June 2023

Hi Caddyshackers, 

You know that feeling when you are really on a roll with your work?

We get in a really good rhythm of designing and writing content, collaborating in our social content calendar meetings, webinar research and planning and our team meetings. Oh and then recording and reflecting on social media insights in our social marketing reports and team monthly reports.

We love what we do and how far we’ve come. It’s always helpful to stop and acknowledge our growth! We also love sharing the lessons we have learnt and what has worked for us. No need to hold that close to our chest, what would be the point of that?!

As sexual health promotion officers, we’re always aiming to provide information & education on sexual & reproductive health through innovative approaches. With this in mind, we thought we’d give you a peak behind the scenes of what we do.

behind the caddyshack curtain

Caddyshack Project has a presence on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube along with our website (obvs, cause here you are).

From October 2020 we refreshed our social media and began to be more intentional and consistent with our posting schedule (thankyou COVID). We know, in a world of a million followers and influencers that our results are not instant or even that big, but our growth has been slow and steady and therefore we like to think more loyal and authentic (like us!).

Our patience in growing these spaces has taken years thanks to Facebook and Instagram censorship around sexual and reproductive health content. Reach out to Maddy about the challenges of that one!

Howdy, Maddy here. Let me give you the short version…

Social media platforms like Instagram put sexual health and sex education content in the same bucket as selling sex and pornographic content which is censored. This sucks cause it means that not as many people are seeing our content and therefore don’t have the opportunity to engage in our content or learn about our sex positive messages. So what do we do about it? Keep being consistent in our posting schedule and connect with other like-minded pages to share knowledge. Can’t get rid of us that easy!

Side note: The pornography industry has larger revenues than Microsoft, Google, Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, Apple and Netflix combined. Just sayin’.

a snapshot

Our social media content is all organic, we don’t pay for engagement or reach, so for the purposes of this blog, let’s take a snapshot of May 2023, where we had 656 website visits, 640 Instagram followers, 706 FB fans and 314 YouTube views. We know that’s not a lot of YouTube views in the world of billions of views (Baby Shark Dance we are looking at you) but we know that our audience can go back to watch or re-watch webinars and that YouTube is a good place to give the recordings an online home in perpetuity.

The making of Connie Condom Dress remains our most popular video to date with almost 6,000 views. We really are grateful for our die hard subscribers.

The cost

We capture all our data in a social marketing report we create every month which allows us to keep track of trends and be flexible with our content. It’s also helpful when writing articles, abstracts, conference posters and forum presentations & blogs (wink).

We always seem to need more to be invested into health, whether that’s time, space or money and of course we know that prevention is better than cure. It’s important to have the right tools for the job and we’d like to be transparent about some of our digital costs in the spirit of encouraging people who would like to know more and get into this space if they haven’t already. Plus of course, being from the government (you can trust us) we are accountable for these funds and we take that seriously.

the numbers

It costs us $330 a year to have a domain on Squarespace for the Caddyshack Project website. Oh hi & welcome, you are currently reading the blog on Squarespace.

Hootsuite costs $910 a year, this is where we can pre-schedule our Facebook & Instagram posts and pull monthly analytics data from.

It costs $150 a year to be on Preview, which is an app to plan your Instagram feed, rearrange the order of your posts on grid, edit your photos, find the best Instagram hashtags, test your hashtags, check your analytics and more.

We signed up for the $230 a year option on Zoom that has a cap of 100 participants. This is for our On The Couch webinars. You know, the ones we have promoted in almost every blog this year (we know, love a bit of self-promo!).

We host all our webinars for free and we use Sticky Tickets to register the tickets. As we don’t charge for the webinars, Sticky Tickets don’t charge us and we appreciate that. Sticky Tickets are not just an ‘on brand’ name choice for us (though you know… ALL puns intended there) but we really like the useability of this lesser known platform.

In November 2022 after presenting at a state wide forum on digital health promotion, a colleague let us know that we could apply for a not for profit status with Canva, which we did and were instantly granted (if only everything were that easy!) So that’s saved us $120 a year to be able to build decent looking graphics.

Fun fact: Canva is an Australian graphic design platform which was launched in 2013, that is used to create social media graphics and presentations.

If you did the quick maths with those subscriptions, the incremental cost of scaling up our work in digital health promotion has been minimal compared to hiring venues, getting catering etc. as we said at the start.

But we feel and we know that the potential has had a greater impact in our reach.

We have got the analytics to prove it!

Where to from here?

We are constantly learning new and better ways of doing things and carving new neural pathways. All these platforms genuinely want you to succeed and YouTube is your best friend to learn how to do stuff.

We continue to improve the quality of the webinar series and social media content by enhancing our digital skills in technology, design, journalism and social media and recognising these as vital health promotion practices.

We strike a balance of planning from 1 to 3 months in advance, so we stay fresh with what’s current but also know where we are heading. This ultimately means being organised but flexible.

A final stating the obvious thought: We work during business hours but all our online content can be found 24/7. Yep #reach

We reach and engage with our online audience on social media in an era of censorship and de-platforming by keeping up to date with changes to the algorithm, being creative in design and delivery of content and connecting with like-minded channels to share knowledge.

The wrap

As a final reflection and sharing, we would say that the key defining aspect of our program has been the Interconnection between each element, from Instagram, to Facebook, our website, to the On The Couch webinar series & our monthly e- newsletters and blogs. Caddyshack does not have a start, middle and end. It’s not a project that we will ever ‘complete’. It’s more like a garden that we continue to tend.

We had a little chuckle, one time when we reached out via Instagram to Family Planning in New Zealand (so lovely and helpful) about a campaign they were running in order to get their permission to feature some of the images. They advised us that our social marketing team would easily be able to access and use their tiles. Ummmm, we don’t have a social marketing team! It’s just the four of us, who are self-taught and continue to learn and grow.

What we are loving right now

Shameless plug time!

We are loving our own section of the website called ‘What We’re Reading’.

It’s our very real pleasure to read and review books related to our work and we feel that it is important to share this with you!

If you have any favs you would like to recommend to us, please send us a note.

Until next month.

Peace, Love & Protection

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