Humans Behind the Handles: Kate Blake

For our third episode, we spoke to Kate Blake, Social Media Manager at Cats Protection.

As a fellow cat enthusiast, Kate jokingly sums up her role as “posting cats on the internet,” though her work is far more strategic and complicated than that...

The Backstory

Kate didn’t start her career thinking she’d end up in digital comms. A self-described “live music buff,” she began working as a freelancer in the live music scene, from dressing room to stage management and all across the world, from Europe to America.

In between gigs and tours, she found a temporary job at Help for Heroes, but there was something about that “nice feeling when you're driving home from a nonprofit job where you just go ‘oh my goodness, I had a really good conversation today’ or ‘someone was really great today’” that she just couldn’t get away from.

Since then, she’s worn many hats across various essential charities - and Cats Protection turned out to be a purrfect match.

The Reality Check

With over 400 Cats Protection-branded channels, no two days are the same in Kate’s paws. She has to run a “global and local strategy at the same time” and to empower and upskill the “local volunteers that are time- strapped and doing it out of the kindness of their heart.”

Although it’s hard to define what a typical day is, it usually involves “a lot of approvals, double checking of scripts”, upskilling webinar organising, holiday campaigns reviews, providing creative direction and overseeing appeals. She also mentioned that “all of our comms, ideas and footage goes through the veterinary team for fine tuning and insight.” When it comes to the welfare of cats, they will always check with the experts!

For Kate, the most common misconception is that the job is simply "post[ing] cute cats for a living". Social media is much more strategic than that, as we know. “When products and appeals are in their infancy, we should make sure that comms teams get a seat at the table to help shape the narrative [...] to avoid being on cleanup duty when it comes to live dates.”

The Highs and Headaches

There have been many highlights over the past few years for Kate, but this year’s campaign to push for better legislation around animal breeding is a standout in her career.

“Rather than trying to make the campaign look serialized and similar, we actually looked at different concepts to tell the same story.” For example, they created a Sims-style fake videogame where you have sliders to alter the traits of a cat, so the more extreme it looked, the more health issues and warning signs the game showed. The point was to show “that cat breeding and animal welfare isn't a game.”

Another highlight was the awareness-raising campaign that piggy-backed off the Taylor Swift release album to highlight that her breed of cats suffer from arthritis. The goal was to talk about extreme traits without placing blame: she managed to make a campaign “pointed and bold, but without being nasty.”

Because not everything always goes according to plan: this was also the year when she learnt the tough lesson to “check your links on all platforms and on all devices.” Everyone who works with social media has, or will have, a link outage so this is the perfect reminder to check your links!

The Self-Care

While impossible not to work out of hours in this type of role, it’s important to “take TOIL seriously [...]. That time ensures your work-life balance and it makes you ready to fight another day.”

Kate also reminds us of the importance of “filling your life with really beautiful things that you're looking forward to finishing and doing and getting on with, whether that's sports and hobbies or dogs or cats...”

Lastly, because comms can often go under the radar, her top tip is always to I think it's to “know your worth, to show up for things, to really be proud of yourself.”

Thank you so much to Kate for the chat, the tips, and the honesty!