How to maximize and follow through on your communications goals

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

If you’re like most nonprofit communicators, you have a list of specific quarterly or yearly goals. No doubt they include growing your e-mail list, acquiring new donors and increasing engagement on your Facebook updates.

But whatever your goals are, make sure they cover these seven tips below:

Write it down

1A plan is very difficult to follow and measure if it’s not written down. Most nonprofits don’t have content strategy. And based on the limited work I’ve done, they also lack an online marketing strategy that’s written down.

Make a resolution to create written plans for each campaign throughout the year. Your plan should include stated goals, stated messaging, a strategy outline, and finally, tools and tactics. How much detail you include in this document is up to you, but at least include these elements.

Also, check out these three articles on develop a solid online marketing strategy:

Practice split-testing

2If you’re like most nonprofits, your donor retention rates are less than satisfactory. Improving this starts with fixing the places where you’re converting poorly.

• Begin by split testing your fundraising pages, if you haven’t already. Split-testing helps increase conversions by testing out variations in the content. Some typical areas to start with include headlines, images, button location, button text, button colors, and copy. Check out how the Marine Mammal Center split-tested variations of a call-to-action.
• You should also split-test email subject lines and email content. This will eventually point the way to increased open rates, click-through rates, and eventually conversion rates.

Check out this article on how split-testing raised over $100,000 for WWF.

Maximize secondary actions

3Make the most of every interaction people take with your nonprofit. For example, when people sign a petition, immediately email them to ask for a donation (says thanks first). This approach uses recency to create momentum towards a secondary call-to-action – essentially killing two birds with one stone.

In fact, maximize any webpage people see after completing a transaction (signing a petition, joining your email list, making a donation, registering for an event). Carefully consider what secondary actions make sense for each transaction. For example, if someone makes a donation, make sure they can easily share that with their friends.

See beyond the dollars

4All too often, the scope of the supporter relationship is limited to money. But donating money is only one way that they interact with you.

Supporters also share your Facebook updates, sign your petitions and pledges, and re-tweet your blog posts.

Develop a specific plan to encourage these types of actions, remembering that growing a community is like growing a garden. It takes time, care and consideration. Focus on growing your community, both in terms of numbers AND engagement.

Be useful

5It seems like all the social media experts claim that the key to success to being awesome. But what your community really needs is for you to be useful.

Being useful is much easier than trying to be awesome. Being useful is about putting the needs of your community first, like in this Facebook update from the Museum of Fine Arts:

Take risks

6New tactics and strategies for using social media sprout up every week, making “best practices” somewhat limited. In fact, I think we should change the term “best practice” to “most commonly used practice that gets average results.”

The fact is, the web and mobile are changing very fast. Those who play is safe get average results at best, while risk-takers adopt more quickly (test, fail / win, learn, repeat). Fail forward, they say.

Test and measure

7Most nonprofits are not strategically testing or measuring digital media. Yes, data is collected and stored in excel spreadsheets. But the hard questions aren’t being asked: Why are we measuring click-through rates? Why are we measuring our Facebook page fan growth?

Let your strategy dictate what should be measured. This will make your data much more useful. For example, if your goal is to convert more donors via email, then you want to test and measure conversion rates via clicks in those messages. Go back to what I said about split-testing.

Remember to breathe

If you’re like me, you need a fair amount of down time.

You need time to step back, take a breath, and take in the panoramic view of what you’re doing – in work and in life. Pace yourself and be smart about daily habits.

And try to have fun.

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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.

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Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, marketers, managers, general public.

There seem to be countless tools available for social media marketers. Tools for managing social media, measuring it, and even for creating content that looks amazing!
Yes, technology can seem like a godsend.

But if you don’t have a solid strategy, you’re going to waste a lot of money on a lot of tools that promise a lot of results.

What does a social media strategy look like?

The POST method (People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology) was originally coined by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff in their book Groundswell (Harvard Business Review Press) is a proven framework for developing a social media strategy.

People

You can’t achieve even a basic level of success on social media if you don’t understand your people. No one will like, retweet, or repin your blog post if you haven’t answered the only question that really matters: What’s in it for them?

Objectives

If you don’t have a destination any tool will do. Any best practice will do too.

Clear objectives helps you determine if you were successful or not. Long-term success on social media requires a lot of trial and error. But you have to know what’s a trial and what’s in error. Plus, they help you discover what you’re doing right!

Strategy

Your strategy is more than just a plan. It’s a plan that will meet your objectives based on what you know about your people.

In other words, strategy is about a value exchange. What are you going to give in exchange for their email, money, time, influence and attention?

Whether it’s a meaningful pledge, or a sweepstakes, write down exactly how you will offer enough value to encourage them to help you achieve your objective.

Technology

Once you understand your people, objective, and strategy, you can confidently select the tools and tactics you’ll use for your campaign. For example, if your strategy is to engage millennials on Instagram, crowdsourcing content around a hashtag would be a tactic.

Here’s the infographic!

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Social media, as many have said time and again, is only part of your campaigning, part of your fundraising, and part of your communications. It isn’t something that lives in its own department, nor does it have staff that are separate from the rest of the organization. Just as the content distributed and conversations participated in are integrated into many different aspects of your organization’s work, so should the knowledge, access and responsibility to participate be integrated across your staff.

These 5 steps are intended to help you create a successful social media strategy, but as you will see, they focus on your organization’s overall strategy!

1. Goals & objectives

Evaluate your goals and objectives, as an organization. You will not be able to identify tools and engagement methods for your organization online without knowing the bigger picture and without knowing it in concrete goals that will let you build and work towards them. Hildy Gottlieb’s Pollyanna Principles are a great place to start if you want to learn more about how you can evaluate and identify your organizational goals (and larger view) in a way to successfully design projects, programs and even partnerships for real impact.

For more resources on goals & objectives:

• The Pollyanna Principles
• My review of The Pollyanna Principles

2. Capacity

Before sitting down to work on your social media strategy, evaluate what kind of capacity you already have in your network. Things to consider include: staff knowledge and experience with different tools as well as other internal knowledge or previous work experience. It’s also a good idea to evaluate the capacity (especially if you think collaboration or partnership is an opportunity) of related organizations. Lastly, consider what other organizations, companies or campaigns in your sector have already done!

For more resources on capacity evaluation:

• Social by Social’s How-To archive
• How-To “Find out what’s already been done”

3. Strategy

Now it’s time to focus in on the meat of this post, the actual “social media strategy” part. But, there’s a catch: it’s another 5 steps!

• Identify the audience or community you want to engage.
  This includes thinking about who you are already communicating with and how, as well as what groups you want to start communicating with who you currently aren’t including. Who you want to talk to, listen to, and create a community with is the foundation for everything else you do with social media tools because it is what ultimately decides the success or failure of your other decisions—if you base your timing, tools, and process around those you want to be a part of your work, then you’ll be a lot more successful than if you pick tools you like when it’s convenient for you without considering the community you want to use them.
• Identify the resources currently available within your organization. Resources include staff knowledge and comfort with different tools, experience levels of staff working with supports, volunteers, and the public, staff with time available, staff with appropriate job duties to include social media, available budget for training or workshops, etc. Often, we forget that because the actual application/software/tool may be free, really using it is not. What we put into our social media engagement is what we get out of it, like everything else in life. If you only have an hour a week to post to a blog, then it is unreasonable to expect a lively conversation and community emerging from it, at least not very quickly. By evaluating what resources you already have on hand in the organization, you are much more prepared to fully examine your options. And remember, sometimes you assumptions about social media use and your staff can be way off! There is something out there for all of us, and more and more people around the world are engaging online, so don’t assume that it’s only your college intern who knows how to use these tools!
• Identify what success will look like. This is really helpful in order to evaluate the appropriate tools for your work. If you want to create a space for volunteers and potential volunteers to share their knowledge and experiences with each other you are going to need very different tools than if you want to create a space for volunteers and potential volunteers to share that information with you. It’s also important to remember that social media is a changing space, with tools and applications, even functionality, evolving every day. So, your definition of success has to be flexible to the changing times and the changing needs of your audience.
• Identify what technologies are most appropriate. Now that you know who you want to communicate with, who and what you have to work with in your organization, and where you want to go with the relationships, you can identify some tools to start exploring. There are lots of blogs, directories, and lists available online to help you get started picking tools that match your goals. One great way to help guide you in the process of identifying and selecting the most appropriate technologies is to ask your community! What are they using now? How would they like to engage with your organization? Explain what success looks like to you and ask how they would go about getting there!
• Identify what measures of success can be used. You know who and what, and you identified where you want to go, but before you dive in you also need to establish how you can measure and monitor activity from day 1 onward. This includes things you are probably looking at already like the number of visitors to your website and subscribers of your emails; but, it also includes metrics based on the funcationality of the tools you choose and how you identified success. If you are using a forum, then measuring the number of replies to post (or, if your forum allows voting, then the positive feedback on posts) could be appropriate, as well as the ratio of people signed up vs posting vs replying, etc. It’s incredibly important for the success of your work to evaluate how things are going throughout. If something isn’t working to the degree you had hoped, it’s okay! Identify that issue, and correct it with either an alteration to the current tool or set up, or by shifting the group to a different, more appropriate tool. Just be sure to openly communicate your evaluations, ask for feedback (”Do you see what we see?”), and explain any changes well ahead of time.

For more on building your social media strategy:

• Read the full post with the 5 Steps from above
• Review the POST Method
• Review the Social by Social Handbook (read for free online, or buy)

4. Feedback

Be sure that you create mechanisms for feedback and input throughout your process and throughout whatever you “build” or use (whether it’s a social networking space, a website, a blog or anything else). You need to provide opportunities for your community, as well as your staff and any others participating on the “administrative” end of the operations to share ideas. The best way to approach this is to create feedback opportunities that are “evergreen” or always available, like a contact form or address, a public forum, or commenting; and opportunities that are “seasonal” or based specifically on an event, idea, opportunity, etc. (like a blog post about possible functionality that could be added to the site, asking for feedback and ideas or even voting on the options). Remember, though, that there is no point to asking for feedback and letting your community suggest their ideas if you aren’t going to listen. More often than not, the community knows what it wants much more than you do, so listening is key!

For more on feedback and listening:

• WeAreMedia’s Listening Toolbox
• Social by Social’s How-Tos

5. Evaluate

Just as part of the social media strategy process in step 3 above calls for evaluation, so does the overall process. Evaluation in this step is focused on the higher level: how have your networks grown or changed? are there new opportunities for partnerships or collaborations? are there new opportunities for empowering your community either in different roles within the social media/online space or in other areas of your organization? do you have stories of volunteers, staff, community members, or those you serve that could be sharing their stories in new or different ways to highlight your impact? And more!

For more on evaluation:

• Social by Social How-Tos
• WeAreMedia’s ROI Toolbox
• Liveblogging notes from Beth Kanter’s NTC session on “Mapping your social media strategy to metrics”

Then…repeat!

As with most everything else, it’s all a cycle. You will always be revisiting your goals, your community needs, the options for tools and how to evaluate your work. Continuing to keep the cyclical process moving, though, means that you will ensure that you give your organization all the opportunities to possible to improve it’s work and further it’s impact. This is one self-perpetuating cycle that’s good for you!

What do you think? What lessons have you learned from designing social media strategies in your organization? What did I miss? Looking forward to your conversation!

This post originally appeared on Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NP Tech.

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My current job title includes the term “Community Builder” and I get asked nearly every day just what that means: How do you build community? Where is the community you want to build? How can I be a community builder online? Tips, secrets, ideas?! I want to take a break from all the hard work building community (does that get a wink?) to share some of what I believe is the core of successful community building (on or offline).

“Community building” is about a lot of things. Some people define it as organizing, especially around specific events, campaigns, legislation, or fundraising. Others see it as specifically applying to online community spaces, like a social networking site. I believe that community exists everywhere, really. That the Internet is a huge community of people looking to connect with others like them to form smaller, more specific communities. Those of us in positions to support those connections and collaborations are some of the luckiest people in the global network, acting as the email or Twitter post or blog reference that helps individuals make networked jumps to where they really want to be.

Gardening vs. landscaping

So, what’s the secret to successful community building? You guessed it: Be a great gardener and avoid the temptation to landscape. Here’s what that means:

• A gardener only takes out the weeds; a landscaper takes out everything that isn’t part of the design. Think about the number of beautiful plants or trees that have sprung up in parks, your yard, or even out in nature that weren’t “intended” to be there but quickly grew to be a valuable part of the ecosystem.
• A gardener isn’t afraid to mix things around; a landscaper plans and plots and plants.  Sometimes you can’t know ahead of time just which plants will respond well or want more sun or shade so you need to be flexible.
• When a storm hits, a gardener can remain open to planting anew and rejuvenating others; a landscaper may just order more of the same. Sometimes it takes a storm to realize which plants just weren’t going to make it or which were able to stick it out.
• When in doubt, a gardener will try more plants or kinds of plants and see which take root; a landscaper may default to less. What about the plants you had never used before to know about and how they took root, flowered, and bolted up right before your eyes?

Clearly, this is all very metaphorical here with the back yard options. It is, though, meant to paint a picture:

The Gardener creates an ecosystem open to change, available to new groups, and full of fresh opportunities to emerge naturally. The approach is focused on organic collaboration and growth for the entire community. The gardener is simply there to help, cultivate, and clear the weeds if/when they poke up.

The Landscaper creates an ecosystem that matches a preconceived design or pattern. The approach is focused on executing a preconceived environment, regardless of how natural or organic it may be for the larger area. The landscaper is there to ensure that everything stays just as planned.

Your community

How can you apply these ideas to your community building? The first question I always ask myself when considering a new tool or functionality online, a new project or campaign, or even new partnerships or members is: “Is this something the Community wants or something I want?” It doesn’t matter what I want, really. It matters what the Community wants. And how do you know if or what they are interested in? ASK! Be sure to always provide opportunities for your community members or those who come across your work to share their ideas about what they would like to see, how they’d like to connect with each other and how they would like to work with you. And when considering anything new, ask for feedback and share your ideas and plans ahead of time. You may be surprised, but your Community often has even better ideas than you!

What do you think? Do you have other ideas about successful community building? Have a great example or case study you want to share? Looking forward to more!

You can read the post and join the conversation on SSIR here.

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Recently, Bebo hosted an all-day event for members of the No to Knives and Crime Coalition, as well as others working in the sector of positive youth engagement in London and beyond.  I want to share my slides and notes here for those who attended as well as for all those out there who didn’t.

My presentation (above) concentrated on a few case studies where certain technologies were the appropriate tools for engagement and aided work to connect, empower, and educate youth communities.

There are really just so many great examples for this topic.  If you are looking for more examples about social media and communications technologies applied to youth empowerment, here are some additional links/groups to check out:

• http://bom411.com (social media used as outreach about teen dating violence)
  
• “huge forum success via virtual worlds (e.g. Habbo’s InfoBus re: curbing violence against gay teens; developing understanding via the Matthew Shepard Foundation visiting ‘in-world’ or the War Child Int’l foundation partnership to focus in-world on kids impacted by violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda etc. (they hosted a cool “virtual Global Peace” gathering inside their world to coincide w/last fall’s UN discussion of same: http://tinyurl.com/ngzfxm)” – from Amy at Shaping Youth
• http://www.myspace.com/invisiblechildren
• http://www.myspace.com/oxjam
• http://geturvoiceheard.co.uk
• http://engage.wesharestuff.org/
• www.publicmattersgroup.com/about.htm
• www.marketmakeovers.org
• www.vimeo.com/publicmatters
• headspace: The National Youth Mental Health Foundation in Australia

After the case studies, I focused in on two aspects of the strategy building that are most important:

The Audience: If you do your research (even if you are “sure” you already know), you can identify your audience, those you already talk to and those you don’t. You can figure out how best to communicate, and how (both the medium and the words).  You can see more about this in the slides above.

The Goals: Yes, we all want to, in this case, fight knife crime; but that’s not our goal.  Take the time to identify your goals focused on living in and inviting youth to co-create a community without knife crime.  There is more about goals in the slides above.

If you would like to view the presentation above with the speaker notes included, click here.

What do you think? Has your organization tackled issues in the youth community and used new technologies to support your work? Share your story – we’d love to hear it!

Cross-posted from Amy Sample Ward’s Version of NPTech.

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