Time to Wade (Cautiously) Into Social Media

By Abny Santicola

In a tough economy, with limited financial and human resources to work with, how should you allocate your time?

Harmon said when people ask her if they should have a Facebook profile, she recommends answering the following questions:

What do you want to do?
Where do your stakeholders live [online]?
What's your capacity?

Understand the capabilities of the different media, think about what you want to do and fit your goal to a tool. For example:

Awareness — build a presence on social networks.
Activism — build a presence on social networks.
Raise money — direct mail is still king. For example, total individual giving last year was more than $300 billion, and Facebook Causes raised $2 million. Online giving is, however, on the rise.
Acquisition — Google Adwords, e-mail marketing, co-registration.
All of the above — Most organizations don't have the capacity to do all of these things, so Harmon recommended created a hierarchy of which is most important to accomplish.

Content is king online, and it takes a lot of time to create. According to ThePort, the average nonprofit is allocating 25 percent of employee time to social media.