Communications Toolkit to Support Newcomers
Communities throughout Alberta share a need to grow. With low birth rates and baby boomers quickly retiring, many communities are struggling to sustain a base of workers.
Newcomers have been a vital part of Alberta’s history and will continue to play a significant role in the future of Alberta’s communities. Unfortunately, newcomers can often become targets of hate and may face challenges in building social connections in a new community because they are seen as different. This places significant mental and emotional strain on newcomers, but also stunts the growth of a community if newcomers choose not to stay and invest in the community.
This toolkit provides municipal governments with templates for posters and newspapers and suggested text and imagery for 15 different types of posts on social media. These tools can help municipal governments to educate and inform residents that welcoming new people through immigration is a key factor in how your community grew over the past century. The need is similar, and perhaps more urgent today.
In creating this toolkit, we have considered many factors, including using language that will engage and motivate, without preaching to residents or insulting newcomers. It can be a sensitive topic, and delivering the message in the right tone, using carefully chosen wording, can increase positive engagement.
We’ve built the content to be as easy as possible to use for any municipality that is using social media, with different options depending on the skill set of the person managing the social media account.
We have also provided templates that your municipality can use for newspaper ads, posters, or banners to promote the value of welcoming new people to your community.
This toolkit offers details instructions on how to use the poster, newspaper ads, and social media messaging and imagery using the most basic or advanced software tools.
This toolkit offers tools to communicate with 1 of 4 distinct purposes in mind, always with the goal of encouraging your audience to welcome newcomers and help them feel a sense of belonging in the community.
Educate (social media/poster/newspaper ad)
Educational posts share facts and ideas that counter common myths around immigration. Keep posts short and positive. Don’t state the myth, but instead focus on the reality that people need to know—and the action they should take to make your community more inclusive and welcoming.
Engage (social media/poster/newspaper ad)
Engagement is about getting people involved, creating conversations, and triggering actions. These posts focus on sharing ideas and encouraging positive responses. Use emoticons to keep the tone friendly and eye-catching. Don’t use the royal “we.” Keep it conversational and never preach to the audience about past behaviours or mistakes.
Don’t: We all need to meet and welcome new people.
Do: Have you met someone new this week?
Energize (social media)
Energy fuels action. These posts focus on creating enthusiasm and excitement for the community’s future by highlighting the benefits of welcoming new people. The goal is to create a buzz of energy as your audience visualizes what can be accomplished together, and how it relates to them as neighbours and residents.
Entertain through Storytelling
Storytelling entertains and creates conversations—and your community has infinite stories to share. Storytelling social media posts take a little more work because they are unique to your own community and you need to create the content, but they can have a powerful impact.
The social media posts in this toolkit utilize four distinct ways of communicating the message to your community, always with the goal of encouraging them to welcome new neighbours and help newcomers to be happy and successful contributors to the community. The posts are designed to educate, engage, energize and entertain through storytelling.
This toolkit offers text content and imagery that you can publish to your social media in just a few quick steps.
Social Post Structure
When you are creating your own social media shares, structure is important.
Start with a strong, short first sentence about an event or a person. The goal is to attract the reader to expand the post and read the entire story. Focus on how that event has shown growth or what that person is giving back / loving / passionate about, followed by a paragraph break and then the story.
Frequency of Posting
You may find that some of the social media modules in this toolkit resonate with your community more than others. Choose the ones that are the most appropriate and effective, and re-post more than once. You will find that audience members check in at various times, and in order to reach as many people as possible, re-posting is essential. The more often you update your social media channels, the more often you should re-post important content such as this.
Note that we are deliberately avoiding phrases that carry baggage or negative connotations. Even the word “immigrant” can trigger biases based on dated perceptions. Our preference is to refer to immigrants and refugees as new neighbours, or just new people.
Input from municipalities and community support organizations has told us to avoid negative wording of any kind, including common myths and misconceptions that are likely to become fodder for trolls (and create extra work for moderators). Instead, we will focus on the positive truths and important benefits of attracting and welcoming new people.
Educate - sample post
The dream of a new life in Alberta is how our community has grown over the last century. Our story is still being written by new families here in [community name] and other communities.
It’s how we grew.
It’s how we’ll grow.
#albertawelcomes
Engage - sample post
We are so 🍀 lucky to live in [community name], and the 🔑 to our future is in attracting smart, talented, ambitious people who will also choose to make [community name] home.
It’s how we grew.
It’s how we’ll grow.
#albertawelcomes
Energize - sample post
There is so much to be excited about [community name].
We’re a community with a history, and a vision for our future. As our Boomers (and soon gen-Xers) retire, we need to know that our local businesses will have the people they need to keep our local economy moving for our future. Next time you see a new worker, welcome them to [community name]!
Welcoming has always been the [community name] way.
It’s how we grew.
It’s how we’ll grow.
Go to the Instructions to download all 15 social media posts and images.
- Download the .zip file here. The download will provide you with the suggested text and images for all 15 social media posts that are included in this toolkit.
- Find your desired social media post and the related image. Each post and image is labeled by its purpose and number so you can easily match them up.
- Images are ready to share as they are, and are framed by images from many parts of Alberta. Review the images to select the ones that are the best fit for your community and message.
- Open your preferred social media app (e.g. Twitter, Facebook) under your municipality’s account.
- Copy and paste the text from the downloaded file into the field for posting information.
- Attach one of the photos from this toolkit or create your own. Next to the sharing field, click the button to upload the image you have selected for this posting.
- Edit any parts of the post content that should be customized. Any time you see “[community name]”, change the text to your municipality’s name. Make any other edits that help the post feel more local and relatable to your audience. This might include local place names, venues and landmarks.
- Add appropriate hashtags that you use for your community and create your own to help community members to find related posts. We recommend using #[community name]welcomes and #albertawelcomes plus creating unique hashtags related to welcoming people and community inclusiveness.
- Re-read the content before sharing to be sure it makes sense and is relatable to your audience. If you have an internal editorial review process, ensure it is followed before publishing.
- Publish the post by clicking the appropriate button.