In an increasingly wired world, supporters are deciding how they want to communicate and receive messages in accordance to their personal preferences. While email, direct mail and traditional websites will continue to play an important role in marketing, social media is now a preferred channel of communication for many people. By “fishing where the fish are,” nonprofit organizations can reach their audience through their preferred means of communication. We can help by providing the following services:

1. We Help You Strategize. As with any other medium used in communication, every nonprofit should first create a plan before embarking on the use of social media. A good plan involves assessing your organization as a whole, defining what it wants to accomplish, and identifying the right approach to ensure you are well-positioned to achieve your goals. By evaluating these areas, a well-planned strategy can be created to develop social media programs that suite your organization.

• We help you understand why social media is important for nonprofits

• We will help you understand the influence on and benefits of social media for nonprofits.

• We will help you to understand the various types of social media:

• Social Networks: Facebook™, MySpace™, LinkedIn™

• Blogs: Wordpress, Typepad, Blogger, Convio Content Management System

• Microblogs: Twitter™, Tumblr, Plurk™

• Video Sharing Sites: YouTube™, Vimeo™, Blip.tv™

• Photosharing: Flickr™, Picasa, PhotoBucket™

• Online Communities: Ning™, BuddyPress™, Jive, Chatter

• Social Bookmarking: Digg™, Delicious™, StumbleUpon™

• GeolocationLocation Based Services: Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl

• We  help you identify your strategic objectives for social media

• We help you evaluate your audience and your organization

• We help you select the right social media outlets appropriate to meet your goals

2. We Help You Listen Better. Listening is the one tactic appropriate for every organization, regardless of mission, size or field of interest. The truth is, someone, somewhere is talking about you online and with a few simple searches you can find these conversations. BY knowing where to listen we  help educate your staff, respond to misperceptions or—even better—help someone with an issue and in turn create a loyal supporter.  By listening, you’ll learn a great deal about the people interested in your mission, your constituents, and your organization. You’ll be in a better position to respond, provide better services, and plan for the future.

• We set up listening tools, such as Google Alerts, for terms or keywords you associate with your mission and organization, URLs and public-facing figures.

• We use free social media monitoring tools, such as Google Alerts or Social Mention, to track keywords associated with your organization and mission.

• We help appropriate staff sign up for the major social networks as an individual, and join all of the discussion or fan groups associated with your cause and organization.

• We monitor the mood of comments on the social media properties where you see activity and note how trends correspond to your organization’s activities.

• We follow or add to your list of friends: advocates, influencers, bloggers and mainstream media. We will use segmentation tools to create a feed or list on Twitter or Facebook to monitor their activity for collaboration opportunities.

• We go deeper on the keywords being monitored by adding brand terms, campaign-specific terms, and names of key staff members, public figures or competitors.

• We monitor real-time conversations through hashtags on Twitter that you have created and/or that are pertinent to your mission.

• We conduct a weekly or monthly review of recorded insights from mentions and listening data. This process will eventually teach you where there is the most activity for your supporters online.

3. We help you share valuable content. One of the main reasons so many people have flocked to social media and made it their primary online activity is that they seek out information and find value in what they find shared in social channels from friends and colleagues. As a nonprofit, to be successful in your efforts, never forget that value has to be at the root of the content you share.

• We create a branded Twitter account and help you start sharing updates about your organization or cause through at least two tweets a day.

• We begin a branded blog and help you create at least two relevant posts a month with links back to your website and action pages, such as online petitions or donations.

• We expand your footprint to third party communities by posting to causes on Change.org and Care2 that have a pre-existing base of supporters on relevant topics.

• We help you distribute newsworthy links on your organization’s Facebook page as timely events occur.

• We help you share relevant images from your organization’s events, functions and supporters on photosharing sites such as Flickr.

• We enable social sharing on your website to make it easier for supporters to distributed information upon your behalf.

• We create a branded YouTube account, leveraging video on your blog and website(s) in various capacities.

• We make it easy to stay in touch with your blog updates by offering an email sign-up option and RSS integration with newsreaders.

• We help blog visitors connect with your social media properties by integrating feeds of various social media entities into your main blog via widgets and RSS feeds.

• We help you cover your organization’s live events in real-time using social media tools with updates and news.

4. We help you engage with supporters. Once you are comfortable with the toolsets at your disposal and understand where your constituents are active online, you can begin to interact with them to build relationships, create awareness of your organization, and initiate an ongoing dialogue that will help you continuously engage constituents with your brand and mission.

• We teach you how to respond to and retweet Twitter updates that support your mission or communication objectives.

• We teach you how to post photos from past years’ events on Facebook to better market the event and share experiences with users.

• We show you how to comment on blogs, forums and online communities to build awareness of your organization’s cause and social media presence. We teach you how to share links to your website(s) within your comment.

• We add “Connect with Us” links on your organization’s website(s) to build awareness of your social media presence. In order for people to join your social media properties, they must be aware that they exist! We help you do your best to always be promoting your social presence online.

• We help you interact with event and conference attendees in person at events and encourage them to spread news about your activities within their network.

• We add Facebook’s “like” feature on your organization’s website(s) to allow wider range of social sharing capabilities and thus increase engagement across the Web.

• We help you initiate Twitter conversations by listening and responding to relevant brand or cause mentions.

• We help you reach out to key community leaders and bloggers who are interested in the type of campaign you are running and the mission of your organization, and encourage them to share information with their contacts on an ongoing basis.

• We help you learn how to create a meme using hashtags that are relevant to your supporters, allowing them to engage with you and your organization in an ongoing, fun manner.

• We remind you to encourage supporters to share video and images to use for marketing purposes.

5. We help you drive action and build your email list. One of the most important things nonprofits can do to drive success is to build a file of supporter information— namely email addresses for online communication— to then use in stewardship efforts. Social channels are an ideal place to ask for new supporters to take action by signing a pledge or providing information about themselves. The information acquired can then be used in future outreach efforts to turn these contacts into donors or activists.

• We teach you to add your organization’s events and campaigns to your Facebook page to drive registration and encourage involvement.

• We teach you to tweet your fundraising event details to raise awareness and increase sign-ups.

• We teach you to email Facebook “fans” through your branded Facebook page and invite them to your organization’s events.

• We help you promote offline events with blog posts that contain event information and incorporate multimedia from past years’ events.

• We help you create a hashtag, and encourage people to use it to raise awareness and interest in online campaigns.

• We help you orovide content for supporters to share and post on their own social networks.

• We teach you how to schedule tweets to run during live events to help communicate live opportunities and reminders.

• We create custom landing pages on your Facebook page to inspire fans to support advocacy campaigns.

• We use Facebook as an email acquisition tool by integrating email sign up form on your Facebook page.

• We teach you to set up events in Facebook to give participants the ability to RSVP for your event online.

• We create an advocacy widget that can be embedded on blogging platforms, your Facebook page, and your organization’s website. These widgets will help keep web visitors tied to your social properties and vice versa. Widgets also make it easy for your followers to share content on your behalf.

6. We help you raise funds. The goal of social media for most nonprofit organizations is to raise money. And while social media is still a very new channel for raising funds compared to email marketing, direct mail and offline events, it has helped organizations reach new donors and thus successfully increase their fundraising. Moving beyond traditional channels to leverage social media’s capabilities, embracing a multi-channel approach has proven to be very effective.

• We help you create blog posts to share information about fundraising campaigns and solicit donations.

• We teach you to tweet messages throughout the duration of your campaigns to inspire action and create awareness for your cause and campaign.

• We create a campaign donation form on your Facebook page.

• We develop content in advance for supporters to share and post on their own social networks to help drive donations around seasonal campaigns and help raise money on your behalf.

• We create a Facebook Cause, providing compelling information that can be shared with users to donate and take action on your behalf.

• We create a fundraising widget that can be embedded on blogging platforms, your Facebook page, and your organization’s website. These widgets will help keep web visitors tied to your social properties and vice versa. Widgets also make it easy for your followers to share content on your behalf.

7. We help you measure ROE (Return on Engagement). Communications and marketing efforts should always be accompanied by proper reporting and metrics that gauge effectiveness and help practitioners learn how to improve future efforts. Social media tactics are vast and ever growing, but it is possible to show a return on investment, or possibly better stated, a return on engagement (ROE). Although there are many ways and various tools to track these metrics, this is not as daunting a task as it may seem. We use reporting as an opportunity to highlight success to your management team and understand how to better your programs.  It’s important to note that the metrics you track and the reports you run should be based on your organization’s initiatives. However, a number of core elements should be evaluated when beginning your pursuit to measure your return on engagement. 

• Analytics: We help you identify the right metrics to track by analyzing your goals, assigning the right resources, and using the right tools to track metrics

• Benchmarks: We take your raw metrics and report on them in a comparative way. We begin by making a master dashboard, baseline your activity, and help you broaden your metrics when appropriate.