For nearly three years, I served as the Social Media Coordinator for the Non-GMO Project. This included social media strategy, creating video and graphic content, community management, monthly reports, paid ads, and daily management.

Some of the biggest challenges included making scientific processes digestible in common language and content moderation when our Facebook account would be overtaken by trolls.

The Non-GMO Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to building and preserving the non-GMO food supply for all. We offer North America's most trusted certification for GMO avoidance. With our Butterfly label, shoppers decide for themselves whether to consumer GMOs.

The Non-GMO Project is a mission-driven nonprofit organization offering rigorous product verification and trustworthy education that empowers people to care for themselves, the planet, and future generations.

We believe…

Everyone has a right to know what is in their food and deserves access to non-GMO choices.

By voting with our dollars every time we shop, collectively, we have the power to change how our food is grown and made.

Preserving and building the non-GMO supply chain is a critical step in transitioning toward a non-GMO food supply for future generations.

The integrity of our diverse genetic inheritance is essential to environmental health and ecological harmony.

A verified non-GMO system supports organic and regenerative agriculture by reducing contamination pressure and protecting the supply of non-GMO seed.

Check them out 👇

During my time at The Non-GMO Project, their social media presence consisted of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But Instagram was the only account that was seeing consistent growth so we built the social media strategy with an Instagram first approach.

Our Facebook account was engaged but did not reflect our target audience and Twitter continued to remain stagnant no matter our efforts. So all content creation and campaigns were created based on what worked on Instagram and then we would rework that content for the other channels.

Some content ideas included: hosting high-impact Instagram and Facebook Live events in collaboration with influential stakeholders, resulting in increased lead generation across social media platforms and piloting Brand Wednesday - an opportunity to collaborate with brands in the Non-GMO Project Verified community on socials and build deeper relationships.

Food systems and technologies are full of complicated processes. Knowing what synthetic biology, CRISPR, heme are, let alone understanding how our seed and food systems work isn't information that most people have. The Non-GMO Project aims to be transparent in its messaging and therefore it's important to breakdown these big terms and ideas to help customers make their own informed choices.

Using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and collaborating with our copywriter, I broke down these big themes in carousel infographics to help educate our audience! These were a great way to introduce larger themes that were discussed more deeply on the Non-GMO Project's blog - a great CTA to drive traffic. It definitely helps that they do better in Instagram's algorithm too.

This, combined with the larger social media strategy designed to achieve the company’s 2022 goals, resulted in a 55% increase in organic impressions and a paid reach increase of 648%.

The Non-GMO Project's Facebook account often found itself on the wrong side of the internet. As a company that aims to take an intersectional approach to transforming the food system, the Facebook comments would often be full of trolls who had a lot to say against this. Some of the most challenging days of the job were when the trolls would take over the comment section of a post.

Unlike Instagram, Facebook's moderation settings do not allow you to turn off the comments to posts so we had to get creative with our approach. First and foremost, we created public community guidelines to our page outlining the type of comments and conversations we would or would not allow. Anything that went against these guidelines we either hid from the public view or deleted entirely and depending of the severity of the situation, we would block certain trolls.

There were a few instances where we had posted something to Facebook and the comments were coming in so rapidly that four would pop up for every one that was deleted. We really believed in the message behind the content that we had posted so rather than just deleting the post to make it stop, we developed a social media moderation team. This included myself along with a few of my Marketing colleagues who were willing to stay online after hours while our Facebook account was in chaos. Some of the troll comments were so unsavory that this task wasn't for the feint of heart and it certainly took its toll but it the team really came together and worked together because we believed in what we were doing.