Social Media Portal

Head of content Nathan Bonnisseau at PlanA.Earth on content, social media and saving planet earth

Social Media Portal (SMP): What is your name and what do you do there for PlanA.Earth?

Nathan Bonnisseau (NB): My name is Nathan Bonnisseau and I am head of content for PlanA.Earth, the first fully-fledged fundraising platform in the fight against climate change. Our platform allows for organisations to fundraise for environmental causes.

I am in charge of developing our content and expend our reach online as well as offline.

SMP: Briefly, tell us about PlanA.Earth

NB: PlanA.Earth is a fundraising platform to funnel money from different sources and stakeholders to environmental projects. We curate, promote and fundraise for partner NGOs that make a difference in the fight against climate change. Through our content outlet and events, we raise awareness and collect donations for these organisations.

SMP: Who are your target audience and why?

NB: Plan A emerged from the existence of different problems along the environmental donation chain. There is a gap in charity donation between the ?20 and ?20,000 donations. Millennials and younger generations want to give more, but are faced with a ?too wide a choice to choose? and an inherent suspiciousness for ineffective and cammy processes. This is the bond we are trying to strengthen.

Thus, we created a platform integrating information, community participation, and a simple two-click solution to give online to organisations that are verified and efficient.

Our target audience is a new brand of donors, roughly aged between 18-35. This audience has a wide-ranging of leisure from surfing to knitting, and his or her values include social justice, acting up, and positivity.

We do have a geographically bound community in Berlin (where we are based), but our message is addressed in English to reach a maximum amount of people. We always remain positive and encouraging, to push a new form of environmentalism, one that can happen and get everyone on board.

SMP: When was the company founded, how many people work there and how is it funded?

NB: Plan A was founded in the Spring of 2017. We are now six full time employees working with a varying number of interns and volunteers.

SMP: How did you initially attract users to site, social channels et al and how do you do it now (and how are you creating your distinct tone of voice)?

NB: When we started Plan A last year, we launched a campaign with five partner organisations on reforestation.

After having forced all our friends and family to like, follow and share our social media accounts, we developed our follower base through offline events, printing some of our online content and sharing it in real life. Word-to-mouth works well if you offer quality content that is geared towards news and trending topics. So that?s what we did at the beginning.

Our tone is probably one of our main assets today. After having analysed environmental content across outlets, we noticed that the topic was not getting enough attention, and maybe not the right kind of attention. We decided to create a news outlet that would be as informative on climate change as it would be entertaining. This was and is to this day one of our drivers of engagement and traffic.

We are now in the process of expanding our content offer with new forms of articles, a podcast and a newsletter in development. Content quality will remain the most important field in our marketing system.

SMP: What are the challenges that you?ve encountered and how are you overcoming them in what you have been doing so far at PlanA.Earth?

NB: Raising money for a cause is harder than you think. People don?t give their money easily when they buy something so imagine when they just contribute! One of our biggest challenge with Plan A is to convince donors that they are investing in the future, and that this investment is necessary and urgent.

Therefore, we cannot go without a very high quality content, a convinced base of follwers, and transparency of our actions. Yet, we must strike a balance between awareness, fundraising and action to answer the needs and wants of all our ecosystem.
SMP: What are the high moments of what you have been doing so far?

NB: We organised in March a week-long celebration of the planet called the Water Festival. This event promoted our campaign on river preservation in the Balkans, but also enhanced our position among the environmental movement in Berlin.

The closing of our campaigns are always great moments that validate our concept, business model and way of going about climate action. To this day, we have closed five campaigns on plastics, reforestation, lemurs, elephants and rivers, helping build, educate, repair or plant our way to a sustainable society, and that is our great pride.

SMP: What are the main social channels are you using, why and which are the most effective for PlanA.Earth?

NB: We are progressively expanding on different social media. Most recently, we have opened a Reddit account to share our content farther and wider. The most successful media are our Instagram and our Facebook account, although Reddit has been performing very well since its start.

It depends what indicator you are looking at. Facebook gathers efficiently our community for events, updates and outreach. On the other hand, Instagram gives us less visibility but tends to generate more partnership proposals.

We use social media as mouthpieces for different audiences and different content. But our main takeaway is consistency. A social media channel is only as good as what you put inside it.

SMP: What sort of activity / engagement are you receiving across the social channels that you use and how do you create / sustain this?

NB: Our main website PlanA.Earth has received more than 15,000 views since February. Social media accounts for a third of this number. We have also been successful in getting attention from other environmental stakeholders that have started following, getting in touch and reusing our content on their own channels.

Our followers have risen by 33% in three months on Facebook and Instagram. Now, we are working on getting these followers to follow our other channels to expand our space of interaction with them.

Finally, we are developing new forms of content that will both retain existing followers and engage new verticals that should know about us.

SMP: What do you see as your biggest challenges and opportunities for your sector and the competition that you have?

Our biggest challenge is also our biggest opportunity: everything remains to be invented to get people on board. That is why we have playlists for the planet Spotify, a Reddit account to engage with new environmentalists, or offline events https://www.facebook.com/planaearth/events/, to support our local community to act at their level to save our planet.

SMP: What is the most challenging part of building upon your brand presence in digital environments (including social media)?

NB: Labour power! A lot of people assume social media is 10-15 minutes spent on the Gram. It is actually very time consuming and very interruptive to have to manage too many social media. Reactivity and conversations are key in social media. It is a two-way street, and marketers need to understand the importance of ?post-posting service?, that is to say, commenting, sharing, repeating and outreaching with this content.

SMP: What do you think is going to be the most interesting aspect regarding content marketing for the next 12 to 18-months and why?

NB: Content marketing is -still- expanding rapidly. Beyond expanding the nature of our content, we want to go more towards one-to-one marketing and less towards generic sharing. Virality is an often overlooked KPI that we consider key in our marketing strategy. If we can engage conversations with determined ?captains?, we can multiply our reach, success rate, and enhance our efficiency.

SMP: What are your top five predictions for content marketing for the next 12 to 18-months and why?

NB replies with:

• Positivity is back. Create positive pieces for positive people. Content needs to have that feel-good vibe to it nowadays. Or else? Just think for yourself of the pieces you remember of the last 6 months.
• The continuous merge and blurring of the frontier between consumer and marketer. Influencers are going from micro to Nano and this trend isn?t going to stop. Programmes to turn these individuals into groups and teams will see progress. Maximising the influence of these clients by providing them with ?toolkit? content and facilitating their actions will be determining.
• Live and happenings. Life happens now, and you need to do this now. The advent of ?insta? ?live? or ephemeral content creates a sense of urgency like never before. Stories are up for 24hrs. No more, no less. If you haven?t been present on the media, you lose up on this quality content you want to see. Micro events, shared via live media are going to take some importance in the future. FOMO is the word we are looking for here.
• Local content. This is not the newest trend, but it is one that is not completely tapped. Whether you sell a product or a service, local anchorage is indispensable. Take the time to devolve some time to content dedicated to your local audience. This smaller pool will feel all the more special about it, and this will solidify your validation process beyond.
• Conversational content. Whether it?s the advent of voice in human-computer interactions or the systematic referral to a smartphone in any debate, content needs to be tailored to be embedded in the conversation. Answer simple and direct questions.

SMP: What are your top overall five content marketing tips and why?

NB replies with:

• Choose the people to do content that fit your culture. You can never sign off all the content that will come out of all your channels. Accept this, and put in place the processes and guidelines so that the team understands what they are asked to create.
• Batch it up. Take the time to create your calendar, and respect it. This will not only save time and effort, but also and maybe more importantly help you devise your strategy. If all your content is laid out, it will become transparent what scheduling mistakes and opportunities are.
• All members of the content team can bring to each piece. It is important to have different people working on different projects, but it is equally important to let people suggest ideas. The idea box, or however you call it where you work, should be read, and some of these ideas should be implemented. This strengthen the creativity and inclusivity of the team.
• Stay focused. Your content has a mission, a goal and a strategy was (hopefully) designed for it. Do not let externalities (?share my post please?, ?it?s the international day of woodwork today, could you create something??) influence too much what you are posting. No piece should be gratuitous and stray away from the original objective of your content marketing. Write this objective in huge on a piece of paper, and post it up in the office. It helps.
• Integrate members of the team beyond the content team. This will help you to understand the company better, and them what your weird creative team is doing for the common good. Bonus: you get to find new niches you hadn?t thought of to place your content into.

SMP: Is there anything else we should know, or is there anything that you?d like to share?

NB: Do your best today, help save the planet each day, analyse and understand yesterday.

SMP: Best way to contact you and PlanA.Earth?

NB: We answer all messages, whatever the channel. hi@plana.earth is our contact email, but you can also direct message us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter @PlanAEarth and all our other social media platform.


SMP: What did you have for breakfast / lunch?

NB: My breakfast is heavily French. It includes, but doesn?t limit to: black coffee, pain au chocolat, croissant, and sometime fruit jam, but I rarely have the time to toast the bread.

For lunch, I go to local guys from where we work, where they are starting to know me. THis way, I get nice portions, made by people I actually like! And it?s local.

SMP: What?s the last good thing that you did for someone?

NB: Yesterday, I called my mom to tell her I loved her. She?s coming to Berlin with my old dad to this weekend!

SMP: If you weren?t working at PlanA.Earth what would you be doing?

NB: I would probably be working to open a community center in a farm. I want to help people gather and return to the countryside instead of agglomerating in polluted cities. I want to make the countryside great again, a place of life as it has always been.

SMP: When / where did you go on your last holiday and why?

My last holidays happened two hours away from Berlin where I went to a music festival called Fusion. Alternative cultures, electronic music and camping. Not much sleep though. That?ll be for next time.

SMP: What?s the first thing you do when you get into the office of a morning?

NB: I organise my day according to pressing issues, ad hoc things to achieve and necessity. Once this is sorted, I get the second coffee of the day at the café on the ground floor of my coworking. And it tastes pretty good. Better than the first one? No. I live with an Italian.

SMP: If you had a superpower what would it be and why?

NB: I would like to be able to talk to other forms of life on this planet (and beyond!). I?m sure we would understand much more about the universe if we heard it from a bee or a dolphin.

What I need to figure out is how to do this without having antenna on my forehead.

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