Every week Mashable.com summarizes the site's stories and blogs that they classify as the essential social media resources you may have missed. As a corresponding resource for the non-profit world, I take it each week and share some of the applicable tools through a pair of non-profit spectacles. You can find the May 15, 2010 edition below.
1) Making your Twitter account a success...- Write a Great Bio - You get 20 extra characters! Rather than the standard 140, you get 160 characters to make your case and be interesting to visitors (translation: potential donors and friends). Think of some key words that you could associate with your organization via a search engine. It is quite possible they are pillars of your mission. If you have resources such as board members, volunteers or donors-in-need-of-further-engagement - ask them to take a stab at your 160 character bio, while using the three or four words you identified. Compile the best of what you gather - key phrases, short sentences... remember, 160 characters won't mean you're combing through that much. Hopefully, this produces a gem you can use as a bio.
- Choose a Great Picture - Whereas conventional wisdom (as well as research) indicate a smiling face as the best for personal use, I advise clients to use a consistent image for your organization across all social media. Generally this should reflect your organization's logo and efforts - likely consistent with your brand image strategy. Remember that your Twitter profile picture normally will be displayed in a 48x48 (pixels) format. It also can be displayed in a larger format if users click on the picture. Therefore, you should use a higher quality pic that Twitter will automatically resize to 48x48 for use on the site. Here are two examples:
- Your Twitter Background - The Twitter background provides your organization the opportunity to illustrate your efforts, provide other links and put a personal face to your Twitter account. PETA provides a great example of this - listing Facebook, YouTube and MySpace accounts, illustrating their current campaign to stop the bludgeoning deaths of of baby seals in Canada, and introducing you to Royale Ziegler, PETA's "twitterer and veganista extraordinaire," Michelle Cho and Joel Bartlett as the people behind the Twitter account. Screen shot (click for a more detailed view):
- Your web link - Use your home page, without using a URL-shortener.
- Your tweets - Make sure your tweets generally provide value and engagement. While I encourage having fun with your tweets on occasion, as they add personal flavor, you want to make sure that if a new person visits your page they will get a sense for the value of your organization and the impact you are attempting to make.
- Use lists - Lists illustrate that you are trying to build the Twitter community and further more than just your own cause. Create a list of other like organizations or those with which you collaborate. For example, Share Our Strength has the @sharestrength/antihunger-organizations list that includes various food banks and community organizations with similar missions to SOS:
2) Partnering with a for-profit organization for a cause campaign...
From Mashable: Cause marketing can be described as the mutually beneficial relationship between a business and a non-profit organization. Social media cause campaigns are similar, but not identical to traditional cause marketing, in that they allow for more flexibility. Small businesses can gain exposure without breaking the bank, and large companies can reach millions of consumers in a matter of hours. Social cause campaigns can be run by individuals and non-profits without big company sponsorship. They provide easier, faster involvement with supporters, and require fewer resources.
For example, the hugely successful Blame Drew’s Cancer campaign was started by a single person, cancer fighter Drew Olanoff. Drew gained national attention when he encourage tweeters to #BlameDrewsCancer for everything from bad weather to a sports team’s loss. When Drew decided to sell his Twitter handle for charity, TV star Drew Carey stepped in and offered to donate up to $1 million to LIVESTRONG in exchange for @Drew.
Components to success:
- Create a strong theme with clear goals - This is where much of the success in social media fundraising has been garnered. It is also where some of the larger, more general campaigns (ex: higher education annual funds) have faced challenges in the medium. Keep your goal simple, your theme direct and have a deadline / clear ending.
You want to make it as easy for people to participate as possible; in social media, distractions fly a mile a minute. - Melissa Jones, Social Media Specialist for the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation.
- Find a for-profit partner who understands and is active in social media - The reach and success of your campaign will only be amplified if your partner is advanced in the platform and has more constituents (followers, fans - err... "likers?", etc) to engage. While we cannot all get Ashton Kutcher (4,897,179) followers at this moment) or Britney Spears (4,886,537) to give our campaign a promotional plug, make sure you do not approach a corporate partner before researching how savvy they are with social media.
- Identify and use your best social assets - Do you have connections to any celebrities? Does your organization have a connection to any influential Twitter/Facebook users? Engage them and get them to promote your campaign. Are there Twitter/Facebook lists/groups that align with your goals? Recruit members to help share your efforts.
- Identify your target audience - ...And this should not be a broad definition! "Everyone on Twitter," for example, is not a target audience, nor is "all our alumni" or "anyone with a dog!" A better defined audience will help you tailor your message and goals. As much as this may sound like Communications 101 it is a step that is often overlooked.
- Properly time your campaign - Timing can be the difference between campaign success and failure. Keep track of other events, news, holidays*, etc. that you can tie into for your kickoff and/or close of your campaign. Keep the duration long enough to engage a large audience, but short enough to create urgency. A month is about as long as you want a social media campaign to last. * I am partially complete with a comprehensive list of holidays - traditional, obscure and humorous - that have potential for non-profit tie-in. Keep an eye on the blog for more...
- Steward participants/donors - Once the campaign is complete, you need to provide quick and effective stewardship to your participants. This can be via email, blog and website, but must also be done via the medium/media used during the campaign.
We wrote a post-social cause campaign article on our blog to thank our supporters and include them in the celebration because we value our donors and volunteers as equal stakeholders in the organization — our success is their success - Noland Hoshino, Heifer International Portland Volunteer Coordinator.
3) Top social media tips for executive leadership...
Mashable gathered opinions and expertise from a top-of-the-line group of industry leaders: Tim Bray of Google, Guy Kawasaki of Alltop (formerly Apple), Doug Ulman of Livestrong, John Battelle of Federated Media and Steve Rubel of Edelman on the why and the how when it comes to executives and social media.
- Facebook & Twitter - These are obviously the two biggest players in the social media world. Should your CEO/VP/AVP/etc have doubts that the medium is only used for parties, cyber-farming and posting drunken pictures, be prepared with statistics on who uses Facebook & Twitter. Cite examples of the user demographics and general statistics, as well as what your peers/competitors are doing. Nothing gets an exec motivated like competition! If you need help with statistics, send me an email with what you are trying to propose and I will provide some helpful numbers. It is important your executives are able to speak with confidence about your social media efforts. A VP saying "Oh, we have young Bobby to work on our FaceTwitter account" will not only undercut "Bobby's" work, but anything the organization has done in the social media realm.
The average American consumes almost 12 hours of information per day in total (all formats) according to a study by the University of California at San Diego. However, social networks are increasingly directing these information flows... Basically marketers have always focused on generating maximum awareness and engagement with the greatest efficiency. In the past this was TV. Now it’s social networks. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn [are] the new ABC, CBS, ABC and Fox. So my advice is to maximize these as best you can – but this requires surface area and thus not just a media buy. - Rubel
- Invest in people and relationships - For most executives, time equals money. This provides a challenge to the average executive, as social media requires an investment of time. However, Battelle makes some convincing statements on the topic:
When sharing information with fans on Facebook or followers on Twitter, don’t forget that your job is to add value to these folks’ lives. Social media is about relationships. (CEOs and executives should) ...be the kind of person others want to seek out because each time they interact with you (or your brand), they feel like you’ve earned their attention and their loyalty.
- Be an expert - This should not be difficult for your organization. (I hope!) Your executives need to be experts in fundraising and case-building on behalf of your mission. They also need to be an expert (or have the help of some donor relations experts) at illustrating the impact donors are having. This will pay dividends in terms of stewardship and renewed gifts.
- Make it personal - Show the human side of your organization's leadership. Did your university's VP break his arm while biking? Tweet: "Took a silly tumble on my bike & broke my arm - thankfully @univhospital took good care of me!" Did your executive director spill a drink on her blouse at a VIP donor event? Post a picture to Facebook and laugh it off!
- Use social media within the organization - Share pictures via Flickr, Buzz or Facebook, create or promote events with the tools. Why not have an after-work happy hour that is only for those who reply to a CEO's tweet?
4) Turning social media "slacktivists" into activists...
Mashable tackles this one well from the non-profit point-of-view. You can view the entire piece here. Otherwise, here are the summary points from the post, with quotes that I thought illustrated the point well:
- Stop Thinking of Them as Slacktivists
What the world needs now is far more engagement by individual citizens, not less, and simple steps such as signing petitions or even sharing opinions/tweeting are steps in the right direction. As Edmund Burke once said, "Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little." Because small steps can lead to bigger steps, being critical of small steps serves no good. It simply disenfranchises folks. - Randy Paynter, CEO and Founder of Care2
- Steward People Up the Engagement Ladder
There are some slacktivists that will become fundraisers, but if you are messaging correctly, they will mostly self-select. But the fastest way to lose slacktivists is to ask them [to do] what they hate doing the most — getting off their butt and [doing] something. My advice? Send out great content targeted at recruiting more fundraisers and driving people to donate, and empower the slacktivists to spread the word for you. - Dan Morrison, CEO and Founder, Citizen Effect
- Reevaluate the Donor Funnel
Our current funnel goes something like this: Blast out marketing, see who responds, ask them for money, send them a receipt, ask them for more money. The new funnel should work like this: Go out to where people are talking about our issue online, listen, reflect back on what you’re hearing, invite small acts of engagement, thank people and tell them the difference their small acts made, listen some more, invite them to speak, then ask for bigger acts. - Katya Andresen, Chief Operating Officer of Network for Good
I think slacktivists — like anyone else on social networks — need to be cultivated and feel appreciated for their contributions, as small as they may seem. We message our cause supporters individually, and respond to (almost) every message that comes into us via social media. It takes a lot of time, but this individual engagement is what has made us successful. - Carie Lewis, director of emerging media at The Humane Society of the United States
- Create New Calls to Action
Don’t focus on asking them to give, focus on asking them to retweet any and everything you tweet, post on their wall, forward e-mails, etc. Focus on that, because that fits in their behavior pattern. Now, every once in a while, you can make a [money] appeal [to] the ones that [send] you a signal that they may be emerging from slacktivism. If you build a relationship with them, they will naturally graduate up the value chain. You can give them a nudge, but trying to force them will make them leave in droves. - Morrison
That does it for this edition of Through Non-Profit Eyes... until next time: may the gifts be plentiful, your constituents happy & your mission served,
DTM
P.S. Have you missed previous editions of Through Non-Profit Eyes? - check them out here.
Images courtesy of Twitter.com & Mashable.com
