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 7/27

From Frogloop…
Taking Advantage of Wikipedia
Millions of people look to www.wikipedia.org as a starting point when they are searching for information about specific topics. Allyson Kapin of Frogloop encourages nonprofits to bear this in mind, and to create or update their organizations’ Wikipedia entries. She writes that Wikipedia can be a powerful promotional and educational outlet. As Wikipedia becomes ever more fixed in the internet culture, nonprofits should be aware of its potential uses.

From the Nonprofit Communications Blog…
The First 100 Hours: Turning Media Spikes Into Fundraising Leads
Kivi Leroux Miller’s post discusses the importance of turning media coverage into fundraising leads. According to Kivi, media coverage of an organization will lead to a window of roughly 100 hours of increased traffic and search engine hits. This time frame represents an opportunity to raise funds and increase interest. Kivi recommends using customized search ads, a strong landing page devoted to the issue that brought media attention in the first place, and social media. It is important for nonprofits to strike while the iron is hot, and media attention represents a prime opportunity to generate awareness and bring in revenue.

From AFP: Nonprofit Technology Blog…
Twittering for a cause: Web 2.0 and its philanthropic impact
Linking to a post from The Daily Tell, the AFP Blog discusses the impact that Web 2.0 has had on philanthropy. In particular, the post discusses how Twitter has become a fundraising avenue. Through campaigns such as “Tweetsgiving” and “tweet4good”, Twitter users have proven that they are generous to charitable causes. As the use of social media for charitable causes spreads, nonprofits that are not currently taking advantage of social media ought to find ways to get into the game soon.

Holiday fundraising technology

We came across this query on LinkedIn recently, and thought we’d put it out there for readers to contribute to. Marion Conway asks:

I plan to post on my blog about recommendations on how to use technology for fundraising with new donors this holiday season. I’ve done this in the past, but so much is happening it is hard to keep up with new ideas. I’d appreciate your input.

You can respond in the comments here, or directly to the LinkedIn query here.

For inspiration, we’d like to offer an excellent post Katya Andresen published last year: 13 Secrets of Holiday Fundraising Online.

What we’re reading, week of 9/8

From The Raiser’s Razor…
My Big Announcement
Jeremy Gregg announces that he’ll be taking on a new position as VP of Development at the Center for Nonprofit Management. This sounds like a great move for Jeremy, and an opportunity to really capitalize on his knack for advising nonprofit leaders. Best wishes!

From Frogloop…
Five Minutes with Fundraising Guru Ted Hart (Video)
In this video, Ted Hart discusses his predictions for the future of nonprofits, including innovative uses of technology and a renewed focus on the environment.

From the Fundraising Coach…
More on what really annoys your donors
Evidently, Marc received a ton of answers to his question about nonprofit missteps. Behold the magic of LinkedIn! In this post, he links directly to some of the answers so readers can read and reflect upon them directly… and perhaps meet a few new industry contacts in the process.

Organizations that should not pursue a social media strategy

Last week, we asked readers to help answer the question “When should organizations NOT pursue a social media strategy?” in response to a query on Beth’s Blog. Here are a couple of the answers we received, when we asked nonprofit professionals on LinkedIn…

Social media requires a real commitment to being social: That is, anyone engaging in any kind of social campaign needs to be ready to engage with their supporters, answer questions, deal with negative responses, help people with problems, etc.

If your organisation doesn’t have a) the desire or b) the resource to respond to any feedback from your audience, then you don’t have a social campaign. What you have is a failed advertising or direct marketing campaign.

Don’t get me wrong, advertising and direct marketing are fine. They work brilliantly for all succesful NFP organisations.

Social campaigns DON’T work effectively for lots of NFPs, and that’s precisely because they’re not able or ready to deal with the sheer volume of engagement that these campaigns require.

I’ve worked on some pretty high profile social campaigns, and it’s vital to be seen to be responding to supporter concerns, dealing with negativity and rewarding positive feedback.

Personally, I think that NFPs stand to benefit from social campaigning much more than brands, as people are much more prepared to wear their heart on their sleeves and publicly declare their support for a cause than they are for a brand, and the power of the social networks is perfect for raising campaign awareness which can be directly converted into fundraising, lobbying or volunteering.

If people could get the idea that a social campaign is more about word-of-mouth and referral marketing, than about web and technology, then most NFPs would have a much better idea of what such a campaign requires in terms of resources to be succesful.

- Stephen Foxworthy, BPL Marketing

I always go by the commonsense dictum my Grandma used to say: “If there’s nothing to be said, best say nothing.” The corollary also applies.

Either way, best to make a deliberate strategic decision (even if your strategy is to “say nothing” — make that a deliberate strategy) so that you at least have a basis for measuring against and comparing at a future date when it may indeed make sense to have something to say.

It is never good not to have a Strategy.

- Andy “Chieftain” Cawston, Guardian Angels New Zealand

Nonprofit transparency, Part II

We asked, and you answered! Here are some of the most interesting responses to last week’s questions about nonprofit transparency:

I think its several things:
- Making it clear what your money goes to
- Stating an expense ratio so people can see what percentage of every dollar donated goes to the cause
- Having financial reports avaialble for donors
- Disclosing what you will and won’t invest any reserves in.
- Disclosing any related party transactions

- Director, Marketing and Business Development at Heart Foundation

In addition to all those good things that Darrin mentioned, I think transparency is also about creating a culture within your organization that questions are welcome, not an annoyance, and patrons and others are encouraged to learn more about the organization and see how it works. It’s one thing to tell them what their money is going towards. It’s even better to show them in your publications and your website, and having opportunities for them to see the offices and operations, to ask questions, and to learn.

- Non-Profit Fundraising & Management Professional

In the ‘for profit’ world transparency to investors is accomplished through a 10K or a 10Q. These documents not only highlight financial information, but also describe operations, ‘wins’, and risks to success.

To the extent your organization can emulate to some extent what companies in the public sector do, you go a long way towards accomplishing transparency to your constituents.

While in general I agree with the previous comment, expense ratios certainly don’t provide as much insight into the success or lack thereof of a NFP. As a highly simplistic comparison to the for profit world, Rolls Royce certainly has a higher operating cost than that of Volkswagon. But I think we could all conclude that Rolls Royce certainly makes a higher quality product.

The bottom line is that successful transparency results in full disclosure of financial, non-financial, objective and subjective information to your interested parties.

- Director-Finance/Controller at X PRIZE Foundation 

What do you think? Anything else to add?

Nonprofit transparency

As we explore the idea of transparency in nonprofits, we thought we’d also conduct an experiment in using LinkedIn’s Q&A feature to source some industry experts’ thoughts on the matter. Please feel free to weigh in on this question, either here at iOn or via LinkedIn, and we will be compiling some of the more interesting responses next week:

What is transparency with donations? Ok, so when we all donate, we want to know what our money is going towards, right? Is this the only form of transparency NFPs need to think about? Anyone out there have particular feelings on what this is and how NFPs should be addressing this issue?