How Active Is Your Nonprofit's Leader on Social Media?

A couple of weeks ago, a Weber Shandwick study concluded that 64% of the CEOs at the world's largest companies were not social online. How about your nonprofit? Is your CEO/Executive Director/President/etc. active on social media? Well... let's start with the basics... Does he/she have an account with any of the big boys (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube)?

If he/she does have one or more of these accounts, what is he/she doing with it? Is he/she using it or is there a random intern who "gets" social media that manages the accounts? Is the CEO blogging anywhere? The level of social media use among nonprofit leaders is this week's poll question. I will follow-up with results, thoughts and best practices once the poll closes.

Poll:

In the meantime, here are some of the findings from the Weber Shandwick study:

• Over nine out of 10 CEOs in the world’s top 50 companies (93 percent) communicated externally in traditional fashion: 93 percent were quoted in the major global news and business publications and 40 percent participated in speaking engagements to an external, non-investor, audience.
• Online communications did not fare as well among this executive set. Most CEO online visibility is limited to what is said about them on Wikipedia, the web-based collaborative encyclopedia which CEOs and their communications teams are not responsible for. Removing Wikipedia leaves the online CEO space rather barren—only 36 percent are engaged through their company websites or in social media channels in any way (e.g., CEO messages on company websites, video/podcasts on company websites or company YouTube channels, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, company-affiliated blogs).

Who Is a Social CEO?
A sample of the characteristics of Social CEOs as identified by the research:

• Social CEOs are multi-users. When they engage online, social CEOs employ more than one channel, with 72 percent using more than one channel (on average, social CEOs use 1.8 channels).
• Social CEOs are more tenured. Newer CEOs (3 years or less) are less likely than those in their middle (3 to 5 years) or later period of their tenures (more than 5 years) to engage online—30 percent vs. 38 percent vs. 43 percent, respectively.

Original version of title photo (without icons) from Heliotrop3's Flickr photostream.

CEO graph from Weber Shandwick press release.

Results: Should gift officers make gift to organization?

I posted the above question last week. The results did not surprise me, but it is good to see the actual numbers:

The "Other" responses included one from a consultant who writes letters for many orgs and does not see the need to support each of them and one without a comment.

That being said, having overseen staff fundraising campaigns previously, I doubt 87% of fundraisers do make a gift to their employers. I also have seen the divide between "frontline fundraisers" and "backroom operations" / "support staff" in terms of giving percentages. This is why I hammer home the need to make everyone on your team embrace the fact that every individual is a fundraiser, even if they don't go out and make the final ask. The research, support, etc. are all critical components of a fundraising campaign and should be recognized as such.

If you have giving percentages for your organization feel free to share below (anonymously) or share your thoughts in the comment section.

Poll: Do Gift Officers Need to Give to your Organization?

Do those asking for money on behalf of your organization need to support your organization financially as well? ...Or is the ask simply about having the skill to make the ask?

Poll:

How a Non-Profit Can Find More Twitter Followers

So last week I posed the question "Do you follow #FollowFriday suggestions on Twitter?" This question was asked because of some of my findings in this post and my discussions with others on Twitter. The findings were not surprising - #FF is becoming more noise in the system than a useful tool. But it is still resulting in some following.

That begs the question - What is the best way to gain followers for your non-profit?

Before I address that question, let me answer the basic question - "What's #FF?" This was the response of 14% of the poll's respondents. It started on January 16, 2009, when Micah Baldwin posted the following on Twitter:

It resulted in one of the most common hashtag campaigns on Twitter. The idea works because it is easy, has some good karma behind it (if I #FollowFriday you, maybe you'll do the same for me), and it is perfect for the Twitter medium. If you want to know more about the history of #FF (as it is commonly referred to), you can visit the Mashable article on the topic.

As for the results of the poll, the number one response was "I rarely follow #FF suggestions." Other responses below (click on the graph for a larger, more detailed version).

So how do you gain followers? First we have to examine that question... is the number of followers your most critical statistic on Twitter? No. It used to be a big deal to inflate your follower number... particularly if your name was Ashton Kutcher. Now - unless you're selling weight-loss products or energy drinks - it is more important to find quality followers rather than quantity. That being said, how do you find more followers and the right followers.

1. Be active.

Twitter isn't for checking into twice a month.

2. Have great content.

Great content gets users engaged, retweeting & clicking on links. Lousy content gets users to click "unfollow."

3. Have balanced sources.

If you constantly send people to your blog or website, people will start to ignore you... as you'll seem like you're only focused on self-promotion. On the other hand, if you only post other users' material, you'll lose any status as an authority.

4. Seek out the best in your field.

Follow them. Engage them (without seeming like an annoying "groupie").

5. Follow @moredonors

See how I just threw that in there for fun? In reality, you need to mention it on your website and in press releases or blog posts. Your Twitter button should be prominent on your website, as I mentioned in the post 8 Common Social Media Mistakes.

6. Plug your account at live events.

You can even provide a laptop for Twitter users to follow you or non-users to sign-up during events.

7. Ask questions.

Questions result in answers, which results in curiosity and broadcasting of your username... which results in more followers.

8. Be grateful.

Thank people for following and their input. Answer their questions. Avoid saying "Thanks for the RTs" every few posts, though.

9. Use bit.ly to shorten URLs... then use retwt.me to redirect.

Bit.ly provides easy tracking and searching of previously shortened URLs. Retwt.me provides a nudge and almost-subliminal suggestion to retweeting your links.

10. Follow other non-profits like your own.

This will help you see best practice examples and generate new ideas and partnerships for your organization.

11. To auto-respond or not to auto-respond, that is the question.

I'm not a big fan of auto-responding to followers, because it is so obviously an auto-response and is worse than no message at all. That being said, if you were to use language like "Thanks for following! This is a auto-response, but to start a real dialog, tell me what question you have for us / like about our organization / would do to improve our efforts / etc." That would avoid the appearance that you're trying to pass off an auto-response as genuine and personal.

Updated to include an example:

12. If appropriate, have multiple accounts (and only if you can manage them!)

Organization, CEO, material experts, etc. However, if you can't manage them, stick with one.

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What other thoughts do you have on the topic?

#FollowFriday: Do you do it?

So I recently was promoted as worthy of following on Twitter by @nonprofitorgs as a "#FollowFriday" designee:

At first, I thought... "Wow... I'm going to get tons of followers because of this promo!" Reality set in shortly thereafter. Of @nonprofitorgs ~377K followers, three followed the suggestion. For those of you doing the math, that's about 0.00000796%. First, let me say I appreciate being designated as a #FF and won't look a gift horse in the mouth, so-to-speak. But it led me to question whether or not #FF had gone from being a positive Twitter hashtag to simply being noise in the system. That leads to two things:

1) My two cents on listing others as worthy of #FF: Give a reason to follow. See the example below re: @rosettathurman (follow her!). It makes the user seem more worthy.

2) This week's poll question:

Poll: Is Your Non-Profit on foursquare?

Select as many answers as applicable: