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Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Social Media for Nonprofits: How Do I Keep Up?

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You’re an organization that promotes the social good.  You’re on social media.  Why doesn’t it feel social?

drinking out of a fire hose

This is not what you want to do on social media!

Probably because you’re trying so hard to keep up.  Following other people on social media is proverbially like “drinking out of a fire hose.”  Feeding your followers’ hunger for content is like running a short-order kitchen.

When do you sit down and actually talk?

Automate Tasks, So You Can Be More Personal

You want to use social media to a) get to know your supporters and b) have them get to know and love you better.  That takes a personal touch.

Paradoxically, the way to get personal is to automate more tasks.  Think of it this way: you have only so much time, right?  How would you rather spend that time: scheduling posts (which is something a machine can do), or having a real conversation with someone who’s interested in your group?

Social Media Tasks to Automate

There are certain social media tasks that lend themselves easily to automation.  Adam Stetzer, President & Co-Founder of HubShout, lists a few do’s and don’ts.  DO:

  • Automatically share every blog post to multiple social media platforms.
  • Use software to schedule posts so your feeds look alive when you are asleep.
  • Find strong sources of specific content about your mission that your audience will enjoy, that you won’t have to create.

Don’t Automate These Social Media Tasks

  • Highly-customized content that complements the news about your issues mentioned above, but shows the personality and human-side of the organization.
  • “Thank you’s”: When a human reaches out to you, find a way to build the contact into a relationship with a highly customized (i.e., human) response.
  • Refollows: Don’t follow every follower. Many are machines and bring no value.
  • Retweets: Automation will reduce the quality of social media presence.

Will you put these tips to use in 2015?

So You Want to Market to Nonprofits? How to Find Them

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There are 1.8 million tax-exempt organizations in the United States alone, from Harvard University to your local homeless shelter.  This is a huge market that many businesses don’t know how to tap.

Do you want to sell your services or products to nonprofit organizations?  First you have to find them.  Here are a few tips on how.

  1. In your local community, find a few organizations doing work you admire. Reach out to them via social media by retweeting or sharing their content.  Attend their events.  For that matter, sponsor their events.  Ask for an informational interview with the Executive Director, and if you really want to build a long-lasting relationship, volunteer!
  2. Seek out organizations that serve the nonprofit community.  The Association of Fundraising Professionals is one. State associations like the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network are good too. Go to their conferences and meet their constituency: it could be the audience you’re trying to reach. Let them know where they can find you online. Share useful information written in a way that speaks their language.
  3. Read nonprofit journals, like The Nonprofit Quarterly or more specialized publications like the Chronicle of Philanthropy. See what their readers are interested in and make those a centerpiece of your social media presence.

I also recommend becoming active in LinkedIn groups such as Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations. You can learn a lot by listening to conversations in these groups and build your own presence by genuinely getting involved.

Nonprofits, what other advice would you give to vendors who want your business?

How Do You Say That in Nonprofit? 3 More Translations

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Nonprofits can find a lot of good advice about communications on the web–but we have to translate it from business-speak before we can use it.

I hope you enjoyed my previous post, “How Do You Say That in Nonprofit? 13 Translations.” and the sage advice in the comments section.  Here are three more translations–because I Speak Nonprofit!

  1. Landing page: Not the home page of your website, but the page you send people to when they want to do something specific: join a campaign, download a document, sign up for a class, register for an event.  Here are some examples.
  2. Marketing automation: Despite the cold name, this can be a hot way to nurture relationships with new contacts.  Using software, you automatically send messages keyed to the contact’s interests, typically at set intervals after he or she signs up.  Why? To speed them through the cycle of becoming your loyal supporter.  You can use tools you already have: that will cost time instead of money.
  3. Social media automation: When you try to keep up with social media, do you feel overwhelmed?  Using tools like Hootsuite to pre-schedule your posts will let you spend your “live” time on social media actually having conversations with the people you want to attract. 

What are some other communications terms you’d really like to understand?

 

 

 

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