NTC

Nonprofits are embracing Social Networks: an industry survey reveals 74.2% of non-profits have a presence on Facebook. But is it being used successfully? Yes! At the Nonprofit Technology Conference session, “Confessions of a Social Media Campaigner” with Danielle Brigida, National Wildlife Federation, David J. Neff, American Cancer Society and Carie Lewis, The Humane Society we saw some impressive results and heard some cautionary tales.

Our favorite story was about Greenhour.org shared by Danielle. We could imagine just about any non-profit with a lightly visited website and little dedicated social media support being able to pull off the same sort of results. Her strategy was first to understand the core community of this NWF micro-site namely parents keen on taking their children outdoors. Then she encouraged the staffer running the site to reach out to ‘mommy bloggers’ by posting comments to their blogs. Next they used stumbleupon.com, a social bookmarking site, to ‘thumb up’ the sites pages to improve search engine ranking by increasing inbound links. They actively engaged the site’s community using Twitter. Finally, she submitted the site’s content to Kirsty.com, a mom oriented niche Digg-like service.

The results? Within eight months pages views doubled (from 8,000 to 16,000), email list doubled (2,500 to 5,000) and they have established relationships with influential ‘mommy bloggers’ across the country who are representing them. Moral of the story?

  • Target your marketing and pursue niche audiences
  • Campaign about something you have street cred about
  • Improve your search engine ranking with inbound links using stumbleupon, reddit, and possibly digg.
  • Guest post on external blogs to extend your audience
  • Campaign about thing where you are credible
  • Start a twitter account with feeds from you main site

Some other great bits of advice from the other panelists included:

  • Be ready to spend time on social media, it is not about $, it is about time. Trained up interns can take some of the drudgery out of the most repetitive tasks and they can be based anywhere.
  • Integrate social media into overall online communications. You get the best results when your campaigns are showing up in all your channels, including your main website.
  • Failure can sometimes be the best lesson. Try, learn, try something new: there is no failure unless you give up.
  • Make everything shareable – use AddThis or ShareThis
  • Set easy and measurable goals at first (e.g. double number of followers by 20% in 2 weeks). It gets your management engaged and excited.
  • Don’t be afraid to show personality – we are all real people behind the Twitter feeds!

The potential of social media for the non profit sector is amazing, it is a matter of experimenting and finding what works for you.

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