Social Media Primer

What is a Social Media Campaign?

The Social Media Buzz

We’ve all heard the social media buzz. It started as a low hum when young people began friending each other on Facebook and sharing photos on Flickr. The buzz grew louder when we looked up and Facebook had enough members to be the fourth largest country in the world. (To see how big social media really is, watch this video “Social Media is Not a Fad”). Then we were getting information about the Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran wars from tweets by activists and posts on their Facebook pages. Today every CNN broadcaster has a twitter account.

And it hasn’t slowed down. Nonprofits are now getting into the act. According to a study last year from the Society for New Communications Research “The nation’s largest nonprofit organizations have outpaced corporations and academic institutions in their adoption of social media, for the second year in a row.” The buzz is huge.

Social media is a powerful tool for nonprofits in general and your organization in particular. But with the noisy buzz, it can be hard to hear the facts. Everyone has a different idea about what social media is and how to use it. So let’s begin by sharing my philosophy about social media.

My Social Media Philosophy

Social media is a tool, not an end.

Social media can help you reach your organization’s goals, but a social media presence cannot be the goal. This is not a “build it and they will come” proposition. It is important for organizations to be clear about what they are trying to accomplish and then build their social media campaign to accomplish those goals.

Social media is interactive.

A good social media campaign increases conversation between your organization and your supporters/ advocates. The more you engage them, the more you can mobilize them. That is the difference between Web 1.0 (the static, never changing web site), and Web 2.0, where the basic operating premise is to engage your audience in conversation. You want your supporters to comment on your blog posts and post on your Facebook wall, answer your calls to action via email and share their experience via Youtube, too. Supporters make up your community.

Social media is viral.

A successful social media campaign is an integrated approach to media platforms. Your organization’s total web presence has to be consistent and connected. If you have news, your community should hear about it on your web page, your blog, your Facebook page, your YouTube channel, and see photos on your flickr account. Oh, and they should have known to look for the news when you tweeted them. Your community members will choose their preferred channel for getting information about your organization, and will then share it with others via that same channel.

Social media campaigns are focused.

There is a tendency among nonprofit organizations to try a social media campaign in pieces. As a consultant, I am fully aware of the temptation to take parts of this proposal, divide them among certain staff or volunteers and hope to get the same result with less cost. It is this viral result that is frequently lost in that approach. A single focus is the way to engage in a successful social media campaign. Individual tasks can be delegated, but the oversight of the campaign cannot.

A Successful Social Media Campaign will pay for itself.

Any social media campaign takes time to build momentum, so the initial costs for the first few months of the campaign will be paid for by the organization. After that, the increase in support and donations will pay for the campaign. A social media campaign will not support an entire technology staff in mid-sized nonprofits. It will, however, raise enough resources to support itself and improve fundraising.

It’s all about the stories

Stories are the gold of nonprofit organizations. Each of us knows why our work matters and we value the work for many different reasons. I have been amazed when I interview staff and volunteers at nonprofit organizations about why they are there. You can bet it’s not for the money. Their stories never cease to move me.

Nonprofits used Web 1.0 to talk to our brains. Social media campaigns talk to our heart. At this moment, we have an amazing opportunity to create, compile, and share our stories. Social media has democratized communication. If we listen and compile our stories and build our platform, we will grow our community. With social media, we can mobilize that community to do almost anything.

The Stages of a Social Media Campaign

A well-integrated social media campaign will build your community of supporters and advocates. It will increase your visibility, volunteers, chapters, and, yes, donations. Eventually, you will need to increase your staff. But most importantly, it will allow you to make a difference in the lives of people you serve.

Stages are the easiest way to explain the process and describe the tasks (and ultimately, the cost). Remember, however, that parts of these stages are going on simultaneously. The nature of social media is that it feeds on itself (that viral thing). There is really no linear path for a social media campaign. Rather, it is several parallel paths that cross over each other (some might say a maze, but you have the map).

The first step of any campaign, after agreeing on goals, is to build your platform. The elements of your platform are the tools you will use to both listen and talk. It helps to think of this as the stage on which you will offer your performances and have conversations with your audience (for you theater lovers). There are some basic requirements I recommend, but you will change and add elements as you go forward and learn from your campaign data. Social media changes every day, so you must be prepared to be flexible and responsive.

While you are listening and talking, you build your community. Everything else you want to accomplish is dependent on this stage. These are people who are your supporters and others interested in your work. You compile their stories, experiences, and feedback. Then you share those stories as your community expands. You listen to them and tell them how important they are to you. You engage them in projects and causes. You offer gifts, acknowledgement, rewards and information.

When your community is listening to you and each other, you ask. You will ask about donations, about volunteers, about resources, about finances, about prayers – you get the idea. At this point you will have a community that cares about you, about each other, and about children and families facing cancer. You can do anything.

Stage One – Build the Platform

The basic social media platform for nonprofit organizations consists of both sites and tools.

Sites

Social media sites are locations where you present information, stories, and opportunities for connection and conversation with your supporters.

A website or blog (often in combination as a blog-site)
A Facebook Page
A YouTube Channel
A Flickr Account
A Change.org page – Guidestar Verification
A wikispace

While you have some of these started, it is their interaction and integration that will make the campaign successful.

Tools

These are the things you will need to build and talk with your community.

A Twitter Account
Email Marketing Utility (mad mimi for example)
Friendfeed account
Merchant account (Paypal is the most versatile and easiest to start)
A Google account
A social bookmarking account

These are all critical to build community, capture information, build loyalty and create the foundation for mobilization.

A blog is more flexible than a website, but you need to engage your supporters in a conversation. If you keep your website or blog in a Web 1.0 format, you are putting out information and if anyone needs to know about it they have to contact you. That creates a log jam at the end of the funnel and both supporters and staff get frustrated.

The goal is to get as many people talking to and about your organization as possible. When you don’t have multiple ways for your supporters and potential supporters to talk with you, the conversation stops at the bottom of the funnel. This diagram is the best way to explain what happens.

During Stage One, we’ll get all the elements to connect with each other. Two things are critical for that to happen. First, any part of your platform needs to be easily accessible and easy to update. Second, all parts of your platform will need to be promoted on all the other parts. Your social media links (icons) need to be on all your other sites. These links connect platform elements. These connections are one of the ways to ease the burden of social media updates. The sites feed each other.

We customize the sites with your brand as much as possible on each site. Your Facebook page is about making connections and talking with you community. Your YouTube Channel and your Flickr account are ways for you to tell your stories.

In addition to creating and connecting your sites and tools, this stage requires web research on your content. Who else is concerned about this issue? What are they doing online? What keywords are being searched that relate to what you do and who you wish to attract to your cause? What kind of content could be added to your sites and blogs that would interest your supporters and potential supporters?

So, now you have the platform. Where are the performances? The collection of stories is critical to getting your stage to hum with activity. And it is integral to building your community. I am sure you are already feeling the burden of daily blog posts. Every blogger does. So now we build the community.

Stage Two – Build the Community

This is the longest and most difficult part of the campaign. You have built the platform, but if no one is coming to listen it won’t matter much. This will take time and needs to be a single-minded focus for a period of time.

These are some of the tasks of community building I would recommend.

Capture those emails:

• The first campaign is to get your supporters to enter their email addresses. No one gets anything from any of your sites without entering an email address. And the address is automatically captured.
• Set up an email subscription to your newsletter.
• Offer to email things to people – lists of resources, links to your social bookmarking site, etc. Every time you offer something via email, you collect an email address.
• Ask a question. You would be surprised how many people want to participate in a survey. The only requirement is an email address.

Get people involved

• Get people to upload photos and other info to your sites. Again, you have them upload the photo of those pillowcases and the upload form includes an email address.
• Let supporters gather emails by sending a request for you to their friends.

Friend and follow

• You want to friend everyone following you on Twitter, as well as all of their friends.
• You want fans on your Facebook page. Have your friends get friends.
• We built these sites and developed all these tools to talk to your community. Tweeting them regularly is to inform, entertain and mobilize. Don’t just ask for stuff – be supportive as well.

Find new ways to tell your story

• Good storytelling is the secret. Every time anything happens someone should be there with a camera and a flip. Those files go on every site to tell the story everywhere to anyone who is listening.
• Tell your stories in every way you can. That means blog posts, photos on flickr, videos on YouTube and even podcasts (you know more stuff than you think you do). Your stories are your currency. It’s also how you talk to the heart.

Optimize all of your sites to be found by search engines.

• This is a workshop all on its own, with many twists, turns and techniques.  Suffice it to say, once you are built, you have to make sure you have traffic.  We work with you to make sure you have all the tools you need to find and be found on the Internet.

Stage Three – Mobilize the Community

So now you have a loyal group of followers and they are talking about you all over the Internet. What would you like them to do?  At this point, social media really  has become a vehicle.  You have the car all ready for the road trip.  Take off to accomplish whatever the pressing goals of your organization.