In the nonprofit world, “social media marketing” is nothing to sneeze at. As I learned at the second annual Craigslist Foundation Nonprofit Bootcamp, telling the story of your organization online is one of the most effective ways for nonprofits to connect with audiences and attract new donors.
In a workshop called “Social Media Marketing and Campaigning for Nonprofits,” See3 Communications and Greenpeace offered new solutions that nonprofits can use, despite limited resources.
I already knew that places like MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook provide unique platforms for nonprofits to tell their stories. But as I learned at this workshop, being online is only half the story. Creating a coordinated strategy and campaign around social media is vital to success.
Daniel Hartman of See3 Communications suggested the following strategies:
- Be portable
- Take advantage of RSS feeds, banners, widgets, and video
If you use a network like YouTube, don’t just passively slap up video. It takes a focused campaign. Be sure to:
- Create a branded account
- Use effective keywords in tags and descriptions
- Make and respond to comments
- Coordinate promotion to your list and via partners to reach a threshold for featured status
The next speaker, Beka Economopoulos, a field organizer for Greenpeace, offered an interesting case study which utilized fairly simple strategies and provided fascinating insights into how they used video to leverage their existing audience—and attract new audiences. At the onset of her talk, she reminded the audience to never “fetishize the technology.” Instead of the popular mantra “the media is the message,” she suggests replacing that with “the message is the message.” No matter how you do it, have a good message and execute a campaign effectively.
But how can nonprofits use the power of the Internet to do this? Economopoulos suggests that web pages should never be static and that nonprofits should think of themselves as destinations—places for users to come and talk and even better, engage offline. Online and offline integration are key to creating community. As an example of this, Greenpeace used these very strategies to take on a corporation—and simultaneously spread their mission virally.
