Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

United Way Social Networking Spring Fever

 
Lynn M. Tveskov (Photo from Lynn)
Manager, Community Impact Leadership
United Way of America

March comes in like a lion and goes out like lamb, especially true in New England.  This morning I got an email from Lynn M. Tveskov from the United Way of America letting me know that UWA has caught social networking spring fever!

She forwarded me this fabulous handout titled "How_to_Listen_to_your_Online_Community" written by Meghan Keaney who is the Director of Communications for the United Way of Massachusetts Bay & Merrimack Valley.  (Their blog is called "Speak United")  Meghan used the materials in the WeAreMedia Wiki (and my blog) and customized it for the United Way.  

The handout explains the process of listening and how the tools.   My favorite part is advice on how to respond and a story about how a negative comment was an opportunity.

When not to respond:

• If the blogger or commenter is talking about another United Way.
• You wouldn’t talk on behalf of another United Way to the media, don’t do it here either.
• If the blogger or commenter is clearly baiting, being antagonistic, or trying to incite a fight.
• You only have so much time! You don’t have to respond to every comment about United Way.
• Respond only, when you think it’s productive or important.

Hints on responding about United Way:

• Be transparent -- say that you work at a United Way.
• At the same time, stress that you’re speaking as an individual.
• Don’t pick fights or get pulled into them. They’re not productive.
• Don’t speak negatively about another organization or individual.
• Answer thoughtfully, ask questions, your goal is to learn and inform.
• Provide a link to relevant content on your website

A United Way Story

Here is an example of how responding can turn a negative comment into a learning experience:
Note what happens when the negative comment from “o2fishmore” is responded to by one of our partner agencies (gtarbox). Gtarbox is able to correct the inaccurate information and refocus the original poster on how the agency can help her. United Way then provided additional information about the investment and calling 2-1-1 for help.

Lynn pointed out a few stellar examples of United Ways using social media:

Finally, Lynn pointed out some examples of how United ways are using social media.

Facebook

United Way International 
United Way Campus and Youth Engagement group  (Mike Brooks)

YouTube

UWA Flash mob video (PSAS)
United Way Alternative Spring Break Videos

Detroit, Michigan - United Way for Southeastern Michigan has been using social media for years.  http://www.uwsem.org/ - especially blogs (you'll see links on their home page.)

Here's the individual blog (vs. the organizational blogs I’ve also provided) of a United Way CEO, Patrick Jinks.  He's been blogging for years (he's at a small United Way in Danville, VA):  http://unitedwayleadership.blogspot.com/

United Way of San Diego County, San Diego, CA - http://www.uwsd.org/  - on a Team of local United Ways that helped inform UWA's own social media strategy.

United Way Silicon Valley, San Jose, CA - http://www.uwsv.org/ - another California member of the team that helped UWA with their social media strategy.

United Way of Orange County, Irvine, CA, is on twitter:  http://twitter.com/UNITEDWAYOC

United Way of Central Ohio, Columbus, OH http://www.liveunitedcentralohio.org/ - looks to be a heavy user of flickr, including for their Alternative Spring Break:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/liveunitedcentralohio/

United Way of Greater New Haven, New Haven, CT - http://www.uwgnh.org/ - another member of that committee that helped UWA.  They are actively blogging, too:  http://uwgnhnews.blogspot.com/. 

WeAreMedia Live Workshop: Reflections

Flickr Photo: Illustration of Participant's Learning Questions

Earlier this month, we piloted the first two-day workshop on social media strategy and tools for NTEN's WeAreMedia project.  I was pleased with workshop, even though it was the first time and that is always difficult because instruction improves with feedback from learners. 

Co-instructors included Holly Ross, Nina Simon, Rachel Weidinger, Britt Bravo, David Cohn, and John Kenyon.  In addition, we had expert knowledge in the room from JD Lasica, Paul Lamb 
JD Lasica, and Laura Novig.

This was workshop was based on the knowledge shared on the WeAreMedia wiki over the past year using Dave Cormier's Community as the Curriculum approach.

The content on the wiki has now organized into an instructional format as a two-day face-to-face workshop.  The next step is to see how people remix, improve, and share back the material (with attribution of course) - that is the true power of working wikily. 

My debrief of the two-day workshop.

We had a lot of content to cover in two days.  I wonder whether face-to-face workshop delivery is the best approach for ultimately helping people put a social media strategy into practice.   Therefore, the learning goals be more aligned with the base of Bloom's Taxonomy - more about exposure, understanding, and knowledge.   Being able to make decisions and evaluate are more appropriate for a learning experience delivered over time such as a semester long course or at least having some time and space in between sessions.

The learning objectives were:

• make decisions about how to effectively integrate social media into organization's overall web communications plan
• understand how to design and implement a social media experiment that enables listening, participation, content creation, or community building and is appropriate and realistic
• evaluate the results of your social media experiment and use the information to improve your next social media strategy experiment
• experience a variety of web tools that are essential in listening, participation, content creation, generating buzz, and community building tactical approaches

Participants were asked to set up blogs as their workshop notebooks. This was useful for the introduction and pre-workshop activity, homework, and reflections.  Many of the participants lived blogged the sessions and the notes created are good content for the wiki. 

On the evaluation survey, we asked people to identify their "aha magic learning moment."  Here's what participants said was most useful:

"There were so many good things I got from the We Are Media Workshop that it's hard to distill it down to just one magical moment, but I think sitting in the conference room and seeing how many of us were inspired to *listen* to our constituents and connectors was really powerful. Your workshop encouraged us to devise a strategy for using social media, and to tease out what these tools could really mean to our mission, vision, and constituencies -- rather than just, "hurry up and get your org up on Twitter!"

"Having the strategic planning for social media broken out into 5 steps and identifying what tools went with each section."

"Being in one space with over 50 people all coming together to learn about why/how they can each use different social media strategies to help their organization."

"The hands-on education on actually using tools was most helpful."

I'm always overly critical about instructional delivery, and rely on evaluations to help hone and refine it. One of the instructional design flaws was that we assumed that all participants would be ready to write a draft social strategy as homework for the first night.  A few participants completed the assignment as you can see from the workshop blog notebooks here, here, here,  here, here, here, and here.   Thinking through a strategy requires more reflection and discussion within the organization and some level of experience with the tools.  However, on our follow up survey, 71% of respondents said the workshop will help them craft a strategy in the future.

That threw off the morning of the second day which was going to focus on participants sharing their ideas and giving feedback on their strategies.    I think after the first day's focus on strategy, people were very much interested in getting into the techniques, tactics, and tools. We could have allocated more time for the hands-on tactical small groups.  The cross pollination would have worked better sharing tips and tactics learned from the tool breakout sessions.  One person noted, "Perhaps each tactical session could be slightly more condensed or focused so that there was time (and mental energy!) to take in two of the technical topics."

For the next version of a two-day workshop, I'd deliver the break out tactical and tool sessions on the afternoon of the first day and repeat them again in the morning the second day.  This way people could attend two.  I'd also allow some time for people to share what they learned as a group or in small groups before selecting the second session.  As one respondent on our survey noted, "I would have liked to be able to go to more than one tactical breakout, and then have an opportunity to talk to people who went to the other sessions to find out what they learned."

I'd use the social media game as culminating activity.  From reading the participant blogs, there were a lot of insights generated from the strategy game like this one.  I'd include the implementation/metrics at the end or as an extension of the game.

In addition to a by the numbers survey, I always do a reflection survey where I ask what people learned, what they will put into practice, what is still unclear, and remaining questions.   While some of the  questions were about the how to implement tactics, a number were focused on the challenge of transfer.

• What of all this “stuff” is truly relevant for me and my organization?
• Will having a good social media strategy make my organization more successful or just more busy?
• What kind of a time investment does it take, how can I frame/align/justify that investment relative to other expenditures and needed areas of focus?
• How do we avoid “shiny object” syndrome?
• When will social media pay off for us?
• How to sell executive director on a smaller, more informal pilot?
• How do you balance where the organization is today with the potential of social media?

Some tangible first steps that people plan to put into practice are:

• Listening strategy
• Setting up a blog
• Use the smart chart to get communications strategy in place first
• Finish the social media strategy map
• Refine strategy based on listening first
• Set up a Facebook Page
• Experiment with StumbleUpon
• Finish plan, get more expertise to help with implementation
• Set up RSS Reader, Start Commenting on blogs

Just How Smart Are Your Social Media Objectives?

Source:  Are We There Yet? A Communications Evaluation Guide by Asibey Consulting

I've been exploring different ROI and communications evaluation approaches and how they might be adapted for social media strategies.  In the comments on my post about Results on Insights,  Bruce Tractenberg said:

You can't even begin to measure ROI if you don't know what you're trying to accomplish and whether what you are doing is working. To help, the Communications Network recently published a guide to help foundations and nonprofits develop plans to evaluate their communications.

The guide is an excellent road map for designing and planning an evaluation of your overall communications plan.  I particularly like the worksheet.   I've been reviewing it thinking how to specifically apply or adapt it to a social media strategy.

We all know that setting objectives comes first.  For social media, you need to set your objectives based on a clear understanding of how social media changes the feedback loop between your organization and stakeholders.  Here's some examples of what you can accomplish with social media.

• Listening and Learning: You're monitoring what stakeholders are saying about your organization, your issue, or programs and using the information to support your marketing goals. You're testing different social media tactics and learning what works.
• Build Relationships and Issues Awareness: You’re interacting with key audiences on the social media channel in order to build awareness for your organization's brand. You’re increasing your visibility in the right areas and trying to stick in the minds of others through active interaction on many different levels.
• Improve Reputation: You want to improve how others think about your organization or issue and are responding directly to feedback through social media channels. You may also want to improve your organization's reputation as an expert by being consistently involved in discussions on topics or aggregating information that are relevant to your organization.
• Content Generation and Issues Awareness: You encourage stakeholders to create content about your organization or it's issues and share it with others and encouraging fans to talk about your issues to others (word of mouth).
• Increased Relevant Visitor Traffic and Page Rankings: You're using social media tactics to drive traffic to your organization's web site or newsletter sign up or improving search engine results or using social media channels to spread your web site or blog content.
• Taking Action or Fundraising: You're using social media tactics to spur supporters to action or donate. Remember this objective will take considerable more time and effort to be successful.

However, your social media objective needs to be  "SMART" -- Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Result-Focused, and Measurable.   The evaluation guide's worksheet offers an IQ test for your objectives. Do you have an example of how your organization's "SMART" social media objective?  Leave it in the comments.

Resources:
Jeremiah Owyang, 50 Ways to Use Social Media Listed by Objective
Dosh Dosh, Social Media Marketing Campaign Objectives and Audience Defintion
Smart Chart 3.0:  An Interactive Tool To Help Nonprofits Make Smart Communications Choices

Share Your Story: Building Blocks of Social by Amy Sample Ward

Social Media Building Blocks

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: nonprofit nptech)

Earlier this week the Storytelling & Social Media series from NTEN and TechSoup Global launched with Amy Sample Ward, who is the community builder at Netsquared, as the first speaker.   Her slides are above and she did a brilliant job of covering the basics!  If you're not already reading her blog, you should subscribe now!   If you want to check out the recording of the session or register for webinars that are still to come, check out the full line up.  

WeAreMedia Live: Intensive Face-to-Face Workshop Feb 12-13

NTEN's We Are Media will be coming to San Francisco, live and in-person on February 12 and 13!

That's right!  The sector's first and only social media curriculum created by YOU is coming to San Francisco.  This workshop is designed for small planning teams from nonprofit organizations ready to roll up their sleeves for two days and dive deeply into understanding how to craft a social media strategy and to experiment with tactical approaches.  

Throughout the workshop, we'll walk through important topics like:

• Social media readiness
• How social media fits into your communications plan
• Implementing social media tactics
• A look at the tools you'll use

I'll be co-teaching with some awesome colleagues who have an amazing array of expertise in social media strategy and tactical implementation.

• Holly Ross
• Nina Simon
• Rachel Weidinger
• Britt Bravo
• David Cohn
• John Kenyon
• JD Lasica
  

Participants will leave with ideas to test and an understanding of social media concepts and tools. You'll also know where and how to find follow up information and other nonprofit practitioners via the WeAreMedia wiki.

Register Now!

Or, if you're registering 2 participants at the same time:

Team Registration!

(Please note that both participants must be associated with a single organization to take advantage of the streamlined Team Registration.) 

Well, back to work on developing the materials from the incredible knowledge and expertise shared on the wiki.   

WeAreMedia Toolbox: The Final T-Shirt Winners

Throughout the month of October, NTEN's WeAreMedia worked on building the Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box.  Nonprofit social media techies filled the pages with links to tools, tips, and tutorials for these types of social media tools:

• Monitoring
• RSS Readers
• Social Bookmarking
• Commenting
• Blogging Tools
• Podcasting
• Photo Sharing
• Video Sharing
• Crowd Sourcing
• Micro Media
• Lifestreams
• Social Networks
• Fundraising Widgets

We'll be back at the end of the month with the last module on experiments and then onto curriculum creation and packaging up what's here for the workshops that begin in Feburary.  In the meantime, here's another batch of T-Shirt Winners:

Kristin Wolff
Will Coley
Amy Sample Ward
Avi Kaplan
Chad Norman
Maggie McGary

Congrats!

WeAreMedia Nonprofit Social Media Toolkit: Your Last Chance at a T-Shirt!

Photo by Stitch

Throughout the month of October, NTEN's WeAreMedia worked on building the Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box.  Nonprofit social media techies filled the pages with links to tools, tips, and tutorials for these types of social media tools:

• Monitoring
• RSS Readers
• Social Bookmarking
• Commenting
• Blogging Tools
• Podcasting
• Photo Sharing
• Video Sharing
• Crowd Sourcing
• Micro Media
• Lifestreams
• Social Networks
• Fundraising Widgets

We still have a few t-shirts left to give away so if you've been wanting to participate but haven't - here's your last chance. Edit or add something to the toolbox before Friday, November 7th and you might win one of those killer t-shirts.

WeAreMedia: Wear E-Media - Week 3 T-Shirt Winners

The We Are Media Festival of Tools continues this week, but we wanted to make sure you're not only prepared with the right Social Media tools, but that you're wearing e-media!  That's why we're sending a fabulous T-shirt to the following contributors as a small token of thanks:

• Danielle Brigida
• Wendy Harman
• Dave Cormier
• Laura Lee Dooley

You can still win a t-shirt - just contribute something to the WeAreMedia Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box - this week we're working on social networks and fundraising widgets.

WeAreMedia: Social Networks - Build the Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box

Source: Nielsen Online

The We Are Media Festival of Tools is starts the last week of work on the Nonprofit Social Media Toolbox with a focus on social networking tools and widgets and apps.

So for today, our focus is on social networking sites.  According to this recent Nielsen study there has been explosive social networking growth over the past year.  The top social networking sites include some familiar names - Myspace and Facebook.   What is interesting is that nearly half of the biggest social networking sites are also among the fastest growing - and they are all most popular among age groups over 25.

Gartner VP recently published a report from analyst Andrea Di Maio, who says citizen social networks will complement, and may replace, some government functions. "Today, the primary role of social networks for governments is to facilitate the exchange of information and to establish novel collaboration patterns, often across organizational boundaries," Gartner's report says.  It argues that blurring departmental boundaries, increasing horizontal exchange among departments, shrinking budgets, and a growing trend in which control over storing information is relinquished to third parties are all fueling the adoption of social media within government organizations.(And perhaps nonprofits?)

For the social networking section the WeAreMedia tool box, we have included the definitive list of every social network in the world, but what would be really helpful to have the short list of where nonprofits have had some results.   So far that list includes the big ones like Facebook, Myspace, Ning, and LinkedIn.  And, it should include some of the focused social networking sites for nonprofits, like Change.Org, so the quesiton is what others to include on the social networking part of the tool kit?

Office Life:How To Befriend The Boss On Facebook

In addition to links to the various site, we would like you recommend the best of the best how-to posts or videos for the specific social network.   The example of above comes a collection of screencasts about Facebook. (Hat tip to Kari Dunn Saratovsky of the Social Citizen's Blog for find the one above).  We have lots of resources with tips and examples related to strategy in other sections of the WeAreMedia project, what we're looking for here are the pure how-tos related to the specific social networking sites referenced.

So, go over to the wiki and add your best how-to resource and you could win a t-shirt.

Advocacy 2.0 Guide: Cross-Posting

Global Voices Advocacy has released another guide in its Advocacy 2.0 series called "Cross-Posting" writting by Sami Ben Gbarbia. 

This one offers a brief introduction to how to use cross-posting for online advocacy campaign. It reviews different web 2.0 tools, highlights successful examples where cross-posting has been used for advocacy. The guide also includes the pros and cons of the cross-posting technique.

The guide highlights how to use RSS tools like Twitter Feed and Feedburner to automatically post content from your blog and other sources to Twitter and Facebook.  You may wonder why do this?  The guide explains why:

For some digital activists from countries with widespread Internet censorship use this tactic to automatically keep their audience updated about new "mirrors" to their blocked/censored website and blogs. So, instead of spending time sending emails and filling their subscribers' mailboxes with email updates, applications like Facebook, Twitter are doing the job of displaying the new URLs to their website, bypassing censors
and getting the message out.

Message in A Box: New Toolkit from Tactical Technology Collective

Message in-a-box: Tools and tactics for communicating your cause is a new web resources that includes tactical guides to using a wide range communications tools for social change, packaged with some open source tools for creating media.  This resource is for small to midsized nonprofit organizations.

This guide is a one-stop place to find checklists, strategy tips, and how-to guides for creating everything in you need to implement a communications strategy - from quick guide for a print strategy to selecting a content management system.  It also includes tips and resources for developing an Internet Strategy
sharing content on mobile phones, and an email strategy.  

The guide incorporates some tutorials and how-to information social media strategy, most notably a Blogging guide for activists and campaigners for using blogs for grassroots organizing and citizen journalism written by Sokari Ekine who blogs at www.blacklooks.org.  There is also a rich section about how to incorporate the use of video -- from creating your own to using works created by others.

The tools section is an annotated directory of open source tools that describe the tool and include links to downloads, manuals, and tutorials.  

The content incorporates and points to materials created by others in the citizen journalism and activism fields and is packaged as self-paced tutorials and checklists.   There are a few content areas that I do not normally included in the other many similar guides available.  These include:

•  Quick Guide to Images:  Advice about how to incorporate images effectively in your campaign materials.
• A Simple Guide to Animation Creating short animations can be an effective way to communicate about your cause.  This short tutorial steps you through some easy ways to create animation.
• Primer on Search Engine Optimization A good primer for those just beginning to think through a search engine optimization strategy.
• A Guide To Open Content  This section explains creative commons licensing and open content in easy to understand terms.

Well, I'm off to add links in the appropriate places in WeAreMedia.

WeAreMedia ToolBox: Micro Media Tools - Twellow

The month of October we've been focusing on building out the Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box and awarding t-shirts to contributors!. Today we're looking at Micro Media tools. This is any form of concentrated content created using social tools that broadcast text, voice, images, or video to targeted Web and mobile communities. The tools listed include one from each - text, audio, and video - but there are many, many others.  This includes Twitter, Utterli, and Sesmic.  This is the place to share all your great Twitter clients and more.

I'm sitting here in Hawaii at the Social Media Workshop and Kristie Wells just gave an awesome presentation on participation in social media. One thing I learned about was a search tool for Twitter, called Twellow.

Twellow.com is grabs publicly available messages from the Twitter.com micro-blogging service. We then analyze and categorize each of the users responsible for those messages into the various categories found at Twellow.com. By adding these people to specific categories we help you narrow your searching into specific niches where you can find who you are looking for. In addition to Twitter, we're actively working on adding more social media services to broaden your capacity to find people who matter.

Have some tools and tips to share related to MicroMedia?  Add them to WeAreMedia wiki here.

WeAreMedia Tool Box: Your Best TIps and Tools for Photo Sharing and Video Sharing

All this week for NTEN's WeAreMedia project, we've been focusing on the tools that let nonprofits share their story social media style!   So, if you're like me and little bit behind this week, you can play catch up today and tommorrow by suggesting tips and tools for photosharing and videosharing.  It won't take you long at all and you could win one of those cool t-shirts!  (WE'll be announcing this week's winners late on Friday)

Photo Sharing tools are Internet sites where anyone can upload, share, and organize their digital photos with friends, family, colleagues, and the rest of the world. Photo sharing sites have many social networking features and with open API's can help you easily republish your photos in other places.

I've been a big fan of flickr and a collected many nonprofit examples and add-on tools for flickr over the past three or four years since I've been a flickr addict.  Here's two places where you can help fill out the tool box:

• Flickr Add-On Tools:  There must be hundreds of nifty third-party tools out there.  I'd love to know which ones you think are the best tools that help make flickr efficient, effective, and fun for nonprofits.

• Other Photo Sharing Sites:   Read/Write Web did a round up of other photo sharing sites.   WHich ones have nonprofits been using?

Video Sharing are Internet sites where anyone can upload, share, and organize their video clips with friends, family, colleagues and the rest of the world. Video sharing sites have social networking features. Most offer functionality to easily link to and even embed the videos in other websites and blogs.

As Holly Ross noted the other day on the NTEN Blog, See3 put out a great set of videos on how to create and use videos in your nonprofit work.   And YouTube has a new set of handy tip sheets.  And of course the class resource, Free Vlog from Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman.  Here's what need to add to the Video Sharing section:

• We have links to many video sharing sites, but we don't have a post or place that does a side-by-side feature comparision.  

So, you have two days to go over to WeAreMedia - add some stuff - and you could win a t-shirt.  What are you waiting for?

WeAreMedia Social Media Tool Box: Podcasting Tools for Nonprofits

Photo by IrishTypepad

Today, the NTEN WeAreMedia project is working on the podcasting tool box.  I'm hoping folks in the know about podcasting in the nonprofit technology space will jump in add their favorite tools and tips.

Those folks would be:  Britt Bravo, John Wall, Corey Pudhorodsky or maybe you?   Let us know the best tools and tips and you could win a t-shirt.

We Need Your Best Blogging Technical Tips and Tool Suggestions for the WeAreMedia Tool Box

Photo by Dave Melbourne

We're going to kick out this week's NTEN We Are Media Toolbox fun with blogging tools.  One of the best resources on blogging for nonprofits comes from Idealware, the blogging tools report.   It presents a side-by-side comparison of features for 7 lower-end blogging tools commonly used by nonprofits. 

But after you selected your blogging platform, where's the best (and free) how-to information?   We're looking for your best blogging tool and how-to tips for the WeAreMedia blogging tool box

(And, if you're lucky, you could win a t-shirt!)

Congrats to WeAreMedia T-Shirt Winners from Week 1

Photo by NTEN

 

The NTEN WeAreMedia project continues the month-long exploration of social media tools as part of building out the Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box.  Almost every day this month, we've been asking folks to share the tools they use to listen, share, and build community.  It's easy to participate -- all you to do is tell us what tools you use, point to some how-to tips, and tell us why you love them.

You'll get two great rewards:

• First, you'll get the satisfaction of helping to build a curriculum that will help other nonprofits learn how to use social media effectively.
• AND, you'll get the shirt. (You know you want one!)

The first t-shirt winner was Ashely Messick and I'm delighted to congratulate three other winners from last week:

David Neff
Christine Egger
Steve Heye

This week we focus on tools that help nonprofits share their stories social media style, including:

• Blogging Tools
• Podcasting Tools
• Photo Sharing Tools
• Video Sharing Tools

This is fun, it's easy, and doesn't take a lot of time to do.  So, help us build the Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box!  You could be one of the lucky t-shirt winners!

Nonprofits Using Ning: An Interview with Community Media Workshop and Best Practices

Last week for WeAreMedia project, I put a call on Twitter  for case studies, best practices, and links about nonprofits using social networking sites, including Ning.   Ning, which lets you set up your own custom social network, has attracted attention for its ability to create communities that are more functional than those created through competing services from Google and Yahoo listservs. Nonprofits, support groups, and nonprofit professionals have found their homes on Ning.

LauraatNing was listening and just pinged me to point me over to this blog post about nonprofits that are using Ning with their donors and supporters.  She interviewed Manny Hernandez from Tu Diabetes and Es Tu Diabetes, and Ayumi Stubbs from the ASPCA Online Community. Combined, these networks have almost 20,000 members, a testament to the hard work (and networking expertise) of these two network creators. Here are their best tips and advice — whether you’re thinking of launching a network, or are already building up your member base for an already-launched network.

• Build off your existing brand
• It’s about more than raising money
• You don’t need to be established to start
• All about the Forums

But many nonprofits are using Ning for peer-to-peer knowledge sharing and learning.  Take for example the Community Media Workshop's Ning Site which is used to complement their face-to-face training session.   Recently, Thom Clark, Gordon Mayer, and Demetrio Maguigad did an email interview with me. 

1.)   Tell me a little about your organization's social media strategy for its ning site?   What did set out to accomplish? Who were you trying to reach?

Community Media Workshop’s Ning site began as a way to solve a very practical solution—keeping workshop participants and trainers connected. During a social media workshop, trainers Demetrio Maguigad and Gordon Mayer covered a number of online tools with attendees. During the workshop, a number of participants requested that there be a place for them to stay connected and acquire additional materials for their work after the workshop. A Ning site was developed in order to answer this specific need.

For every online social network training we do, we actually present the ning site and demonstrate ways participants can create and customize profiles, syndicate RSS feeds, post blogs, photos and videos and more. We then invite participants to join. After the workshop, we post a discussion topic on the specific training with attached handout materials and links to further help participants of our training.

Other then this practical reason, we also syndicate headlines from our blogs, podcast, and videocast in order to pull them into the Workshops resources and eventually to our flagship website  to purchase our media guide, sign up for additional training, and subscribe to our electronic newsletter.

Every broadcast of our subscription based e-newsletter highlights headlines not only from our online broadcasts but also user generated posts and also a call to join the network.

Because both participants and trainers are members of our ning site, participants can continue discussions with trainers where they left off in the classroom and share the discussion with others.

2.)   Why did you choose Ning?

Ning is very intuitive and easy. Someone who has no html, CSS, JavaScript, or PHP experience can set up a site utilizing these features in less then 20 minutes and its free. Ning is also very flexible. Developers who are more experienced can create customized scripts and widgets on their site to accommodate the needs of their users.

Developers can also pay a premium fee to remove all Ning branding on their site, as well as remove advertisements. You can even use your own custom URL!   Compared to other “out of the box” social website apps, Ning seems to be the most flexible, the most affordable, and easy to use.  Ning also allows open API to work with other popular social networks like Flickr and Facebook. Users can import their Flickr photos from their account and promote their profile pages and widgets on Facebook.

3.)   How are you measuring your success with the site? 

Our Ning site currently has over one hundred members who post videos, start discussions and connect with others. Also, approximately 6% of visits to our main site is referred by visitors to our Ning.

The goal of our workshop is to provide media training for nonprofits, including training on using these new tools.  The Ning site provides a comfortable place for people ask their peers for advice and to experiment before they bring these tools back into their organizations.   For example, we had one participant who started a blog on the Ning site who told us they never would have started if it had not been due to the encouragement of peers.  This is what we were trying to reinforce with our workshops.

4.)   Tell me a couple of stories about how the project has delivered value to your organization?

Staff members have attended local face-to-face professional networking events and got to meet people face-to-face that they first "met" on the Ning site.   There was instant rapor.   The Ning site has given us the ability to connect different people with one another and keep them informed about happenings and campaigns they are working on.

5.)  How much time did take to launch and maintain?  Who on staff is the "community manager"? 

It took us about 20 minutes to set up the intial site, but has gone through a series of revisions based on the user experience and feedback. Our cmmunity manager was Maude Carroll our former Marketing Coordinator, who used the site to build personal relationships with our audiences.

6.)  What would you recommend to other nonprofits who are considering doing a similar project?

If others are to develop a Ning site, we suggest thinking of it  as a very specific tool that should support your main online goals or main wesbite. Audience and users should be identified and the site should be developed based on their needs and wants. Its worthwhile to consider psycho graphics or the general psychology of the user experience you want to convey. Take time to develop a theme or metaphor to keep users thinking of the site as fun and common place to meet but still get the resources they need.

WeAreMedia: Nonprofit Social Media Tool Box and Wiki Raid - End of the First Week

We've come the close of the first week's round of We Are Media Toolbox fun.  What do we have to show for it?  Some awesome tool resource pages where you'll find links to simple definitions, tips and tutorials, and some tools.   This week we worked on listening and participation tools:

• Monitoring
• RSS Readers
• Social Bookmarking
• Commenting

You can still participate and you might even win a cool t-shirt.   The tools we'll be focusing on next are those that can be used for sharing your story social media style.

• Blogging Tool
• Podcasting
• Photo Sharing
• Video Sharing

Just take a few minutes to add some links to tips and tutorials and you could win a T-Shirt.  (And, you don't have to wait until next week, either.)  Come on, what better way to spend five minutes on a Friday afternoon.

WeAreMedia: Social Media Listening Has Value - and You Can Win A T-Shirt Too!

Yesterday, we kicked off our month-long We Are Media Festival of Tools with a conversation about how to monitor the conversation.  Ashely Messick jumped in and won herself one of those awesome WeAreMedia T-shirts.

For each of the modules in this section, we're focusing on just a few tools -- will share tips and tutorials.  In the Monitor section, we've narrowed it down to Technorati, Google Alerts, and Twitter Search.    We still need a few tips in those sections as well as links to how-tos.    So, if you've written a fabulous blog post about any of those tools, please do link it up.   We're also included a growing list of other listening tools - so if you don't one of your favorites - feel free to add it to the list.

WeAreMedia Module 5: Social Networks (and widgets) for Community Building, Taking Action and/or Fundraising

Photo by Mill Zero

NTEN's WeAreMedia project has been discussing and building six tactical modules on social media - the practical tips and resources you need before you start to focus on the tools.    In the last four weeks, the community has shared tips, resources, and case studies to create four awesome tactical modules:

• Listening is the first step
• Participating in the conversation
• Sharing Your Story Social Media Style
• Spreading Awareness and Generating Buzz

This week, we're talking about Module 5: Social Networks (and widgets) for Community Building, Taking Action and/or Fundraising.   This module takes a look at ways that you can build an online community, engage people and inspire them to take an action, or raise money using social networks and fundraising tools.   We looking for tips, examples, and resources.

• What are the best getting started tips for using Ning or LinkedIn for community building or sharing knowledge?
• What are the best getting started tips for using Facebook or MySpace for engaging people and inspiring action?
• What are the best getting started for using fundraising widgets and social networking fundraising apps for fundraising?
• What are the best examples from nonprofits?
• What are the best of the best resources?

I'm particularly excited about this module because we have a lot of expertise and knowledge in the WeAreMedia community.   

Help build this module by visiting the wiki and share what you know!   The module page is here.

Social Media Roadblock: An Interview with Wendy Harman, Red Cross - Social Media Strategy Case Study

For the WeAreMedia Module 4: Spreading Awareness and Buzz With Social Media, the community has built an awesome resource - lots of tips, resources, and ideas from people's experience.   To top it off, I did an interview with Wendy Harman from the Red Cross about her recent experience using Twitter and other tools to spread buzz for campaign -  Social Media Roadblock

1. Tell me about the campaign - what, why,objectives

The Social Media Roadblock campaign's objective was to encourage social media activists to show solidarity with the Red Cross by displaying Red Cross PSAs, videos, photos, widgets, on their online spaces. We also encouraged people to change their avatars (see above).  It was an echo campaign to complement a radio roadblock on Friday, September 19, 2008 when the NAB encouraged all radio stations to run a Red Cross PSA at 1 pm EDT. We hoped to created more awareness of the need for support for all of those affected by recent disasters. Our key objective was to make a viral splash, to spread dynamic content, to increase donations to the ARC Disaster Relief Fund.

2. How did you implement it?

Well, I knew about the radio Roadblock for about 4 days before the event, but it wasn't until about 9:30 am last Thursday morning that I was hit with the idea for the social media roadblock complement.  That meant we had less than 24 hours to implement.  I quickly reached out to our advertising department to bounce the idea off of them (they're responsible for NAB relationship and PSAs). They liked it and said go for it.

I asked my current volunteer (who happens to be a social media genius and a member of ARC's National Youth Council) to draft a "press release" announcing it. I wouldn't normally do a press release, but on such short notice we needed to get the word out. I also knew that it would take too long to get all the proper approvals in-house for a press release issued on the wire. I contacted our media relations lead and she suggested sending it out on free distribution services social media and pitch engine.

I had already been working on the social media tools wiki so we could offer our supporters a bunch of easy ways to help online. That was useful considering our time crunch.  We put the release out and miraculously got it posted to the "Press" section on redcross.org (beyond my expectations!). It's great to have a "legitimate" URL to point to.  I posted a blog entry announcing it on Redcrosschat.org, and we used twitter to announce. We have enough Red Crossers on Twitter for that to get attention - they retweeted to their communities and we were off to the races.

We have several chapters who are social media savvy. Our Rock River, IL chapter communicator was able to get a 2 minute piece about the roadblock on their NBC affiliate's evening news that Thursday night, which was uber exciting for us. Other chapters announced it on their blogs, in Twitter, etc.

We also got our media relations lead to call in an Utterli explaining the roadblock. This turned out to be key because the founders of Utterli listened and ended up sending the announcement to ALL of their users AND starting a group just for American Red Cross social media supporters.

On the actual day, I reached out to bloggers like you and  Kami Watson Huyse, John Cass, Ike Pigott, our friends at Good2gether, and other social media big wigs I am privileged to know and asked them to help spread the word.

3. What were the challenges?

VERY SHORT NOTICE.

The Red Cross is trying to raise $100 million before the end of the year and lots of focus is now on social media initiatives to help get that done. I saw an opportunity to take 2 spheres and make each of them bigger than they would have been on their own, so I jumped at it.  My fear is that I won't be able to do it again before the end of the year, so of course I would have enjoyed more time to plan and implement a bigger splash.

4. What were the results? Anything surprise you?

I think we did ok. In some ways we sort of shook our own house and I'm not sure how far outside our already active supporters we reached. I think we could have overcome this and had a hugely broad reach with a bit more time to plan. That said, I had tears of joy at the outpouring of support by the end of the day on Friday.

I also believe that it's more inspiring for an individual to feel moved enough by a cause and take action independently of the nonprofit. I am skittish about launching too many of these experiments by the Red Cross National Headquarters when I feel sure it would be more impactful for human beings to do it. That's why I'm making the wiki full of tools - so it'll be super easy for anyone to do this to support victims of disaster.

(Beth's Note:  Wendy kindly shared her documentation of the campaign here

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to document results like this so you can see what happened and evaluate.  I think this is the key to Wendy's successes)

5. What would you do differently next time?

Well, I'd say I would plan in advance, but these things tend to happen exactly like this at the Red Cross, so we always have to be prepared to act really quickly. I would have spent more time on Thursday night reaching out to my social media friends. I would have maybe spent more time asking people to share the info on Facebook.

I would have started a hashtag for Twitter.

I'd try to figure out how in the world to measure how many people changed their avatars. I have no idea! Seriously, measurement is always tricky in this space. Is it a success because 100 people tweeted to their 5 million friends? I think we need to tie back to how much money was brought in on Friday, even though we asked people to help us fundraise, not to donate themselves.

I hope we'll be able to build on this experience as we go through this massive fundraising campaign without wearing out our welcome. I want to really empower people to help other people and not browbeat the message that the Red Cross needs money - all the money we're raising for the Disaster Relief Fund will help those who are impaced by disasters.

6. Advice to other nonprofits about doing this?

During National Preparedness Month (September) my best advice is to always be prepared to react quickly to implement online campaigns that will complement offline activities. Opportunities to showcase social media's value in context of a larger picture is always useful here, so that's why we jumped on this one.

WeAreMedia Module 4: Tips for Generating Buzz - Crowdsourced in a few minutes via Twitter!

WeAreMedia Module 4: Spreading Awareness and Generating Buzz, is about how social media tools can help you spread awareness and generate buzz about your organization's programs or campaigns. What happens is that you share your message with enthusiastic supporters and they in turn may choose to pass it to others with a similar a interest in your organization or campaign. But first, you have to build trust, credibility and -- most importantly -- a relationship with those who might interact with your posted content.

Using social media to spread awareness is an excellent method for generating web traffic and visible support for your cause in the form of comments and other forms of engagement. Best of all, it is very low cost. Referrals from sites like Digg and StumbleUpon can be longer lasting than search engine results. But you should be aware that it may take a while before you have the ability to leverage your connections on these networks in order to generate large waves of web traffic. Finally, it's easy to get started!

I put the word out on Twitter asking for nitty gritty practical tips using Digg,  Stumbledupon, Twitter, Friendfeed as well as some general tips.   Wow, this section has come together beautifully - thanks to Suewaters, Jonathan Colman, Laura Lee Dooley, Jeff Gates, and several other wiki participants who did not register so can't thank them personally.  I'm sharing these below.

General Tips

• Be a good member of the community: promote others even more than you promote yourself (i.e., "treat others as you would have them treat you"). Linking and promoting others is a nice way to show you care about people
• The creative material or your message should be something that people want to share - newsworthy, controversial, timeliness, immediate usefulness, and even humor all work well
• Don't spam: a good rule is to make one post of your own content for every 5-10 posts that link to other sites
• Don't digg/stumble/link/tweet every single piece of your content. Save it only for your very best
• Try hard not to send too many self-promotional emails or make too many posts of just your own content. Wrap your self-promotion in something of value to others, instead.
• Sometimes, just doing really good work is worthy of others promoting you. Try it!

(General Tips Adapted from Chris Brogan's ebook "Personal Branding for the Professional
and Todd Defren's Produce, Propagate, and Promote)

Twitter

• Make your content Twitter-friendly. If you want “re-tweets” of your content, keep that summary to well-under 140–characters
• If you want people to re-tweet your content, append "please retweet" to your tweet
• If you retweet, give credit where it's due by including source of original tweet
• Build relationships with other Twitterers, respond back to their tweets regularly
• Learn more about the interests of your followers by subscribing to their blogs
• DM or @ new followers - recognize/thank them for following
• Use #hashtags to identify tweets specific to an event or theme
• Think of the 140 character limit as a challenge to be creative

Digg

• Don't just submit your own content: submit stories from all around the web
• Be a good community member and learn by watching people whose posts regularly become "popular" on the homepage
  
• Spend time building your reputation by digging stories and making intelligent comments
• Respond to "shouts" of stories that you like by digging them and letting the shouter know that you supported them
• Spend at least 10-15 minutes each day digging stories, making comments, and submitting new content
  
• Remember that you only have 24 hours to make your post "popular"; any longer than that and the post usually can't become popular anymore
• If you become friends with a powerful digger, occasionally have them post content on your site to Digg rather than doing so yourself
• Check with your IT/IS staff ahead of time to ensure that your site can handle a "Digg Effect" -- a giant waves of people all coming to your site at the same time
  

StumbleUpon

• Make friends; connect to other stumblers who have a lot of friends (100+)
• Don't spam, stumbles lots of other content besides your own site
• Find people interested in your topic and connect to them
• Find niche groups related to your topic and join them
• Stumble your friends' content and occasionally e-mail them, telling that that you did so
• Spend at least 10-15 minutes every day stumbling and reviewing content, making new discoveries
• If you become friends with a powerful stumbler, occasionally have them "discover" content on your site rather than doing so yourself

But, we don't have a single tip for using FriendFeed?   Can you help us out?  Leave your best tip for FriendFeed, or point us to a good tip sheet.  Leave a comment or add to the wiki.

 

WeAreMedia Module 4: Spreading Awareness and Social Media Buzz

Photo by Ectaticist

The WeAreMedia project has been discussing and building six tactical modules on social media - the practice tips and resources you need before you start to focus on the tools.    Last week, we finished an awesome module on sharing your story social media style, filled with lots of stories, tips, and resources contributed by the community.   For this week, Module 4:  Spreading Awareness and Generating Buzz.  Your content may be lively, but does it have life?   The tips and techniques in module will help give you content legs.

Social media tools can help you spread awareness and generate buzz about your organization's programs or campaigns. What happens is that you share your message with enthusiastic supporters and they in turn may choose to pass it to others with a similar a interest in your organization or campaign.  Using social media to spread awareness is an excellent method for generating traffic. Best of all it is very low cost. Referrals from sites like Digg or StumbleUpon can be longer lasting than search engine results.

Here's what need for this module:

• What are your best tips for spreading buzz?
• What are some awesome examples from nonprofits?
• What are the best resources available - specifically we're looking for great primers on spreading buzz with Digg, StumbledUpon and Twitter.

Leave a comment or just add it to the wiki.

 

WeAreMedia Case Study: LoL Seals - An Awesome Example of Stakeholder Generated Content

Winning caption by Zelda - Westlake, OH

Last week, the WeAreMedia project discussed and built Module 3: Sharing Your Story Social Media Style.  I put the call out for some case studies and Carie Lewis, the HSUS, Social Media Rock Star, took the time to share her story about the success and challenges of LOLseals.

1.  What was the LOLseals Photo Caption Contest?

It was a photo caption contest based on the popular LOLcats site  where users share photos of Cute Cats with funny captions. The Humane Society's LOLseals Photo Caption Contest offered cut photos of little baby harp seals and asked people to come up with cute, endearing, and funny captions that celebrated the cuteness of seals.   The campaign also urged people to learn more about how to protect these adorable creatures and get engaged with the campaign.

2. What was your strategy for getting people to participate?

We learned from a previous photo contest that flopped that if you make it hard for people to figure out how to participate and time consuming, they won't.  We provided the photos and an easy way to caption them - so it didn't take a lot of time to participate and it was fun.  We also spread the word via social networks and blogger outreach.  We have a significant presence built up over the last 18-24 months on major sites like Facebook and Myspace.

3. What were some of the interesting responses?  What were some of the challenges?

Some people didn’t “get” the LOLspeak… and they wrote serious captions!   The biggest challenge was making it as easy as possible for people to participate. We learned with the Wendy’s campaign that you’ve GOT to make it easy. Before, we asked people to upload their photo and tag it themselves, which meant they had to create a flickr account and know what “tagging” was. In using the API, everything was automatic, tagged, and uploaded without the user having to even touch flickr.  We were also able to capture email addresses directly to our CRM this way.

4. What you would say made the campaign particularly innovative?

One – that everything was in one step and two – that we were able to pull off showcasing the “celebrating animals” part of our mission on a very serious issue and three – that we played off a pop culture / internet phenomenon (lolcats)

5.  What were some top line results? 

We had about 3,000 submissions and it helped get about 2,000 new email addresses.

 

WeAreMedia: Nonprofit Examples of Stakeholder Generated Content, Some Great Tips, and More

Photo by Brian Caldwell

This week on WeAreMedia we're working on the Tactical Module 3: Sharing Your Story Social Media Style.  We've gotten some excellent "user generated" content (for example, check out the tips).   But, we need some more content.

If you have five minutes, and your nonprofit has a blog, podcast, youtube channel, or flickr stream that you think is an awesome example of sharing your story social media style -- add a link to it and tell us why it is awesome.  Go here to add your organization.

I asked folks on Twitter for mini case studies from nonprofits who have been successful getting stakeholders to contribute content.  The list of suggestions follows below, but I need more information.  I'm blogging them here so if you are from the organization or know someone - you can easily add the information here or simply add a link to case study you've written about the project.    If you want to contribute one and aren't on the list - please add your information here or in the comments.

1.  Unitus Empowering Women campaign
http://tributes.unitus.com/sections/ew/stories/stories_search_tributes.asp
Suggested by http://twitter.com/katiegruver/statuses/925589580

2. Squidoo for Heart Kids http://www.squidoo.com/groups/congenitalheartdefectsSuggested by http://twitter.com/drmani/statuses/925364118

3. LOL Seals
http://www.hsus.org/marine_mammals/protect_seals/protect_seals_what_you_can_do/lolseals.html
Suggested by
http://twitter.com/rjleaman/statuses/925164538

4. Sharing Hope TV http://www.fispace.org/2008/09/sharinghopetv-now-with-blogging/
Get David Neff to fill in.5. Working Films

5. Everything's Cool
http://www.workingfilms.org/article.php?id=86
Suggested by http://twitter.com/workingfilms/statuses/924959775
Need more details to figure this out - urls

6. Threadless from the Red Cross
http://www.threadless.com/loves/redcross
Who implemented this project and could answer questions?