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CORRIDOR
Nonprofits increasingly use social media for marketing
Reporter: Gigi Wood
gigi@corridorbiznews.com
It’s all about connections.
Nonprofits are a leading industry when it comes to creating, maintaining and strengthening relationships with clients, donors and the general public. That’s the lifeblood of businesses that focus on service.
Earlier this month, the Harvard Business Review published a blog on how successful nonprofits are at working with social media, such as Facebook and Twitter.
“In the nonprofit sector, relationships have always been the key currency: the relationships with the members, donors and supporters that NGOs (non-governmental organizations) depend on for volunteer labor, financial support and advocacy muscle,” Alexandra Samuel stated in her June 16 blog entry, “Why Non-Profits Are So Good at Social Media.”
“Because nonprofits are so deeply invested in the relationship business, and because they often have not just a notional but a structural accountability to their members, many NGOs were early adopters of online community tools,” she stated. “NGO-run online communities and social media presences offered nonprofits a new way of stoking and harnessing their members’ loyalty and passion; and in their many successes, businesses can find key lessons for using social media to enhance customer relationships, too.”
Several Corridor nonprofits are jumping on the social media bandwagon these days. The Girl Scouts of Eastern Iowa & Western Illinois, for example, uses Facebook and Twitter. The group’s Facebook page is used to post event photos, connect with volunteers and parents and create awareness of the organization. Its Twitter page offers news about the group, is used as a way to network with other Girl Scout councils and stay in touch with the media.
“That was something we moved into late last year; I saw the value of us getting out into the social media,” said Chuck Gysi, spokesman for the Eastern Iowa Girl Scouts. “At the time we jumped forward, we really didn’t know where it was going to go. We were one of the first Girl Scout councils to go out there, as well. We try to be innovative and try to be at the forefront but we didn’t have a lot of information about what others were doing so we just jumped out there blindly.”
Now the group has 158 followers on Twitter and 345 fans on its Facebook page, where users can send friends virtual Girl Scout cookies.
“One of the things Facebook offers us that we really didn’t know going in was we can figure out who our demographics are on our Facebook page,” he said. “Our demographics tell us that the 25 to 44 age group is 70 percent of our fans on Facebook. So that tells us a couple of things: one, that it’s volunteers and two, that it’s parents (visiting the page). So that’s kind of shaping where we go with the page.”
The group is considering adding a Facebook page aimed at girls.
“We don’t want the girls to feel left out because it’s all adults on our fan page,” he said. “We need to give them a place, as well.”
Mr. Gysi tracks the popularity of Twitter posts online.
“By using different short URL services, you can see how many times people click on the links you provide. Now that’s a real key to measure the effectiveness of your Twitter account, is to put links in there and see how many hits those get when you post them,” he said.
Goodwill of the Heartland is working to start some social media sites, Dana Engelbert, spokeswoman for the group, stated in an e-mail.
“It is a very inexpensive way to closely manage the people you hold most dear,” she stated.
Junior Achievement of Eastern Iowa included social media in its most recent strategic plan and aims to have 1,000 Facebook fans by June 30, 2010. The group has 265 friends now and 151 followers on Twitter.
“We try to link to articles on NBC about bankruptcy and things like that so we’re linking to something relevant as opposed to just saying what we’re doing,” said Stephanie Filer, a spokeswoman for JA.
The group established some new goals for its social media sites for the new fiscal year.
“We’re going to try to have a more scheduled timeline of when we’re going to put certain things up,” she said. “We want to make sure there is consistency and continuity but not overlap. We want to make sure it’s frequent enough for people to look but not too frequent that people will ignore us.”
So far, JA’s efforts have been successful. A promotion on the two sites helped Junior Achievement sell an additional 50 tickets to a wine tasting event in April.
Read the Harvard Business Review blog at http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/nonprofits.html. CBJ
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