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Media Activity Reports

NCSF Media Activity Report – 2023

The PR Committee manages NCSF’s social media by building awareness about NCSF and providing education about our projects and consent to enhance our presence and be more effective at broadcasting our information. The PR Committee falls under the Media Outreach Program which does media advocacy for kink and non-monogamy groups, events and individuals on request. Here is our social media Policy & Procedures. The PR Committee meets once a quarter in 2024 (January, April, July & October) on the 3rd Monday of the Month at 8:30 Eastern. We moved to a once a quarter format because after forming this committee in the Fall of 2021, we really have a handle on things and don’t need to meet as much.

Media Updates

Our Media Updates is our way to provide direct feedback on how kink and nonmonogamy are covered. It also serves as a way to track media coverage on our communities. For the past several years, nonmonogamy articles outnumber kink articles. It’s only been since 2012 that we started to see a majority of positive kink articles rather than negative, which we can attribute to both the change in the APA’s DSM-5 that depathologized BDSM, and 50 Shade of Grey, which love it or hate it, changed the way the media talks about kink.

NCSF published 101 Media Updates compared to 113 in 2022 (61 about non-monogamy, 35 about Kink and 5 sex-positive) including:

Instead of putting out a Media Update every 2 weeks, this year we’ve started broadcasting to our email list a monthly NCSF Update with the 4 Quarterly newsletters falling every three months. These will have the Media Updates and our news for the past month – which will help spread the word about our initiatives and programs.

Also, the algorithm for the Google Alerts that find articles for NCSF’s Media Updates has changed and is returning non-related content, avoiding the keywords we have used: kinky, swinging, BDSM. These alerts have been going for 20 years, and suddenly they’re different. It shows that increasingly, we’re being silenced and stifled by online technology.

Interviews

We did about the same number of interviews as the past few years. Mainly we’re doing podcasts that are produced by our own communities to make sure the word is out about Explicit Prior Permission and our Consent Counts materials for nonmonogamy and kink.

NCSF staff members gave 24 interviews with community podcasts and publications in 2023 (compared to 25 in 2022, 17 in 2021, and 24 in 2020). This included:

NCSF News

These are the announcements we make on our Blog about our services and advocacy work, along with allies’ announcements.

24 posts were published on the NCSF Blog about NCSF services, our advocacy work, and in support of our allies, including:

Looking ahead to the publication of Explicit Prior Permission by the ALI, we have created:

Promotions

  • Metamour Day 2023 was celebrated with a new winning graphic – Metamour Day 2024 was celebrated with two videos created by our Swing Liaison Kiley and we publicized the cards by Anna Hirsch, Polyana, who created our Metamour Day graphics in multiple languages
  • Consent Month was celebrated with a new graphic and slogan: “Consent is Key in 2023”
  • Polyamory Day was promoted on Thanksgiving, Nov 23rd and got 15,000 views on Facebook. An initiative by our Coalition Partner, the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association.

To support NCSF as an organization, we hold bi-annual promotions:

Infographics

  • Consent Infographics – 49 infographics (33 new ones were created in 2023) are on rotation on our social media, including our new FetLife profile, where Steve also posts blurbs about consent, often sending our posts to Kinky & Popular. This might be our most successful initiative – our consent infographics and blurbs
  • Consent Signs – 24 consent signs

Videos – Along with the promotional videos that I mentioned already, we posted two consent videos:

The two original initiatives of our Media Outreach Program are the direct advocacy – interviews and media updates – both were started 27 years ago and have changed the way that the media covers kink and nonmonogamy.

Guest Blogs

These allow a broader range of voices to be broadcast by NCSF and have been valuable resources. We have a strict criteria that you can see in our Policy & Procedures that the post must offer education for professionals about the kink or non-monogamy communities or pertain to how the kink and nonmonogamy communities interface with mainstream society (i.e., child custody discrimination, outing, dealing with law enforcement, discrimination by professionals or DEI issues).

NCSF posted 12 Guest Blogs in 2023 including:

Social Media

NCSF appears to be under a Facebook shadow ban, which reduces our reach to 10% of what it was in early 2022. So where we once got 10,000 views, we now get 1,000. We haven’t discovered any way to combat a shadow ban, and as you heard in IRR, other groups were asking about this.

NCSF’s social media stats at the end of 2023:

  • NCSF announcement list on Constant Contact – 7,701 contacts
  • Facebook – 6,526 people like our page and 7,062 people follow us
  • X – 10,900 followers (posting has been suspended in 2023 due to moderation issues)
  • NCSF Profile on FetLife – 618 followers Started in June 2023!
  • NCSF News on FetLife – 6,690 members
  • Consent Counts on FetLife – 3,164 members
  • Instagram – 3,400 followers (up 1,000)
  • TikTok – 1,270 followers
  • YouTube – 1,520 views