A Narrative of Haribon’s Online Environmental Advocacy

Abstract

This qualitative study aims to understand the experience of Haribon Foundation, a non-government environmental organization, in using social media as a communication platform for environmentalism. It describes the mechanisms used by Haribon to make its presence felt online and investigates how environmental communication survived in an online advocacy. This study was written with a problem-solution or issue-realization sequence in six parts based on William Labov and Joshua Waletzky's natural narrative. These are abstract, orientation, complicating action, resolution, evaluation, and coda. The communication officers of Haribon were observed and interviewed for this study. Results revealed the crucial role of the communication officers as vehicles of information between Haribon and its audience. Communication officers are advantaged if they are knowledgeable about the advocacies as well as equipped with the skills in delivering these advocacies to the audience through social media. The strategies in promoting Haribon's advocacy through Facebook (FB), Twitter, and Instagram were the use of informational campaigns through creative posts, sharing trivia about specific topics, riding on popular culture, conversing with the audience, linking and tagging posts to partner international organizations, and using FB boosts and analytics. Through the communication officers' experiences, this study drafted a theoretical framework as a guide in developing a social media strategy or plan for non-government organizations of the same nature.