Scattered thoughts for constructing a social media plan

I’ve been reading our textbook, class blogs/posts/resources, and poking around various other articles… and gathered a variety of new ideas and things to consider. I want to give a quick shout out to Dominic, Alyssa, and Kate Bladow, whose various posts I pulled some of these things from

These are fairly unfiltered thoughts, but just a collection of those things to think about… some pertaining to questions we might ask our organization, and some which just might be things we need to consider as we prepare our social media plan.

Thinking points:

• Connect twitter, Facebook, and blog to each other—but be sure to actually keep checking them, posting original things, and responding to anyone who comments!
• Think about how to effectively set up the Facebook timeline
• Add “storytelling” aspect to the social media plan, through podcast or other things
• Will we be able to have any influence on their actual website?
• How much time is the organization able to give to social media per week?
• Make our plan measurable (how do we know if we’ve succeeded?)
• Re-purpose content from a newsletter to go on a blog?
• Assign staff members to blog on different weeks?
• Variety of types of posts–some updates, some stories, some features, some advice
• Importance of interacting—need to respond to people who comment, etc.
• Should posts/tweets/updates be as one voice of the organization? Or let individual staff members post as themselves?
• It might be more important to work on using current tools effectively instead of attempting to introduce new tools
• Find out the level of “transparency” they are comfortable with
• Remember to focus on organization’s mission
• It might be helpful to group target people by characteristics  (what common characteristics do they have? are they young or old? are they social media savvy?)
• How can we make posts sound personal?
• Find out where current website traffic is coming from
• Look at what similar organizations are doing with social media
• Remember we want to talk WITH people, not AT them (we want to generate comments, not just likes–need to encourage participation)
• How does the organization currently recruit volunteers?

Like I said, it’s all a bit scattered, but I’m sure my group will incorporate many of these thoughts into the questions we already put together to ask our organization on Friday and will consider them in our final social media plan.

Until next time!

A generation shift

I appreciated how approachable and easy to read the Networked Nonprofit book is. It’s also up to date, which is always a really nice thing in reading textbooks, especially about technology. Even after only reading the first 2 chapters, I already feel like this is going to be a very useful book.

I thought it was very interesting how the book talked about the changes needing to be made in non-profits as much more than just the new phenomena of social media, but rather a generational shift. The “millennial” generation is just as important to consider in terms of how Non-profits can and should approach rallying support for their causes. The tie between social media and the “millinials” cannot be overlooked; it is the millinials who use social media, after all.

The concept of “free agents” was something that I hadn’t thought about as a term before, but it is something I clearly see when I look at my friends and causes that they support. It’s so true that we don’t seem to want to be tied to any one organization/cause for a long time, but that we want to be able to support a variety of things in a variety of ways. I also think it’s true that the younger generations really wants to see similar organizations working together as allies instead of competing with each other. This view may be more simplistic than reality will allow, but I do think this collaborative, teamwork approach is something that is really appealing to my generation.

The book also points out that it is important for non-profits to be continually welcoming to newcomers, as well as to embrase those who have “left” the organization and come back. Social media really fosters these sort of relationships and I think that many in my generation have come to expect being welcomed with open arms when they come, for however long they plan to stay committed. To really reach this generation, non-profits shouldn’t try to curb this tendency to come and go, but rather to embrace it and use it to their advantage.

 

 

Use of Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest by NPs

TWITTER

On Twitter, I began following a variety of NPs and noticed immediately that the Tweets come on a variety of topics. Some NPs posted links to promotions, liking designing a tshirt, etc. and many had had links to news stories, photos, or website/blog updates (which is obviously to be expected). There  were some conversations happening, but it didn’t seem to be a ton. There were some organizations that would post direct questions to followers, attempting to generate some interaction, which seemed to work a bit, but it was hard to tell how effectively.

Charity:water was one organization I kind of focused on; their use of Twitter, or at least the interaction happening through Twitter, seemed to be quite effective. It was recently World Water Day, so a lot was going on. I pulled some Tweets off their page just to show some of the ways Twitter was being used:

Thanks for letting us fill your Twitter feeds yesterday for #worldwaterday – we were so blown away by the support – 6,688 birthdays pledged!

My birthday is coming up. Want to buy me a cup of coffee? Send the money here instead

Our little girl informed us of plans to sell her jewelry on @Etsy and give 60% to charity. Wants to start with @charitywater. #ProudPapa

I gave up 2 bdays for @charitywater & provided 6,483 people w/ clean water. Your bday can change lives: http://bit.ly/GFZXlj #WorldWaterDay

Now, many of these Tweets mention birthdays. Curious (like other onlookers might be too), I went to their website, which was easy to find the link in many of these Tweets and looked for more info. The basic idea is that you’d type in your birthday and pledge to help raise money–basically, they said that when it got closer to your birthday, that they would send you information about how you could start fundraising. So, this is kind of vague, but it’s exactly what our Networked Non-Profit book talked about in utilizing free agents. Charity:Water seems to be allowing individual users to determine exactly how they’ll raise money around the central theme of it being on their birthdays.

 

GOOGLE+
I searched for “Non-Profit” on Google+ and found a bunch of organizations and people writing about NPs. I began following many of them and also re-posted a few articles I found interesting, I think I found at least one about each Pinterest, Google+, and Facebook and how to effectively use them to promote NPs.
Visit my G+ to check them out. I also started following Beth Kanter, one of the authors of our textbook, and she had some very good articles posted.

While searching for NPs, I came across a post from someone working with Aware Central Texas (which I discovered is a child abuse prevention center in St. Belton, Texas). This post said something about her working on on a social media plan for Aware Central Texas and had a link to a Google Doc that contains her plan for the organization. The Google Doc is actually still incomplete, but I thought my classmates might find it helpful for thinking about ideas on how to put together a strategic socil media plan. You can also visit this person’s blog if you are interested

PINTEREST
I searched around on Pinterest for various NPs, but actually had some difficulty. I looked for both NPs in general, as well as individual ones. There were only a few that came up in general and often when I searched a specific one, there were plenty of pints about them, but not whole boards or a person/organization that I could follow from the organization. One of the organizations I looked up charity:water. I couldn’t find the actual organization to follow and there was only 1 board (with only 1 pin) solely about it. However, searching pins in general for Charity:Water, there was a wide variety of pictures from other countries, pictures of merchandise (bracelets, sweatshirts), infographics, advertisements, and people supporting the cause. I thought that it was actually really neat to see all the people posting different things about the organization. One of the articles I posted on my G+,  Pinterest and the Hype Factor, talked some about the difficulty of Pinterest to actually do all that much to benefit from Pinterest, though it does seem that Pinterest is here to stay. Beth Kanter is also quoted in this article. Also,  Beth Kanter’s Pinterest boards are worth checking out, I found them quite interesting.

A draft is a draft, what can you do?

The week is almost over and I just thought I’d post a little update …I spent most of my free time this weekend working on my essay… but I feel like I have painfully little to show for it :/   I’ve got it close to 5 pages, but most of it I’d written earlier in the week and I’m still not terribly happy with what I currently have. Though I will say that it is better than when I first posted it on Friday

One of the main things I’m struggling with for this essay is determining the most logical way to frame my essay, i.e. what things are important and relevant to talk about and what things are not. I still plan to edit out some of what I currently have posted because I’m not sure if it’s all relevant… but I’m going to wait to determine exactly what until I’ve gotten some more writing done.

If anyone has a chance to read my essay, feel free to give me any advice on how to frame it as well as other things I could talk about that I don’t currently have in my outline

Also, if you haven’t taken my poll yet, I’d appreciate it if you would! It’s super quick–only 1 question!  I’ve actually gotten quite  bit of response so far, it’s been really fun to see! I posted it on Facebook and have been surprised by some of the people who participated, but I think it has helped the participants to be more well rounded. However, now I wish that I’d done a more elaborate survey than just the one question! Oh well though, it’s still interesting. I’m sure quite how much I’m going to talk about the poll results in my essay, but I am planning to include them in some capacity.

A quick note to anyone with posted essays: I get a message that says I’m not allowed to comment on most of yours– Oscar’s was actually the only one that I was allowed to comment on. I think that mine is open for anyone to post comments, but if it’s not, someone please let me know!