Play safe and have fun!

Loved this update from Livestrong staff member Brooke McMillan, who does such a tremendous job over at the Livestrong Blog. Her post on August 5 was called, Don’t be afraid nonprofits, you won’t break it!

My favourite quote:

Someone asked “What is the most important thing you can impart on a nonprofit today?” Hands down its to know that you can’t break the internet! Dive in head first. See what happens. Give up some of that control that nonprofits are infamous for. Let people interact with each other in your space without hovering too much. Foster that community. You can always change your direction or try something new. It’s a giant experiment.

Well put. Social media is an experiment, especially in the nonprofit world where less data exists to provide proven strategies for success. What do you think, are you willing to dive in head-first and create your own experiment? Or is it better to hang back and wait for the data to emerge before taking the risk?

What kind of blog should I write?

This is the first post in the series, Five urgent questions, answered.

A question that I’ve been giving thought to lately is what kind of content nonprofits should have in their blogs.  Before launching a blog, it’s important to give some thought to what your goals are and what kind of audience you’re looking for. For example, you may wish to consider the following:

1. Who do I want to read the blog?

2. What messages do I want my readers to come away with?

3. What kind of action do I want my readers to take after reading?

4. What will make my readers continue to read and subscribe?

5. What kind of readership do I hope to achieve and why?

The reason I mention this is because there are several different directions a nonprofit blog can take. Examples include The Event Blog, The Advocacy / Campaign Blog and the Relationship Management Blog. 

THE EVENT BLOG

Style: Information Delivery

Audience: Existing attendees/interested parties

Goal: Improve event attendance

Most successful blogs go beyond information delivery – they offer a collaborative, spontaneous playground for thoughtful minds to come together and build social connections, form new relationships, and share in an interesting, meaningful dialogue.  Not all nonprofit blogs are being used for this purpose, and in fact many are used for the sole purpose of delivering information on a single subject. The purpose, style or source of information may vary, but the main goal of this kind of blog is one-way communication. Nonprofit blogs designed to increase event attendance use this style of blogging.

A great example is the Calgary Reads blog, which was set up with the intention of encouraging people to attend the Calgary Reads booksale, and providing information about the upcoming event.  

There is nothing wrong with a blog that focuses on one-way information delivery, but it should be recognized that your blog will have a narrow focus and will achieve a limited goal, namely providing people who are already planning on attending or are interested in attending with updates.  A blog that delivers information on one topic will not likely capture the attention and interest of readers who are not already associated with the event.  The lack of interesting, inspiring or controversial subject matter and its one-dimensional focus will not provide enough content to attract or maintain many new readers.

This is not a problem if you are using the blog similar to an e-newsletter. This style of blog has its advantages; subscribers get updates with details of events when they change and this blog can be used to increase event attendance. 

THE ADVOCACY/CAMPAIGN BLOG

Style: Online community building

Audience: Those interested in or impacted by any area of the cause or mission – supporters, related-organizations, clients/beneficiaries, and various other stakeholders.

Goal: Widen public support for a particular mission or goal

Blogs that have the intention of inspiring and attracting new support for a campaign may include some information delivery, but the content is likely to be more diverse, including updates on changes to legislation, news items, updates on the organization’s activities and stories from the field or from beneficiaries and clients. This kind of blog is likely to make space for more conversation, opinion, and response, especially if done successfully. (The Greenpeace Green my Apple campaign is an excellent example and so is Livestrong.)

THE RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT BLOG

Style: Diverse

Audience: Those who are, or may become, interested and invested in the organization and its work. This may include a broad range of stakeholders, including those who are interested in social engagement or various social issues in general, as well as the organization and its mission in particular. This offers opportunities to gain new funders, evangelists and supporters. 

Goal: Build trust, gain support, raise awareness

Some nonprofit blogs have more diverse content and wider goals. Content on these blogs may include updates on events, relevant news or information, but the effective ones will also provide  insight into who works at the organization, who benefits, and what kind of work is actually done.  I believe that this is the least-well utilized style, but has the best potential.  

Revealing who you are and what you do is key to building trust with donors; the MSF blogs accomplish this exceptionally well. If you want to write a blog that builds meaningful relationships, you may want to integrate some stories written by your staff, volunteers, clients or field workers.

Advocacy Blogs and Relationship Management blogs provide an opportunity to share diverse content, including captivating real-life stories. It’s an opportunity to share more about who we are are build trust with existing or would-be supporters. 

These types of blogs take more effort than event blogs.  They require frequent posting, because if these blogs are going to attract and retain readers, they need to provide regular, interesting content.  They also require more committment throughout the organization.  This takes time, and doesn’t require just the assistance of one employee, but of many.  (This is a challenge I will discuss later.)

To summarize…

Before writing a blog, make sure you get clear on what your focus will be and what you will offer your readers in return for their click.  If you hope to attract new supporters (financial or otherwise) your best bet, and biggest challenge, will be how to provide content that facilitates the development of trust and connection between readers and the organization.  However, before even attempting this goal, make sure it’s what you truly want.  If you goal is simply to keep participants updated on changes to events, your blog will end up looking a whole lot different.

Five urgent questions, answered – a 5 part series

This has been a busy summer. I’ve been meeting with a lot of Directors of nonprofit organizations in the local area and in the GTA, discussing their social media strategies, consulting and providing volunteer support.  One of the things I’ve learned is that social media has already become a major interest among many Canadian nonprofits. Perhaps nonprofits have already been sold on the issue of whether or not to use social media.  The more important question may be how to give nonprofits the tools they need to make their social media goals happen.  Some of the major questions I’m receiving are more about how to use social media effectively, and how to find technical support. 

Here are a few key questions I’m going to answer in my blog in the next few weeks:

1.What kind of blog should I write?

2. Who can help me use social media?

3. How do I get the rest of my organization to participate?

4. How often do I need to tweet or blog?

5. How do I measure my return on investment?

Some of these are questions I’ve been asked directly and some of these questions have not yet been asked, but are likely emergent problems that I see as urgent.

If you think of another urgent question or problem, feel free to leave a comment below or send me an email.

Building trust in a skeptical era

Two days ago, The Toronto Star published an article called, “Ottawa targets rogue charities: Tough new guidelines in wake of Star exposé make it easier to revoke charitable status.”

These “investigative reports” have hit charities hard, and it’s exactly why the nonprofit sector needs social media to survive.  We need to find new and better ways to communicate our purpose, demonstrate the work that we do, and be more accountable to our donors.  Social media provides a whole new level of transparency, because it allows the organization to humanize itself, revealing its daily activities, accomplishments and struggles.

Like I’ve said before, it’s easier to trust a person than it is to trust an organization, and social media is the perfect opportunity to reveal your honest, genuine, hard-working staff to the public.  Don’t underestimate the power of the genuine voices from staff members, field workers, clients and volunteers. They can contribute as much or more as an Executive Director. The MSF blogs I referred to are perfect examples. 

I feel as though I’m repeating myself a bit, but I wanted to highlight that skepticism is growing.  Charities are going to face an even harder time during this recession as would-be donors become risk-averse and don’t want to take a chance on charities they do not know or trust.

During my Masters thesis research, I interviewed many nonprofit CEOs and staff about how they developed trust with donors.  We need to take those strategies and apply them to new contexts, using new technologies, so that we can reach more prospective donors and maintain relationships with those already invested.

Get twittering with Social Entrepreneurs

A colleague of mine at PI just sent me this fantastic list, released from the Skoll Foundation via Social Edge: The top 100 Tweeps in Social Entrepreneurship. It’s a great list of social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, and folks working in the NP, social media and social entrepreneurship fields. I’m not sure what their list of qualifications was, but I will take their word for it that these tweeps know their stuff.  With a brief glance, I didn’t see too many that I’m currently following, so I can’t wait to get started.

Social media needs a empowering workplace culture

Thank you to Renjie Butalid who sent me this fantastic synopsis by Jocelyn Harmon (Marketing for Nonprofits) of a recent event called BlogPotomac in DC. Harmon  relayed the key points from a speech given by Scott Monty, who is in charge of social media at Ford Motor Company.  No wonder Harmon was impressed – apparently Monty drove home the need for a mutually supportive workplace culture that embraces and cultivates openness and authenticity.  I couldn’t agree with him more.

As Harmon wrote on her blog:

I really appreciated Monty’s reminder of how importance culture fit is to the successful use of any technology but especially social media. For example, it’s one thing to tell your employees to get on Twitter. It’s a whole other ball of wax to tell them that you trust them to connect authentically with customers online or offline and to get going!  In order to succeed with social media you need to pay attention to and cultivate a culture of openness and honesty. You also have to get over yourself and be willing listen to and hear critique.

Lately I’ve been pondering the question of who shouldn‘t use social media.  As we all know, it’s better not to use it than to use it badly.  I’ve been involved in some organizations in the past where I felt as though social media just didn’t fit – but couldn’t put my finger on why.  Now I realize that, although they could conceivably benefit from social media (everyone can,) they just didn’t have a culture that would support it.

What kind of office culture do you work in? Does it support transparency? Does it encourage staff to be open about mistakes? Does it encourage free engagement with donors, clients or customers?

I suppose that social media can be used in environments that do not support open dialogue, but I think it will be likely destinted to be a glorified newsletter, focused on information delivery rather than dialgoue, and may eventually reveal the ugly vice grip senior management has on all external communications.  In my opinion this would only serve to increase, rather reduce, skepticism in donors.

How Greenpeace greened Apple: A case study

I  hearing great social media success stories. Last night at Wired Wednesday in Toronto, I heard the best story yet, from Beka Economopoulos (@Bekamop) who is the VP at Fission Strategy, a company that does online organizing & social media consulting for non-profits. Within nine months, Beka and her crew – who were working on behalf of Greenpeace (US) – had Steve Jobs commit to greening Apple, phasing out the worst chemicals in their product range, which is a pretty impressive feat.

I was worried I would have to recount this exciting story myself, and would undoubtedly miss some important details, but luckily this juicy story is recounted on Green my Apple website. If you want to read a fantastic case study about a campaign that achieved wild success using the best that social media has to offer, that you must check this out.

From the presentation, I gleaned a couple of important take-home messages.

1. Empowerment creates evangelicals.  Much of Apple’s success has been linked to brand evangelism.  (I count myself among the Apple Evangelicals).  In the Green my Apple campaign, they took the same approach. By empowering users to get creative with various forms of social media, (flickr, for example) supporters took the campaign into their own hands and created a whole new level of awareness.

2. The user is the creator. Too often, I see Canadian nonprofits using social media for message-delivery, as opposed to message creation and social connection. Social media has the ability to inspire, which should be one of its primary goals. This is a fantastic example of how avoiding rhetoric and making the tools as open as possible (they created banners and badges that other bloggers could use, and licensed images under creative commons, for example) may inspire users to become more than just passive consumers of information.

Using this approach, here are a few cool things that happened:

• 50,000 Mac users emailed Steve Jobs, requesting a greener Apple, within a 6 month span
• 70% of visits to the Green my Apple website came from referring sites (revealing substantial online discussion)
• 470,000 references to the campaign were made online
• 4070 blogs wrote about the campaign
• The site received 1 million unique visits
• Steve committed to creating a greener apple, eliminating the worst pollutants in the products

My hope is to discover a Canadian nonprofit who has similar success in using social media. Know of any?

Blogging fallacy #1: If you write it, they will come

If you’re going to invest the time and effort to write a blog as a fundraising or public engagement tool, it’s important to learn how to promote it effectively. When I discover really incredible nonprofit blogs, I am frequently disappointed to discover that they have not been attracting sufficient readership to make much of an impact.  

Although posting good quality content regularly will help you to attract and maintain readers, your blog can, and probably will, get lost in the great depths of the blogosphere if you don’t promote it. If I had to sum up promotion, I would say it involves three key processes:

1. Linking back to the blogosphere at large and participating in online discussions 

2. Making your blog easily accessible (too many nonprofit websites do not have a clear link to their blog)

3. Using cross-directional forms of media to promote one another (blog, twitter, facebook, you-tube, etc. should all reference each other)

There is a lot more that you can do, but this is at least the “bare bones” approach to blog promotion.  

The basic point is that social media works differently than traditional forms of communication. If you are only writing your blog to broadcast information, you may do just as well using your e-newsletter or report. Social media is special, because it allows mutual relationships to form and two-way communication to occur.

Learning from the best: MSF blogs squelch skepticism

So far, my favourite Canadian nonprofit blog is the blog series by MSF (Medicines Sans Frontiers, or Doctors without Borders).  Actually, there are 10 blogs, to be exact, including a picture blog and a “best of” collection.

The blogs are amazing. For example, you will want to read the stories of a Field Coordinator in Liberia (“Welcome to Bravo Hotel: Stories from Monrovia”) and an emergency obstetrics Doctor in Haiti (“A Labour of Love”).

Photo: J Stavropoulou. | Maria and baby Takudzwa.

The above photo can be found in the touching story called Finding a Little Miracle. In this post, Joanna – a communications professional working in Zimbabwe – documents her quest to find Maria, a pregnant woman who had been discharged from an MSF camp after being treated for cholera. She lacked the funds necessary to be given natal care at a hospital. Joanna, worried, managed to track her down days later, and happily discovered that Maria had given birth to a healthy baby.

These blogs allow outsiders, like me, to feel connected to MSF’s mission, and more importantly, feel connected to the field workers and patients themselves. The bloggers write insightful, eloquent posts that naturally reveal both desperation and hope. They capture the reader’s attention and hold it in a way that other PR materials cannot.

These blogs are also exceptionally honest and intimate, revealing challenges, fears and disappointment. Dr. Wendy Lai, for example, has written about interpersonal conflict and frustration that she experiences on the job.  It’s obvious to the reader that this is not copy; it’s spontaneous, and it’s real.

If donors had any suspicions about how money is being spent, or whether the funds are getting to the right place, this blog would squelch them.  It’s obvious by these blogs that the MSF workers are incredibly brave, and are doing indisputably important work.

25,000 twitter followers = $25,000 donation

Shortly after I wrote about why I love twitter, I discovered that Doug Ulman, CEO of the Lance Armstrong Foundation, managed to get 15,000 twitter followers in 3 days, a feat which earned him a $25,000 donation.  This anonymous donor bet Doug, who already had 10,000 followers, that he would not be able to reach 25,000 followers in 3 days – and Doug proved him wrong.  After polling their online community (12,000 people voted) it was determined that the money would go to support the Young Adult Alliance.

That was just last week – now Doug has 56,397, and you can bet the number is growing. (@livestrong – the company account – has almost 21,000 and Lance Armstrong has nearly one million.)

According to LAF, this is why they use twitter:

We use the account to help recruit and assist community leaders, educate on cancer policy, offer cancer support services and build a community around our mission to make cancer a global priority. Doug uses his account to do the same and, therefore, the more followers, the more people we can potentially help and can empower.

I know what you’re thinking: More followers does not necessarily equal more impact – and you’re right.  

But the LAF twitterers use social media very effectively.  For one thing, they use twitter in conjunction with other forms of media – including their blogs and forums; this interactive and multi-dimensional approach works best when developing an online. 

But here’s what makes them great: They are real people twittering; it’s not just a feed. They tweet out great links & information related to cancer research, health care and LAF-centred topics, but they also make comments about their daily activities so that you can relate to them and share in conversations. Doug engages with other followers and re-tweets frequently.

Part of the usefulness of twitter is the ability to give your organization a human face . In simple terms, you’re not just there to deliver information; you’re there to make friends. Using a personal voice to convey professional information helps for followers to trust you, and believe in you.  If they believe in you, they will believe in your organization. 

To follow Doug on Twitter: www.twitter.com/livestrongceo

To follow LIVESTRONG on Twitter: www.twitter.com/livestrong

To follow Lance on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lancearmstrong