In this instructional video, the presenter explains how the Women’s Institute (WI) uses social‑media posts that celebrate local anniversaries and birthdays to drive community engagement. A recent example highlighted a post wishing the Marlow WI a happy 80th birthday, which included a photo collage, a prompt asking members to share the age of their own WI, and resulted in 63 engagements, 10 comments and three shares. The speaker outlines the tactics behind this success: using celebratory content to encourage user‑generated responses, targeting posts by geographic location through the platform’s ‘Engage’ tab, and actively liking and commenting on high‑engagement local groups to create reciprocal support. By treating each celebration as a digital business card, the WI builds camaraderie, increases visibility, and attracts new members. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action to click the help button for further assistance.
Chapters
Foreign. Looking at how celebrating occasions can drive engagement on social media. The WI or the Women's Institute is iconic all around the world and they've moved with the times by using social media effectively. They're always posting, they're doing a lot of video content and they've got lots of individuals groups as well as the National Federation of Women's Institutes as well. So we've got lots of individual institutes as well as the national one. Now, what I love about this post is this is them wishing the happiest of birthdays to Marlo bottoms wi. So the. This women's institute has been going for 80 years, which is obviously a massive milestone and they wanted to celebrate it. So they've asked people then underneath this, how old is your Women's Women's Institute? How old is your WI and how did you celebrate? So what they've done here is they've got the collection of photos that the Marlowe Bot WI have put together and then they have shared the actual post and then on it you can see that that has 63 engagements, 10 comments and three shares. And I just absolutely love it because this is all about increasing engagement by celebrating a local birthday or a local anniversary, if you like. So it's great photos, great celebrations and really encouraging others to join in by asking them to do a thing, AKA to say when your anniversary is or when your birthday is. So if you look at the people have absolutely loved it and it is. It's a mix of the other groups or the other institutes and then lots of the other members as well, which is amazing. As you can see, people got really involved in congratulating them and it really shows camaraderie and people would do this, whether it's sports groups, whether this was charities, whether this was individual shops, whether this was celebrating a birthday for a team member, this is all about celebrating your team and celebrating occasions and people absolutely love that on social media. Now, if I was the wi, I'd want to engage in locations in which my groups were based in. So as you can see, this one's in Marlow, this one here is in Winslow, so they're all over. So I would go to the Engage tab on, maybe go to Engage and then you can either do UK wide or you can put in specific locations here. And as you can see, you click a location and then what comes up there is lots of local groups that have the most engagement across in this area. So these are the businesses that are posting on a regular basis that are getting good engagement. So if I was that local wi, or indeed the national one, I'd be going in and liking and commenting and engaging, because the more that you support the local community, the more that they'll support you back. And by getting involved in their conversation, it's like leaving a little digital business card back to you. So it's attracting people back to find out more about the WI and what all the great work that they're doing now. If you've got any questions whatsoever, click on the little blue button. We love to help.
