Oxfam Centralises the Benefits of Many Tools by Choosing SocioLocal for their Digital Marketing

Oxfam is an International Organisation that supports people to fight poverty, injustice & gender inequality. We onboarded Oxfam onto SocioConnect in 2023. They have 45 stores across Ireland and have a strong social media presence for all stores and their brand pages. Each retail store has its own small community. The communities and neighbours of each store need to understand what the shop stocks and the core values they support. Oxfam wants to ensure that each store can connect with its local audiences and create relationships online with its communities. This was one of the reasons why they wanted to team up with SocioLocal initially. 

The organisation has two strategies for both its retail stores and its brand online. While both strategies are aligned and complement each other, they have two separate functions. Oxfam stores have a strong retail focus while the brand focuses on humanitarian and impact objectives. The retail stores have objectives that include shining a light on environmental impacts, increasing awareness of a circular economy and promoting second-hand shopping. Social media is very valuable for Oxfam to increase awareness of the organisation and to increase digital fundraising and awareness of the local stores that fundraise on the ground. Fundraising is divided into digital, direct mail and in-store shopping and the Oxfam shops are the biggest source of income for Oxfam. This means that social media for each of the stores is a key priority for the organisation. 

To help connect with local audiences, Oxfam follows a 40/60 rule for their local store’s social media strategy. 40% of their content is evergreen content which is sent out to stores through SocioCommand - this content showcases brand values and key messages that are aligned across the brand. The other 60% of the content comes from the stores themselves. This is the content that attracts people to the shops and showcases what is available to buy in-store. Some stores are very active and some are not so active online. Because of this, Oxfam needs to have an overview of the content that all of its stores are posting. It also helps them give additional support to the stores that need it. 

When Oxfam chose SocioConnect as the platform they wanted to support their stores through social media, they had two main objectives they wanted to achieve. Firstly, the digital team want one platform for everything - a centralised place to manage all of the shops & the Oxfam brand. The second objective was to have an overview of all of the retail store's messages that they receive both on Facebook and Google My Business. Before using SocioConnect, a lot of messages were missed and customer interactions were hard to track. The Oxfam digital team wanted a way to communicate on behalf of stores that weren’t keeping on top of messages from customers while also having an overview of how the other store managers were responding. Socio Inbox was an integral part of our platform that has helped Oxfam grow its response rate by 16% in just the last month.

I spoke with Samantha Andrades who works as the Social Media & Content Executive for Oxfam about how they are finding SocioConnect

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Kate Scully (SocioLocal): What pain points were you looking to solve with SocioCommand?

Samantha Andrades (Oxfam): We needed a tool that centralises everything in one place! Before using SocioCommand, we were using Buffer for basic scheduling for the retail stores, Hootsuite for scheduling our brand content and SproutSocial for reporting. We wanted to use one tool for everything to ensure all our digital marketing and brand messages were centralised.

We loved that SocioConnect also had a content pool so that it has a place to store designs for

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Kate (SocioLocal): What is your social media strategy for the year ahead?

Samantha (Oxfam): One of our biggest objectives for next year is to onboard local users to SocioLocal. We are hoping to choose a few select social media champions from our Oxfam stores to trial this initially in 2024 and then see how it goes from there. We know that the content pool will be hugely beneficial for them to pull evergreen brand content for specific posts but also to store images of their stock and store for future use.
The second objective is to increase engagement across all of the Oxfam channels. We will be tracking this on the performance module and the Business Intelligence module on SocioConnect.

Kate (SocioLocal): What do you think of SocioCommand?

‍Samantha (Oxfam): I think it’s very good because everything is centralised - it has really improved the way we track our messages, we have an overview of everything the stores are doing. I am also really looking forward to launching SocioLocal with local users next year!

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We are so excited to be a small part of the journey of helping Oxfam spread the word on how they improve and save the lives of those hardest hit by poverty and injustice and campaign for a fairer, more sustainable world. 🌏

If you want to learn more about how SocioConnect can centralise your multi-location marketing, collating the benefits of many tools in one platform, purpose-built for multi-location brands and franchises, Book a Demo! We’ll show you how to achieve better reach, engagement and instore performance with ease and efficiency! 

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