As a follow-up to my Periscope for Nonprofits Quick Guide, I wanted to focus on real Nonprofit Periscopers, and how they’re using this new tool for social good.

Today, I’m featuring Jennifer Tislerics, the Special Events & Partnerships Coordinator for Gift of Life Michigan. Gift of Life Michigan coordinates organ and tissue donations from deceased donors for the state. Jennifer also handles social media, youth outreach, faith-based programs, workplace outreach, and more.

As a refresher, Periscope is a three month-old, free mobile app that allows any user to live stream from wherever they are. Jennifer bravely responded to our call out for ‘Nonprofit Periscopers’ and she had a lot of great advice to offer in our Q & A.

1) What made you want to try out Periscope? Was it a strategic move as part of a larger social strategy, or did you want to experiment with the app first to see if it would work for your nonprofit?

I saw the Michigan Secretary of State staff using Periscope at a press conference during National Donate Life Month in April. (In Michigan our Secretary of State oversees the DMV, and helps coordinate the state’s organ donor registry.) It seemed like an easy way to engage a broader audience in an event. I watched a few other broadcasts on the iPad and was intrigued by the possibilities to engage distant supporters in real-time. I decided to experiment with it a bit, to see how it might benefit our organization and cause.

2) What event did you use Periscope for?

In late April I used Periscope at a kick-off breakfast event for an annual walk/run event. I plan to use it again at the actual walk/run in late July.

3) What was the experience like? Did you get good feedback from users? Take us through your steps.

It was a rough start, actually. One of the biggest lessons I learned is to use a tripod and get up close to the action – do not carry the iPad around or video from the back of the room. At least not at a seated event – I will probably move around some at the walk/run event. I accidentally stopped the video early (bad finger placement holding the iPad), so had to start fresh with a new video, which our Twitter followers may not have found. Actually, I did a few shorter-than-intended videos. The ones with the most audience traffic had short but interesting titles, which made our video stand out from the crowd.

4) What was engagement like?

Not nearly as many people watched the videos as I had hoped, but it was early on a work-day morning. It was fun to see people in the real-life audience following on Periscope, too, and sending us hearts and positive comments!

5) What did you learn? Any tips to share?

Practice first! Practice on-site. Make sure you’ve got a solid internet connection. Use a tripod. Prepare a few people to talk to you on video beforehand. Promote it in advance so people know to follow you on Twitter to get the link (and any new links you may create after accidentally cutting the video short).

6) What worked and what didn’t? What would you like to see improved?

I wish we could “add on” or continue a previous video, rather than having to create a new one if we accidentally stop the first video. It’s tough typing in a new title in a hurry, trying to rush and get online again. In general, I think Periscope viewers prefer interactive videos rather than “broadcasts” of speeches, although when we video’d a Michigan Supreme Court Justice speaking that got some audience attention!

7) Would you use Periscope again?

Definitely! I plan to at our walk/run on July 25 in Detroit.

8) Did you download the broadcast?

No, I didn’t feel I got a high enough quality video to make that worthwhile. This time.

9) Do you see yourself adding it to your social media strategy?

Yes, if these first few experiences prove successful, or at least promising, we will incorporate it into our strategy.

10) Anything else you want to tell me that I didn’t ask?

Follow @giftoflifemich on Twitter the morning of Saturday, July 25 to get links to our Periscope video(s) and send me feedback! I’m always open to suggestions for improvement.

We will definitely do that, Jennifer, and we’ll send you tons of Periscope hearts for all the great work you are doing at Gift of Life Michigan! Thank you for sharing your Periscope experience with us.

Photo courtesy of Gift of Life Michigan

PS – I will be featuring nonprofits and NGOs using Periscope on this blog, so please let me know in the comments below of any npos you know that are using Periscope to engage their supporters.

The post Nonprofit Case Study: Periscope for Nonprofits appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, fundraisers.

I‘ve seen my share of fundraising campaigns over the years, but one of the most impressive has to be the campaign put on by Brianna Haag and her team of volunteers for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

The nonprofit’s fundraising competition, which started 22 years ago and now exists in 73 chapters of the organization nationwide, generated some great events at the local level this year. Coming out on top was Slap Cancer, a 10-week series of events in the San Francisco Bay Area that raised $207,000 for blood cancer research and garnered Brianna honors as the Society’s Woman of the Year.

Brianna shared her thoughts on how other organizations can use social media and event planning to hit their fundraising goals in this 6-minute video interview on Vimeo.

Not only did Brianna’s Slap Cancer campaign take the winning title, it actually set a new local record for most funds raised. It’s also the first year in a long time that the female winner raised more than the male winner. One of the Bay Area events, Mr. Marina, went viral thanks to social media and the buzz that was generated in the young professionals community.

Brianna, who’s the San Francisco event evangelist for Eventbrite, points out the power of an online ticketing agency like Eventbrite to generate and track ticket sales to the real-world events taking place over the course of the campaign.

5 ways to create a successful cause campaign

I asked Brianna to sum up the campaign’s learnings for other organizations looking to run cause campaigns, and she came up with these five recommendations for event organizers:

1Use social media to spread the word and spread out your donor pool! The more people who find out about your event, the better. Eventbrite has found that shares on Facebook are worth an average of $2.52 each, which means there’s a huge value in people sharing events with their networks. Take advantage of that!

2Monitor your ticket sales regularly. The most successful fundraisers are those who log in daily to monitor ticket sales. That way, if things aren’t going according to plan, figure out a plan B. Pinpoint what isn’t working as early on as possible so you can adapt.

3Get as many people as you can to have a vested interest in the success of your event, because those are the people who will help you spread the word.

4The majority of ticket sales occur in the week leading up to the event, which is stressful. Try to promote early ticket purchases by offering early-bird prices and offer discount codes to people whom you’d like to target with special pricing.

5Set a plan and work backward with your goals. Set a total that you want to raise and then benchmarks of how you’re going to get there. How many tickets do you need to sell to reach your goals? How can you track progress to ensure that you’re on pace leading up to the event?

Brianna and the Slap Cancer volunteers did everything from taking over AT&T Park to hosting a fantasy batting practice with the San Francisco Giants’ J.T. Snow to a Mr. Marina event at the Mezzanine nightclub with 1,000 people.

Impressive all the way around — and a good use of social media to drive attendance at real-world events, which we always point to as a campaign’s ultimate success.

Note: Nonprofits can get $100 toward their first event on Eventbrite by signing up at http://eventbrite.com/britesf

Related

• Crush your Fundraising Challenge and the end result (Brianna Haag on Eventbrite)

• 7 tips to attract more donors for your cause (Socialbrite)

• Social fundraising tools for nonprofits & causes (Socialbrite)

• 10 tips for a successful fundraising event (Socialbrite)

• Understanding the return on fundraising events (Socialbrite)

• Fundraising articles on Socialbrite

The post Slap Cancer: 5 lessons from a successful cause campaign appeared first on Socialbrite.

Issues of storytelling, transparency & disclosure come to fore

The big social media story of the year so far has been Invisible Children’s 30-minute film on Joseph Kony. I mean, you just couldn’t get away from it last week — 75 million views on YouTube and counting.

I was fascinated, not so much by the video, which I agree was beautifully produced, but by the amount of conversation it generated. So I talked to a few of my colleagues in the nonprofit world, all powerhouse professionals, to get their take on the video and the cultural hubbub that ensued.

And while much has already been written about the campaign, including this terrific Forbes piece on social media lessons, here are a few things nonprofit organizations should keep in mind when using digital media to further their causes:

You must let the truth get in the way of a good story

1One of the primary criticisms is that the Kony 2012 video doesn’t accurately represent the current state of affairs in Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army, not to mention the fact that warlord Joseph Kony hasn’t been in that country in a while. Invisible Children said that in order for the story to resonate, they had to simplify it, and basically admitted via the statement on their site that they left out a lot of detail:

“In our quest to garner wide public support of nuanced policy, Invisible Children has sought to explain the conflict in an easily understandable format, focusing on the core attributes of LRA leadership that infringe upon the most basic of human rights. In a 30-minute film, however, many nuances of the 26-year conflict are admittedly lost or overlooked.”

Yes, the story is complicated. But with the expert talent at their disposal, I have a hard time believing Invisible Children couldn’t have given a sense of history by date-stamping the different interviews and so on.

Beth Kanter agreed, saying, “I believe nonprofits, in a day of social media connectedness, really have to understand transparency and that they can’t get away with not being transparent.” Beth elaborated further on this in a recent post, reiterating that “for responsible social change, you need transparency.”

How much storytelling is too much storytelling?

2Kami Watson Huyse raised an interesting point: “It was clear to me that this video was a storytelling exercise, and stories by definition are personal and take a particular point of view. I was more concerned with his use of his own son’s reaction as part of the story.

“The truth is a matter of interpretation. I think that this video was designed to get people to act, not to be a realistic documentary.”

While I’m not a parent, I would imagine this would resonate with many of you who are. We’ve seen time and time again that good stories are those are easy to understand and that pull on your heartstrings. But do you really have to bring your kids into it?

From Beth on storytelling: “Successful messaging is compelling, visual, emotional and simple. Some highly effective online activists told me that one of their secrets is that their messaging is at sixth-grade level because that makes it clear and simple to understand. That’s a good thing to do.”

Kony 2012 did that in spades. But at what price? At what point does the story take over the agenda — or become the agenda? It goes back to being transparent – which pretty much everyone I asked agreed was key. Nancy Schwartz summed it up perfectly: “The end doesn’t justify the means.”

It’s tough to say no to kids

3I first heard about the video from my Johns Hopkins students. Granted, they’re not kids, but they’re exactly the demographic of young activist and activist-oriented people that the film was trying to reach. Beth said she first heard about it from her 12-year-old son. JD Lasica, my Socialbrite colleague, first heard about it from his 12-year-old son. (By the way, JD interviewed one of the founders of Invisible Children for Socialbrite in 2009.)

My guess is that versions of this scenario played out in countless homes across America last week. (How about yours?)

What happens when your kids, or young people you are responsible for, announce a new fact? You go look it up. What happens when they tell you they’ve just learned about ____ cause and are going to support it? You go look it up — because you want to support them, you’re proud of their developing a social conscience, and you don’t want to let them down. Right?

And if they ask you to support it along with them, it becomes really, really hard to say “no,” especially if they are convinced that a particular cause is going to hunt down a “bad guy.” Because if you refuse, doesn’t that make you a bad guy by association?

If you’re going to try and generate social change through young people, you have a responsibility to them to make sure they understand exactly what they’re getting into. Yes, this goes back to telling the truth. Because if you don’t, it could backfire.

Be prepared for everything to be scrutinized

4Invisible Children started out trying to raise awareness — in their own words, to “make Joseph Kony famous.” But now everything about the nonprofit is being scrutinized, from its financials to its motives. To its credit, Invisible Children has posted several years’ worth of 990s on its site and clearly reiterated, time and time again, the approximate breakdown of expenses.

Did it anticipate having to do this? Probably. But it probably didn’t anticipate the amount of criticism that would be leveled at it. In fact, yesterday CNN reported that director Jason “Russell said he had been a little surprised by some of the criticism. ‘I didn’t know there was that much tension,’ he said.”

Personally, I find this a little naïve. If you’re dealing with an issue that is emotional at its core, it’s going to create, or reveal, tension. The nonprofit world, while doing a lot of good, has its share of competition and politics. After all, there is only so much attention the rest of us have to direct toward causes, and there is only so much our pocketbooks can take. Of course there’s going to be tension.

So even if you don’t think your mission will generate controversy, prepare as if it will. Be prepared for everything – everything – to be scrutinized. And though your original message might be co-opted or broken down in ways you hadn’t anticipated, at least you will remain part of the conversation.

Be clear on what you classify as direct services

5One of the major criticisms that’s been made is that only about a third of the money Invisible Children raises goes to direct services, with the other approximate two-thirds going to film production and marketing. Russell has been unapologetic about this, basically saying that this is how they function, and that raising awareness — through videos, marketing, social media, etc. — is critical to their cause.

This is a conundrum that a lot of nonprofits have to face. Because without marketing, you can’t raise awareness. Without awareness, you can’t get donations. Without donations, you can’t fund your programs.

And since the percentage allocated to programs is one of factors in ratings issued by nonprofit evaluation sites like Charity Navigator — note it gives Invisible Children only two stars out of four for accountability and transparency — you have to be really careful that the public is given as accurate a picture as possible about not just how you raise money, but how you spend it and what exactly classifies as a “program.”

Should rating sites change the way they evaluate nonprofits, particularly to account for the increased importance of marketing? As Kami pointed out, this has been an ongoing debate for a while.

But one way that Invisible Children could do this is, as Nancy pointed out, to “consider marketing as the program. If raising awareness is the goal, this stuff is the program!” (If you look at Invisible Children’s description of its programs, they all seem to be direct service-based.)

What do you think about the Invisible Children video and ensuing firestorm? Do you have other lessons for nonprofit organizations, or do you think I got any of the above wrong? And many thanks to Beth, Nancy, JD and Kami for helping me put this post together!

Related

• The story behind Invisible Children (Socialbrite)

• KONY, Networked Nonprofits, and Transparency (bethkanter.org)

• The best tools for advocacy campaigns (Socialbrite)

• How to effectively use calls to action in nonprofit videos (Socialbrite)

• Writeups on advocacy campaigns (Socialbrite)

The post 5 advocacy lessons from the Kony 2012 video appeared first on Socialbrite.

Socialbrite presents at the United Nations today

Today my Socialbrite partner Shonali Burke and I are giving a presentation to NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) at the United Nations.

Back in November, an invitation flew into our laps from Amine Lamrabat of the Civil Society and Outreach Unit (CSOU), Division for Social Policy and Development (DSPD), Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA). By gosh, when it comes to acronyms, nobody beats the UN!

The department is focusing in the new year on marshalling resources to combat poverty — quite a challenge, considering up to 80 percent of the world’s 7 billion people live in poverty or near-poverty conditions. (See stats from the World Bank.) So we tailored our presentation to highlight the work of some international nonprofits that are making an impact, especially in the developing world (or Global South, as some call it), including:

• Send a Cow, a UK-based nonprofit that is helping African farmers create a sustainable ecosystem and a process of paying it forward. Farmers who are helped, with training on how to grow crops in harsh climates, agree to pass that knowledge on to other farmers — along with a first-born calf. Send a Cow helps African farmers grow enough food to feed their families, sell their produce, start small businesses and rise out of poverty. They do a nice job with their website, produce high-quality videos and are growing a fan base on Twitter and Facebook, though we couldn’t spot any online fundraising or mobile efforts.

• USA for UNHCR’s Blue Key campaign, which Shonali is overseeing, has built a nice community over the past year, with occasional tweet-a-thons to raise funds, $5 per key, and awareness about the plight of refugees.

• In my view, charity: water has made the most astonishing use of social media and new media, with breathtakingly good videos, multimedia, photography and smart ways to mobilize social networks. Check out the story of charity: water video they did for their 5-year anniversary as well as the new WaterForward campaign. Also, see the video How charity: water changes lives through multimedia and find your charity: water project on a map — I’ve been using on that in my presentations for years.

We’ll also be discussing:

• Epic Change and its annual To Mama With Love campaign

• 1-to-1 micro-giving and micro-fundraising platforms, including Vittana, give2gether, Razoo, Causevox, Kiva (for loans) and DonorsChoose.

• We’re proud that Socialbrite strategist Ken Banks has created a mobile NewsWatch series for National Geographic online, focusing on use of SMS for social and economic good in the developing world. Also see Frontline SMS mobile case studies.

We’ll be tweeting about our UN appearance on our @socialbrite Twitter channel.

The post How NGOs can use social media to combat poverty appeared first on Socialbrite.

Image by Michael Darcy Brown for Big Stock

A look at nonprofits’ use of Twitter, blogs, YouTube, Flickr & Facebook

Target audience: Nonprofits, NGOs, cause organizations, social enterprises, brands, social media managers, bloggers, individuals.

Idealware just published the second edition of their Social Media Decision Guide, which you first heard about on Socialbrite last year. The guide includes information about how nonprofits are benefiting from Twitter, blogs, YouTube, Flickr and Facebook.

Facebook drives website traffic and gets people to take action

As you’ll see from the graph above, most nonprofits report using Facebook to increase website traffic and get people to act.

They also found that a growing segment of Facebook users turn to the platform as a reference site. Not being on Facebook today is almost as bad as not having a website.

Download the Social Media Decision Guide

What you’ll really love about the Social Media Decision Guide is that it’s extremely easy to understand and digest. You’ll be led through a five-step process (that includes a bunch of amazing worksheets):

• Understanding Social Media
• Defining Your Goals and Audience
• Evaluating Specific Tools
• Choosing Tools to Meet Your Goals
• Creating Your Social Media Strategy

Download the Social Media Decision Guide here.

The post Study: How nonprofits benefit from using social media appeared first on Socialbrite.

One of San Francisco’s largest social services agencies is living its core values — and growing its impact

Guest post by Stacy Coleman
Vivanista

Located in the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco’s harshest urban environments, GLIDE is an oasis that has served poor, homeless and disenfranchised individuals, families and children for more than 45 years. A leading organization for social justice, GLIDE’s core values are rooted in empowerment, recovery and personal transformation for the community it serves. Those values also guide its mission to create a radically inclusive, just and loving community mobilized to break the cycles of poverty and marginalization.

Since launching its first social services in 1969, GLIDE has continually built on its strong foundation of acceptance of and connection to its community and has evolved into one of the largest social services agencies in San Francisco. GLIDE now provides support services that range from meals, housing, primary and behavioral health care, substance abuse recovery, domestic violence abatement, family services, youth literacy, nutrition and wellness programming, housed in five buildings.

I spoke with GLIDE’s communications manager, Joyce Sood, about how the organization continues to thrive in a changing economic environment and its approach for scaling impact. Sood says one of the approaches it takes to quantifying the impact of its programs is by putting into place a strategy and evaluation team. The team looks at each of GLIDE’s programs individually and tracks participant demographics, program services and client outcomes. Each year, GLIDE programs conduct client evaluation surveys to gauge the effectiveness of the program and inform new program integration, design and strategy.

The constant evaluation that GLIDE performs has allowed the organization to consistently expand its services. Twelve years ago, GLIDE built a model housing program for support services and mixed population homeless individuals and families. Sood says the program has served as a nationwide model for affordable and low-income permanent housing. Over the past two years, under the GLIDE Economic Development Corporation entity, GLIDE has built two additional affordable and low-income permanent housing buildings for working families and for homeless individuals, she says.

Another way that GLIDE is able to continually provide a comprehensive set of services is by partnering with a range of funding partners, which includes corporations such as Wells Fargo and GAP, government agencies such as the the San Francisco Department of Children and the California Department of Education, as well as non-profit and private foundation partners. GLIDE has a 23-member Board of Trustees who works with staff to strategize fundraising, partnership building and other means of raising funds for the agency. In addition, GLIDE has an 11-member Legacy Committee of young professionals who work with staff on fundraising events and to cultivate partnerships with next generation audiences, Sood says. Partnering with corporations and professional organizations also helps to spread the word and raise awareness about GLIDE among the younger generation.

GLIDE is diligent about showing appreciation for its donors and volunteers. “We invite donors to become more involved in the organization and community through special events, tours and volunteerism, and to follow the lives of the people being helped,” she says. “We thank our donors through acknowledgement letters, event sponsorship recognition at events, donor profiles in the quarterly newsletter (mailed to 28,000), on our website and through press releases.”

One of its most successful events, the Warren Buffet Power Lunch eBay Auction, was held in June and raised $2.63 million this year. GLIDE also holds an annual themed Holiday Festival in December. This year, the theme is “The Love Grove,” a Jam Session for the Hungry. The event will take place at the San Francisco Warfield Theatre; honorary co-chairs already include Carlos and Cindy Santana, Pete Escovedo, Joan Baez, Huey Lewis, Paula West, Sweet Honey and the Rock.

In addition to the standard social networking platforms of Facebook and Twitter, Sood says GLIDE is an active user of YouTube, Vimeo, PodOmatic, First Giving, and Give by Cell, which all aid in its outreach efforts and in building its community.

To learn more about GLIDE, watch their video above and visit their website at http://www.glide.org.

This article originally appeared in a modified form at Vivanista and is republished with permission.

The post How GLIDE fights for social justice appeared first on Socialbrite.

Integrate social components into your site’s design and function

By Debra Askanase, Socialbrite
and Seth Giammanco, Minds On Design Lab

If you’re considering revamping your website to include social elements like the Facebook Like button, streaming from YouTube, or adding information from a social site through its API, it can be overwhelming to know where to begin. There are many ways to “get social,” and so many reasons for doing so. Primarily, it’s about creating a fundamentally engaging experience for the website visitor that brings them closer to your organization.

The process of considering how to get social starts with considering goals.

Why integrate social into your website?

Ask yourself: what do you want to accomplish for your organization using social media? Having a goal seeks to address why you might want to make your website social. By thinking first about the goals, you clear a path for the decisions around which tools you’ll use to get there.

There are five main reasons for integrating social media with your website:

1. To build followers within the nonprofit’s social media spaces
2. Create on-site engagement
3. Develop a sense of community on the website
4. Raise funds
5. Create a call to action

In our review of many social websites, we noticed that some websites have at least two primary goals for placing social media on their website. Think about separating your goals into “priority” and “lesser priority.” Don’t be afraid to begin with one or two primary goals, while testing frequently at the outset to see whether or not your goals are being achieved. Gradually, you can add more social media integrations as your initial goals are achieved.

Categories of integration

Categories of integration address what you might do to meet your goals, and how you would do it. While reviewing websites, we specifically looked at the different types of social media that organizations were integrating into their websites. We categorized the (almost limitless) social media integration possibilities into six categories:

1. Show
2. Share
3. Interact
4. Co-create
5. Authenticate
6. Open source

Each category is exhibited by different tools, technology, and/or approaches. Here are some examples of categories and how they might be implemented within a website:

1. Show – Recent Tweets, Likes, Comments
2. Share – Like & Tweet Button, E-Card, Fwd to Friend
3. Interact – FB Live Stream, Hashtag (Tweet Chat), Comments
4. Co-Create – Shared Content: Mapping, Mosaic, Wiki, Links, Games
5. Authenticate – FB Login, Twitter OAuth
6. Open Source – API

Some of the items above are simple widgets and plug-and-play doodads that allow one to take a little snippet of code and incorporate it onto a Web page. With services like Disqus, even complicated features like comments can be added to a page in literally minutes.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are uses of technology to create unique “co-create” opportunities, if not open opportunities, where content can be made available through APIs and syndication for others to use. Check out the Brooklyn Museum’s API documentation for some pretty advanced tech sharing.

The graphic below illustrates the intensity of resources required for each category.

Examples of sites that integrate social resources

Here are a few social websites that offer different levels of resource integration.

HandsOn Network: America’s Sunday Supper

1This was a Livestream-powered event billed as “America’s Sunday Supper” in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., which was part of a national event to inspire giving and local leadership. HandsOn created a page on their site to showcase the livestreamed panel discussion on volunteering and leadership, and encouraged online participation through its live Twitter and Facebook streams on the website.

• Goals: develop a sense of community, create on-site engagement
• Categories: show, share, interact
• Implementation: livestreaming, Facebook event plugin, Twitter feed

American Red Cross: Why should I give?

2The site presents, one reason at a time, why one should give to the Red Cross. Each reason is clearly presented with no more text than you might put on a PowerPoint slide. The reasons are sourced from blogs, news, or case study posts from a network of American Red Cross sites. These posts are linked to if a visitor chooses to read more about the reason shared. For each reason you view, the site ticks up your donation counter one buck, and if you decide to give, the resulting donate screen defaults to the amount of your donation counter and number of reasons you needed to be “convinced.”

The primary goal of the site is to fund-raise and build followers. The social aspects of the site rest in the use of Facebook and Twitter social plugins and widgets for sharing, as well as liking the campaign.

• Goals: raise funds, create on-site engagement, create a call to action
• Categories: Show, Share
• Implementation: Tweet Button, Facebook Like Button

VolunteerMatch: Live Map

3VolunteerMatch has created an up-to-the-minute live map on its website, offering information about the total number of searches and different categories of referrals indicating when a user has responded to a volunteer opportunity. The map pinpoints where the referrals were made throughout the United States, with the goal of showcasing individual activity collectively to illustrate the social impact of volunteerism. VolunteerMatch also utilizes social authentication to allow Facebook account holders to login using their Facebook accounts. VolunteerMatch also has placed a Facebook activity widget on the home page to highlight users whom have recommended (liked) content on the site.

• Goals: create a call to action, develop a sense of community on the site
• Categories: show, authentication
• Implementation: Custom mash-up of site specific volunteer activity with geo data to map via Google Maps.

It’s an exciting time, where strategy begets technology solutions and in turn technology inspires new strategic opportunities. It’s critical that all of us crafting engagement keep learning, and keep seeking out new tools and inspiration from our peers. Each day, new tools are announced and someone is doing something cool with it to create connections and do some good. Having a framework to organize your goals and to categorize the types of technology integration available can help you make quick sense of a social site.

NTEN webinar on how to socialize your site

Please join us online on Sept. 13, 1 pm Eastern (10 am Pacific) for our NTEN webinar The Social Website: Integrating Social Media into Website Design and Function to look at additional examples of sites getting social. If you have a social site to share or are curious about other examples to check out, please visit the Get Social blog.

The post How to create a more social website appeared first on Socialbrite.

JustCoz, Twibbon, Google Docs were among tools used for community engagement

Guest post by Amy Sample Ward
Membership Director, NTEN

Every campaign, every organization, every individual engaging with others online has a set of tools and techniques they’ve learned from and rely on every day. Building community and maintaining engagement is often a full-time job – even if it goes unpaid.

Epic Change is no different. The To Mama With Love campaign saw them try some new tools as well as some trusted favorites, even with no budget and lots of volunteer time.

Twitter is a major part of Epic Change campaigns and their daily engagement plan. To Mama With Love is no exception – but, as Stacey Monk, CEO of Epic Change, reflects, “It’s a much different medium than it used to be.”

Two or three years ago, you could have a conversation out in the open and have people organically join in. It’s much more challenging to do something like that now. The 2011 To Mama With Love activity on Twitter was driven primarily by people very close to the campaign, whereas the first Tweetsgiving was driven by people Stacey didn’t know yet or hadn’t invested time cultivating relationships with.

More than 180 people with over 635,000 total followers signed up to participate by authorizing Epic Change to post via their Twitter account using JustCoz, an online relay system that lets you donate a tweet a day to help raise awareness for causes that matter to you.

While there were a few instances of serendipity – where notable JustCoz participants like prominent technologist & entrepreneur Jeff Pulver (who has over 400,000 followers) were retweeted by followers like Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior (who has nearly 1.4 million followers) – Stacey points to the difficulty in getting people to join in the conversation on Twitter.

Some messages sent by Epic Change via their 180+ JustCoz participants would get zero response — from over 635,000 total followers. “No one seems to be listening anymore,” Stacey said.

By comparison, when Epic Change launched the original TweetsGiving in 2008 – when Stacey herself had far fewer followers & the Twitter ecosystem itself was exponentially smaller – the campaign generated over 3,000 tweets in just 48 hours.

Twitter should be used for cultivation, not broadcasting. Stacey uses it for one-to-one personal connections. She explains that when they first approached Twitter, they thought it would be a way to amplify voices of people who weren’t being heard. Now it seems like no one will be heard.

JustCoz: Relying on focused engagement

Twitter was thought of separately than JustCoz for just this reason. Focused engagement, with direct messages, replies and retweets, required a different process and purpose than broadcast messages.

The limitations of JustCoz include the ability to send messages only once every 24 hours (meaning, at least 24 hours must pass between messages), messages go out through all authorized accounts at once (there’s no option to stagger posts) and you have only one message (there is no segmenting).

In Stacey’s opinion, the most helpful tweets are the ones written authentically from the first person. You can’t do that when you’re mass-tweeting.

Stacey and her team thought JustCoz could be a good way to get people involved and start generating buzz before the site actually went live, and then maintain some messaging throughout the campaign.

How did it go? Well, like much of social media, it depends on the message. Here are a few of the examples:

• When we asked people to join by tweeting, because it was easy and different, we went from 20 to 180 people who had signed up to let us tweet through their accounts.
• When we tweeted with the ask “write a love note,” we generated more responses to that during the campaign than actual campaign messages.
• We thought we could generate a conversation but it didn’t happen. That may have been because the “tweeter” of the message wasn’t aware that they’d tweeted anything, so couldn’t carry on the conversation. Stacey offered that it would be helpful if JustCoz participants received a direct message any time a message was sent from their account.

Twibbon, Pitch Engine and blogger outreach

Epic Change also incorporated Twibbon into the To Mama With Love campaign. Supporters simply connected their Twitter profile with Twibbon on the TMWL Twibbon page, and the tool updated the Twitter profile picture of the user with an overlay that included the campaign logo and hashtag. According to the Twibbon profile for TMWL, 667 users added the badge to their pictures.

In addition to Twitter, two volunteers created separate press releases about the campaign on PitchEngine to spread through their networks. Stacey does feel that it’s a useful and simple tool that can help spread your story, but had there not been volunteers in the public relations industry involved in the group, she may not have made the time to use the platform.

When it came to blogger outreach, a Google Doc was the preferred and successful tool. They were able to update it at any time with all the information necessary to reach out to, orient and support bloggers spreading the message about the campaign.

The first TMWL campaign used a highly customized WordPress site. To incorporate the level of functionality and customization they wanted for the 2011 campaign, Epic Change recruited a volunteer developer to redesign the site in PHP.

They did not have a preference in mind for the redesign when it came to the programming language, just a clear understanding of what they wanted supporters to be able to do. That directed the build. PHP was selected because that’s what the developer volunteering to contribute the tremendous amount of work and hours was most comfortable with.

The team had about six to eight weeks of development from mock-ups to live site. But, again, that was with incredibly capable developers passionate about the work and campaign. In most cases, it should be noted, the process would take longer. An important contributing factor to the speed at which they could build the site was their clarity around what they wanted and needed; they never changed their minds or redesigned aspects during the process.

Bit.ly was another major infrastructure component, Bit.ly is a URL shortener that allows you to track your links across social media as well as customize the shortened link. Epic Change had an organizational account and almost always gave a URL they were using in email, Facebook or Twitter a unique URL that matched the content or ask. Especially when it was a URL to pages they would reference often, like the sign-up pages to join the volunteer team, creating the shortened URLs helped them share easily while making it easy for supporters to share appropriate links, too.

The third part of the TMWL infrastructure was Radian6, a social media monitoring service. Radian6, which was acquired by Salesforce on March 30, sponsored the campaign by providing Epic Change with free access to the monitoring tool. This allowed Stacey and the team to have real-time access to detailed metrics, making it possible to revise the messages & tactics on the fly.

Manymoon: Project management app connects to your Google accounts

Planning tools abound, especially for small teams looking to use a Web-based tool to keep everyone connected and informed at any time, from anywhere. Epic Change used four planning tools, but much of the work was really in just two: a private Facebook group and Google Docs.

With the intention of using a project management tool to be organized and purposeful before the campaign, and during, Stacey set up the team with Manymoon, a project management application that connects to your Google apps/Gmail accounts. Stacey felt it was a great tool, but they didn’t use it effectively. Furthermore, asking volunteers to master a tool that’s not entirely intuitive — that’s the biggest fault with most every project management tool on the market — is a stretch. Ultimately, Manymoon was helpful for putting the plan together between Stacey and Sanjay. They will look for another tool to use next time specifically for site development planning.

Stacey found that what they were trying to do in a project management space wasn’t really project planning, but organizing the volunteers and volunteer opportunities. As such, creating Google Docs let them have varying levels of privacy for different documents – some were intended to be shared publicly, others with just the team and so on – as well as update content easily and in real time. Some of what they used Google Docs for included:

• A new form for supporters to sign up for various missions
• Information for bloggers
• Information about the campaign and how to get involved

To make the Google Docs even easier to share, Stacey created custom URLs for the pages using Bit.ly.

The bulk of the communicating, organizing and planning – both before the campaign launched and during – was carried out through the private Facebook group. Stacey was already participating in private groups to have an idea of the functionality and options and found private groups could be really engaged – especially because of the functionality and layers of notification settings that Facebook provides across the platform.

One aspect they were dissatisfied with about the Google Group from the 2010 campaign was the broadcast feeling of the emails, often resulting in Stacey being the only one to start a conversation or share a message. On the flip side, they found the Facebook group allowed for people to start their own threads and conversations. This wasn’t because of any difference in permissions between the two platforms but because discussions in Facebook’s groups are all visible and non-linear, whereas email can often lead to conversations getting muddled or people reading and following without responding.

Using both Facebook and Google for groups

Stacey struggled with the decision to commit so much time, energy and focus on Facebook during this campaign because of the ethical questions around the site’s practices regarding personal privacy, data sharing and so on. They had a lot of conversations around whether they wanted to be in there; they knew there were people who would have participated but do not want to be on Facebook. It was a difficult decision that meant people would be left out.

Despite the downside, they do want to nurture the group that formed there in between campaigns and get people involved further ahead of time for the next campaign. Ideally, though, Stacey says she’d like to see something that is equally useful and easy to use, but that will allow everyone in. She’d like to have the option of choosing both utility and ethics.

Since the Facebook group kept most of the supporters and volunteers engaged throughout the day with updates, idea sharing and feedback, the Google Group was used mostly for major updates to ensure that important announcements made it through to everyone involved. Since Facebook’s notification settings can be set to receive no email updates from groups, Stacey felt it was important to send periodic updates through the Google Group as a supplement, even though it was not very good for conversation. She thinks they may move to MailChimp next year.

Because it is a fundraising (and love-sharing) campaign, it could be argued all of the tools are fundraising tools. But, as for specific technologies used for transactions, there were just two: bitcoin and PayPal.

Representatives from bitcoin, a peer-to-peer currency exchange, reached out to Stacey before the campaign. Epic Change decided it could be an interesting way to allow for donations, so they added it to the TMWL site. Ultimately, only one person used it. Since it does not require extra work or management by Epic Change, they may continue to offer it for their campaigns and measure any growth in interest.

PayPal was the the workhorse, as it managed all of the donation processing. PayPal offers reduced fees for 501(c)3 organizations and is a flexible tool for donors (not requiring a PayPal account, for example).

Have you used any of these tools? Please share your questions and your experiences!

Related

• Plant the seeds of hope wherever you can (Socialbrite)

• 5 lessons from a crowdsourced birthday party (Socialbrite)

• Why you need to share your story (Socialbrite)

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