Why social media & email marketing are key to your nonprofit’s success

If you work for a small nonprofit, chances are you feel the pain of limited staff, limited budgets and the limited hours in your busy schedule. On top of that, no one seems to understand these challenges. They expect miracles.

So it’s natural that at some point you’d ask, Which is more important: social media or email marketing?

Alas, you need both.

In the 2-minute video above, I briefly explain the difference between social media and email marketing and why both are critical components in your marketing arsenal.

Social media and email marketing serve different purposes. How is email different from social media?

1. Privacy. Email is imbued with a degree of intimacy. People invite you into their in-box for a specific purpose.
2. Segmentation. You can divvy up email recipients through their interests. Are they more interested in sea turtles or climate change?
3. Conversion. You can determine how many of the people you reach out to complete the transaction. That’s harder to do with social media.

In short, email is transactional. You can tailor your message to different recipients. Social media is relational. It’s a way to induce people to share your message.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment below.

The post Which is more important: Social media or email marketing? appeared first on Socialbrite.

How Convio uses social media from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

The name Convio is a well-known brand in the nonprofit sector. The company offers online fundraising and marketing software and donor database and CMS solutions to its more than 1,200 nonprofit clients, ranging from a seven-person nonprofit with remote staff to large institutions like the Humane Society and American Cancer Society. (Yep, you have to be a nonprofi.)

At the Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco I caught up with Jordan Viator, interactive communications manager for Convio. Jordan heads up their social media efforts, much of it through their Connection Cafe blog.

In this 6-minute video, Jordan talks about Austin-based Convio and how it uses social media.

Watch or embed video on Vimeo
Watch video in beautiful H.264 QuickTime on Ourmedia
Download video from Archive.org

Convio offers software as a service, which means you don’t install the software on your servers but rather manage your modules “in the cloud,” as we sometimes say. While the nonprofit space has a wealth of vendors, Convio offers solutions that encompass online marketing, donor management and fundraising. Impressive.

The post How Convio uses social media appeared first on Socialbrite.

And for good reason:

Facebook is one of the largest social media sites on the web:

• More than 200 million active users
• More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day
• More than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside of college
• The fastest growing demographic is 35 and older

And their users are very active:

• Average user has 120 friends on the site
• More than 4 billion minutes are spent on Facebook each day
• More than 30 million users update their statuses daily
• More than 6 million users become fans of Pages each day

Hubspot, an Internet marketing company in Cambridge, Mass., recently published a free book for businesses looking to use Facebook.

I was curious how useful How to Use Facebook for Business would be for my typical nonprofit client, so I downloaded it (no email required!) and read through the 22-page guide.

The ebook includes the following topics – all very useful for any nonprofit:

• Why you should be on Facebook – business value overview (also applies to nonprofits!)
• Facebook’s ad builder can be used to research potential supporters by filtering on age, location and interests.
• How to create an engaging Facebook Page to encourage wall comments – seen by all of commenter’s friends.
• How to use the FBML application to add HTML content to your page (also see this video tutorial).
• How to get search engine credit from Facebook with the HTML application.
• Using Facebook’s analytics to measure traffic on your Facebook Page.
• A Facebook reference guide and glossary.

I found these two pages particularly useful:

And a one-pager on the difference between Facebook Groups and Pages (also see this post).

Download the ebook here: How to Use Facebook for Business

The post Free ebook: How to use Facebook for business (and nonprofits) appeared first on Socialbrite.