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Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Are All Young People Social Media Experts?

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graduate on cell phoneCongratulations, class of 2021. You survived. You graduated. You even landed a job.

Now, watch out.

Your employer thinks you’re a social media expert.

Just because you’re a “digital native” who played with an iPhone before you could ride a bike, your new employer thinks you can be the company’s social media manager.

Without training.

In addition to all your regular duties.

 

What are you supposed to do with that?

It all depends.  Do you want to be a social media expert?  Then, here are three things you need to do right away.

One: Explain to your boss what you have to learn.

  1. How to create a strategy for your organization, so that you reach the people you want to reach, where they hang out, with a purpose in mind.
  2. Who in your organization has great stories to tell.
  3. Who in your organization can take great photos.
  4. Who in your organization can produce great graphics.
  5. How to motivate the people in 2, 3, and 4 to send that content to you to use.
  6. What a publication calendar is, and how to stay on schedule.
  7. How to write killer subject lines for email, headlines for blogs, and text for tweets.
  8. How to write content that will make people look past the headline.
  9. The best ways to make sure your Facebook posts get seen.
  10. The best times of day and days of the week to post on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn….
  11. How to integrate your print communications, website, blog, email, and social media.
  12. What will make your followers like, share, and comment on your posts.
  13. How you can find and curate content your followers will be glad to read.
  14. How to tell whether any of it is making a difference.

Two: Tell your boss you’ll need a budget for training.

(Call it “professional development”: it sounds classier.)

  • There are great online courses.  The Social Media Managers School founded by Andrea Vahl and Phyllis Khare is one of them.
  • You can also take webinars on the subject of your choice.
  • In-person classes and conferences will bring your skills up to date and keep you there.

Three,  politely explain that being a social media manager could be a full-time job.

Heather Mansfield, author of Social Media for Social Good, estimates that doing a good job with just Facebook could take you seven hours a week.  Get a very clear set of instructions about your boss’s priorities: in writing, if possible!

eating snakes

Is this how you think of social media?

But perhaps you’d rather eat live snakes than manage your organization’s social media.  Then, show your boss this blog entry to make the case that it’s just too big a responsibility to do on the fly.

Suggest that he or she hire a communications consultant to do it right. (I might just be available.)

You just helped make your organization better.  Congratulations, graduate!

Fundraising Tuesday: Tell Stories to Funders AND Donors

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I heard this advice a lot when I was a Development Director: “Don’t let your grantwriter write your appeals to donors.”

Why? Supposedly, foundations and donors are two different species.

Foundations have deadlines. Donors give on impulse.

Foundations check to see if you meet their written requirements: what questions you have to answer for them, in how many words, with what documentation attached.

Donors spend three seconds looking at your letter before they decide whether to read it or throw it in the recycling bin.

It was well-meaning advice. But maybe it was wrong.

different species

Different species can love the same thing

The best advice might have been to let a storyteller work on both.

What Storytelling Does for Funders

Pamela Grow, the dean of direct mail fundraising for small nonprofits, remembers when she worked at a foundation. After reading thousands of proposals, there was one applicant she looked forward to hearing from every time.

It was the one who told her stories.

Edith was the impassioned founder of her organization, a faith-based nonprofit serving women and children.  Every grant proposal from their organization featured dynamic stories of their clients’ struggles, challenges, and most importantly, victories. Oftentimes, her stories read like magazine serials, and they really brought the organization’s mission to life.

“Remember Joan S?” Edith would write. “She’s now living in her own home, has regained custody of her children, and next June she’ll be graduating from college…”  

Pam tells us that the storytelling organization was funded for twice as long as the foundation’s guidelines allowed. (She can say that now, since she doesn’t work there any more!)

An Even Bigger Impact on Donors

Okay, so here is a major grantmaking foundation, with written guidelines and procedures, a competitive process, and a bureaucracy that included the President,  the Vice President of Administration, the Vice President of Programming, and the Vice President of Finance.

Those are supposed to be the hard heads at the foundation, the sticklers, the keepers of the gate.

And all of them wanted to read this particular grant application every time it came in. Because it told great stories.

The donors on your list aren’t professional funders. You don’t have to overcome their skepticism. You just have to touch their hearts.

It’s so simple: always tell stories to your donors. They’ll look forward to hearing from you, and they will give.

TY Thursday: What Your Nonprofit Can Learn from My Guest Bloggers

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How is your nonprofit like a guest blogger on Communicate?

Answer: You both have to put your audience before yourself.

How Guest Bloggers Succeed on Communicate

Amy Hufford

Amy Hufford

Laura Rhodes

Laura Rhodes

Tripp Braden

Tripp Braden

 

 

 

 

I don’t let just anybody post on the Communicate blog. It doesn’t matter how big a name they are or how long they’ve been in the field. What matters is that they serve readers like you: small- to medium-sized nonprofits that want loyal friends and donors.

Amy Hufford, Laura Rhodes, Tripp Braden, Brock Klinger, James Gilmer, Sybil Stershic, Tripp Braden, Rebecca Thompson, Lisa Dunn…all of these writers took the time and effort to do three things:

  1. Send tailored posts. Guest bloggers didn’t just grab something they’d written and chuck it my way. They came up with a topic and an approach that would interest my readers.
  2. Do the homework. They looked at other posts on the blog, figured out what you, the readers, like to see, and they wrote something like that.
  3. Be unselfish. Yes, of course we all know that the guest bloggers would like you to look at their websites too, and possibly to buy their products or services. But they thought about you first.

This Thank-You Thursday, I want to thank my guest bloggers. But more than that, I want to suggest you, the nonprofit organization, can follow their example.

Write For Your Donors, Not Just Yourself

This sounds obvious, but too often we forget: your donor has something valuable to give you.

I can only give space on this blog. Your donors give your nonprofit its lifeblood, the money it needs to keep running.

Or they don’t. Your donors can say no.

What do you need to do in order for them to say yes? The same things that bloggers do when they want me to say yes to their guest posts!

  1. Send tailored communications to your donors. Write first and most often about what they want to know–not what you want to tell them.
  2. Know your audience. Do research to find out who they are and what they care about. Segment your list so that you’re sending messages about housing to people who care about homelessness and messages about food banks to people who care about hunger.
  3. Make the donor the hero.
    • “We do great work” is selfish.
    • “We do great work with your help” is selfishness in a thin disguise.
    • “You do great work. Keep on doing it with your donation” is putting your audience before yourself–and paradoxically, that is what will benefit your nonprofit the most!

Learn from my guest bloggers: what they say, but more important, what they do. Put others first if you want them to help you.

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