Thou Shalt: 10 Musts for MySpace Advocacy-Building

Online social-networking sites offer nonprofit organizations a free, easy way to spread their message and acquire supporters.

MySpace is one such site, where users can set up personalized profile pages with their own blog, photos, music and videos and connect with a network of friends. It has more than 100 million registered users and, according to a comScore Media Metrix report released in early October 2006, more than half of them are age 35 or older.

Nonprofit organizations have begun to see the value in joining MySpace and creating a profile for their organization as a means of branding and advocacy building. But in the white paper “The Ten Commandments of MySpace Advocacy,” Marc Ruben, senior consultant for M+R Strategic Service, says before your organization dives into MySpace and launches a campaign, it should:

1) Decide if MySpace is right for your organization. MySpace works for some nonprofits not because it has a slew of users, but because it’s a great place to engage young people. Bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better. Smaller networks with a different demographic might be more effective for your organization.

2) Let go the reins of control. You can’t examine every word of every person’s profile who wants to become your friend. “If you or your lawyers are not comfortable with the fact that you’re going to lose some control over content, MySpace probably isn’t right for you,” Ruben writes.

3) Accept that the pay-off might not be immediate. MySpace is a place where users make friends. According to Ruben, “converting those friends to activists and/or donors will likely be a long-term process.”

4) Pay attention to the buzz. See who’s already talking about/advocating for your organization on MySpace. There already may be a user-generated profile for your organization set up by supporters. Perhaps someone is blogging about your work. If people are talking more about your organization on other social-networking sites, it may be wise to focus your energies on those sites.

5) Make sure you’re ready before going “live.” You want to wow potential friends from the start. Be sure to test your layout on a dummy account to make sure the coding is correct. Do you like the picture and title of your profile? Does everything display as you’d like it to?

6) Create edgy, viral content. MySpace is a great place to test out ideas to see what things interest people and get passed around. “If it doesn’t make you think ‘Cool!’ then it’s probably not viral,” Ruben writes. Post videos and music, if you have them. See what works better: a campaign-specific page or a general organizational page. If you have a campaign based around a personality, e.g., a candidate for a political organization, or an animal for an animal-welfare group, you can set up a fake profile for them.

7) Contact your current supporters who have MySpace accounts. Survey your members to find out who they are. You can upload your personal address book and send contacts a “friend request.” MySpace will let you upload up to 90 e-mail addresses from your personal address book at a time.

8) Keep up communications with MySpace friends. Update your profile regularly to reflect new issues you’re working on. You also can encourage friends and constituents to subscribe to your MySpace blog to stay current with new postings.

9) Devote staff time to MySpace advocacy. Once created, don’t leave your page — and friends — hanging. Ruben recommends assigning a staff person to accept friend requests, post comments on other people’s pages and invite new users to become friends.

10) Funnel friends to your organizational Web site to build your e-mail list. Create prominent links on your profile page to make it easy for people who visit your profile to join your e-mail list, and track who joins your list through your MySpace profile. Tailor your messaging in subsequent communications with them in a way that acknowledges that this is how they joined your constituency.

For the complete white paper, visit www.mrss.com/news/Ten_Commandments_of_MySpace_Advocacy.pdf