verb forms.) We see engaging in social media as just another way of accomplishing our mission: improving health care for older Americans. Despite the time and dollars we and other foundations have dedicated to improving training for medical professionals, care for older adults is not improving quickly enough. If we want geriatric social work, nursing, and medicine to be an important part of the conversation surrounding health care reform, we have to talk about them as much as possible, in as many venues as possible.
Additionally, the secondary (or perhaps the primary) purpose of stepping up our communications efforts is to be more transparent about our intentions and perspective. I see blog posts such as Why We (Fight) Write, Declaration of Innovation, and Growing Leaders, our 2008 Annual Report series, as providing a window into our collective foundation mind.
We would love to have you join the conversation. Post a comment on the blog. Re-tweet a Twitter post to a colleague (yes, re-tweet is now a verb, too.) Share videos with friends, students, colleagues, and the public on YouTube. For inspiration on how organizations can use YouTube to share their message more broadly, check out the video contest the Geriatric Social Work Initiative held in 2008 , in which they asked social work students to express why they thought gerontology was important to the field.
We also invite your feedback on our foray into social media. Do you agree that foundations should be using social media to share their message with a broader audience? Do you have ideas for expanding our social media efforts that could help us do an even better job of communicating with colleagues and perhaps even the public at large? Let us know—there are certainly no shortage of ways for you to communicate with us!