Social Media

In last year’s installment of this annual nonprofit trends feature, we wrote that something felt different about all the change happening in the sector. We chalked it up to urgency. Acceleration. Things were changing fast. That was nothing compared to what’s in store for 2017. We collected insights, observations and predictions from some of the nonprofit sector’s smartest people, and we’re delivering them to you here. We hope the 40 ideas here paint a clearer picture of the sector as it is and as it will be...

On Facebook, it is ridiculously fun to quip, banter, engage, taunt, delve, disembowel and titillate. It is so much fun that a few times I have wandered into “Not-Niceness.” I had to find a way to stop being not nice. And I did. I Facebook-friended every church friend I could find, including my pastor. I friended them all so that they would see what I wrote. I thought that would constrain me. And I was right. It did make me nicer. But why? And more importantly, how could I make use of this behavior modification technique in fundraising?...

Cara Schmidt, development officer for Camphill Special School, wanted to build upon the school’s #GivingTuesday success in 2014 with a bigger, better 2015 campaign. The catch? She wanted to do it entirely via social media. It’s easy to reach people on social media. It’s much harder to get them engaged...

Last year, I gave you five priorities for success in 2016. I called them “Dive the Five.” This year, I’ve expanded my thinking a bit. I give you “Seven is Heaven.” I promise if you focus on these fundamental areas, you will hear the angels begin to sing and your mission will take wing. Some of these areas will seem familiar, but the way you employ them may need to be tweaked in order for you to survive and thrive...

If you knew that 80 percent of your unsatisfied constituents would unsubscribe from your email, would that make you more concerned about satisfaction? What if unsatisfied constituents translated to your email list or Facebook community shrinking?...

While the ever-shifting social landscape eventually renders many prognostications invalid, it’s still worth analyzing what might be on the horizon as a means of trying to understand where we’re at, and where we’re headed, as we plan for the next 12 months. Last year, my predictions mostly pointed in the right direction, so again, I’ve…

It’s no secret that as technology grows, the world’s attention span shrinks. A 2015 study by Microsoft reported that the average person’s attention span is now about eight seconds. That’s down from 12 seconds in the year 2000, at the start of the digital revolution. So how can a nonprofit catch the eye of a potential donor when attention shifts so rapidly? Try video...

I hope your year-end fundraising campaign is going well. Fundraising is a year-round effort and after you’ve thanked your donors, you need to make a plan to communicate with them at least once or twice a month throughout the year. If you’re getting stressed out wondering how you’re going to pull this off, then you…

As I mentioned in a recent post, IMPACTS is working on a social media metric that goes beyond thinking about vanity metrics such as likes, comments and shares—numbers that are good to have at high levels, but have variable impacts on our bottom lines of financial solvency or mission execution. We are working to create…

Shurat HaDin (the Israel Law Center) has launched a social media campaign to gain support for a $1 billion lawsuit against the king of social media, Facebook. The Tel Aviv-based nonprofit organization specializes in fighting terrorists in court. Its successes have included a $655 million jury award in New York in 2015 against the Palestinian…