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

The 2014 Nonprofit Technology Conference, which took place last week in DC, is a conference that so many nonprofit tech and communications staffers look forward to every year because of the great sessions, useful tips and tools, and awesome people committed to using technology to advance social good.

I was pretty excited when I saw that there was a “Disrupting the Nonprofit Sector” session. I like forward-thinking panels of this type because I look to conferences for two things: practical tools and updates on my sector that I can use straightaway on Monday morning, and importantly, sessions on the future of our sector.

Here are some of the high-level thoughts and takeaways from the “Disrupting the Nonprofit Sector” session hosted by Amy Sample Ward, CEO, NTEN, Allyson Kapin, Partner, Rad Campaign, and Sheila Katz, Director, Ask Big Questions, Hillel International.

There are currently 1.5 million nonprofits in the US – that’s 60% growth in 10 years. That’s certainly great news but the bad news is that it is estimated that nonprofit giving will not get back to pre-recession levels until about 2018.

13 ways nonprofits are keeping up

So how are nonprofits supposed to keep up? One of the ways nonprofits are staying afloat is by innovating and adding alternative revenue streams.

Here are 13 ways they’re doing it:

1. They are thinking like a startup and using lean startup principles – fail cheap, fail quick, fail often.
2. Amy Sample Ward gave the example of how at NTEN, failure is great. They’re just trying to do things differently which isn’t failure. They encourage failure but with zero mistakes. There’s a big difference.
3. The advice to nonprofits looking to innovate is that the money needs to be there first. Think like an investor. So, if the program fails, you’re not caught in a bad situation.
4. Get feedback on your new project or innovation. Start small and test. In nonprofit lingo, this would translate into conducting a pilot project and then working on your proof of concept.
5. Be OK with the messiness of innovation
6. Buy-in for your new innovation or project has to come from the top. If the top is ok with seeing this as an experiment and is comfortable with the possibility of failure, then there’s less finger-pointing. But if senior management doesn’t really believe in it, it can easily put people on the defensive.
7. Make innovation part of your annual budget. Make a new line item for it every year. It will set the stage for innovation to become part of your organization’s work.
8. All your nonprofit stakeholders need to be involved in your experimentation. Include your board members! Ask yourself how are they part of the conversation from the beginning, so that they’re integrated and feel part of the success or the failure.
9. Ask yourself before you start: What do we do with the failures when they come?
10. If we’re going to start scaling a project or innovation broadly, it has to come from the field-level. Take a risk on grassroots ideas.
11. There are nonprofit cultures that allow for collaboration and failure. How can you create this type of culture in your organization so innovation and failure becomes part of your organization’s value-system?
12. Be honest: It’s great that people want to experiment but you have to be realistic about your expectations. For example, you’re not going to raise a ton of money online if you haven’t grown an existing network of supporters.
13. Find pilot programs at nonprofits that have been successful and connect to those folks. Talk to them about how they did and what are the lessons-learned and take-aways.

Are you innovating within your organization? Intra-preneurs abound everywhere – tell us your story!

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Find inducements & show them the payoff

This is the second part of a two-part series on making the case for your social media plan and initiatives. Also see:
• Getting your board on board with social media

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, social media managers.

Getting your board engaged and on board with social media can prove to be a challenging task at many nonprofits. But your board members want to make a difference and have a real-world impact, right? Otherwise, why are they there.

So we’ve assembled this short list of ways board members can help support your organizational goals via social media.

• It is important to start small with your social media requests and to frame their initial engagement with social media around organizational programs that they understand are important to support. For example, you might want to ask them to do three LinkedIn updates around your upcoming gala or benefit. It’s important to be very specific about the asks and have them understand what the end goals and deadlines are.

• Because their engagement will likely start off involving only specific programs or initiatives, it’s important to write messaging for them that they can easily share with their networks. Providing them with sample posts and engagement language is always a good idea and will increase the likelihood that it gets shared.

• You will want to encourage them to personalize the posts (you can write it out for them) by adding how excited they are about a particular program or event, and their personal thoughts about the content. This type of sharing is most effective because it goes beyond the reposting of organizational information but also includes the most important part: sharing their passion and enthusiasm with their influential network, which can be the hook their colleagues and friends need to learn more, donate, attend an event, or get involved somehow.

Opening the conversation about social media to your board

1Start with your social media plan and ensure that your CEO is clear on what you want and what you’ll be asking board members to do. Your CEO is the board’s default sounding board, so it’s important that s/he be clear and know what initiatives you’re proposing to them and how they can help.

2Before a board meeting, have a conversation with the board member you feel will be your greatest ambassador to the rest of the board. This person could be either the head of your board’s communications committee or, if there is none, just a person who you know is already a good messenger or advocate. Talk to this board member about your plans for board participation and ask them for feedback. This way you can anticipate concerns and questions early, and then you already have a de facto board advisor, which boards like since they generally appreciate being consulted with.

3At the board meeting, ask the board ambassador to sit with you and support you during the presentation, perhaps leading a part of the discussion that centers on how board members can take initiative. These types of conversations can have greater sticking power and impact when coming from a board peer instead of a staff person. Also, board members can apply peer pressure in a way that communications staff cannot.

4Discuss a first set of initiatives (perhaps for the upcoming quarter) and explain to them how and when you will be reaching out to them for support. Explain to them the benefits of their outreach and how you all plan to learn and benefit from these experiences.

5Follow up and send a thank you email. Then promptly follow up with something they can add support to. Use your board ambassador to send out a message and showcase their “share” with the other board members. Gentle peer pressure can be a useful tool.

6Let them know that you’ll be following up periodically to see how the outreach has been working. Explore ways they can evolve their outreach that matches their comfort level and advances your communications and social media goals.

Social media outlets for board members to focus on

• LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the most promising social media outlets for use by board members. You’ll find that most board members have a LinkedIn account, with some board members using it with more frequency than others. Either way, it’s an outlet that most are familiar with and it has a great ability to immediately reach their network.

• Facebook. Facebook can be a great personal tool since you’ll find many board members using Facebook to connect with colleagues, friends and family. Many nonprofit leaders also use Facebook in their professional capacity. So encourage them to post via Facebook as a way to connect their networks of friends and colleagues to your organization. It’s important to be selective on which items you ask them to post, but encourage them to personalize, personalize, personalize. They’ll get a higher degree of engagement and responsiveness.

• Twitter. Twitter is a great tool to connect with other organizations, potential partners, journalists, thought leaders, and influencers. It will be helpful to find out which of your board members can retweet for you and tag other thought leaders or influencers in their networks who would benefit from the post.

•Blogging. A great goal around blogging is to encourage board members to write at least one blog post per year. The post could be tied to initiatives you are trying to support or could be a way to generate new supporters. The title of the post could simply be along
the lines of, “Why I got involved in XYZ organization and why you should, too.” It’s a powerful way for you and them to recruit new supporters and even take that first step in helping them outline ways they can start a conversation with potential new board members or donors.

• Email marketing. Do your board members already do outreach to their networks via your fundraising team? If they do, they should be including your organization’s social networks at the bottom of their emails.

Engaging board members in social media can be a bit of a hot topic. Have you asked your board members to engage in your organization’s social media efforts? Why or why not? Let us know in the comments!

The post How to entice your board into the social media waters appeared first on Socialbrite.

This is the first of a two-part series on making the case for your social media plan and initiatives.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, social media managers.

You get it, your team gets it, but how do you make sure all the directors on your board understand the value that social media can bring to your organization? Some board members may know it’s an activity your nonprofit should be engaging in but still feel it’s something that can be relegated to an intern instead of making a real resource investment in social media. Sound familiar?

Explain the role of social media

If you’re having a debate over whether to spend time on social media, you’re having a discussion that was valid five years ago, but society has moved past that. The era of one-way communication is over. The conversation today should be about your organization’s expressed programmatic goals – with social media being the means, not the end.

Make it about what your key stakeholders (CEO/Board) already want

Don’t position your ideas as a social media initiative. Frame it as your initiative to support your organization’s programmatic goals.

Make it about the community

A good way to depersonalize the debate over social media is to make it about your community’s preferences rather than a philosophical tug of war between you and others who may be a bit apprehensive about the role of social media within your organization.

Sign up to listen

Set up Google Alerts and TweetBeep (email alerts for Twitter mentions) for your CEO so she can see that there are already many discussions happening on social about your nonprofit. Once this is apparent, two things are likely to happen. First, it will become clear that your organization no longer controls your message and what people are saying about you online. Second, once engagement is revealed to key stakeholders, it will be apparent how valuable it is to join those conversations online – which is what social engagement is all about. Often resistance or apprehension comes from not actually experiencing the conversations and engagement in real time.

Start small

If you want to grow your nonprofit’s use of social media, start small. Pinpoint where your supporters are and branch out from there. You don’t have to be an overnight social media expert – you just need to be a part of the conversations about your cause and grow your program through listening, learning, and engaging.

Set a clear goal and measure and report successes

At board meetings and other staff or 1:1 meetings, be sure to tie your successes and results back to your social media efforts where possible with careful tracking. For example, if you see an uptick in website hits to a particular web page, and you’ve noted that 50 percent of that increase in traffic is coming from Facebook, it’s good to report it in that way. So instead of just sharing that there’s been an increase in traffic to a promoted project page or blog post, say that we’ve seen an uptick in traffic that is directly coming from Facebook. Share every little bit of progress and relate it to social media whenever possible.

Remember: This isn’t a crusade for your communications team alone, it’s a learning experience for everyone. If there is a project that didn’t do as well with social media supporting it, share and learn from what came up short. Go back and analyze and then evolve your social media plan with those learnings in mind. There is no shame in gaining knowledge from mistakes. Every success builds on past failures.

Engaging the board in your communications and social media initiatives

It’s important that board members embrace their roles as ambassadors of your organization’s message. In essence your board members are your greatest messengers, often the most connected to other potential influencers and donors and well positioned to grow your network of influence.

When engaging your board in your social media and communications plan, it’s important to start small (as to not overwhelm) and guide them carefully, giving them enough room to feel comfortable to tailor the messages to their networks.

Below are some steps and tips to guiding your board to greater communications and social media engagement:

As a first step, we suggest surveying your board to find out five things:

• What social media outlets are they already engaging with?

• What new ones are they open to engaging with?

• What has been their experience with social media in general? Are they comfortable using social media?

• Are they open to helping communicate important messages to their networks in support of your nonprofit’s mission and programmatic goals?

• Would they like a social media mini-training incorporated as part of the next board meeting?

Once you have this information, you’ll be better equipped to determine how your board can help support your social media initiatives.

Stay tuned for part 2 of our “Getting your board on board with social media” primer!

In the comments, please share with us ways your board members are using social media to support your cause. We’d love to know!

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