Social media basics for nonprofits presented to Women's Way.

1. Social Media For
Nonprofits:
Don’t Get Left Behind
April 19, 2012
Eileen O’Brien
@eileenobrien

2. What is Social Media?
• “A social trend in which people
use technologies to get the
things they need from each
other, rather than from
traditional institutions like
corporations”
Groundswell by Charlene Li &
Josh Bernoff

3. Social Media is a Tactic
• Social media is not a strategy but a tactic
• Start with an objective, create a strategy and
determine the best tactics
• Integrate into your overall marketing objectives
• Key to marketing is telling a compelling story
 Social media can enable this

4. Is Your Target Audience Using SM?
Source: PewInternet.org

5. How Is Your Target Using SM?
Source: PewInternet.org

6. How Do You Start?
• Recruit the people
within your organization
who are passionate
about social media
• Use it in your own life
and become comfortable
with the technology
• Be selective: start small
and build

7. Monitor Social Media
• Pay attention to what is being said about your
organization
 Free Google alerts
 Take it private
• Don’t delegate to intern
• Have a crisis communications plan
 Be prepared to act quickly using same media
 Be nimble

8. Learn from Planned Parenthood
• Komen used SM as another
platform for corporate
announcements
• PP used SM to engage in
continued dialogue with
stakeholders starting well
before the crisis
• Komen’s messaging was
inconsistent, changed course
and tone
Source: Lessons from the Komen Controversy,
SocialMediaToday.com

9. Listen
• Listening may give you insights which will lead the
strategy
• Learn what’s important to your audience
 Can you fill a need? How can you add value?
• Check out what the competition is doing
• Pay attention
• Social media has been compared to a cocktail
party

10. Add Value

11. Be Thoughtful
• Many social media tools are
free, but they require
resources to create content
and keep them updated
• You can damage your
reputation by starting and
then abandoning social
media projects
• Squat on your name
 http://namechk.com
Image courtesy of Striatic on Flickr

12. How Do You Find The Time?
• Integrate into what you
are currently doing
 Bring a video to an
interview and post a
teaser on YouTube
• Make a conscious
decision: the time spent
on social media may
mean giving something
else up
Image courtesy of D. Sharon Pruitt on Flickr

13. Use Your Time Wisely
• Measurement is essential
 Determine up front how you will measure success
• Did you meet your objective?
 More volunteers
 Heightened awareness
 Donations
 Increased event participation
 Generated PR
 Education on issues
Image courtesy of Jonny Goldstein on Flickr

14. Make It Shareworthy
• Most effective online organizing programs
whether fundraising or advocacy is to
make each of your appeals part of a
campaign
• People give to funds that generate an
emotional response, tell your story
• Articulate in simple terms what you are
trying to do
• Make it urgent, have a deadline
• Make it EASY

15. 100 Uniforms in 100 Hours

16. Twitter

17. What’s Twitter?
• A free social networking &
micro-blogging service
that allows users to send
updates or tweets (text-
based posts up to 140
characters long) to anyone
who opts to receive them
• Asks: What’s
happening?
• Per Pew, 13% of American
adults who use the
internet are Twitter users Image courtesy of Robert Scoble on Flickr

18. What’s Twitter?
Use free tools: Tweetdeck or HootSuite

19. Types of Accounts
• Organization
 100% branded content, don’t follow people or interact
 Can be managed by a team, low risk of going off
message
 Using interactive tool to push out information, not
establishing relationships
Source: Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

20. Types of Accounts
• Organization With Personality
 Employee(s) who tweet are identified & interact with
followers
 Makes it personal, builds relationships
 May be difficult to scale, succession can be an issue if
person becomes so associated with brand leaves, also
risk of going off message
Source: Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

21. Who To Follow
• Thought leaders and cause enthusiasts
 For social media & nonprofits: @kanter, @ntenhross,
@beautifulthangs, @SocialBttrfly, @peterdeitz
• Search on your topics of interest
 Look at who others follow
• Take your time

22. How To Get Followers
• Quality over quantity
• When you follow someone send them a tweet
explaining why you are following them
• Search on your area of interest and then answer
questions or respond
 “Seek out people you can help and do it!” Wil
Reynolds
• Add yourself to “yellow pages”
 http://twellow.com
 http://wefollow.com

23. How To Get Followers
• Engage with your
followers, thank them for
support, give them ways
to get involved
• Utilize hashtages
(#word)
• Weekly Chats
 Take part in existing ones
or host a Tweetchat
Image courtesy of Christopher Carfi
on Flickr

24. Check Out TwitCause

25. YouTube

26. YouTube
• Second largest volume
of searches
• In December 2011
 85% of the total U.S.
Internet audience views
online video
 182 million U.S. Internet
users viewed 43.5 billion
videos
Source: comScore Image courtesy of Karl Jonsson on Flickr

27. YouTube
• A keyword-tagged video is 50 times more likely
to appear on the 1st page of a Google search
result compared with a traditional web page
according to Forrester Research
• YouTube program for nonprofits
• YouTube Video Volunteers
 Can find someone who is willing to use their
equipment and skills to help a nonprofit make a video

28. YouTube Channels
• Free to set up a
YouTube channel
• Centralized place for all
videos, can be branded
& users can subscribe
• Can turn off comments
or use it as another way
to connect

29. How Do You Get Views?
• People have short attention spans, so capture
attention in first 30 second
 Keep the whole video short
 Have a call to action at the end
 Shoot for a computer screen
• Ask for user-generated content
• Tell serial stories which engage viewers & keep
them coming back
• React to current events
• Use endorsements
• Tag & title your videos with relevant keywords

30. How Do You Get Subscribers?
• Subscribe to the YouTube
channels of other
nonprofits, they may do
the same
• Ask people to subscribe
• Share links for your videos
with supporters so they
can help get the word out
 Make the embed code
available so people can post
the video on their sites Image courtesy of Todd Huffman on Flickr

31. Facebook

32. Facebook
• Nonprofits can create customized pages
• Claim vanity URL
 http://www.twitter.com/yournonprofit
• Engage with fans
 Comment on their wall posts & help people connect
with others
• Show people how to connect beyond Facebook
 Email sign up or drive to website

33. Facebook Page
• Non-Profits on Facebook

34. Facebook Stats
• Use the data to understand
what your fans like, don’t
like, what type of content
they interact with the most
and what they share with
their friends
 Facebook gives you locale
breakdown and demographic
information
Image courtesy of Sasha Wolff on Flickr

35. How to Get Fans
• Promote via other marketing channels
• Encourage fans to suggest to their friends become
fans
• Run promotion or contest
• Give fans what they want
 Be active and add content
 70% of all actions on social networks are related to
viewing pictures or viewing other people's profiles
Source: Understanding Users of Social Networks

36. Blogs

37. It’s All About Content
• Excellent for search
• Enables thought leadership
• Syndicate content
• Recommend WordPress
• If too time intensive, consider:
 Guest blogging
 Combining forces
 Comment on other blogs

38. Google+

39. Google’s New Social Network
• 100M adopters versus Facebook 1 Billion
• Needs content, engagement with fans
• Being used for search results

40. SlideShare.net

41. Share Presentations
• Free account, post and tag presentations
• Access this presentation on
http://slideshare.net/eileenobrien

42. Summary

43. Market Social Media
• Integrate the social tactics into the entire
marketing strategy
• Promote social media tactics via all marketing
such as: direct mail, email signature,
newsletters, announce at events
• Leverage your content across various places
 Put video on YouTube
 Embed it into a blog post
 Promote blog post via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn
 Link to the blog post in an enewsletter

44. Golden Rules
• Social media is all about being human, so have
personality
• Never say anything you wouldn’t say in front of
your mother
• It’s all about building relationships
• Treat others with respect
• Be generous
• Add value
Image courtesy of Jason on Flickr

45. Resources
• ComcastNewMediaExchange.com
• Groundswell
 Examples of award winning non-profits
• Beth Kantar
 Beth’s Blog: How nonprofits can use social media
• Pew Internet & American Life Project
• Netsquared
• Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the
Connected Age by AllisonFine

46. Questions?
Thanks!
eiobri@yahoo.com
@EileenOBrien