Humans Behind the Handles: Holly Tuke

We caught up with Holly Tuke, Social Media Manager at RNIB.

The Origin Story

Holly, like our previous guests at #HumansBehindTheHandles, has had a beautifully wiggly career and didn’t initially plan to work in digital communications.

While at university, she had a bit of a “what am I doing with my life? Is this the right thing for me?” moment which encouraged her to start a blog on living as a disabled person. Her disability activism led her to the online disabled community, and work with various charities.

After graduating, she began working in assistive technology and found herself running the social media channels. Soon after, she got a role as Social Media Officer at the RNIB - and the rest is history.

“It's a real mixed bag of where I was to where I am now, but I feel like it all aligned for a reason.”

Business as Usual

A real day behind the handles at the RNIB usually includes “some community management,

signposting to services and support, answering questions about what it's like to be blind or partially sighted and debunking misconceptions”.

Yet, every day is varied: “you could be working on a project one day, the next day you could be calling out a brand because they haven't added alt text or they've used a post with a ton of emojis and it's not accessible”. While there is a rhythm with reporting, content planning and project strategies, your day can be turned upside down to jump on a trend or make a cultural moment accessible to blind and partially sighted people.

For Holly, working on social media for the RNIB is “trying to make the world better, more accessible, one post at a time”.

Two Misconceptions

Holly shared some of the misconceptions that she urges people to bear in mind.

Firstly, not everything can have a real impact on social. It doesn’t just “take five minutes to put a post together”, as we must keep the wider picture in mind and ask ourselves how “we are serving our community through that content and what are they taking away from it.”

An even bigger misconception is, however, “that blind and partially sighted people can't work in social or be a social media manager”. There are challenges and things she cannot do, but this is irrelevant in light of everything she can do.

Highlights

For Holly, some of the most satisfying moments working social media at the RNIB come from educating brands on accessibility. “Everyone goes on their accessibility journey and everyone has a part to play”.

One of her favourite posts she ever did for the RNIB was a screen recording of an inaccessible post from the Met Office, which was “a really nice opportunity where we could all learn from each other”.

Another similar post was calling out Greggs for an inaccessible inside joke posted through emojis. “It was a fun one to put together - although we didn't get free sausage rolls, so I was a bit sad about that.”

Unfortunately, not every time they jump on a cultural moment, the message lands correctly. “We're constantly learning from those reactive moments”.

Boundaries and Advice

Because social media doesn’t stop, Holly felt like “something had to give” from being online all day for work and for her personal disability advocacy role. She came up with three strategies:

The first, is to be intentional about her social media use: “chances are I don't need to sit

and scroll through Twitter (X) all the time”. The second is filling her feeds with joyful, uplifting content that makes her feel good.

The third is asking for support when she needs it. This last one required a mental shift away from internalised ableism, since she felt that, as a disabled person “if I ask for support, then it looks like I can't do it”.

To wrap up, Holly’s top piece of advice for anyone working in digital charity comms is to “tap into the community and don’t be afraid to tell those stories”. Do what you must to get permission to create those “yes moments”.

Thank you so much to Holly for talking so openly and candidly to us! We loved learning about you and your experience behind the handle.

Join us for the next episode of Humans Behind the Handles as we continue to discover the real people running the social media channels of nonprofits and charities.