Comments on: Social Media – No Killer App

By: Stephen Best

Stephen Best — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:50:37 +0000

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.”

By: Ivan Moss

Ivan Moss — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:16:02 +0000

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.

By: Stephen Best

Stephen Best — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:22:32 +0000

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.

By: Laurie Pringle

Laurie Pringle — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 12:53:22 +0000

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.