Blogger Spotlight: Tania Tirraoro, Special Needs Jungle

Special Needs Jungle is an award-winning blog founded in 2008 by Tania Tirraoro who felt inspired to create it to help her deal with the challenges of having a child with a disability. Using her own her experience as a foundation, Tania’s blog is a resource for parents and those who work with children affected by special needs, disabilities or any other mental health condition. In this spotlight, Tania chats to us about building the blog’s audience through social media, how she likes to work with PRs and the campaigns she is currently working on. 

Why should people read your blog? What makes it different? Special Needs Jungle is unique in that it is led by a team of parents of children and young adults with disabilities who are experts by experience in the special education and health issues they write about. We cover timely topics as well as publishing parent stories that almost always include top tips and columns from people working in the field who want to share best practice for helping disabled young people to thrive. It’s written in a friendly, easy to understand way that readers can relate to.

How do you measure the success of your website? SNJ started off as a parent blog before social media sharing was a thing, and over the years my audience grew so that I took someone on to help me create content as I had become ill. Since then our readership has grown exponentially and I have now registered it as a non-profit organisation (albeit tiny and unfunded) and have two volunteer co-directors who help me consider the future direction of the blog. This is because so many people – parents, practitioners, professionals and politicians rely on us to follow or express the parent viewpoint in our sphere of special educational needs and disability that it’s important to get it right.
Apart from the readership and size of our social media following, success really is in the number of people and families whose lives we make a difference to. We aim to empower parents by giving them the information they need to advocate for their children. If they feel better able to do that after reading a post on SNJ, that’s real success.

What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a blog? There are so many blogs out there these days – when SNJ started back in 2008 there wasn’t much in our field at all. So often people will start a blog and then soon run out of steam. I would say do what I did – think about what you want to achieve before you start and write about what interests you. I realised pretty quickly that writing about myself wasn’t that interesting in the long term or feasible as my boys were getting older. It was much more satisfying to write about useful things, but that’s probably because I’m a journalist by profession. Learn about how your blog works on a technical level too. If you’re on wordpress.com or blogger, there isn’t a whole lot that can go wrong so just have fun with it and be creative. If you choose to go self-hosted technical skills are even more important. Also learn about social media and how to use it to leverage your content and create your readership. Most of all, don’t follow the herd. Make your own path.

How do you work with marketers and PRs? We don’t, very often, unless they’re offering something suitable for our readers, such as a giveaway of a useful book. We are never lacking for content of our own and we know the value of a post on SNJ -we’re the No1 SEN blog in the UK. PR and marketing in our niche isn’t as developed as, say beauty or fashion. But for us, integrity is the most important thing.

How do you use social media to promote and share content? What are the challenges? Social media is key to our blog – we have built our audience entirely through the careful use of social media sharing a mix of our own content and stories from elsewhere in our area on an 20/80 basis – 20 us, 80 elsewhere. This means people don’t think we just talk about ourselves and we have become known as a trusted source of content curation. It also follows my thesis that if I think it’s interesting as a parent of children with disabilities, then others will too. The challenges are staying across everything, but I have tools to help me do this and I’m part of a team, including a team member who concentrates on curating content sharing with me.

What can PRs do in working better with you?

• Get to know us and try to build a relationship – we do get a lot of approaches and I prefer to work with those I have got to know.
• Don’t be lazy – read the blog first – or at least the about us page. Ascertain our audience and read our aims section.
• Don’t spam us with irrelevant offers of “professionally written content”. We can do this ourselves. What have you go to offer that’s different?
• PLEASE stop saying, “I hope this email finds you well.” What does that even mean – other than encouraging me to hit the delete key?
• Address me by name – it isn’t hard to find if you’ve read the blog.
• Don’t expect to get something for nothing. If I sound like a hard sell, it’s because my background is, as mentioned, as a hard news journalist and I’ve also been a PR myself.
• I have a chronic pain condition and an autism diagnosis myself, so my time and energy are limited and I’m not in it for irrelevant freebies; I’m in it to make a difference. If you want us to tweet something, send a perfectly formed tweet ready made – likewise a Facebook share. Make it relevant.
• If it’s for my personal NotAsAdvertisedblog.com, it’s much more relaxed and I am much more open to PR approaches but still, the same applies as to respectful approaches. Think about who I am – a 49 year old health and education campaigner with a chronic pain condition. But I’m still a woman who wants to look good for her age. Are baby products relevant to me? Unlikely. Beauty for the older woman? Definitely.

What has been your blogging highlight? Having the SEN flow charts I designed incorporated into the government’s national SEN information packs for schools and local authorities.

What will be big in your blogosphere in the coming months? We have a campaign to develop a Code of Conduct for professionals working with children with disabilities and their families that we would like to get accepted across the country.