The Challenge
Each of March of Dimes' 34 local market teams play a critical role in engaging their communities, creating awareness, and fundraising for the important mission of leading the national fight for the health of all moms and babies. March of Dimes needed a scalable way to manage local social media across all of its local markets without sacrificing brand integrity, compliance, or efficiency. But decentralized execution created risks around inconsistent messaging, sensitive content handling, and a lack of visibility at the national level.
March of Dimes wanted to expand its use of user-generated content (UGC), especially those authentic lived experiences from mission-impacted families, to strengthen community engagement and support fundraising. However, this often includes content that requires additional oversight, making it essential to have a structured approach to curate, approve, and scale content across local and national channels with confidence, control, and sensitivity to the families involved.
March of Dimes needed a centralized local social media solution that could:
- Support local markets efficiently
- Ensure 100% content moderation and compliance
- Simplify workflows for lean teams
- Enable scalable UGC and community storytelling
The Solution
March of Dimes partnered with Hiper, a digital marketing agency specializing in multi-location marketing, to build a centralized, technology-powered local social media program using SOCi. This Hiper + SOCi ecosystem combines strategy, execution, and automation to support both national oversight and local flexibility.
As Melissa Telsrow, President and Co-founder of Hiper, explained, “SOCi is core to how we achieve scale while building local community for national clients like March of Dimes. It’s the technology infrastructure that lets local stories support the national strategy, without ever losing control of the brand.”
1. Centralized content moderation and approval workflows
Using SOCi, Hiper moderates 100% of March of Dimes' social content before publication. Automated approval flows route sensitive posts to internal stakeholders for review, ensuring compliance with legal and brand standards. Hiper actively manages approvals and communicates directly with local operators, closing the loop and reinforcing best practices.
2. Scalable support for 34 local markets
Hiper provides hands-on support to local teams through custom post requests, content planning, and scheduling. SOCi's content libraries and preset templates make it easy for local operators to publish on-brand content without starting from scratch. This reduces friction and eliminates bottlenecks while keeping teams aligned with national priorities.
3. “Lived Experiences” UGC strategy
A core driver of performance is the focus on authentic, community-based content. Ambassador families and local communities share real stories, curated and amplified across channels. This "lived experiences" approach consistently outperforms traditional content and strengthens emotional connections with audiences. This is possible because local teams have an approved process for submitting or scheduling content for publication through a centralized platform, SOCi.
4. Local-to-national amplification
Each week, top-performing local posts are identified within SOCi and elevated via a national Instagram Story roundup. This strategy highlights locally tagged content, improves local search visibility, and rewards local teams by giving them broader exposure. It also encourages more participation when communities see themselves featured at a national level.
5. Education and enablement for local teams
Using SOCi, Hiper trains and supports local operators in social media, helping them understand how to create effective, brand-compliant content. This ensures that even non-marketing staff can confidently contribute to social media content efforts without feeling overwhelmed.
"Hiper is an incredible partner to March of Dimes. Our centralized local social program, powered by SOCi, and so much more of what we do, simply wouldn’t be possible without them. They consistently push our work forward in the best way—grounded in data, driven by solutions, and focused on real results. Their ability to interpret insights, deeply understand platforms and industry nuances, and go all-in on everything they touch is unmatched. Over the past five years, our centralized local social program has continued to evolve and deliver standout results because of their unique expertise. Working with Hiper is a privilege, and their work will unquestionably elevate any brand.
The Results
Using SOCi, Hiper has helped March of Dimes transform its local social media strategy by driving greater visibility, deeper community engagement, and stronger operational efficiency across all markets while maintaining full brand control. March of Dimes has seen the following results with SOCi + Hiper:
138% increase in local social media publishing
By implementing preset templates, centralized content libraries, and a streamlined custom post request process, March of Dimes significantly increased the volume of local content across all 34 markets. This removed previous bottlenecks and enabled local teams to consistently show up in their communities.
11.4% local Facebook engagement rate
The shift to "lived experiences" UGC, featuring ambassador families and real community stories, has contributed to driving substantially higher engagement. This performance exceeds typical industry benchmarks of 2–3%, demonstrating the impact of authentic, locally relevant content on audience connection and mission awareness.
100% content governance and moderation
With SOCi's automated approval workflows and Hiper's hands-on management, every piece of local content is reviewed and approved before publishing. This ensures full compliance, protects sensitive information, and maintains brand integrity, critical for a nonprofit operating in a highly regulated and trust-driven environment.
Stronger alignment between national and local teams
Weekly amplification of top-performing local posts to national channels increases visibility for local markets while reinforcing a unified brand voice. This approach incentivizes participation, strengthens communication, and creates a feedback loop that continuously improves content quality.
Improved operational efficiency for lean teams
By combining SOCi's technology with Hiper's strategic and executional support, March of Dimes reduced manual effort, improved workflows, and enabled local teams to participate in social media without added burden, freeing them to focus on supporting their mission of leading the fight for the health of all moms and babies by expanding their overall community reach and impact, and sustaining fundraising initiatives.