Social Media

With its ability to spread the word easily and quickly, social media is a great tool for your nonprofit to use in fundraising. But if that’s the only thing you’re using social media for, you won’t get very far. People use social media to be social, to interact with others. That means you should be engaging with your supporters throughout the year by chatting them up on your sites, responding to them when they have questions, and sharing useful and entertaining information about your charity’s mission.

How do you go about getting email addresses from your social-media fans? First, put a URL in your About (“Short Description”) section on Facebook, and as the “Website” link on Twitter. Next, set up custom tabs on Facebook. Keep making asks to your audience to get people to sign up for your email list. Try using online advertising on Facebook and Twitter.

Thanks to a partnership with the Public Interest Registry, Heather Mansfield of Nonprofit Tech for Good was able to report live from the Nonprofit Technology Conference (#14NTC) last week in Washington, D.C. Empowered with a tablet and smartphone, one of Heather’s first priorities was to reveal the faces and expertise behind some our favorite nonprofit brands. The results are below and what you’ll hear are the responses to the question: “What is your number one piece of nonprofit technology advice for nonprofits?” You can view all videos at instagram.com/nonprofitorgs.

To better understand how nonprofit practitioners integrate social media and online communications into their strategies, the Case Foundation, in collaboration with Social Media for Nonprofits, created an informal survey to help advance the conversation around how nonprofits use social media to engage their communities. Close to 500 nonprofit professionals, who are involved with running their organizations' social media and online communications efforts, responded to the survey detailing their own methodologies and practices.

Social proof is the concept that a person will follow suit the thoughts and actions already validated by others. On the Internet, marketers have looked to social poof as a measurement of a product or company’s value of credibility. Simply put, people care about what others think and recommend. Nonprofit organizations can leverage social proof to attract new donors and recruit a fresh cohort of supporters.
 
Here are a few ways you can increase the visibility of your organization’s social proof to harness its power in garnering new support for your organization.

I’m just back from the SXSW Interactive Festival, where I was on a panel called “What Social Media Analytics Can’t Tell You” moderated by Alexandra Samuel of Vision Critical, Jeremiah Owyang of Crowd Companies and Colby Flint of Discovery Channel. We discussed how social-media analytics can provide some great information on your existing social media followers, but at the same time, there are gaps that need to be filled through other techniques.

The rise of Twitter has resulted in a new campaign awareness strategy and online event known as a tweet chat. Organized around the use of a hashtag, such as #HealthTalk or #PovertyChat, nonprofits worldwide are adding tweet chats to their editorial calendars. When done well, nonprofits can gain exposure on Twitter, solidify their brands as expert resources and increase awareness about the issues they advocate. To ensure a successful tweet chat, nonprofits should …

Other than finding that young mentor or hiring a social-media specialist, here are five tips for increasing your social-media success.

There is lots of chatter all around about how social media can help with fundraising. Fundraising still works the “tried and true” way, by building authentic connections. For me, social media is just a tool … and fundraisers need lots of tools at the ready to do the job.

Using tools to manage information — donor databases, wealth analysis, social media — can help move relationships along. Here’s how I have used LinkedIn with midlevel and major donors.

To join or not to join? That is the question. With hundreds of social-media sites out there, how do you choose which ones to use for your organization? Doing it because it’s popular isn’t necessarily the best reason. Here are a few tips on making the tough choices: You can't be on every network — pick two or three that make the most sense. 2. The message is the medium …