“We carry out international relief and development on behalf of Lutheran constituencies in Canada. Our donors, naturally, are mainly Lutherans. At the moment we haven’t much thought about directly fundraising through social media in the way HelpAttack does. Right now, using social media has been about gaining, informing and engaging supporters. We’re trying to increase our Likes and Followers. Gaining and engaging young supporters (teens and adults up to age 35) is an important goal for the organization right now and social media has been one way we’re trying to do that, although our more active Facebook friends and Twitter followers at this point are generally older than 35.”

http://www.clwr.org
http://clwr.wordpress.com/
http://www.facebook.com/CanadianLutheranWorldRelief
https://twitter.com/CanLWR
http://www.youtube.com/user/CLWRvideo

Overall, CLWR has a good looking website, and they have a solid set of practices on Facebook.  We suggested a few ways to align their website and blog, their Facebook page and email list, and their long and active history with a more social organizational mindset.  They were already using targeted Facebook ads and tagging of appropriate partners to grow their Facebook community.

Facebook Recommendations:

• Move Likes App out of top 4 positions
• Replace with an email list signup tab app.
• Continue to Like partner pages as the page

• Keep develop a list of partners, online & offline, aligned with your fundraising, mission, leadership, and board efforts.
• Continue ad campaigns with specific targeting, and review new Likes to see who responds
• Put more events on your timeline – founeed in 1946!  Tell the story in a few posts from each decade, using visual materials if possible

• Already have some newsletter and other content.  Link to your wordpress blog from the website, perhaps invite guest posts from partners.
• Deactivate donation form until the new one is ready.  Perhaps a PayPal button can fill the void for now?

Supporter Database

• Consider adding social media profile fields to your supporter / partner / donor database.

1. Your communications and development (fundraising) staff should be buddies.  Break down those silos, and settle those turf battles.  The communications folks can do it on their own, because they control the Facebook page, but the campaigns will be much more successful if everyone’s working together.
2. Know how you’ve gotten online donations in general.  Who?  Why?  Be familiar with what a “conversion rate” and “conversion funnel” is in the context of online fundraising.  The same knowledge will serve you well on social media.  So will the process of shortening and simplifying the donation form on your website, as well as making it mobile friendly and accessible.
3. Continue building partnerships, and be sure to do so on social media.  Like pages and follow profiles of partners, funders, grantees, local media, your volunteers, and everybody else who rocks your offline world too.  Tag them in Facebook posts.  Retweet them.  These are the people who will help your fundraising campaign reach 30,000 people instead of the 300 who follow you.
4. Rename your “donor database” a “supporter database.”  Supporters can contribute by volunteering, sharing, retweeting, Liking, emailing, running (a 10k), referring, cheerleading, and of course donating too.  Make it easy to identify how an individual can best help.
5. Is someone listening?  Do you mostly broadcast stuff out through Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn or is someone hanging out in HootSuite or TweetDeck answering questions, retweeting, and listening?

Done all that? You want something more specific?  How about these:

1. A way to accept payments on social media. Yes, you can link back to your website’s donation form, but consider adding a Facebook tab app too.
2. Do something special.  If you just ask people to give on social media, they won’t. Tell them why, and who they are helping, and they might.  Throw in a prize, video stories from recipients of care, shout-outs from a local celebrity, and you’re getting somewhere.  It doesn’t have to cost money, you can invent a “Facebook Fan of the Week” and award them with a hokey prize, and post about them.
3. When somebody shares the link, what image and description pops up?  Make sure those are attention grabbing and compelling.  Facebook uses the Open Graph protocol.
4. Gamify it. This means think about the incentives people have for sharing your content, and figure out how to align the goals of the campaign with that. Pay particular attention to what it means for someone to share and create awareness, versus give and drive donations.  Some content is good for one, but not the other.

Did you notice how few of those items are directly related to social media tactics?  We can help you with all of the above, and I’ll bet we’ll return to this post to add things as we continue learning.  For now, enjoy!  What made social media fundraising successful for you?  What helped you turn the corner?

1) Don’t underestimate our giving power:

Yes, we’re poor, so nonprofits often think of us as volunteers rather than donors. But, there’s this new great thing called micro-fundraising that we are actually capable of participating in. If we all give our spare change every now and again, it would make a BIG difference. And learning to give at a younger age forms a lifetime habit of giving (so in the future when some of us are millionaires, we’ll be able to give way bigger!).

2) Frequent where we most often hang out:

And, where is that? Facebook and Twitter, of course! Social media is like our own personal news station, providing information on people, events, and industries that specifically interest us as individuals. It’s important for organizations to keep up with these media in order to stay relevant and become more prominent in these “sources of news”.

3) Talk to us in our language:

It’s obviously not enough to just be active on social platforms. You have to know how to talk the talk and walk the walk. One of the best (and more simple) plans I’ve seen is FirstGiving’s Guide to Sharing Your Fundraising Page With Social Media. This doesn’t just target us college-goers. It’s a generally great strategy on how to appeal to social media users (which happens to be in the millions).

4) We like attention. Make us feel special:

Social media has done a lot of great things, but one not-so-great effect is a little boost to our own egos. We think people care when we Tweet about our breakfast, or feel sympathy when we post about our life troubles. So, if we do volunteer, micro-donate, “Like” you on Facebook, show us some love. Maybe even share it on your page so everyone can see how AWESOME we are. We like to feel like we’re good people and that we matter. This also gives us a reason to share with our friends and followers, and to return to your fundraising pages to see who’s donating and if we had a minute of fame on your site.

Social media has opened so many opportunities for nonprofit organizations to reach a younger audience without having to pay a big ad agency to make campaigns. These networks are bringing in more and more donors and donations every year! So, from the mouth (and typing fingers) of a 23 year old recent grad, there’s some easy advice on how to make us love you.

"So the chart is accurate?" "Yes, precisely."

In late March I blogged about the 2011 Nonprofit Social Network Report. I used some pretty strong language (for me) to point out some problems I saw in how the report was being discussed, and how they arose from choices made when compiling the report.  At the Nonprofit Technology Conference, I was able to talk with a few stakeholders in the report, and through them, get introduced to others. At the core, it IS good that there’s a report covering website and social network use by nonprofits. I understand that doing random sampling among 1.6M nonprofits is hard and expensive. Still, we just want to make it better.

The new 2012 report came out during the conference with roughly the same approach, showing broad growth in use of social networks. Again, I think the figures are skewed upward because the report was compiled from self-selecting responses from organizations who self-selected to be on the email lists used.  For marketing purposes, I suppose it’s in HelpAttack!’s interest that most organizations think they are not using social media enough compared to their peers.  Well, we wish a Facebook Like was worth $214 to causes on average in the 12 months after acquisition…but it isn’t.

So after another few weeks of stewing about it, a couple ideas bubbled to the surface:

• Actually, for nonprofits, it doesn’t matter! Basing your nonprofit’s decision to invest more or less in social media based on broad reports like this is kind of like deciding whether or not to bring an umbrella based on average annual rainfall. Look at your cohort of similar organizations, look at your strategy, and make your decision based on that.  It’s more the funders, foundations, vendors, and app developers (like us) who should deeply study the broad numbers.
• If a nonprofit should focus on learning from (and emulating) very similar organizations, is there something we can do to instead report on the average Facebook community size for animal shelters in Missouri, or land conservancy organizations, or food banks?  The source data for that may not exist yet, but it will.
• There’s always talk about innovation and openness at NTC, and this is a perfect opportunity to put that to work. We’ve reached out to lots of other organizations and thinkers in the industry, seeing who else might be studying these issues, and to try to see what HelpAttack! can do to help.  If you’ve gotten this far in the post  and you have an idea, an opinion, or a need, please let us know.