5 Ways to Make LinkedIn Board Connect Work for Your Nonprofit

LinkedIn Board Connect for nonprofits from LinkedIn for Good

With nearly two million nonprofit board seats open, good board members are hard to find. Most nonprofits know that looking for board members can be time-consuming and frustrating. I’ve been there, on the hunt for people who have the expertise and passion to make a positive contribution to the nonprofit I care about.

Read the article here

Promoted Facebook Posts for Non-profits

Earlier this month in my post "Advertising on Social Media"  I explored some thoughts on how effective advertising on social media sites such as Facebook is for small non-profits.  My main point was that social media sharing sites are places where we go to "find out stuff" about friends, relatives, colleagues and each other.

Heather Mansfield in her recent blog post Promoted Facebook Posts for Non-profits: The ROI of $30 spent in advertising shows us how she measured the difference in reach between a Facebook status update that received $30 of ads vs. a status update post that received no special promotion at all.  The bottom line seems to be a 4% increase on exposure on one post for the $30 spent compared to a control post that received no special attention or promotion.  The author feels that $3 would be a better price for this kind of online exposure than $30 and for small low budget non-profits advertising on Facebook is somewhat useless.

The question I ask is how does this really compare with other online ads such as Google or using other online sites such as Craigslist? If a traditional local community newspaper ad increased awareness of your organization by 4% would that be considered to be worthwhile? How about niche non-profit arts organizations that promote the study of classical, jazz and world musics?

If we assume 100% of the population is interested in what we are doing, then 4% seems low. But what percentage of the population is interested in our mission in the first place? If I spend $150 on a display ad in a local paper, it may reach 50,000 readers. But of those readers, what percentage might actually be interested? Of that small percentage of people interested , what percentage is actually going to act on the information in the ad? I suspect that the number is much, much less than 4%.  So is this another case of "we see what we look for" and our perceptions are being skewed by preconceived biases that we have before we even start?

My question is "How can we develop a meaningful set of metrics that can help small non-profits with tiny marekting budgets efficiently evaluate the effectiveness of these various strategies?"

Gary's Social Media Count

If you are a social media statistics junkie, this might be for you!

 

Advertising on Social Media

Since Facebook's grand entry into the world of public trading, or rather lacklustre entry into public trading many are wondering about the value of social media sites in terms of their revenue building potential. So the grand question becomes "Is it good value to advertise on Facebook?"

Some media articles are pointing towards the "no" campaign, like this article in the Globe and Mail that says "Facebook ads just don't work: Poll"  The problem is that if you go out an poll the "Average Joe" on the street they would tell you television ads don't work either. The point being the "Average Joe" on the street in this case is the wrong person to ask.

Companies that buy ads are the people to ask. GM is cancelling its ads on Facebook, but would you buy a car just because you saw a Facebook ad? Would you buy a car just because you saw a TV ad? Would you buy a car because of that radio ad advertising a free ipad 3 which each purchase? The only place I actually listen to the "radio" these days is guess where? Driving in my car!  Hmmmm.....

Bigger question to ask is "why do people use social media"?  There are lots of reasons but "I have a great gob of disposal income to spend today and I want to something to spend it on so I am logging into my facebook account" would be a notion pretty far down on most people's lists (those types would be better to log into their ebay accounts!)
Read more »

Social Media: What's Your Policy?

An interesting article appeared earlier this month on Charity Village about a real life story of some of the errors that can be made when using twitter and other social media accounts. Mistakes will happen, that is human nature, but how we react to our human frailties can be as revealing as the mistakes themselves.

If you're an avid devotee of social media, chances are you've already heard about this infamous gaffe: a Red Cross employee uses HootSuite to send out an otherwise-innocent tweet about her alcohol-induced evening in the company of a specific beer. She thought she was sending it from her personal account. But she was wrong. As we all know, mistakes like that are not easily repealed and once you've hit that send button it's hard to take things back.

But here's the thing about the Red Cross and their reaction to the incident: no one got fired, nothing hit the proverbial fan and no one went into heavy crisis mode.

In fact, they made light of the situation with an affable response.

"We've deleted the rogue tweet but rest assured the Red Cross is sober and we've confiscated the keys," said the follow-up tweet. In a statement about the incident, Social Media Director Wendy Harman summed up their response this way: "We are an organization that deals with life-changing disasters and this wasn't one of them; it was just a little mistake."

Taking full advantage of the situation, the beer company referred to in the original tweet, Dogfish, promptly sent out their own tweets requesting followers to donate to the Red Cross. Before long, a number of pubs joined in, offering pints of the beer to anyone who donated blood. Ironically, what could have been a disastrous situation ended up win-win. Well, almost.


In Control?

That's not always the case. Sofia Ribeiro of Kiwano Marketing relates another story: in early March, an employee of Chrysler's social media agency accidentally sent out a message from the Chrysler handle and used the "F" word in one of his tweets. It didn't take long for Chrysler's management team (and its 9,000+ followers) to see it and react. The employee was unceremoniously dismissed and Chrysler also dispensed with the agency. Though they deleted the tweet from the company's twitter thread, the damage was already done, explains Ribeiro, adding, "What's interesting is that many of Chrysler's followers were shocked to learn that the agency managing Chrysler's twitter account dismissed the contractor over this, further damaging the brand." No win here.
Read more »

Social media & customer engagement

This recent article on BC Business magazine explores how to use social media, and gives a great example of why you don't want a junior employee in charge of it. The article sites how a small business owner has used twitter to personalize his business and respond to customer tweets about the experience at his small fitness club, probably not unlike the size and scope of a small music school.

Question for our readers, how many of you use Twitter? My suspicion is that if I were ask people to rank the methods of communication most used I would get this order:

1. email
2. text messaging 
3. old fashioned phone call
4. facebook
5. twitter

For those under 25 years of age, my guess is that this would be true:

1. SMS or text messaging
2. facebook
3. email
4. old fashioned phone call
5. twitter

I have twitter is last spot here on both of my lists... So for users in the province of BC, do you think I am correct with this notion, or behind the times as they say? 

If your Kids are Awake, They are Probably Online

So how much time do our kids have to practice and do homework? Considering that today is the day Apple is set to tell the world about the iPad, this article is rather timely. According to this study just released from the Kaiser Family Foundation in the United States by Victoria J. Rideout, M.A.,Ulla G. Foehr, Ph.D., and Donald F. Roberts, Ph.D., kids are spending almost every waking moment with some electronic media device or another.Smart phones, texting and Twitter are taking over our lives.. Knowing my own students, I would say that what is happening here in BC would be exactly the same, especially in urban areas.

A national survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that with technology allowing nearly 24-hour media access as children and teens go about their daily lives, the amount of time young people spend with entertainment media has risen dramatically, especially among minority youth. Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time 'media multitasking' (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of media content into those 7½ hours.

Article in the New York Times

Kaiser Family Foundation Study

Generation M2; Media in the lives of 8 - 18 year olds  Pdf report