The Power of Instagram Storytelling: Insights from a Conversation with Common Cause Social Media Coordinator Jordan Johnson

As part of our series on leveraging Instagram for advocacy, I spoke with Jordan Johnson, social media coordinator for Common Cause — a nonpartisan, grassroots organization fighting for an accountable government and equal rights, opportunities, and representation. The Instagram account for Common Cause national (@ourcommoncause) boasts nearly 7,000 followers and successfully utilizes photos, graphics, art, and reels to engage its followers. In her role as social media coordinator, Jordan is responsible for everything encompassing social media —including creating content calendars, managing social media rapid response, and being on the front line of communication with their members and the general public. Throughout our conversation, Jordan shared many helpful Instagram insights that I’m sure will serve you and your organization as you manage your social media presence.

Building Your Instagram Strategy

As with any effective communications project, a successful Instagram account requires a thoughtful strategy. While it can be tempting to post anything and everything that comes to mind, to make the most of your time and resources it’s critical to be very intentional with what you’re sharing and understand why you’re sharing it. It’s also important to start with a strong brand with which you can stay consistent. Make sure you have an eye-catching profile picture, a strong, informative bio, and some solid introductory posts that tell the viewer who you are, who you serve, and what you stand for. From there, as you continue to develop your Instagram strategy to maximize follower retention and engagement, Jordan recommends thinking about these four components:

1. Educating and advocating: This aspect is essential to ensuring your followers are informed on the issues related to your work. These kinds of posts are often infographics, or a visual communication tool that uses graphics and patterns to present data or information in a way that’s faster and easier to understand and retain (Engaging infographics for any project, campaign, or visual story with Canva). You might be providing information on an important date in history, a new bill introduced to the legislature, or a compelling statistic.
2. Building community: Building community between your organization and your followers is a great way to keep your members engaged and invested in your work. To build community for Common Cause, Jordan makes sure to post for holidays such as Black History Month and Women’s History Month, and also posts to highlight new hires or other new members of the Common Cause community.
3. Amplifying impact: When you have a win, your followers should know about it! Not only will it be gratifying to those who volunteer with or donate to your organization, but it will encourage others to participate as well. Whether it be a legislative victory, meeting a fundraising goal, throwing a successful event, or making a direct, positive impact in someone’s life, make sure you’re sharing that story with your followers.
4. Staying relevant and visible: In the ever-changing advocacy and social media landscapes, it can be hard to stay visible. There are so many issues to be addressed and so many organizations doing great work, and only so much attention to be shared. To make sure your work is still showing up on people’s feeds and resonating with the public, Jordan suggests taking advantage of major pop culture events and memes. Finding ways to tie your work to the Super Bowl, the Met Gala, the Oscars, or any similar event is a smart strategy for staying in the public eye. Don’t be afraid to also adapt any memes or social media trends you may be seeing in your personal feed.

Writing Engaging Captions

While Instagram is a highly visual platform, the captions on your posts can be of equal importance to the images themselves. Captions are the place to expand upon what you’ve shared in the post, provide additional information and context, and make your posts more accessible for disabled users (5 Ways to Make Your Instagram Account More Accessible Right Now). To write a strong caption, here are four things Jordan considers in captions for Common Cause (note: all four may not be applicable to every single caption, but at least one will apply).

1. Character limit: Unlike Twitter, Instagram has a generous character limit of 2,200 characters per caption. This gives you a lot more space to share information with your followers. However, if you are cross-posting between Instagram and Twitter or another platform, you may want to take that into consideration.
2. Telling a story: Sometimes, the caption is where you should tell a story about the image(s) you shared. Consider the highly popular account (12.8 million followers) Humans of New York (@humansofny). Most of their posts are simply photographs of individuals they profile, but in the caption they share their stories. This format may not work for every post, but can be impactful when you don’t want to layer text on top of a photo or work of art.
3. Keeping it short: Though Instagram allows for long captions, you still want to be tactical with how you use the space as Instagram is primarily about the visuals. If there is too much text, it can be easy for the reader to become disengaged or miss key points. If you need to write a longer caption, Jordan recommends breaking it up into smaller paragraphs.
4. Call to action: Calls to action are a fantastic way to engage your followers and work towards the goals of your organizations. Examples include phone zaps, signing petitions, sending letters to elected officials, and fundraising. Many campaigns and organizations have had great success mobilizing their members through Instagram, so make sure to post engaging graphics with clear instructions on how to take action and see what a great impact that can make.

Measuring Your Instagram Engagement

You’ve developed your strategy and you’re regularly posting on Instagram; how do you measure its success? A key measurement is engagement. Knowing how much Instagram users engage with your posts is not always straightforward, but Jordan has two main ways to keep track:

1. Impressions: An impression is any time the post is displayed on someone’s device, whether or not they click on it or interact with it in any way. This is important to keep track of because even if someone is not liking or commenting on your post, they may still be taking in the information when it shows up on their feed. In order to see the analytics on your impressions, make sure you have your Instagram account set as a public business account (How to set up a business account on Instagram).
2. Engagements: Engagements refer to likes, comments, and shares. These are good ways to see if the content is resonating with the audience and if they want to take an extra step beyond just viewing the post. It’s important to remember that your engagements are relative to the number of followers you have, so don’t be discouraged if an account with a much larger following is getting a lot more engagements on your posts. As you get more shares, your likes, comments, and following will grow more too.

It’s important to note that even if your strategy doesn’t seem to be paying off right away, in terms of engagement, that doesn’t mean you have to start from scratch. Give your strategy some time (Jordan recommends a few weeks to a month) and if you’re still not having the success you’re looking for, try changing one or two things within your greater strategy. That could mean posting more reels, starting a story series (i.e. a weekly round-up of your work, highlighting different team members), or posting at different times or frequencies. Just make sure you are leaving some consistent, core elements of your brand so it’s easy to monitor what changes are making a difference and so that your content is still recognizable as part of your organization.

Additional Tools and Resources

• Sprout Social: social media management and intelligence tool for brands and agencies of all sizes.
• Canva: graphic design platform that provides tools for creating social media graphics, presentations, promotional merchandise and websites.
• CapCut: free all-in-one creative platform powered by AI that enables video editing and image design on browsers, Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS.
• SocialPilot: social media scheduling and management tool that helps professionals, teams, and businesses automate their social media management.
• Mojo: app designed to help make video content for Instagram, TikTok, and more.

Ultimately, Instagram, like any other social media platform, is a way to connect with people. As Jordan told me, “you really have to tug on those emotional heartstrings to convey storytelling…it’s primarily about the storytelling element so it can resonate with people who then in turn like or share, or if you even want them to take a step further, sign a petition, donate, or make a phone call.” Engaging photos, infographics, reels, and captions are a means to an end: reaching people who you could recruit to your movement or organization to help you meet your goals.

For more Instagram advocacy tips, check out my last blog post: Insta-Activism: How to Leverage Instagram for Your Next Advocacy Campaign

More about Jordan Johnson

Jordan is an Austin, Texas native who holds a B.A. in Mass Communications from Sam Houston State University and an M.A. in Strategic Communications from Texas Tech University. She joined Common Cause in February of 2023, before Common Cause she served as a digital strategy consultant for many political campaigns and non-profit organizations.

When she’s not working to defend our democracy Jordan enjoys dancing, listening to true crime podcasts, and traveling the world.