Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, Web publishers.

Facebook ads are an incredibly powerful tool to promote your Facebook Page or your Facebook Page updates, whether you’re a nonprofit, social enterprise or business.

But only if you use Facebook advertising as part of an overall strategy to:

• Grow your Facebook Page fan base
• Increase engagement with your current fans
• Expand engagement to friends of your fans
• Promote a specific campaign like a fundraising or advocacy campaign

And it doesn’t have to cost much at all.

This video will show you how to:

• Get started with Facebook’s ad tool
• Decide whether to promote your page or a post
• Configure how your ad will appear

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Twive competition pits cities against each other to see who’s most generous

Guest post by Ifdy Perez
Community manager, Razoo

More than 200 organizations are preparing to bombard the online world with Twive and Receive — Twive combines the words Twitter and Give — a 24-hour fundraising competition on June 14. Twive pits cities against each other in a competition to see which city is the most generous in America, and one of the tools these nonprofits will be using includes Pinterest, the third most-visited social network in the country.

Here’s a list of five ways you can use Pinterest to drive traffic to your online fundraiser that works both for Twive and any other fundraiser your nonprofit starts!

Pin images and videos about what you do

1Through Socialbrite’s John Haydon, I learned that the emotional part of our brains processes images better than words. Tell your nonprofit’s story by uploading pictures or videos from events your organization held, the people and communities you’ve helped, and even of your staff members. Images are all around you — you just have to look for the ones that represent what you do.

If you’re pinning a blog post, make sure you have images on there that Pinterest can capture. Also avoid any copyright issues by using images with a Creative Commons license, such as these on Flickr.

Communicate often and consistently

2For fundraising events like Twive and Receive, communicating to your donors about what you need them to do often and consistently (on Pinterest or elsewhere) is very important because the more you appear in front of them, the more they’ll remember what you’re telling them. Narrow down the primary things you need your donors to support you on. Try keeping the list to three or fewer items.

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PTA conference: Embracing community outreach while protecting student privacy

On Friday I flew down to Anaheim to give a 90-minute presentation, “Communicating in a Networked World,” to a packed room of about 250 attendees at the California State PTA Convention.

We had a great give an take about how social media can be used, by Parent Teacher Associations and other organizations, to advance schools’ and school districts’ business goals. I present at a lot of workshops and it was great to see the amount of interaction throughout the session — not just questions to me but PTA reps pitching in to help their colleagues.

Topics covered Facebook, Twitter, storytelling, Pinterest, Scoop.it, community strategies and more. More than half the workshop was spent on Facebook — probably 80 percent of the PTAs in the room had a Facebook page, compared with 20 percent that had a Twitter account.

Business reasons for using social media

Why use social media if you’re a PTA or educational association? I suggested these reasons as a starting point:

1. Enhance the educational experience at your school (this needs to be the main reason, and one that you revisit time and again)
2. Promote your PTA, school or school district
3. Involve the community in decision-making
4. Feedback loop with community
5. Enlist volunteers

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Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, video producers, Web publishers.

If your nonprofit or social enterprise has a YouTube channel, and you have the occasion to edit videos for your organization, you’ll find this tutorial very useful.

I’ll assume you want to increase the number of people subscribing to your YouTube channel, right?

Getting subscribers’ attention while they’re watching

You already know how powerful timely call to actions can be in your emailing marketing, on Facebook news feeds and on your website. The same holds true for your YouTube videos.

Yes, people can subscribe to your YouTube videos at the top of your channel on YouTube. But prompting them to subscribe in the video itself gets their attention while they’re watching the video!

Creating calls to action with YouTube annotations

In an earlier article, my colleague Lauren Major explained how YouTube annotations work.

YouTube has a feature that allows publishers to annotate videos with text, notes and various links. And if you have access to video editing tools like iMovie or ScreenFlow (for Macs) or Camtasia (for PCs), you can kick things up a notch by adding a button to your annotation  (check out the end of this 55-second video for an example).

The video above shows you how to link a button in your video to an annotation on YouTube. Pretty cool, right? Do you ever do this?

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, anyone with a Facebook page.

Network for Good hosted a free webinar the other day where I presented 27 Ways to Increase Engagement on Your Facebook Page.

According to a recent survey by NTEN, 89 percent of nonprofits today use Facebook to expand awareness around their cause and to grow their fan base. One challenge that many nonprofits face is keeping fans interested and engaged after they like their page. (Remember, most people who Like your page never see it again — unless it turns up in their news feed.)

Above are the slides from the webinar. Some of the things you’ll learn:

• The three most important pillars of your content strategy
• Three shocking facts about every Facebook Page
• The best times during the day to post content
• Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm defined and why you should care
• What types of content get more exposure in news feeds
• How to post links in a page story
• How to use photos to spark engagement
• How to use questions to spark conversations
• How to use closed and open questions to spark conversations
• And lots more

If you want to hear the 60-minute recording, download it here. You can check out the SlideShare presentation above or download it as a PDF.

The Million Hoodies movement is among the activist campaigns using NationBuilder to engage and organize supporters. (Photo by Joe Lustri)

Service helps you mobilize your supporters to take action

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause and advocacy organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, Web publishers.

Guest post by Adriel Hampton
Chief organizer, NationBuilder

My company NationBuilder has been in the news lately after raising a significant round of funding from a hot VC firm and for initial investments from several early Facebook employees.

The tech press headlines are fun, but it’s what happening behind the scenes that’s really important. Just over a year after launch, NationBuilder is working with hundreds of nonprofits, activists and social good organizations to help them grow their communities and move their supporters to action. Our community organizing system offers a solution to two damaging technology paradigms: the legacy in-house server setup with huge architecture costs and annual contracts that cost more than a full-time staff salary, and the stitched-together “free” solution that requires half a dozen log-ins and leaves organizational data fractured and nearly useless.

NationBuilder overcomes these technology challenges with a highly elastic infrastructure that relies on innovations in cloud computing and email delivery (if you really want to geek out, you can check out a full description of our stack here) and by pulling together the core elements of organizing on and offline – a flexible, customizable CMS; deep social media integration with Twitter, Facebook, Meetup and more; supporter and volunteer recruitment and tracking; online donations and donor management; bulk email; action tools; text messaging; and events.

For smaller organizations, NationBuilder offers a toolkit that used to be affordable only to the largest nonprofits – including full ownership and easy export of data such as supporter email addresses. For our larger customers, we’re able to replace old infrastructure and expensive contracts with transparent, affordable pricing and expert technical support. On larger projects, organizations typically work with NationBuilder expert consultants like Liberal Art. That’s how America Bikes built out is web platform, complete with 50-state action tools for promoting pro-cycling legislation and policies. Other large nonprofits using NationBuilder include Media Matters for America, The Black Institute, the Brave New Foundation and The International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict.

Meeting the needs of modern advocacy campaigns

Our core technology shift to deep social integration and the cloud means rapid and affordable scaling for the kind of surging traffic typical of today’s advocacy campaigns. When the State Integrity Investigation, a project by PRI, Global Integrity and The Center for Public Integrity, launched its 50-state investigation of public corruption in early March, its traffic spiked 15,000 percent overnight. On the NationBuilder network, that surge caused not a blip in actual site performance nor in additional costs to the organization.

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Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, marketing professionals, businesses, educators, photographers, general public.

The reason Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram is the same reason why Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing social media sites in history.

It’s also the reason why Facebook redesigned pages to the new Timeline layout: People love pictures.

People upload more than 300 million photos to Facebook every single day!

Facebook users love liking, commenting on, and sharing photos more than any other type of content on Facebook. So posting photos automatically gives you an advantage in the EdgeRank game.

Here are six ideas to help you get more from the photos you post on your Facebook Page.

Post big photos

1Make sure your photos are at least 851 x 403 pixels to accommodate highlighting or possible use as Facebook cover images by others. That said, you should also consider posting sizes even larger so that when users view photos in fullscreen, they’ll see the image at the highest resolution. This varies depending on screen size, but as an example, a 17-inch Macbook Pro is 1920×1200 (iPhone photos are 2592 x 1936 pixels).

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Advanced search features on Twitter (& other secrets revealed at the Women’s Funding Network Summit)

This morning I’m giving a 90-minute bootcamp at the annual Women’s Funding Network Summit in Los Angeles on the subject social media for small budgets — which covers just about all the nonprofits and foundations in the room.

Above is the presentation on SlideShare.

We’ll spend a lot of time taking a deep dive on Twitter, Facebook, storytelling, how to use your community, plus a bit on monitoring, mobile and social fundraising.

On Twitter, we’ll delve into prospecting for supporters using Twitter Search, Twitter Advanced Search, how to save Twitter searches and the arcana of Twitter search “operators,” or rules governing how Twitter conducts searches — fairly similar to how Google does.

How to use Twitter search like a power user

Too few people use Twitter’s advanced search features. Go ahead, hit the Advanced Search page and begin typing a city into the “Near this place” field and — presto! — see what happens. Then choose a range of miles, which wasn’t visible a moment earlier.

Now click on the link for search operators. How many of these have you used? Here are some of the most useful ones:

Summit theme: Women, Economics and Peace

The topic of this year’s summit is “Women, Economics and Peace.” The Women’s Funding Network connects more than 160 organizations that fund women’s solutions across the globe, making them one of the largest collaborative philanthropic networks in the world. Their members consist of women’s foundations that span public charities, private foundations and funds within community foundations.

For more on the bootcamp training, see Socialbrite’s WFN landing page with resources on monitoring and metrics tools, guides for storytelling and making media, mobile resources and more. And follow the conference’s #wfn12 hashtag today.

Code for America from Inkerman Road on Vimeo.

Code for America: 5 tips on upping your video game

Code for America, a nonprofit that uses technology to transform local governments, boasts a creative, compelling promotional video that not only clearly describes its message but also engages its viewers to get involved. In just five simple steps, any nonprofit can follow its example.

Be human and personal

1Be sure to make a personal connection early in the video. Many organizations and causes have a cohort of motivated, smiling people behind it. Bring these people to the forefront and show how upbeat and promising working for the cause is! Code for America illustrates its work environment by interviewing employees about what part of the job and cause they like. People are human and social creatures and are more inclined to stick with a video if they can relate to the on-screen subjects.

Use captivating visuals  

2Watching a talking head is no fun for anyone. But listening to someone speak while looking at colorful flowers or a fun work environment is far more interesting. The supplemental footage in a video that does not capture a talking head is called b-roll. For example, Code for America’s video displays a shot of the office while founder Jennifer Pahlka speaks over it.

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