Saying Thank You in a Social World

A donor, one big or small, makes a gift to your organization. Your backend office generates and (e)mails a thank you letter and/or reciept. If the gift size says "major donor", you might even call to say thank you.

But is that enough? Are you missing out on opportunities to show your appreciation in a more public way, especially one that would encourage *other people* to make a gift?

It's easy to tweet a "thanks to all of our donors" message or rely on Facebook Causes to display a list of donors. But have you named specific donors in a Wall status update that would be displayed outside of the Cause or tracked down a donor's Twitter account and acknowledged them in a tweet?

There's a reason why Facebook and Twitter display the number of friends, fans, and followers you have. And a reason why #followfriday is popular. And why Digg, Twitter and now Facebook can display the number of times a page has been shared. People are, well, a little bit vain. That's not to say all of social media is a popularity contest, but don't ignore the opportunities to call out a donor by posting a more personalized thank that would show up on their Facebook news feed or list of tweets mentioning their @username. Your public appreciation could bring you closer to a repeat gift or a viral appeal and hopefully your next donation.

Using the Social Media Snowball Formula

A staple read this week in the online nonprofit sphere was Brenna Holmes’ blog post on Community Organizer 2.0 about building the California State Parks Foundation’s (CSPF) Facebook Fan Page from 517 fans to 45,000 – a pretty big honking deal.

It’s especially remarkable given that CSPF’s four-day “Friend Get Friend” campaign nearly met its original goal of 5,000 fans, then surpassed it with 6,236 fans on the following day. The campaign brought CSPF considerable media attention and encouraged about 5,000 concerned Californians to visit state parks on a weekend in June and then post photos from their visits to CSPF’s Fan Page wall.

It’s the kind of online-to-offline-to-online success that would make any digital-savvy mother proud, and Brenna’s must be smiling.

Of course, any nonprofiteer who read this wants to know how to make this narrative her own. And absent a perfect villain like the anti-progressive, state park budget slashing Governator himself, and the fierce urgency of legislative deadlines, will CSPF’s Facebook formula of smart messaging be enough?

Before we go there, let’s assume that while your nonprofit addresses a noble and necessary social need, there are no foreseeable wars, hurricanes (though ‘tis the season), forest fires or sinister bands of ninjas out to undo your good work. 

The first question you should ask is whether you’ve taken full inventory of opportunities that do exist. For instance, are you aware of Twestival Local, and that your city and charity might qualify to benefit from it if you register by August 25th?

Moreover, are you on Twitter? Why not? (Don’t worry, CSPF didn’t get there until late last July.)

The next step is to realize that success isn’t all about fortunate externalities – although they do help. It begins instead with a combination of perspective, the right tools and a winning formula. And persistence, of course, but since you work for the cause that’s in your DNA.

To see what I mean about perspective, turn back to the CSPF example with a different mindset: State parks are always under the threat of budget cuts, that’s not unusual; compared to other Republicans, you could be facing much worse opponents than Governor Schwarzenegger.

If CSPF had this perspective, there would be no state parks east of the Rockies. The point is that there may be no impending ninja attack, but your job wouldn’t exist if there wasn’t a threat to your cause. It’s up to you to reframe it, and apply the right online tools to communicate and make it viral.

Let’s begin with the tools. If your organization hasn’t already invested in email campaigns, you undoubtedly intend to. Next consider the two strongest social media applications in online organizing, Twitter and Facebook. Regardless of where your nonprofit lies on the spectrum of novice to advanced, everyone shares a common interest with these tools: growth. That is, followers on Twitter and fans on Facebook.

(A quick aside: There’s been great debate over the benefits of Facebook’s Causes vs. Fan Pages applications. Your correspondent is of the opinion that Fan Pages win this one. Causes are great but have trouble sustaining over time – once dormant, they’re hard to resuscitate. Fan Pages are like the vintage Mustang you take out on weekends – they’re more timeless. And with a Static FBML box, you can embed donate or email subscribe functionalities on your Fan Page.)

Finally, the Fan Page-Twitter cocktail is ideal because both applications create communities of potential donors; have email blast-like capabilities (in fact, many practitioners have found greater returns on tweeting take-action or donate links than they get from conventional email campaigns); provide a forum for activity, media sharing and conversation; and the online audience you’re not reaching on Twitter is probably active on Facebook.

Now for the winning formula, which goes something like this:

Goals → Urgency → Communications → Giving

 
The Snowball Formula, as I just decided to call it, earns its namesake because each element rolls into the next, making your campaign bigger and more formidable as it goes. Besides, snowballs grow, which is precisely what you want you campaign to do, not just with followers, but with generating a buzz and raising money.

Here’s how it breaks down:

Establish Goals: There’s nothing like clarity. Tell your supporters exactly what you’re trying to do. You want a million dollars, 10,000 fans/followers on Facebook and Twitter, and you need it all by this deadline. Promote this on your website (or, dare I say, a microsite?) and in email campaigns, and don’t forget to be creative: Tie your goal to a mission match (e.g. 10,000 fans for 10,000 blankets for the homeless) or donor match (e.g. 10,000 fans matched with $10,000 from ACME Co.).

Introduce Urgency: This step is best accommodated with robust communications coupled with timing. That is, constant vigilance for opportunities to exploit, such as hurricanes and marauding ninjas. More importantly, you need to sound convincing. As stated earlier, CSPF had several externalities working to its advantage. In their initial Friend Get Friend appeal last May (broadcast via Fan Page email notification), they articulated Schwarzenegger’s plan to halve the General Fund budget by July, and eliminate it by 2010. But the real urgency was introduced several sentences later when they said, “This year’s cuts are 10 times as bad so we need 10 times the fans on Facebook – 5,000 – by Friday to fight this newest proposal back.”  That’s it. No meticulous breakdown of cause and effect, no online grassroots feasibility metrics, just a few words that said, basically, you should really, really do this. Because we said so.

Sustain Communication: Your average dictator, cynic or communications consultant will tell you that power lies not in facts, but in controlling the story. Communications should remain consistent throughout your campaign while you optimize all channels of social media and email. Content is largely informed by external events, but some can be planned in advance, such as reminding your supporters about goal status (i.e. urging people to recruit more), and finding new ways to express urgency. There is also the matter of not-so-public communications: Along the way it helps to identify and enlist individuals with large online followings (it could be a Twitterphile celebrity like Ashton Kirchner, but any person with a zillion followers will do) to help contribute to the buzz you’re creating on Facebook and Twitter, especially if you decide to end your campaign with a big ask…

Get’em Giving: There’s nothing wrong with asking for money. And it actually improves your chances of reaching your supporter-growth goals if you orchestrate the giving into a singular fundraising event, such as a 24-hour offline-to-online Tweet-up event. This is because the days leading up to your fundraising day will be all about growing your supporter base. Treat it the way you would a fundraiser house party. Your friends will be happy to help you promote it, and on the party day itself, you have a captive audience that’s ready to give $20 here and $100 there. Several examples are worth mentioning, such as Charity: Water’s Twestival, Epic Change’s Tweetsgiving and PlayPumps International’s Aquathon.

There is, of course, much more to be said for social media outside of Twitter and Facebook, and even more regarding the 3rd party applications that support them. But if a strong, social media sensibility comes first, the tools will follow.

Nonprofits say YES to social media… and mostly to Facebook

We know there is some dispute over whether or not Facebook is good for fundraising. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t.

But there’s no dispute over its popularity. In a recent NTEN survey, almost 1,000 nonprofit professionals answered questions about their organizations’ use of social media. And they said loud and clear that they’re using it.

Some highlights:

• 86% have a presence on commercial social networks in general, and 74% are on Facebook.
• 81% said their primary purpose for having a presence on these networks is marketing.
• 81% allocate at least one-quarter of a full time employee to the networks.
• The average Facebook community size is 1,369 (unless you leave in those big three organizations that skew the average to 5,391).
• The average Twitter following is 291, LinkedIn community is 286, and YouTube is 268. Oh, and MySpace, which comes in at 1,905 members.

Your constituents are on Facebook. Your competitors are on Facebook. And there’s a lot of marketing going on.

So it’s not always a question of the dollars coming in due to Facebook, but how well you are marketing your organization, and engaging new and loyal supporters.

Thanks to this NTEN study, you can measure your organization against industry benchmarks. And, you can prove your success and relevance in social media in other quantifiable ways. Track the numbers of Facebook Fans and their demographics (via improved Insights reporting on Facebook Pages), the number of Followers and @ mentions on Twitter, and the click trends of short URLs in tweets.

With donations dwindling in this tough economy, it’s important to keep supporters engaged, even with brief status updates of “what’s on your mind” and tweets about “what you’re doing.”

Ninety-five percent of nonprofits said they are either maintaining or increasing staffing resources given to social networks over the next year.

Indeed, everybody’s doing it.

Nonprofit Social Network Survey Report:
http://nonprofitsocialnetworksurvey.com

Does social media have to generate donations to be successful?

A recent Washington Post article reported that Facebook Causesamounted to next to nothing in terms of real donations for most charities. According to the article, less than 1% of the people on Facebook who've joined a Cause have ever made a donation and the majority of participating Cause charities have received no donations through the site.

I can't refute the stats but I can easily counter the overall sentiment that assumes Causes is something of a failure simply because it's not generating millions of dollars for millions of charities. I found this observation in the article very telling about the true nature of getting the most out of Causes:

The idea behind Causes was to take advantage of the vast circles of online friends connected through social networks to reach potential donors and volunteers on a more personal level. People will donate money, albeit in small amounts, to help a cause that a close friend or colleague supports, the application's developers say.

"People are much more altruistic if they get social credit for it," said Joe Green, one of the founders of Berkeley, Calif.-based Causes, who said the application has raised $7 million overall. "The social incentive is to show on your profile how many volunteers you've recruited or how much money you've raised."

For all the Causes I've been invited to, the ones that mean the the most to me, the ones I'm likely to join AND donate to are the ones that a good friend in my network sent to me. And we should all be honest, we all have friends in our social networks who would be better referred to as "that girl/guy I went to high school with and haven't seen for more than 15 years and I'll be your friend because we went to the same high school but I know we have nothing but our hometown in common these days" or the "colleague that I vaguely remember from 6 years ago and I should stay in touch with if even on Facebook because in this economy, I might need a reference or help with a job search". With these degrees of friends, it's unlikely that everyone is going to join or give to every Cause that comes their way.

Another angle on this aspect of the Causes design is that charities on Facebook asking constituents to give is simply never going to be as successful friends asking friends to give.

So really, is there any way for a nonprofit to really get something out of Causes? I say yes, definitely! But here's what you need to plan for:

• Set reasonable expectations. Is money the only thing you'll measure? Is there value in word-of-mouth marketing or growing awareness of your brand?

• Is this going to be your field of dreams? If you're only plan is to build it and think they will come, then you're going to be about as unsuccessful as putting a giant Donate button on your home page but never marketing your website. Do you have a plan to let your constituents know that you are on Facebook? Does your website utilize simple tools like a share bar?

• Who's making the ask? Do a little research. Find the influential people in your networks who have a following of friends and who will have a strong interest in your Cause. That dog lover with hundreds of friends who trade status comments about the need for a dog park is more likely to give to your animal cause and ask their friends to give than others rarely mentioning their family pet.

Keyword Madness Solved

These days, it seems everyone struggles with their keywords; they just seem to grasp at anything in their site's content that may have the slightest possibility of helping them generate traffic. I think people over thinking the problem, so I want to share one of my solutions for generating great keywords.

I use a site Keyword Spy which allows you to type in a site or keyword and get a large amount of relevant information that you can use to generate larger list and better target your audience through search engines.

If you type a keyword into the search box, the site will give you the number of search results for that keyword and the number of clicks a day it generates, along with the average cost per click on ppc campaigns, and the sites using that keyword in their ppc campaigns.

From there, you can dig deeper so you can look at the list of people advertising on that keyword and see what other keywords they are advertising on.  For example, I did a search on the keyword "water", which returned the results you can see in the image above.  Now looking down the list of those who pay for advertising on that word, we find several companies and nonprofits, so by clicking on one of those sites we can get information on just how that site is doing, its advertising items, including a list of the paid and organic keywords being used to generate traffic.

This is where is gets really handy, and where we answer the question which keywords to use. Keyword Spy will give you a list of the keywords combined with a rating for their return on investment, search ranking position, competition ranking, average clicks per day and the average cost per click for every keyword in the list.  This will help you determine exactly which keywords are going to help you more and which ones you are going to be competing a little more on.

Now for those using ppc campaigns to drive traffic to your site, you can even get a list of ad variations that articular site is using, which can help you get ideas for how to word your own ads.

Finally, it will let you export the list of keywords to either a text or Excel document so that you can save them and use them wherever you like, however you prefer.

Now Keyword Spy does have two levels of membership: the first is free, which is honestly all that I use since it gives you quite a bit of information there.  If you decide you need more, then upgrade to the Pro account, which is $139.95 a month.  But, for the average nonprofit just looking to drive more traffic and awareness, I think this is a bit extreme. Anyway, give it a try and let me know what you think. It has always worked well for me.

Making Facebook’s “25 Things” Phenomenon Work for You

By now we’ve all seen the “25 Things” notes circulating on Facebook – the one where your friends write 25 random things that you may or may not know about them, and then tag you in the note asking you to do the same.

If you’ve completed the note yourself, did you find it easy to do and wish the note asked for 50 Things? Or did you have trouble coming up with enough interesting tidbits to share, and worry about friends commenting on some?

If your nonprofit were tasked with coming up with an interesting 25 Random Things list, would it be difficult to do? (Or difficult to get approved?)

As a nonprofit professional, consider the information your organization shares regularly with its supporters. Your mission statement. Details on an upcoming event. Maybe some photos or videos from a successful recent program. Do you ever take a risk and share a little more with your supporters?

Social media allows nonprofits to open doors and share behind-the-scene details and little-known facts about their causes. And by doing so, it engages supporters and helps identify key followers.

Get inspired by the 25 Things phenomenon. Think creatively and share more stories about your cause. What are the most important things your organization wants its supporters to know? What creative ways are you using to communicate these stories to them?

More about Facebook’s 25 Random Things:

• Getting To Know Each Other: Facebook's '25 Random Things'
• MTV Newsroom: 25 Things About MTV News
• Wall Street Journal: Facebook Mystery: Who Created “25 Random Things About Me”? 
• Time Magazine’s 25 Things I Didn't Want to Know About You and 25 More Things I Didn't Want to Know About You

My Mother Is on Facebook...

I'll admit it -- my mother is on Facebook. And lately, a lot of my friends' mothers are on Facebook too. Sure, some parents are joining to monitor their kid's online activities, but clearly an older generation is also using it to reconnect with one another. My mom was overjoyed when she recently reconnected with people she went to high school with just shy of 50 years ago. But enough about mom...

The Pew Research Center released a report this week highlighting a growing trend of adults joining social networks. One highlight from the report: "The share of adult internet users who have a profile on a social networking site has more than quadrupled in the past four years -- from 8% in 2005 to 35% now." You can read the full report at Social Networks Grow: Friending Mom and Dad.

With the new year upon us, now may be the perfect time to re-evaluate your online constituents. Consider a survey of your email list, Facebook fans, Twitter followers, and others to ask about their age range, income levels, interests in your organization for the year, and any other tidbits that will help you communicate and cultivate your community. If you don't have any in-house survey tools, consider these to get you up and running in a few minutes:

- SurveyMonkey.com
- Zoomerang.com
- SurveyMethods.com

Social Gifting

The next revolution in online shopping has arrived – social gifting.

The first of it’s kind – ever – and arriving as an application on Facebook (and soon to MySpace) is Gimme!, a social gift-giving tool that allows one person to gather a group of their networked friends to give a gift card to another friend.

Socialwise, Inc., the application developer, describes the application as “[providing] an easy way to organize a group gift for anyone—even yourself—by allowing users to contribute to a gift card from our collection of top retailers or a pre-paid debit card. The recipient can then choose their own gift, insuring that he or she will always get a gift they love.”

The quality of retailers is impressive, it includes Amazon, iTunes, Borders, Overstock, Motherhood Maternity and several others. The process itself is easy, it’s quick (2 steps) and because it’s on a social networking platform - it’s removes that awkwardness of group gifting and instead provides a good-hearted informal atmosphere to do something that is typically too formal to initiate.  Consider one example I’ve conjured:

• A co-worker goes on vacation; while away she gets engaged and changes her Facebook status. She receives tons of comments on the change.  You set up a Gimme! $100 gift card to BedandBreakfast.com, and invite all your mutual friends to give so that she can have it when she arrives as gift from everyone.

Or to use as a practical joke:

• You notice a friend of yours is wearing the same shirt in every picture he posts or is tagged on in Facebook. As a joke, you set up a Gimme! $25 gift card towards the GAP to present to your friend so that he can get another shirt. Of which your friends will want a picture.

The approach is different, but natural too. And following the forward-thinking of the Causes app in Facebook, the developent of an application like Gimme! only confirms what we already know- the potentials to leverage social networking is becoming very real.

Read more about Gimme!
MaketWatch: Gimme! Offers Innovative Approach to Holiday Gift Giving via Facebook
SocialWise: Socialwise Group Gifting

Learn more about SocialWise on their website: www.ideaedge.com

Twitter as a Growth Tool

I seem to be getting asked the same question a lot in the past few weeks by clients, friends, and just people in general who want to pick my brain.  Everyone I run into wants to know why Twitter is useful and if it is worth their time.

The truth is that Twitter is very powerful if done properly.  Just recently over the Thanksgiving holiday I was part of a project called TweetsGiving which was a 2 day campaign by Epic Change to raise $10,000 for a school in Tanzania as well as get people to share and realize how much we as a whole have to be thankful for this year.  The site entire campaign specifically targeted Twitter as it’s primary marketing point.

Within the first 3 hours the site had already hit the 25% mark to the fund raising goal, and after 47 hours the goal was completely met.  Although there was some word of mouth and the site did get a very good number of mentions on blogs and news sites, had it not been for the use of Twitter I do not think this would have been as successful.

Twitter allows people to follow and keep up with others they are interested in, build large contact networks and reach out to those people when you need them.  With TweetsGiving they began with several well know and heavily followed members on Twitter who were very interested no only in the concept of what the site was trying to do but also the impact they could have.  After these people posted about it, more followed.  Not only did the donations come running in but as people shared what they were thankful for it simply expanded the network of people who were seeing the messages from TweetGiving and driving more people to check it out.

In just those two days the site had over 9,000 absolute unique visitors, and over 16,000 page views with visits coming from around the world.

This is not the only example of how you can use Twitter.

Twitter is a great source for building a brand and loyal follower group. By allowing you to post messages as often as you like, forcing you to keep those messages short, and providing a way for people to share your message with a large number of other people who may be interested you can develop quite a following.

Since the message has a character limit you do have to make sure you can get your point across in efw words. This is great at helping to narrow down and get directly to the point, with no beating around the bush or long drawn out emails.

Twitter can also help to show activity, in many cases with nonprofits and small businesses people want to know you are actually doing something. It is human nature to be skeptical but if someone sees you Tweeting several times a day with what people are doing in your organization or updates on product development then it provides a means of being more transparent easing the tensions people have.

Twitter is also a great way to get volunteers involved. By giving them a way to also promote your cause or product you are simply expanding your customer base. It is really a word of mouth campaign done over a digital age technology. Volunteers can post links to you, updates on what they read from you, and share even more about what they are doing.

A great example is for a nonprofit organization that has several satellite groups working in multiple places the volunteers on location can Tweet from a computer or even in some cases their cell phones giving people real world real time updates to the impact the organization is having.

An example on the business side would be a product development company with multiple products in testing, or even products that have been released. If you have your engineers constantly updating people on fixes, availability and testing they can see just how dedicated you are as a brand to making a solid well produced product.

The best part of Twitter is the cost.  It is a free service this means the only cost of using Twitter is the 1 min it takes to have a person post to it.  For those looking at a solid ROI you can get it here if you make a dedicated effort and use the right strategy for your situation.  If you need help determining the right strategy for you I would suggest speaking to someone well versed in your particular market.  If you need help finding someone who can help you in your field send me a message and I will help you get in the right direction for your needs.

Big Expectations from the Convio Summit 2008

This year's Convio Summit 2008 kicked off this evening at the Renaissance Hotel in Austin, TX with an opening gathering for clients and partner organizations. As the drinks were poured, the buzz for this year's client sessions is centered on a few topics: 

Common Ground: Convio launched their Salesforce-platform-based CRM system two months ago. Now, nonprofits will get to see more of the product and ask tough questions about why the product would work for their organizations. We expect to see plenty of private and group demos to take place over the next two days.

Social Networks: Social media sites continue to be the elusive goldmine that every organization wants to tap into and reap fortunes. Expanding an audience through social media has been the hot topic at a lot of conferences this year and a few panels here are devoted to Facebook applications and social media. Expect a lot of small talk to focus on how to attract and convert social media denizens to eCRM-managed donors and constituents.

Convio Open: How you get these folks from social media sites to an eCRM platform will depend partly on the Convio Open APIs and extensions. Last year, Convio Open was buzzworthy because it was brand new and an interesting concept for the company. This year, it's becoming more about how the APIs and extensions can really be used by all organizations and what are the practical applications for the enhancing the tool. Of course, most organizations still don't have the staff or expertise to create their own Facebook applications and the like. But, knowing is half the battle and just getting acquainted with the initial ideas behind Convio Open can help these organizations make smart decisions about how they can use the platform to do more for their overall online programs.  

The Economy: The elephant in the room; every conversation seems to touch upon our struggling economy. Are donations down? Are people giving like last year or in 2006? Will online continue to push at 30% overall growth rate or will it slow considerably? How can organizations meet capacity, raise money, and communicate with limited resources? How are we doing YTD from last year? Will we meet our online fundraising goals? It's doubtful anyone will have the answer, but they might have good advice on how they're tackling the issue.

We'll review some of the sessions and provide highlights from keynote speaker Tony Elischer's breakfast plenary. Couldn't make the conference and have a question? Drop us an email or leave a comment, we'll be happy to answer your questions or get the scoop on a session for you.