Here are the slides (Hint: visit the slideshare site by clicking on the link below to see the speaking notes as well!)

Questions and Discussion

One question that arose was about communication planning. Aspiration has a great resource that they call the Publishing Matrix. You can check it out, download it, and use for free!  I’ve also blogged before about how to map your community and content.

Participants were also curious to dive in more deeply to the listening dashboard. You can see the public dashboard on nonprofit technology that I have set up at http://netvibes.com/amysampleward.  I also have a step-by-step guide to creating one yourself.

Getting started with social media can be a hurdle for many simply because of the new words, terms, and jargon. As part of the Social by Social handbook, we created a jargon buster and A-Z of terms – could be helpful to participants on this webinar, and to anyone looking to share easy to understand definitions of these new concepts.

If you were a participant on the webinar – what questions do you still have? If you weren’t, but you have questions or ideas to share, please do!

Thanks again to Lori for inviting me to participate and engage with your community – I had a blast at the party

Last month, I presented at the NCVO Foresight seminar: Changing ICT – what does it mean for your charity with a focus on the future of online revenue generation for nonprofit organizations.  What’s most interesting to me within the nonprofits-in-social-space is the difference between organization-driven and individual-driven fundraising (and other promotion) campaigns.  Social media is a space where the individual reigns, relationships are required, and conversations are public.  That’s not exactly the way business normally goes down offline.  And it has real impact on the way organizations fundraise.

Online, the process and attributes that succeed are traits you’d normally associate with an individual: authenticity, relationships, conversations, etc. Organizations should recognize the need for being “real” online and can honor that by, for example, putting in the profile information of organizational presences who is actually speaking from that account, sharing information, resources and links that aren’t only associated with the organization, and responding to people online to have conversations in public (even put a smiley face in there while you’re at it!).  When it comes to fundraising and the options available to individuals to campaign on your behalf online, think of the differences this way:

Offline: you would never have someone that has never met any staff of the organization, or even know where the organization is located, become so excited about the work it’s doing that he or she creates an annual campaign to raise funds on the organizations behalf and then goes through with it each year.

Online: that is already happening with people who use applications like Causes in facebook, which encourages users to fundraise each year on their birthday via their Birthday Cause tool (individuals select an organization, ask their facebook friends to give donations instead of presents, and the funds get distributed to the organization).

Offline: you would probably not have someone who’s had no physical connection with your organization be so excited about your work that they design and produce their own fliers about your work and then canvass their local community to raise awareness or your programs.

Online: that’s exactly what people are doing when they become a fan of your organization on facebook (adding your icon to their profile), add your twibon to their Twitter avatar (a little logo that is placed over the user’s picture), or even when sharing links or messages about your organization (even ones that you didn’t create) with their social networks.

So, how do you respond?

Like I said at the beginning, it’s important for organizations to move into the social media space using the processes that are accepted and successful, with the focus on being transparent and real, and so on.  Some key questions to ask yourself include:

• If people are supporting you by directly connecting with you on different social media platforms, what are you doing to encourage them to connect with you in a space where you have access to the data? (You can’t access your friends on facebook if the platform is down for maintenance, let alone if it goes down permanently!)
• If people are fundraising for you online, do you know about it? (Start looking for it!)
• If people are fundraising for you online, are you saying ‘thank you’ to the fundraisers and to the donors?
• If people are giving to you online on different social media platforms, are you encouraging them to connect with you directly so you can encourage them to give again later?
• How are you showing your gratitude for the hard work of your supporters (“volunteer” means something very different online!) online?

What do you think?

In this very different space for organizations, how has your organization adapted to the online culture and opportunities?  Do you have any tips or examples from your social media presences or campaigns to share?

You can review the slides from my whole presentation, as well as all of the speaker notes, here.

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Visit the SSIR blog to comment, or leave your thoughts below!

You can view the slides below or view the PDF w/ Speaker Notes for more information about the slides.

What do you think?

I’d love to hear your stories about how you’ve used social media on your own, discovered something that could work for your organization and made it happen!  I’d also love to hear any questions you have or other ideas you want to share!