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Like last time, I mentioned that I’d share some blog posts and data for those that want to dive in deeper to this conversation. Here are a few posts to get you thinking about platforms you may not yet be using:

• A Primer on Social Media Demographics in 2013 from Business Insider
• Here’s Where Teens are Going Instead of Facebook from Forbes
• Instagram, Vine, and the Evolution of Social Media from Pew Research
• 2013 Mobile Growth Stats (infographic) from digitalbuzz

What new platforms (new to you or new to the world) are on your list to try in 2014? Where do you see your community going and what kinds of tools are they using?

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When was the last time you were approached by a stranger in the store asking for you to donate to a cause they cared about? Well, sure – it does happen. Especially around the holidays or for local events, but how often do you respond? For many people, the decision to give money is influenced by our peer networks and personal experiences. That’s why social media can be a valuable component of your online fundraising strategies. After all, it’s called “social” media for a reason!

You can think about online engagement as throwing a house party. Your website is your kitchen, where you can prepare the snacks, make the punch, and arrange all the utensils; in other words, that’s where you can create and store all your content. The social channels you set up are the various rooms in the house where guests gather, certain groups sticking together in certain rooms just as your community naturally segments across the web.

You can then offer up snacks and drinks or even start conversations or games based on who is in the room and what they might enjoy, just like you do when you share certain content on certain online profiles based on the sub-groups in your community engaging on each platform.

Social media, the place where you get to hang out with your party guests, is the social space where you not only connect with those you know, but you get to make introductions and meet new people. It’s your chance to have direct conversations with supporters, fans, and donors – conversations that happen in public so many more people can learn about and engage with you.

How does this support online fundraising? Social media is the place where you can change a donation ask from a stranger into a call to action from a friend. This is the space where you can equip your supporters with your message and help them carry your campaign to their own networks.

Here are three ways you can start using social media in your campaign today.

Find the Influencers: Social media is a great resource for identifying the champions in your community. For example, start following the common hashtags, watch for popular retweets on Twitter, and check out the commonly shared images and liked Pages on Facebook. You will start to see certain people and organizations rise to the top. Even if they don’t have big follower numbers, if they are the ones people in your community listen to and respond to, they are influencers. Invite them to participate in your campaign and share your call to donate.

Track the Flow: use social media to track how your campaign is being talked about and where the talking is taking place. Whether you’ve indicated a campaign- specific hashtag or not, use Bit.ly to check for those sharing your website or campaign uRl on Twitter and then see what the tweets say. check your website analytics to see which social platforms are sending traffic to your campaign page and follow the links to the people sharing your content.

Share the spotlight: Social media is an easy tool to use to say thank you to supporters and donors in public. By sharing recognition publicly, in real time, you can give people a feeling that you are excited for their contribution and see them standing out in the crowd. It also encourages others to participate when they see that the organization is there, interacting, and really engaging.

Those are just three ways to get started, but there are endless possibilities for building relationships, establishing trust, and truly engaging your community through social media to join your campaign.

Get the full ebook at: https://www.blackbaud.com/npexperts

Slideshare

I use Slideshare for my presentations and other workshop or training materials. It’s easy to use, and it makes archiving and sharing materials with attendees really simple. Column Five has a new infographic about Slideshare user data with some interesting highlights. First and very striking is the 3 billion slideviews/month number! Slideshare reminds me of YouTube in that many nonprofits and even individuals use YouTube as the online storage space for videos that they plan to embed on their website or blog and otherwise share across the web. You benefit by storing the videos in a public and popular place so those that aren’t already watching your website can still come across your video and get engaged. Slideshare, with that many views, is serving a similar purpose where users are uploading content to be stored on Slideshare that they intend to embed or share elsewhere but benefit from those on the platform coming across the material and learning more.

Another highlight is the organic search traffic that nonprofit should take more advantage of. Have you spent days putting together a presentation for your board or a potential funder that highlights your work and impact? Maybe outlines how a new program is going to make a specific change to your community or the world. Putting that presentation on Slideshare where the title and the slide material can be indexed for searches means the next time I’m online searching for “important programs to end homelessness in NYC” I find your slides, your ideas, and ways to get involved with your organization.

It’s also noteworthy the high percentage of business and organizational leaders using Slideshare. Even more reason to expect that those coming across your material there to be potential partners, donors, or volunteers. There is no need to highlight specific case studies here as Beth Kanter has, of course, already ccreated a great list!

Pinterest

wishpond’s new infographic on Pinterest user data has some interesting data but I also know far more organizations experimenting with Pinterest or even using it well already. The first thing that struck me about the Pinterest data is the stat 80% of pins are actually repinned from another board. It’s really similar to the high percentage of content on Tumblr that’s reblogged from another blog. Couple that stat with nearly 84% of the time pinning content and what that really tells me is users enjoy the site and they enjoy sharing and collecting content; they do not, however, probably want to leave the site just to look at your website.

According to the infographic, 57% of the content on Pinterest is also food related! Considering all these dynamics, I think City of Hope’s shared board collecting recipes for mushrooms as part of the Mushrooms for Hope campaign is right on target. It’s a great example of creating content that is mission-supporting, true to the audience and platform, and really creates great opportunities for people to have interaction with the organization that is valuable to them and not just part of an ask.

Are you using Slideshare or Pinterest?

How is your organization creating or sharing content on these platforms? Would love to hear your lessons and stories!

Haven’t We Had This Conversation Before?

One of the biggest lessons I re-learn everywhere I go – in the city or in the world – is that for all the talk about differences, we are often very similar. Whether in my workshops in Romania or in Saudi (or in NYC), I’m often asking myself, “haven’t we had this conversation before?” As social entrepreneurs, innovators, and nonprofit leaders, many of the questions about social media that are always first to be asked have nothing to do with location but about strategy and success. Though, what is interesting to me, is that the question “how can I use this tool?” is usually embedded in the assumption that the answer is based on geographic location and even the specifics of the organization. Remember, these tools are just that: tools. A hammer isn’t fundamentally different in Saudi as it is in Wyoming. But the kind of building we’re interested in or the interests of the users may change. Social media platforms (tools!) should be considered for their functionality and options as part of your overall communications, engagement, and fundraising strategies but not as areas of investment all of their own.

Single Acces Point, to Facebook

Whenever I’m presenting to a group in another country, I spend time investigating any social media data I can find that is specific to that country, especially as it relates to mobile phones, access, and usage per capita. Saudi, again similarly to Romania, has a high percentage of citizens using mobile phones (especially as primary Internet access point) and with Facebook accounts. The power to connect to friends and family beyond our physical location is compelling enough for people to create accounts even when Internet access isn’t always readily available. This is probably not news, but after the first point above, it is a reminder to not make assumptions about who in your community uses which platforms and the kind of information or engagement they may want to have there. Looking only at data about Internet access in the home, one might think that people in your community aren’t online at all, or don’t want to receive email or updates on social media, when this very well may not be the case. It might sound silly or too simple, but I always encourage organizations – no matter their size – to actually ask their supporters which tools they use, and listen to the answers.

Limitations Often Encourage Innovation

During my time at KAUST I was able to meet with various student groups as well as university staff to learn more about their projects, initiatives, and ideas. Just as I experienced in Romania, preconceived ideas about the limitations innovators and entrepreneurs must be under in countries with far less infrastructure and the assumed lack of products and ideas that must exist are squashed immediately. When given no boundaries, it is often much harder to create something useful and new. But given limitations of any kind, people are driven to new ideas and solutions. I was also excited to see incredible openness to feedback and collaboration! Something I often see less of in the US than I think those outside this country think exists.

I’d love to hear your stories and experiences from working outside the US, especially in the Middle East!

(Photo: KAUST and The Beacon, taken by me.)

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Background: What’s ActionSprout

For years I have grumbled about the fact that Facebook doesn’t allow organizations to access the email addresses of their own Fans. And hopefully you never got me started on how the company has been treating organizations like frogs in a proverbial pot, slowly reducing the number of fans they deliver updates too. The idea that organizations have to pay to get an update onto a meaningful number Fans’ walls (Facebook acknowledges that it is down to 15% today) may be good business for Facebook, but the value proposition to organizations got less and less compelling.

At the same time I have watched organization struggle to engage with Facebook supporters in meaningful ways using just the actions Facebook has provided; Like, Share, or Comment. I have had numerous heated discussions with some of the loudest non-profit social media advocates about the real cost/benefit of Facebook as a platform for reaching supporters and deepening engagement with them over time.

To all who have endured my rants, you will be shocked to hear me say that I believe Facebook finally has the pieces in place to make a major impact on organizations ability to acquiring and building productive relationship with supporters. Yep, you heard me right, just at the very time Facebook is working harder than ever to monetize, I have become a believer. In fact, even their new Promote function provides nonprofits and campaigns with a rather compelling new tool for engaging organizations most ardent supporters.

Let me explain… Earlier this year Facebook rolled out their new Open Graph functionality and my long time do-gooding co-conspirator (Shawn Kemp) and I found ourselves contemplating if and how it might be utilized to help organizations acquire high quality fans on Facebook and, more importantly, build productive relationships with those supporters over time.

After months of learning and developing, we launched ActionSprout.com; to help organizations unlock their Facebook Fans with actions that move beyond Like, Share and Comment. The Facebook App gives organizations dozens of nonprofit-relevant social actions to engage supporters with directly on their own Facebook pages. For instance, instead of asking people to click “Like” on a wall post, they can now ask them to click “Recommend”, “Thank”, “Sign”, “Vote For,” “Stop,” “Contact”, “Support” or one of a dozen other actions we currently support.

Referral Rates

Over the past couple months we have been working with a few organizations and campaigns to put the system through its paces and begin to figure out how to actually use it and learn what kind of impact it can have.

Last week, we launched one of the most important pieces of the system for our team; the back-end analytics dashboard. As we push the dashboard live, we were excited and nervous. Would all these months of work be for not?

One of the key metrics we obsess over is the referral rate organizations are experiencing from their ActionSprout campaigns. In other words when a person takes an action like “Join” or simply clicks like on the post itself, do any of their friends join them? Facebook’s new Open Graph is designed to support the viral growth of highly relevant actions. Whenever a person takes an ActionSprout.com action on behalf of an organization, the app fires the Open Graph and automatically shares that action with some of their friends. We also give action takers other ways to help spread the word. But until you start seeing real traffic through an app like ActionSprout.com, there is really no way to know just what kind of referral rates to expect.

Case Study: ActionSprout and David Suzuki Foundation

One of the first organizations to run tests to measure referral traffic for ActionSprout.com was the David Suzuki Foundation, a Canadian Foundation working to protect the diversity of nature and Canadian’s quality of life, now and for the future. The results have far exceeded our expectations.

The Foundation launched it’s first campaign with the specific goal of testing the performance of ActionSprout.com relative to their standard campaign sign-up process (which drives people to a form on their website to complete a signup form). In order to help ensure that the data we were getting was meaningful, they were kind enough to focus on driving and measuring traffic to their ActionSprout.com campaign entirely through their Facebook wall even though they could have driven much higher performance had they also driven traffic to their ActionSprout.com campaign via email and their website.

The call to action for all posts was to join the Fall Family Challenge by clicking a link. The link on their first post drove people to the organization’s standard web form, not their ActionSprout app. This first post went out on a Saturday and resulted in 125 people signing up for the campaign. As would be expected, the vast majority of these 125 people were Fans who received the call to action from their news feed. “The results from that are meaningful,” says Sarah Hall, the Foundation’s communications manager. “After all, we can now reach out directly to each of those people via email and build deeper relationships.”

On the following Monday, The Foundation posted a similar call to action to their Facebook page. On this post, the call to action link pointed to their ActionSprout.com tab. That call to action drove 119 Fans to join the campaign—not bad for a Monday afternoon. But the really interesting part was what happened after they started seeing Fans take action. For each Fan who joined the campaign through ActionSprout.com, the organization has seen another 1.8 people who were not previously fans join, the campaign along with them. Where did these people come from?

• First, each time a person took the action it fires an open graph story that is shared with some of their friends and gets aggregated on their timeline. That means an open graph story is getting posted to their wall and timeline for 100% of action takers.
• Second, after taking an action The Foundation has ActionSprout configured to give the action taker a quick post to wall dialog. In their case, over 75% of action takers shared the action.
• Third, because this campaign was targeted at families with kids, many of The Foundation’s fans choose to like and share the post but didn’t sign up themselves. Some number of friends of these sharers chose to Join the campaign as well.

In other words, for every 100 Fans who joined the campaign through the ActionSprout.com app, the organization also acquired 180 new campaign members, for a total of 280 campaign members.

The thing that excites us and the David Suzuki Foundation is that those new people didn’t just click “Like” because they wanted to give a wink to a friend who was up to something. They joined a campaign that directly connected them to the organizations work. These people are new to The Foundation, but already Sarah and her colleagues know how they relate to their work and can begin to serve and engage them accordingly.

The David Suzuki Foundation also uses Salesforce as its CRM (constituent relationship management) system, and has ActionSprout.com setup to automatically add or update contact records with names and email addresses of any person who joins the campaign. (This feature is available starting on our mid-level $90/mo plan) During the two-week campaign, the David Suzuki Foundation added several hundred new constituents to its database.

Last Friday, The Foundation launched a new ActionSprout Campaign to support help them apply pressure to “Stop” a potentially disastrous China-Canada trade deal that the Prime Minister has secretly negotiated behind closed doors. This campaign has sees similar referral rates and but with much higher overall numbers. So far, their “Stop” campaign has seen more than 3000 people take the action in under 48 hours.

I can’t tell you how wonderful it feels to finally be able to do more than just grumble about the limitations of Facebook for building truly productive relationships. We are excited to continue to see what organizations do with ActionSprout.com. If you’re interested in giving the system a try, here’s a 30-day free trial code that will work on all of our plans (referral code: Amy112) – so jump in and take ActionSprout for a test drive.

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Last month, a pop song rose up the charts and quickly became number one on both the iTunes and Billboard Top 100 lists. That song, “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, quickly also became the soundtrack to an Internet meme—that is, an idea that spreads online (“I Can Has Cheezburger?” is one of the more famous). More than a dozen athletic teams recorded themselves dancing and lip-syncing to the song (many in vans, spurring a Romney and Obama spoof). Many more groups joined in on the fun,recording videos and posting to YouTube. One of the more recent to join in is Sesame Street. That’s right, a widely recognized nonprofit organization has created a parody so that it can propagate a meme.

Whether it’s “Call Me Maybe,” “Sh*t People Say,” or any other meme that comes along, here are three guidelines you can use to decide when and how to get your nonprofit involved in an Internet meme.

Why meme at all?

Why would an organization even consider participating in something like this? It’s fun, for one. Just watch Sesame Street’s video (above) or the Harvard baseball team’s. Everyone involved in an organization and everyone online is, actually, human, and fun is a good thing.

But beyond that, contributing to a popular meme can help make your brand and even your staff more visible. It shows some of the personality of your organization beyond the brick and mortar. You can also leverage participation in a meme to build connections and get new supporters.

That said, having fun, gaining visibility, and making connections with new supporters happens only if you do it right.

 3 Guidelines for Nonprofits

1. Above all else, don’t compromise your values and mission. For some organizations, that means never participating in any of this Internet hokey pokey, and that’s OK. For others, it means being aware of what the root of the meme is, why people are remaking and remixing the content, and how your community will respond. With the “Call Me Maybe” example, the song is very popular and many people in the Sesame Street community have heard it (a lot of Sesame Street supporters are parents that grew up with the show and support it as adults). The Sesame Street show teaches basic lessons through stories of characters in typical situations and common scenarios. The meme video uses the same formula, changing the words to the song and using the well-known Cookie Monster as the lead character.

2. Stick to your voice. You don’t want to get visibility and make new connections using one message, tone, or personality, and then surprise them once they join your email list, subscribe to your YouTube Channel, or follow you on Twitter with something altogether different. Just as Sesame Street did, use the meme as a chance to tell the story you want to tell, showcase the character (or people!) you want in the spotlight, and do it all in the voice you’ve established at your organization. Neither Cookie Monster nor Sesame Street would ever really sing the words as they are written to “Call Me Maybe,” but the “Share It Maybe” lyrics are aligned with the lessons (sharing is good!), the character, and the voice of the show.

3. Plan for it to spread. We’re great at planning our communications regularly (or at least we try), and you can’t release something a little out of the ordinary without some planning too. In the Sesame Street video, the logo is overlaid on the video footage and linked (via YouTube’s link overlay option) to Sesame Street’s subscribe channel. There is also a segment at the end of the video that promotes the channel, encourages people to subscribe, and points to more videos. As the denizens of the Internet are wont to do, they createda still image of the Sesame Street video and added text to capture the spin on the meme from Cookie Monster’s lyrics—in this case, “they” was Mashable, which created the still to promote the video to its fans on Facebook. This meant fans could share it on social media sites like Facebook, where it’s easy to share images. Since the SesameStreet.org logo appeared throughout the video, it also appeared in the still, so even though the folks at Sesame Street couldn’t necessarily follow where fans were sharing the photo, it still drove people back to the organization. I suggest creating a still before sharing the video to ensure that the URL and message are correct. Whatever medium the meme is using, plan to integrate your branding and links (as appropriate) ahead of time, just like you would with a campaign video or image.

The results of doing it right? Just 24 hours after it posted, Sesame Street’s “Share It Maybe” video had more than 1,780,000 views!

I’ve watched many organizations use custom landing tabs as a critical element for increasing the number of supporters directly connected to the page (aka fans!), and as a way of directing people to specific actions and content. The custom tabs even worked to set the tone for the kind of content and relationship  a supporter could expect to continue after connecting with the organization. Timeline does allow Page owners to arrange the affiliated pages so that the three of your choosing at the top of your Page. (There are four boxes visible, but Photos can’t be moved – reinforcing Facebook’s preferential treatment of graphical content.)

Have you rearranged content to highlight a Welcome or Action custom tab at the top of your Page? Have you changed the way you think about, create, or use custom tabs with Timeline? I’d love to hear your experience and feedback!

Creating Great Content

When it comes to creating great content, there are four important elements, especially with social media, as you can see in the image at the top of this post. You’ll notice that the goal is in the middle of all three because it is always the core of your success and the first step in any decision. The people you want to talk to are closely connected to the goal and if one changes, the other may react. Your tools are defined both by the goal of what you want to do, but also by the people – are they tools that that audience uses and likes? And the content – is that a platform or application that supports that kind of content? Similarly, the content is defined by the goal, but also by the tools at your disposal and the people who will consume it

So, what is the content you want to share? Do you want to be sharing what you know and learn with other volunteers? Inspiring and recruiting your friends to volunteer with you? Or are you trying to promote the organization? Maybe even using these tools to document and share back with the organization all that you’re doing. What you want to be doing with your voice and story via social media will shape the tools and content. Anyone in here want to share what you are now or want to start doing? Start with the goal, and then complete the circle identifying the people, the tools, and the content.

Creating Buzz

On Twitter, look up hashtags that your community uses and follow them to track conversations. Be sure to use relevant (but not spammy!) hashtags in your posts to connect them into related topics. Consider participating or even starting a Twitter chat – the Association Chat is a great example of a weekly chat with an online archive. Be sure to use @ replies to bring people into your conversation directly or thank them for engaging with you. Here are some Twitter-specific tools:

What do you think?

I’d love to hear how you’re using social tools to support an organization you volunteer for, or how you share your knowledge and experience as a volunteer with others!

A Thousand Words Without a Photo

We know the old saying that a photo is worth a thousand words. But, when it comes to Pinterest, a social bookmarking site exploding with attention lately, it doesn’t matter if you have a thousand words or not, without a photo, you can’t save your favorite sites and pages. For example, like many on Pinterest, I’m a female that has a board for fashion I like. Many of my favorite online stores have cute dresses I’d like to save to my board (obviously, that’s why they are my favorite stores); unfortunately, Pinterest isn’t able to identify the image when I provide the page URL. As such, I’m out of luck: I can’t pin the dress and share with my friends on Pinterest.

Alternatively, all I need on Delicious is the URL and I can save it. Not only can I save it privately or publicly (like Pinterest), I can also save it to any tags or keywords that I choose in addition or instead of saving it to a stack (the term used on the platform in the same way Pinterest uses “board”). And, whether or not the page even has an image I can still save the link and I can even add context or notes.

Sharing is Caring

On Pinterest, the sharing aspect of content hinges on repinning something to your own board, and, unless you create the board as one that allows contributors, you are creating content in your own silo. You can “like” and comment on pins, or automate your pinning to post to Facebook, for example, but that is the extent to the social capabilities of the network.

On Delicious, your stacks can be created by yourself or with contributors in a similar way, but even if they are closed to only you, others can still suggest links to be included, helping you crowdsource content without losing control, so to speak, of the content itself. You can also comment on individual bookmarks or on the stacks as a whole – something I am consistently wishing I could do on Pinterest. Because Delicious is built on a history of many years as a social bookmarking platform, it has great resources for the social sharing built in, including:

• View all other users who saved the same link and the comments or notes they left about it to their own accounts
• Find other users based on content tags or stacks
• Share specific bookmarks or stacks via Facebook or Twitter, or even email

Browsing is the new Reading

One criticism I’ve seen consistently from new Pinterest users is that it is visually overwhelming. You look at a board that is filled with wedding dress options, for example, and it’s hard for our minds to sort the maybes from the yes as there’s just so much going on.  I really appreciate the more streamlined user experience that Delicious offers as well. It even provides options to view the bookmarks that are multimedia or video separately, to view all bookmarks just as links and notes, or in the full view. Here is an example:

This is my Delicious stack for Nonprofit Technology Infographics:

And here is Beth Kanter’s Pinterest board for Nonprofit Technology Infographics:

And for one last example, here is a stack that isn’t image-centric, my stack for Nonprofit Technology Case Studies:

I do think Delicious could improve with custom URL options, for example, but overall I think it is a much better platform for the goals of content curation and social bookmarking. What do you think? Would love to hear your thoughts!