A long-established, smaller charity that collects and redistributes clothing was considering a change in policy. The directors had embraced social media and were very enthusiastic about asking fans if they would agree to this. The mechanism was through an #AMA session for one hour on Facebook

(see Key Term – Ask Me Anything #AMA in Chapter 8, Audit Frameworks).

The idea was that questions would be posed on Facebook and the fans or other respondents could ask anything in the one hour allocated and the charity would need to respond.

With over 100,000 Facebook fans this was a brave aim and I asked if we could conduct a risk evaluation before launching the event. It was agreed that we could evaluate the potential risk of holding the event and we would present our findings back to the senior management team. The risk evaluation summary is shown in Table 11.4.

Having evaluated the potential risks we recommended that the #AMA should not go ahead. The risks were too great, the team too small and additional investment would be required. The senior management team agreed. The decision was to explore the change in policy using other means, such as focus groups or online surveys. These would be within a closed environment and less susceptible to the external negative backlash that could occur.
Questions

• Was it a good decision not to go ahead with the #AMA?
• Are there any risks we should add to the evaluation that we missed?
• Can you think of a situation where an organisation has gone ahead with an event or activity online and it went wrong?

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Table 11.4 Risk evaluation for an #AMA event Factor Issues Agree specific aims for the session - what did we want Clear aims agreed to achieve? Was the #AMA the only way to achieve the aims? Imagine every possible scenario that could happen, list every 'what if' situation that could occur Create a response for all scenarios We need to consider the potential for trolls to invade the session and take over. How would we respond? We should plan the response team who would be involved in responding to comments Aims could be achieved outside Facebook, via surveys or focus groups What if we missed something big? As messages can be circulated for hours afterwards (Laufer and Brassell-Cicchini, 2013), for how long would we monitor the channels? Again, what if we missed something big? We would need to recruit additional help and could risk brand reputation Small team, and although others could be brought in, they would need training, which requires additional investment We need to monitor several channels as this could spill How many channels and how could we do this? We over from Facebook to Twitter and beyond could use a social media management system, but there's a time lag with many of these and they might miss critical factors We might need to organise a shift system as some people may join in the conversation much later at night. Investment needed to manage this