If you work within a patient advocacy group, offering quality information to patients, making your association better known or increasing the number of associates in order to be stronger may be among your priorities. This enables you to better advocate for access to treatment or early diagnosis but also involves a lot of work with probably few financial resources to do it.

However, we live in a world of digital communications. Some articles say that we check our mobile phones between 80 and 90 times a day, spending approximately five hours browsing the web and using apps. Social media is at the top of the list of the most used apps and most visited websites.
Maybe you are thinking that this has nothing to do with our objectives as advocates but if you look at this data carefully, you will probably realise that we have the attention of patients and stakeholders around five hours a day and all within reach of our computer.
Choosing the best way to share our content and the most suitable tool to reach our targets is one of the key things we need to do to obtain good results. However, using social media in an inappropriate way may involve some risks for your organisation because of misunderstanding or unsuitable answers.
This toolkit is a support resource for patient associations. Its purpose is to give guidance and information about social media management, in order to increase the visibility of your activities. Throughout these pages we will summarise some tips to get the greatest benefit from social networks reducing the risks that they may have for your organisation.