Book for every child through social media

Name of Business: Pratham Books

Website URL: www.prathambooks.org

Industry: Education (not-for-profit)

Target Audience: Everybody. Pratham wants to put a book in every child’s hand. So anyone who helps them get there is a target.

Category of Business

Pratham Books is a not-for-profit organization that publishes affordable children's books in multiple Indian languages. Their mission is “to see a book in every child’s hand” and create a “Reading India”. In the last seven years, Pratham Books has published over six million books in up to 11 languages.

Marketing Efforts and Results

Being a non-profit organization, the folks at Pratham Books have made time for people. The same is visible in their social media strategy. Pratham Books realized that it was impossible to accomplish their mission alone. The need of the hour was to collaborate with other publishers, writers, translators, parents, etc to be able to reach the last child. Thus, they began their social media efforts to create a community around reading and their efforts have reaped results.

Pratham Books has methodically tapped on the strengths of multiple social media platforms. “Social media, to us, is not a marketing tool and we have never used it as a marketing tool. Social media has been crucial to us building our social publishing strategy and has allowed us to create a very strong community around our mission of ‘A Book in Every Child's Hand,’ says Maya Hemant, Digital Community Manager, Pratham Books.

The organization maintains a blog - blog.prathambooks.org. This talks about publishing, reading, literacy, kidlit, learning, non-profits, events and more. The posts are a treat for anyone who appreciates creativity. Guest blogs have also been welcomed. Pratham Books sees Twitter as a space where they can engage with the community, share ideas, ask for help, get feedback, listen to complaints, participate and mobilize volunteers, to help their reach their goal. Pratham started using Twitter early in 2009 and has more than 3,000 followers. “Growth has been purely organic and we have built a large, geographically diverse community passionate about reading and always ready and willing to help. Twitter and tweeple have helped us connect with children who run a mobile library for other children in Bengal, bikers who have travelled across states and distributed our books to government schools, housewives who informally teach under privileged children in their locality, parents who coax school administrations to hold book fairs with our books, marketing experts who help better our strategy, organizations that need books and want us to help them in setting up their libraries, authors and illustrators who want to work with us, developers who have developed iPad applications for us and more,” says Hemant.

The organization has uploaded many of its books (available under Creative Commons licenses) on Scribd, so they can reach a wider audience. These books can be remixed/repurposed by the community to suit their purpose. There have been cases when their books have been translated into Lojban (a constructed language), Assamese, French and Spanish.

Pratham Books has more than 1,600 fans on Facebook, where it updates information from the blog as well as about the events organized by them. It uses this platform to communicate with the community. The fan page has a very personal and warm approach. Pratham started using Facebook towards the middle of 2009 and has built a tightly knit community. “One of the things that we do differently is that we do not use Facebook, or any of our other channels, to talk solely about our work or market ourselves. This is very important to us because we want our efforts to be larger than just our organization and to reflect the cause of reading,” says Hemant.

Documentation of the initiatives taken by Pratham Books can be found on Flickr. The organization also uses this platform to upload their Creative Commons licensed illustrations. Again the purpose is to reach more viewers and give the community the flexibility to repackage / reuse the content.

One can find Pratham Books on YouTube as well. Documentation of the work they do and information about some of their initiatives are uploaded here. The organization creates trailers to let people know about their books. Audio books, recorded by Radio Mirchi, are uploaded at Soundcloud.

“A key take away is that patience, authenticity and transparency are fundamental building blocks needed to build a successful social media presence and more importantly, a strong community,” says Hemant. Their social media and publishing efforts were recognized at the IndiaSocial Case Challenge, where they won the first prize.

Social Media Marketing Investment

Pratham Books does not allocate a budget for its social media marketing efforts. There is one person, who anchors the effort, while every member of the team.