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Last week, I celebrated my 5th birthday of joining Twitter!    As far as I can tell, the first arrivals on Twitter from the NpTech sector were Ruby Sinreich and Brian Reich who signed up two weeks before me.     So, in honor our collective Twitter birthdays in October and Halloween, I thought I’d [...]

Do you have any advice on getting phone numbers for donors not connected to board/staff/etc? We’re finding it increasingly challenging, and people are understandably protective of personal info. Signed, Waiting By The Phone Dear Waiting: I don’t, actually, though I’m a big user of WhitePages.com, where lots of people “protective of personal info” will find [...]

Even the biggest advocates you can imagine got started by someone asking them to help.

Scott Case was recently at TEDMED and heard Lance Armstrong speak.  Scott told me this story, and it’s worth sharing.

Lance was asked why he committed to dedicate his energy to fighting cancer. He said as he left his treatment on December 13, 1996, his doctor asked him to.

The doctor said: You can stay private or you can lead.

Lance committed to help that day.

As Scott notes: “The rest is amazing outcomes.”

The first step to amazing outcomes is asking someone to say yes.

Following yesterday’s post about a new eGuide available free from Idealware (Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide), today I have five pieces of advice from the guide.

1. IT TAKES TIME. If you want some success from using a social media channel, count on spending at least two hours a week on it.

2. TWITTER IS A SPECIALIZED STREAM. Twitter skews older and more tech-savvy than other popular social media.  It’s an interesting way to reach media, partners and skilled volunteers – but you have to post consistently, because people dip in and out of the stream of Tweets and won’t see most of what you say.

3. SUCCESSFUL BLOGS TAKE TIME.  You need a person or people passionate about posting and four to eight hours a week (or more!).

4. DON’T WORRY ABOUT GOOGLE+ YET.  It’s too early.

5. MEASUREMENT MATTERS.  Keep track of views, followers, engagement and conversion.  And your own time!

Have you ever wondered…

Is it worth it for my organization to be using social media?

How do I decide whether to Tweet/Facebook/blog?

What amount of time should I spend on it?

What will I get out of it?

There’s a great new eGuide available free from Idealware that covers these topics.  Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide is an accessible guide to assessing what to do and planning how to do it (complete with workbook).  I read the whole thing today, and I think it’s worth your time.  In the meantime, I’ll be posting today and tomorrow about its contents.

Today, I’ll cover the answers to those questions I asked at the start of this post.

Is it worth it for my organization to be using social media?

According to the guide (and I agree), the answer is a resounding, “It depends.” 

Social media has two values – it can enable you to hear what people are saying about you online, and it can help you host and participate in conversations.  It’s not a way to broadcast a message or a huge fundraising tool.  It’s a social channel that you need to see as having intrinsic value.  As the guide notes, social media is a journey, not a destination.

The key questions are, does your audience use social media and is that journey of use to you?  That’s what you need to ask – and weigh that against the investment required.

How do I decide whether to Tweet/Facebook/blog?

You first decide who you want to reach, which tools they use and what you want to accomplish.  Then the right tool for the job will be much clearer.

“Different tools have different audiences. Facebook tends to be better at reaching those in and right out of college using it for personal reasons, while Twitter is likely to be more useful to reach older professionals. But more than the demographics of a particular channel, you need to know what channels your supporters and potential supporters are using. How do you find this out? Try asking them. Talk to your staff, board and supporters about the sites they use, or survey your community to find out,” the guide says.

In terms of deciding what you want to accomplish, the guide notes that many organizations enter the world of social media with goals that are too nebulous to measure, like “building awareness” or “spreading the word.”  Make your goals specific, measureable, realistic, relevant to your mission and time-specific.

What amount of time should I spend on it?

The guide surveyed organizations that use a lot of social media and broke down their return on investment to arrive at a recommended amount of time per medium.  The most successful 75 organizations were spending two hours per week, per channel. (An example of a channel is Flickr or Twitter or Facebook).  I think that sounds about right – except for blogging, which is a bigger time commitment!  (I can attest personally.)

What will I get out of it?

If you’ve done a good job setting goals, then you’ll know what you’re getting out of it!  The guide does give you some good reality checks, though.  It’s reasonable to expect a positive impact in terms of website traffic and advocacy actions.  Don’t expect much with fundraising.  Getting volunteers or attendees for events, like raising money, requires concerted cultivation efforts.  One-off announcements on Facebook or LinkedIn aren’t enough by themselves.

Social change strategy firm Communicopia has published a Non-Profit Digital Teams Benchmark Report that surveyed 67 nonprofits on their social media habits to find “how non-profit leaders manage digital and online initiatives in their organizations.” The Stanford Innovation Review presents a three-part series of lessons from the study on how digital teams - staff in organizations that deal with their online or web presence - work.

• The first post in the series is on the five common dysfunctions of digital teams. The key point is that these ills are usually merely reflections of issues that run into the nature of the organization itself. The five dysfunctions they describe are silos, personality fit, overload, lack of digital vision and lack of organizational vision. The first step is recognizing if your organization is suffering from these common issues, and then looking at how they can be mitigated.

• The second post describes four management philosophies for overseeing your digital presence, and overcoming those five dysfunctions. The four (nicely illustrated) management patterns are Informal, Centralized, Independent and Hybrid, each with its own patterns of flow and control between the digital experience and the digital team members. They consider the efficacy of each model, and the reasons they usually come to be, (Hint: It’s rarely a strategic decision.) before recommending the Hybrid model. That model has a strong central digital team partnering with digital leads in each department. The central digital engagement managers take on the most critical projects, but leave enough authority for others to fully implement lower-risk initiatives.

• The third post covers the “seven patterns of nonprofit digital teams.” These are the salient points that the Communicopia team gathered from their survey of the senior online leaders from 67 nonprofit organizations. The seven patterns illustrate areas that show positive trends - digital teams are increasingly proactive - and others that will quickly become problematic. Not surprisingly, one of these seven points is that digital teams need more full-time, rather than contractor, help. That may be a tightly constrained factor for many organizations, but investing in user experience improvements and a better team structure - two other points on the list - could help existing resource go further.

The report contains illuminating material that could help your organization dramatically improve its online engagement. These three posts give a hint of the material. For a more detailed presentation of the report itself, check out this webinar, “Digital Teams: Your Smartest Investment to Manage a Multi-Channel World”, moderated by Care2.

We hear a lot about social good, social change, social media, social marketing, social business, corporate social responsibility, social entrepreneurship! How is your organization keeping up with the movement to connect socially?

While connecting through social media and marketing can be as easy as writing a few blog posts, posting your events on facebook or writing interesting snippets of commentary on twitter, the fact is, there’s much more to it! And consumers of social media and marketing are often just as savvy as the ‘experts’ transmitting the message. So how do you get edge in your social strategies?

The first best thing you can do is have a plan! Something that helps you to set your communication goals, to define your brand and what you want to say, and to work out who you actually want to talk to, how and when. While social media activity is fast-paced and ever-changing, it’s still important to ensure you are strategic – and then you can be more confident in taking advantage of all the social interaction on offer. Here’s a few pointers to remember when developing your plan:

• Make sure it’s targeted and action-based.
• Focus on who you want to connect with, when, how and why. It doesn’t need to be long-winded – I’d suggest leaving the pages of background about your organization, your research etc in your business planning.
• Review your current communications and marketing activities and, if they’re effective, make sure you integrate them into your plan and build on successes.Check out your market and your competitors – how are others connecting and what is working best?
• Determine what your target audiences’ motivations and barriers to being involved in your cause are. List any tactics you can think of that might help to strengthen their motivations or overcome their barriers.
• Break up your strategy into 2 or 3 one-year phases and have at least one measureable objective per phase so you can track progress.
• Be mindful that not every tactic out there works for every organization! If you’re not careful, you can end up spending all of your time connecting, without much time left for effective program implementation or to really drive social engagement. Change tactic or approach when things aren’t working. Your plan should always be living!

It’s also important to acknowledge that you’re busy implementing your programs, dealing with Boards, applying for funds AND managing partner relationships, When people are busy (which these days is most of the time) effective and regular communication and social networking is often one of the first things neglected. So, be sure to carefully prioritize your social marketing activities. As part of your planning, I always suggest developing a manageable annual social marketing calendar (starting with year 1 and evaluating progress and effectiveness of your tactics before setting your next year of activity). Link this annual calendar with your meeting calendar or print it out and display at your desk – this will help remind you to connect, even when you’re busy!

Kate Bowmaker
The Social Deck
Re-published from The Heart of Change Blog 

Guest post by Gabriel Kasper The amount of knowledge and experience in attendance at last week’s Grantmakers’ Gathering on Networks was inspiring. So when Diana Scearce asked me to try to synthesize the learning at the end of the conference, I was at a bit of a loss. It didn’t make any sense to just [...]

So here’s something the Nonprofiteer heard yesterday: if an agency’s response to every initial donation is to have a Board member pick up the phone and call the donor to thank him/her, the likelihood of a second donation increases by something like 80%. What’s terrific about that (other than the obvious, donor retention) is that [...]