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:
- Social Media is not limited to a younger generation. Of the 450+ million individuals on Facebook today, the fastest-growing age bracket on is the 33-55 year olds – a key donor group for any nonprofit. (more on Facebook’s demographics).
- Of all the different communication channels available to a nonprofit today – direct mail, email, website – social media is the most engaging (ie, it’s a 2-way conversation) and it’s by far the fastest-growing. Why would you want to turn the fastest-growing most engaging communications channel over to the most junior person on the team?
Different nonprofits have different missions. But one thing they all have in common is that to achieve their mission they need to build a strong base of donors, members, and supporters. And building that strong base involves strong marketing and development skills, consistently deployed across all the integrated communications channels your organization uses. Don’t turn social media over to a junior intern. Embrace it – it may be the most powerful communications medium your organization has today.
Next up: Developing a social media strategic plan for your organization.
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 
