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

Post by Nancy Schwartz
Nonprofit Marketing Problem Solver & Coach at Getting Attention.org

Pressure. You feel it. I feel it. Every nonprofit communicator and fundraiser out there feels it. Social media pressure, that is.

Whether the source of this anxiety (Am I keeping up? Do I have a billion Facebook likes or Twitter followers? Is my Instagram strategy driving action?) is your immediate boss, board chair, or colleague in programs, it’s there. The pressure to generate a social media miracle.

Breathe—There Is a Solution

You can boost marketing and fundraising impact, and you can deflate that pressure. Here’s how:

1.  Get to know your people. Research, via online survey or calls, where your current supporters are when it comes to social media.

2.  Use your marketing/fundraising plan to remind yourself exactly who your prospects are (the people who are most likely to take the actions that will drive your marketing or fundraising goals forward). Then, use your supporter research to project where similar prospect groups are on social media.

3.  Assess if and where to invest in social media, even if your organization has been there for years. Probe whether the most-used social media channels are useful in helping you achieve your broader goals. Ask yourself two questions: Does the interaction in that channel mesh with your calls to action and goals? Is your investment in each of the most-used channels likely to be profitable?

4.  Focus your energy and time on the single most-used channel, but only if the return on investment (ROI) seems to be there. Note: It will be far more effective to use one platform well, rather than use multiple platforms in a half-baked way. That’s been proven time and time again.

5.  Invest the time. Block out at least 30 minutes, twice daily, for social media if you are using just one platform. I urge you to get that one channel to work—or realize it’s the wrong one—before you take on another platform.

6.  Create some incremental benchmarks so you get a sense of how your investment is or is not paying off. That might be retweets and followers for Twitter or likes and shares for Facebook. Request that your colleagues ask those who do take action—to give, register, or spread the word—what influences sparked them along the way.

7.  Like or follow five to 10 colleague or competitive organizations on that channel, be it Facebook or Instagram. It’s important to see what folks who are competing for your supporters’ and prospects’ attention and dollars are doing. You can also find some relevant models by watching what organizations similar to yours in approach or issue—but not competing with you—are doing.

8.  Adapt your approach as needed on an ongoing basis. Build into your work plan an ongoing analysis of what is and isn’t working, a review of other organizations’ successes and failures, and a revision of your own approach. Social media, including websites and blogs, is a communications channel that requires ongoing evolution. Otherwise, don’t use it.

Take these steps to make your social media efforts meaningful and measurable for your nonprofit. How are you making social media matter for your cause? Chime in with your ideas below! Also, don’t miss Social Media for Nonprofits when this conference comes to Washington, DC on July 14. Register now with code “N4G” to save up to $30.

Nonprofit marketing consultant, speaker and coach Nancy Schwartz  rolls up her sleeves with contagious passion and refreshing practicality to help organizations like yours get attention and motivate giving, volunteering and more.

The post 8 ways to make social media matter appeared first on Socialbrite.

It only works when it’s connected to the real world

At the National Conference on Volunteering and Service — which some folks call “the Super Bowl of nonprofit conferences” — George Weiner and I teamed up on one of the most successful Social Media for Social Good Bootcamps that Socialbrite has put on to date. (Socialbrite has put on camps in New York, San Francisco, Miami, London and elsewhere.)

For those of us who live and breathe tech and social media — me in Silicon Valley and George, CTO of DoSomething.org, in New York and Washington, DC — it’s always a good reality check to come to gatherings like this and see how the non-early adopters are faring.

The three-hour session we led yesterday offered a range of tips on how to use social media strategically for campaigns, for collaboration, for building community, and I invite you to browse through the presentation above, since the attendees found it useful: “AMAZING session” (thanks, Volunteer Centre) … “awesome, fantastic session” (thanks, NCVS) … “Great session!” (thanks, Groupon).

But there were more beginners in the crowd than I expected. For instance, only about five out of 50 particpants were using Google Analytics (the free tool every website and blog ought to have). None had heard of the Grassrootsmapping.org effort to document the Gulf oil spill, even though we’re right here in New Orleans. And only one out of 80 people (not counting me) at today’s session on data had ever used Tumblr, an easy way to post blog entries and photos.

These are good, smart, motivated people — we need to break through the barriers and connect the tools and strategies with the organizations and causes that need them, starting with the basics.

So let’s take a deep breath and remember: We still have a lot of work before us, and there’s a lot of education yet to be done.

The post A reality check on social media appeared first on Socialbrite.

Howard Rheingold has an interesting post titled “Twitter Literacy (I refuse to Make Up a Twittery Name for It). Stephen Downes went ahead and said the word, Twitteracy. Rheingold points to some research data from Nielsen that more than 60 percent of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. Rheingold suggests that is an example of social media literacy:

Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it — on knowing how to look at it.

He goes to lay out some reasons why he finds Twitter valuable, a nice counterpoint to Jakob Nielsen’s critique in BusinessWeek where he suggests that Twitter gives you ADD and can damage productivity. Clearly, if you use Twitter efficiently and in the right way it can provide value.

Rheingold says that to achieve success on Twitter:

It comes down to tuning and feeding. And by successful, I mean that I gain value — useful information, answers to questions, new friends and colleagues — and that the people who follow me gain value in the form of entertainment, useful information, and some kind of ongoing relationship with me.

That last point about “ongoing relationship” refers to ambient intimacy or the ability to feel like you know someone more deeply even though you may not have met face-to-face or only met once.  As a colleague said to me recently when asked if she found Twitter of value as a professional networking tool,  “If I’m following someone on Twitter who I met a conference, I might feel more comfortable picking up the phone to talk to them when I’m networking.”

Let’s dissect Rheingold principles of using Twitter effectively:

To oversimplify, I think successful use of Twitter means knowing how to tune the network of people you follow, and how to feed the network of people who follow you.

The tuning element is about who you follow. Rheingold has a mix of people he knows offline as well as virtual friends. I like Vladis Krebs’ advice on this fine-tuning which is summarized in a post I wrote a few months back called “If you were stuck on a desert island, and could only follow 150 people on Twitter, who would you follow and why?” He suggests identifying influencers in different communities to follow versus following everyone. That’s how I fine-tune who I follow, but I also like to mix it up with a little serendipity.

How is your organization tuning its Twitter network?

The feeding part is what you tweet. Like Rheingold, I avoid over tweeting about myself. I tend to ask questions, share links both what I discover from my RSS reader or retweeting links shared by others in my network, and a few personality items (funny, witty, or something that shows I’m a human.) (BTW, if you want to read some really clever tweets, Shel Israel asked for favorite tweets for his soon to be published book Twitterville — some are hilarious.)

How is your organization feeding its Twitter network? How does what your feed your Twitter networks support your social media objectives?

Certainly, with discipline and a few minutes in the morning as part of your regular routine, you can overcome some the productivity issues that Nielsen points out. And, with Web-based applications like Co-Tweet or HootSuite, you can share tweeting across teams, pre-schedule your tweets and other time-saving tricks. Even better, if you can’t install local clients on your desktop because of IT policy, both of these Twitter productivity tools are web-based. …

Now that Twitter is being used by more and more businesses and nonprofits,  Twitter Codes of Conduct are being added to social media policies.  I like the guideline that Wendy Harman, Social Media Strategist for the Red Cross said last February in an NTEN Webinar, “I won’t tweet anything that would embarrass my mother.”

What questions or tips do you have about improving your organization’s Twitteracy?

Resources

• Pistachio’s collection of Getting Started On Twitter Guides
• Pistachio’s Professional Twitter Guides
• The Twitter Book by Tim O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein (pre-order)

Cross-posted from Beth’s Blog

The post Twitter literacy: Getting value out of social media appeared first on Socialbrite.