This is the first of what I intend to be a 4-part series of posts about how nonprofits can better use social media. But before I can really talk about “best practices”, it’s probably best to just start with “why?”, as in
“Why should my nonprofit organization even be using social media at all?” I meet daily with nonprofit organizations and I’m often struck by what an interesting point in time this is, in early 2010. Some nonprofits already have a very active presence in social media, some want to but just don’t know where to start, and others don’t believe in social media at all. Which means that social media today is pretty much about exactly where the web was in 1995 – some early adopters, some strugglers, and some ardent non-believers.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube are the big names in social media, but
“what is social media?” One definition is simply that in social media there’s a 2-way conversation going on, as opposed to traditional media (TV, radio, websites), where the conversation is really 1-way. And there’s also a “social” component, usually having to do with the fact that individual people are connecting and sharing with each other (over 50 billion pieces of content are shared on Facebook every week).
Humans are naturally social creatures; when we get together and socialize we naturally talk about and advocate for the things we care about. Combine this natural behavior with the network effect (if I tell 10 people about a cause I’m passionate about, and each of them tells ten people, and each of them tell ten people, we suddenly have 1,000 new recruits to our cause) and social media is an environment which is incredibly fertile for nonprofits to use for fundraising, awareness, and advocacy.
Like any communications tool, social media requires a plan – objectives, content strategy, audience, tactics, and integration into your overall communications strategy. And like other communications tools, social media also requires ongoing care and feeding in order to be effective.
Over my next three posts I’ll write about what that social media plan looks like for some of the leading nonprofits which are effectively using social media today.
Next up: Who should own the social media strategy within a nonprofit organization? 
Social Media has multiple uses – communication, donor relations, advocacy, marketing, PR, fundraising – sometimes these departments within an organization work in tandem but more often than not, they work in their own silos. So who owns the social media implementation strategy for a nonprofit? Is it development, marketing or IT?The answer to this question has a lot to do with your particular nonprofit: in small organizations everyone pretty much wears multiple hats, whereas larger organizations have completely separate departments.The biggest mistake that I usually see is nonprofits who put the youngest intern in charge of social media, thinking that “Well, social media is all about the younger generation so I’ll give it to someone junior and let them do it”.Bad idea. There are two reasons why I believe this is flawed thinking:
The folks at DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) ran a fascinating research project recently, and the results are interesting for those of us who are involved with using social media for cause marketing.
The researchers placed 10 moored red twelve-foot weather balloons in 10 locations around the continental United States and offered a $40,000 to the first person (or team) to send in the exact correct location for all 10. There were a total of 4,372 teams who entered, and the winning team (from MIT) took the prize by reporting the exact locations of all 10 balloons in just over 9 hours.
How did they do it? First of all, they used social media to recruit team members and mobilize them across the country. By creating Twitter and Facebook accounts and a Twitter hash tag, the MIT team was able to “crowd source” the project, getting real-time reports on sightings all over the country. They also encouraged people to recruit their friends onto the project, and provided a financial incentive – $2,000 for the first person to provide coordinates of a balloon found, $500 to the person who recruited them, $250 to the person who recruited that person, and so on.
There was also a cause marketing angle: the MIT team promised to give a percentage of the $40,000 prize to charity, adding additional incentive for individuals all over the nation to jump onto Twitter and Facebook to help the MIT team.
It was a pretty interesting study which provides insights into how real-time social media can be used to quickly mobilize volunteers to a cause.
Want to know more? You can 
