We have an interesting discussion underway on The Agitator regarding the utility of social media today for nonprofit fundraising. "Go slow" seems to be the prevailing sentiment. I urge you to flick through this week’s posts and comments if you haven’t yet done so.
But nonprofits are not alone in this quandary. Here are two articles reflective of how marketers in the commercial space view the challenge of sorting through these new media opportunities.
In Social Media Insider, David Berkowitz of 360i puzzles over the proper metric to use for pricing social media … and from there, being able to calculate some sort of return on investment. He proposes:
"Cost Per Social Action (CPSA). It’s for any action with a distinctly social quality that leads to either new relationships (such as through "viral" referrals or acquiring new followers and fans) or deepening existing relationships (such as through "likes," comments, responses, and ratings).
The main benefit of CPSA is that marketers know they’re paying for something social and relationship-oriented. More importantly, marketers know they’re not specifically paying for exposure, traffic, conversions, or interactions (though those can all provide additional value). It’s an acknowledgement that social media is something else, so it’s deserving of a new model, one that stresses relationships above all else."
I think he’s on the right track. If you can’t calculate some kind of ROI, how can you justify any but the most modest, experimental spending on social media? And I do believe the right thing to focus on as a metric is evidence of building and deepening relationships.
In Online Spin, Cory Treffiletti of Catalyst SF paints a picture of marketers potentially overwhelmed by competing social media platforms, tools and applications. He says:
"The beauty of social media is much like the early days of the Web, where the rules are being written and we know consumers are spending more time here. The challenge of social media is also that the rules are being written and no single idea has emerged as the "killer app," so to speak.
The social media space is one of those cases where the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts. Social media is growing in importance, but it is also expanding in complexity and brand marketers don’t want complexity. They want proof that these tools can affect consumer behavior and they want flexibility in case something is not working."
Big corporate marketers are just as desperate for simplicity and proof of efficacy as low-budget nonprofits.
Maybe we should let them sort it out first?! Or should nonprofits be early adopters? After all, nonprofits might know something more than the corporate guys about building relationships.
More opinions?
Tom
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My advice is not to wait to get engaged on the most popular social networks.
I don’t recommend large scale investment of time or money, but don’t sit back and wait. Dip your toes in and begin communicating – particularly on twitter where doing so doesn’t require a large time investment and you can enjoy direct communication with people almost immediately.
While NFP’s sit on the sidelines and wait, other charities are filling that space and developing relationships with their followers. It is such a reciprocal type of engagement that I fear that charities who wait will struggle to gain the loyalty and engagement of potential supporters.
I wrote about this some time ago in my blog: http://bit.ly/3zEaer
Being first counts – even if you’re not “the best”.
The social networking environment will always be a moving target. Changes and dynamic influences will continue to provide challenges for all organizations. Those who invest a small amount of time today to get in there and engage people, will find it much easier to adapt to whatever lies around the corner tomorrow.
When we play with social media that we know, as Laurie Pringle points out in her blog entry above, is not likely to produce an attractive or any positive return on investment, who pays? Not the non-profit, not the fundraiser, but rather someone or something–people, environments, and animals–in need.
When we forgo raising as much money as possible today, for supposed returns in some hoped for new, new future, the cost is measured in the suffering of people, environments or animals.
How does a fundraiser or nonprofit explain to a starving kid that it’s better for the charity to tweet than for the kid to eat?
One day social media may be a truly powerful fundraising and advocacy tool. It may be the way ordinary, caring people change the world. Personally, as someone who’s been deeply involved in this stuff since before IBM contracted Bill Gates to write PC-DOS, I hope that day is soon.
But tomorrow there’s a real person who needs help, there’s an animal in pain, there’s an ecosystem dying. They can’t wait for the new dawn.
And, we as fundraisers do not need to be at the front ranks of change in order to fully benefit when–and if–the new day dawns. With few exceptions there’s no advantage to being first. For every eBay or Google, there’s thousands of VisiCalcs and Wordstars and Wangs.
When we fail to raise the absolute maximum amount of money possible, there are real, often life and death, consequences. When we test the shiny new things, let’s be sure that we can explain that decision to those people and things who’ll be paying the price with their suffering.
Hi this is a valuable debate, but our team has come to the conclusion that its also being overcomplicated.
- We have a database of 25,000 we ‘talk to’ routinely.
- We know that we have a potential audience of 500,000.
- We know that most of them don’t want to twitter/chat/etc with us online: they simply want to read and then react or delete.
Previously, we’ve played a strategy of ‘get you on our mailing list, then talk to you via our mailings’ – a pubisher model.
Now we see that we should move from being a publisher of mailings, to being more like a PR agency. What does that mean? we should:
- decide what we want to say/get heard
- then, like a PR agency, promote that story to the media channels which our audience reads – our database, facebook groups with relevant interest, Linked-In groups, other organisations/networks
- constantly track what response we get from each of these ‘channels’ (and what it costs us – mostly in time – to push our messages in those channels) and invest more or less in each channel accordingly
We view the social media groups as just more channels to more eyeballs. Its kinda like they’re cheap routes to magazine advertising and like with advertising, its just a simple question of which gets the best response for your buck.
I hope this helps some people get a clearer view of the role of social media. We sure did worry about it for a long time before we got to this point of view.
Contrary opinions welcomed – I’m happy to be re-educated, corrrected and learn what I don’t know.
Last April, The Washington Post published an article–To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green (see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042103786.html)–about the viability of social media.
The data reported in the article is sobering. Here’s a sample,
“Fewer than 50 of the 179,000 groups on [Facebook's] Causes have raised $10,000, and just two — the Nature Conservancy and Students for a Free Tibet — have cracked the $100,000 mark.
[Aaron] Hurst jumped on the Causes bandwagon shortly after it launched. The chief executive of the San Francisco-based Taproot Foundation, which recruits professionals to perform pro bono work for nonprofits, he figured creating a Causes page would bring in plenty of new donations. Taproot spent about $3,000 in staff time developing the page, Hurst estimates.
Six months later, Taproot’s Causes page had netted $30, all from existing donors. The group’s page still exists, but the staff has largely abandoned its upkeep.”