About Hato Hone St John 

Hato Hone St John, New Zealand’s largest charitable organization, provides a range of services, including emergency ambulance services, first aid training, event medical services, and community programs. They handle over 600k emergency calls for ambulance assistance annually. 

Hato Hone St John needed a comprehensive platform to manage their social media presence effectively. The goal was to streamline content creation, scheduling, and community engagement across various social media channels. 

With limited resources, Hato Hone St John faced challenges in maintaining consistent communication, engaging with their online communities, and ensuring their messaging was timely and relevant. The right platform would help the organization overcome these obstacles by providing tools for efficient content management and effective community interaction. 

We talked to Mohit Ravi, Digital Marketing Lead at Hato Hone St John, whose small team handle all customer-facing digital marketing. In our conversation, Mohit shared insights on how the team of three enhanced their social media using Brandwatch’s Social Media Management platform.  

This case study will cover: 

  • Better content planning and scheduling 
  • Streamlining online community engagement and support 
  • Efficient crisis communications   
  • Better reporting aiding strategy 
  • Reputation management 
  • Maintaining data compliance 

The challenge 

There are two main components to Hato Hone St John’s social strategy: organic social media, which is managed by the communications and PR team, and paid social media, which sits under Mohit’s digital marketing team.

The organization has decentralized paid social media for different product areas and managers, allowing for paid campaigns to be tailored to their respective products and services.  

The organization receives high volumes of online interactions, which poses additional challenges for the small team. Hato Hone St John wanted to ensure effective communication, visibility, and transparency across the company, and maintain their brand reputation online. 

Given these complexities, Hato Hone St John needed a flexible platform to centralize all social media efforts in one place while still allowing self-service capabilities for different stakeholders. 

Integrating Brandwatch into St John’s marketing strategy 

Hato Hone St John chose Brandwatch’s Social Media Management tool to address these challenges, aiming to improve content planning, community engagement, and customer service functions at the organization.  

Better content planning and scheduling

In our conversation, Mohit shared that Brandwatch’s content planning feature was a game changer for the digital marketing team who used the scheduling module to plan content ahead of time across their chosen social platforms.

This ensured a consistent and organized approach to Hato Hone St John’s social media strategy. 

“Content planning is a big one. Our social media specialist uses Brandwatch to spruce up two weeks’ worth of content within the system.”
— Mohit Ravi, Digital Marketing Lead at Hato Hone St John

Streamlining online community engagement and support 

Using the Engage module in Brandwatch, the marketing team improved the way they manage and handle online inquiries. Hato Hone St John's customer service center used Engage to respond to direct messages and comments related to their products and services. This included addressing operational questions like medical alarm relocations and first aid kit inquiries.

 “The Engage module is used voraciously by our customer service center that handles all DMs and comments about our products online. They handle all operational customer inquiries in Engage,” Mohit shared. 

Efficient crisis communications  

A crisis can hit at any time. A few years ago, a volcano erupted on one of the islands in New Zealand. Hato Hone St John were the first ones on site to help the people affected by the eruption.

The marketing team used Brandwatch to monitor their brand mentions online and respond to questions and concerns swiftly. Brandwatch provided them with the necessary tools to discover and handle crisis communications effectively. 

“We used Brandwatch during the White Island eruption to monitor posts about St John and ensure timely responses. This capability is crucial for our crisis management efforts.”
— Mohit Ravi, Digital Marketing Lead at Hato Hone St John

Better reporting aiding strategy 

Hato Hone St John’s audience range from top-level politicians to people living in rural New Zealand who are dependent on their service. Because they are a charity and offer emergency services at the same time, it’s important for their marketing team to see what content works best for their audience.  

“It's so important that our content is readable and accessible and reaches the right people. From a reporting perspective, that's quite important for us to know what's working and what's not working.”
— Mohit Ravi, Digital Marketing Lead at Hato Hone St John

Mohit explained that the marketing team created category labels in Brandwatch and started labeling all their posts. For example, ambulance-related posts or first aid training. This made it easier for Mohit’s team to analyze and report on the performance of specific content categories. 

Through testing different types of content and using reporting, the team found that posts featuring people – especially frontline staff in uniform or performing first aid training – consistently performed better in terms of engagement compared to other posts. 

These data-driven insights helped the marketing team inform and adjust their content strategy moving forward.

Reputation management 

Managing reputation is crucial for any organization, and it’s especially important for Hato Hone St John, which relies on public trust and support. For them, reputation management extends beyond handling crises; it’s about consistently engaging with their online community to build and maintain a positive brand image.  

With tools like Brandwatch, Hato Hone St John can now streamline content planning and community engagement efforts, ensuring their messaging is timely and relevant. This approach helps the organization address immediate concerns and foster long-term loyalty and support from their stakeholders.  

“We needed a platform to not only monitor online interactions and tell us what the sentiment is, but also provide a central place for us to access that information and empower our staff to answer and reply to those comments and DMs.”
— Mohit Ravi, Digital Marketing Lead at Hato Hone St John

Hato Hone St John’s marketing team set up dashboards to monitor brand sentiment in real time across all social channels, so they would have a single place to view and analyze public perception.  

The organization’s brand team also drafted instructions and response templates for their customer support team, so they could efficiently manage incoming messages using pre-approved templates.  

Maintaining data compliance 

Compliance is a critical piece of reputation management, especially for an organization like Hato Hone St John, which is contracted by the government and handles sensitive public health records and personal data. With consumer concerns over data privacy rising, it is highly important for Hato Hone St John to ensure compliance with regulations and guidelines around data privacy and security.  

Mohit shared that Brandwatch plays a key role in helping Hato Hone St John maintain compliance with data privacy and security protocols. For example, the platform prevents Hato Hone St John from initiating unprompted conversations with their audience and viewing private posts on social media, according to the individual social media networks’ restrictions.  

“Brandwatch becomes central to enabling us to be secure and safe with people's privacy and security,” added Mohit.

“Brandwatch’s suite offers you data privacy, security, transparency, accessibility, and to centralize your social media management.”
— Mohit Ravi, Digital Marketing Lead at Hato Hone St John