What We’re Reading, Week of 9/28

From Beth’s Blog…
How LIVESTRONG Uses Social Media To Animate Its Community
Guest blogger Brooke McMillan contributes this insightful post to Beth’s Blog, taking a look at a few tips utilized by LIVESTRONG to ensure success in the use of social media.

From Acronym…
Purpose-driven membership
What is membership? This lengthy blog post at Acronym takes a look at this somewhat existential and lofty question with some interesting thoughts.

From A Small Change…
Results Oriented Fundraising
Jason at A small Change discusses a comment left by one of his readers to an earlier post about quantifying donations and support.

What We’re Reading, Week of 9/21

From A Small Change…
Musings on the Future of Fundraising
Jason at A Small Change writes about the changing landscape of fundraising and his predictions for the future.

From Beth’s Blog…
How to translate social listening into good twitter conversation that supports your objectives
Beth Kanter takes a look at how organization’s can better utilize social listening (the practice of using social networking sites to listen to their members and potential donors) and turn that into constructive communications via Twitter.

From Acronym…
How secure is that golden handcuff?
An interesting article about how organizations should approach at their “golden handcuff” (a program or product so important to a member that it effectively binds them to the organization).

From NTEN…
Online Donors: Why They Leave and How to Win Them Back
NTEN takes a look at an interesting problem and opportunity when it comes to online donors which they have dubbed “the young and the generous” (they tend to be under 40 and their gifts are around $100).

What We’re Reading, Week of 8/24

From A Small Change…
Building Community Online
This post from Jason at A Small Change blog takes a look at how organizations should go about building their online community by, in part, creating an intentional culture that fit the various cultures of your donors.

From Acronym…
Facebook fundraising: Feeding America shows good taste
Acronym from ASAE examines the effectiveness of one of the early adopters using Facebook for fundraising. To do this they look at Feeding America’s (formerly Second Harvest) latest campaign on Facebook, a “virtual Sandwich Swap n’ Share” involving the unusual duo of Hellmann’s and Best Foods Mayonnaise with musician Billy Ray Cyrus.

From Beth’s Blog…
Seven Thoughts on Slacktivism
This guest post by Ali Cherry of Beaconfire Consulting takes a look at the growing trend of “Slactivism”, the act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem

From NTEN…
The Shrinking Generational Digital Divide
Sami Hassanyeh of AARP contributes this post looking at trends in demographics of the use of technology and where these are headed. Some of the findings about current usage demographics may surprise you (they did us)!

Social media strategy – where do you begin?

Social media has so many tools and web sites it’s overwhelming to know where to start. Atlanta-based social networking strategist David Nour has researched over 400 social networking tools at his consulting firm according to this Richmond Times-Dispatch article. 400! But there are probably three to five that would work well for your association. So where do you begin?

When I present about social media tools, I like to point out that there’s only one Three Letter Acronym in social media (that’s RSS, Really Simple Syndication, used for subscription notifications). But the most popular social media sites have some strange names, I must say. Twitter sounds funny if you say it three times fast. Facebook is two words put together, without using CamelCase. LinkedIn is another word combination that does use CamelCase. The site del.icio.us recently changed its name to delicious.com. Another site you haven’t yet heard of is probably lurking around the corner, right?

Overcoming intimidation

The word “lurking” evokes dark corners, the unknown, and scary scenes. I believe intimidation is part of the difficulty in getting started. I appreciated this line from Hammock Inc’s blog, Conversational Media. “It’s understandable that social media can be scary, but don’t let it prevent you from meeting your association goals.” Their blog post, How to Become Your Association’s Social Media Champion,  goes on to talk about becoming or finding an internal champion.

Listening first

I also encourage a listen-first attitude. “Listening” to social media means setting up Google Alerts for your association and searching for keywords that are important to your association’s goals. The notifications can be emailed to you periodically (daily or weekly). It can mean going to search.twitter.com and entering keywords or hashtags (pre-selected keywords or acronyms prefixed with a # sign), and then subscribing to the results of that real-time search.

Establishing goals

A reasonable approach is to step back one step and look at your overall content and communication strategy and the overarching goals your association has. Is it raising awareness of issues? Increasing connections to other members? Developing killer content for learning?

Analyzing constituents

In May 2009, the ASAE’s Associations Now magazine ran an interview titled “People First: The Key to Social Media Strategy” where David Nour does an excellent job of describing the 90-9-1 rule of engagement in any community event (or party, as his example shows.) This rule applies for mailing lists, wikis, online groups, and special interest groups. There’s a small core group of people, about one percent of the group, who will be very active in the group. Nine percent will contribute from time to time, but a full 90% will only read or observe but will never contribute.

The book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, authored by Forrester analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, has a Social Technographics tool available online that describes a ladder of participants in combination with their demographics. At the top of the ladder are Creators, those who write blogs, publish videos they’ve created, and so forth, might make up a large portion of your member’s demographics. But if many of your members are Inactives, those who do not participate at least monthly in the social networking and creation activities listed, like reading blogs, reviews, subscribing to feeds, you may want to reconsider whether your association’s goals can be met with the use of social media.

Running a small pilot project

If your analysis shows there is interest, activity, and goals to be met with social media, start small. You can use the learning experience to build out your strategy further.

Putting it all together

Beth Kanter, a consultant and trainer to non-profits about social media techniques, has a wonderful blog post about Creating Your Organization’s Social Media Strategy Map. It is full of resource links. Taking 5 minutes to walk through the presentation at the beginning of the blog post may be the best 5 minute start to a successful social media strategy for your organization.

How about your groups? Have you had some difficulty getting started? What are your thoughts on getting started?

What We’re Reading, Week of 6/8

From FrogLoop…
How Sticky is Facebook?
Allyson Kapin provides insightful statistics about Facebook users—“Facebook users with 500 friends actively follow the news on only 40 of them, communicate with 20, and keep in close touch with about 10. Those with smaller networks follow even fewer”. Are you using Facebook within your organization? If so, how is it working for you?

From Beth’s Blog…
Managing Multiple Twitter Accounts for Your Nonprofit
Last week Beth listed 8 CEOs from nonprofit organizations who use twitter. As a follow up, Beth provided some applications to help organizations manage multiple twitter accounts.

From Connections…
5 Email Sins to Avoid
Steve MacLaughlin shares with us 5 tips to avoid during an email campaign. Each tip is equally important and should be taken in to consideration.

What we’re reading, week of 5/4

From Frogloop…
Social Media Study Finds Most Nonprofits Have Presence on Facebook But Raising Little Money
The discussion of Facebook Causes continues, with Frogloop reporting the recent NTEN study examining the relatively low profitability of Causes.

From Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog…
6-Minute Guide to Winning Fundraising Campaigns
Rebecca Ruby Higman shares online fundraising myths and best practices. A good complement to our articles on this topic.

From the Influential Marketing Blog…
How To Live Blog (Or Twitter) An Event Effectively
IMB offers 10 great tips for creating in-the-moment content at a conference without detracting from participating in the event. The tips we like best are: “Publish nuggets, not manifestos” and “Represent the virtual attendees.”