So you want a Facebook Fan Page for Your Nonprofit? Here's the Scoop!

 

NTEN offered a fantastic Webinar today featuring Randi Zuckerberg, Director of Marketing at Facebook and Adam Conner from the DC Office on the emerging best practices for nonprofits who want to set up Facebook Fan Pages.

Here's the description

This webinar will be a resource for non-profits and other organizations for social good. Expanding on the Non-Profits on Facebook page, we want to help you harness the power of Facebook and bring positive change to the world. Facebook empowers non-profits by enabling them to mobilize communities, organize events, increase fundraising, reduce costs with free online tools, and raise awareness through viral networks.

I learned a lot, but I did not capture it all.  Rumor has it that David Krumlauf was taking great notes, so I'm hoping he'll blog them or fill in some gaps here in the comments.

Here are my notes and I've added some of my own references and links for more context:

Overview:

• Facebook is in 30 languages, with 200 Million Users  (want some more demographics on users, check out Nick O'Neil's Demographic Page)

Profiles VS Pages

• Profiles are for individuals,  Pages for Organizations

• Recently redesigned pages to be more like profiles

• Pages are optimized for mass communication
• Profiles are optimized for individual communication

Note that their TOS says you can't create for an individual who doesn't exist.  If you do, they will delete it. (Some of you may remember the flap about Ranger Rick from 2007)

A question that everyone asks - "When should my group set up a Fan Page versus a Facebook Group?
Best Answer yet:   Set up a Facebook FanPage as your main presence or outpost and use a group for more adhoc, smaller organizing.

Tips for Setting Up Your Fan Page

1. Keep your page name short and accurate, can't change after you create it

2. There is a day or two lag for it shows up in search

3. Content is lifeblood of your page
4. Start with information tab: be complete, accurate, and honest
5. Fan Page backend is like a cms and if you know a little HTML you can do some spiffy stuff
6. Not all applications are optimized for pages, visit the app page to check
7. All pages require ADMIN - designated FB profile - for security reasons because they want a real person
8. Admin are not public - add multiple admins - invite by email or FB - always have multiples as a precaution so you don't loose access to the page.  Standard best practice
9. Wall Tab - accuracy updates of information.  "Write Something" lets you post rich content"
10. More interactive content is better - the Wall is a history of interactive
11. Worst thing you can do with a page is dump an RSS feed into the Page - won't be as successful
12. When you make updates to the Page, it appears in the streams of your fans or people who have joined your page.  This is very powerful viral marketing
13. When you start to write in the "write something" you get options to add links, photos, videos - post things that are beyond promotion content. Be interactive, make it interesting, provide behind the scenes content.  Incorporate events into your page.  "Exclusive content is good"
14. Shed the tradition PR schtick content and make it real.
15. Red Cross Fan Page is a great example.  So is One Campaign and Stanford University.
16. Lexicon on Facebook lets you track words and phrases

Some Good References

www.facebook.com/facebookpages
www.facebook.com/nonprofits
www.facebook.com/influencers
www.facebook.com/help
www.facebook.com/advertising

Q&A Nuggets

• Nonprofits on Facebook set up as a mechanism to share nonprofit best practices on Facebook.  That's the intent of Facebook.com/nonprofits so everyone can learn from it.
• Fan Pages have a metrics tool that has just upgraded.  It's called the insight tool -- you can see better metrics for the Fan Page
• If you set up your Fan Page before the nonprofit category, don't worry.  They are working on having the ability to change it, but not high priority.  Doesn't control the search.
• Why can't you invite Fans to your page?
• It's intended to prevent spam. Nonprofits are nicely behaved, but others are not so nicely behave.   That's why there is a limit 30 people to invite to your page
• You can send an update to your members, it's like an email blast and encourage them get people to join.
• Yes, you can link Causes to your Facebook Page - Causes will be rolling out some new information next week, so be sure to check the Nonprofits on Facebook.
• It is useful to have a group for more intimate conversations, where a  page is more public
  You can have both.  Groups are good for small scale organizing. Pages are more public presence
• Nonprofits vanity urls are coming, they're discussing.  (Don't know what the heck a vanity url is?  Read Nick's post) 

How to let people know how to join your page?
(1) Put the Name of page so when people search for it - they will find it
(2) No direct way to subscribe
(3) Fan of your page via SMS - text fan name of your page to the Facebook short code (FBOOK (32665))

Can we delete our group?
Deleting groups is difficult - there is a form you can fill out to have the group deleted - use the help page to do it.

The real scoop about a successful fan page.

"We want to encourage you to experiment. Let's be honest, takes an effort to build a community
Just because Facebook is free doesn't mean it is easier to get a million fans.  Don't start from scratch - look at the other groups that are already talking about your cause and experiment or piggy back or do cross promotion."

Add Apps Strategically To Your Fan Page - at minimum you want video, photos, Causes, and a few others.  "Think like a user, what would encourage your to click through?  Your fans don't think about you 24/7.  So for the few minutes they might visit you, what do you want them to know?" (Here's some good nitty gritty how-to information on which apps to add to your Fan Page)
 

Facebook

• Facebook Pages versus Groups
• Intro guide to using Facebook from Master New Media
  8 Essential Apps for Your Facebook Fan Page
• Overview of FaceBook from HowStuffWorks
• Facebook Pages Best Practices - by Heather Mansfield
• How To Create and Promote Your Facebook Fan Page - by Mari Smith
• Why You Need to Make a Facebook Fan Page for Your Website NOW! 
• Why You Need to have a Strategy before you make a Facebook Fan Page NOW! byJeremiah Owyang
• Who, What, and Why of Facebook Fan Pages by Beth Kanter
  Tim Davies - Facebook Pages vs Facebook Groups Pros/Cons
• Social Media Today, Best Practices for Facebook Pages
• Jeremiah Owyang - Testing Facebook Pages
• Jesse Stay - Ten Things You Didn't Know About Facebook
• Jesse Stay - What You Get From Facebook Pages Series
• App/Gap Blog - Should your business with Friends with Facebook? (analysis of using Facebook groups)
• Jenny Ambrozek, Ten Tips for Getting Business Value Out of Groups
• Heather Mansfield, Facebook Best Practices - Interview
• Shara Karasic, Setting Up A Facebook Page
• Facebook FAQ on Pages
• Five Lessons Celebrities Can Teach Us About Facebook Fan Pages from Mashable
• Five Elements of A Successful Facebook Fan Page by Mashable

Did you write a fabulous tip sheet for Facebook Fan Pages?  Also, I had major brain blip and forgot the name of the polling app that they mentioned.  Anyone retain that? I thought it was wire something.  A friend on Twitter say it was "Ask A Friend." 

 

Comments

[David Krumlauf]

Great summary Beth. I'll offer a few fillers:

Lexicon is at http://facebook.com/lexicon/new and will soon have the ability to enter your own search terms which will make it very useful.
You can email people with link to become a fan. Limit of 30/24hrs is for FB contacts only.
Put a PS in your regular email to become a fan like moveon.org does.
Attach Event invites to fan updates.
Twitter/FB Pages connection is coming soon.
Promote your Page using a celebrity in a personalized video.
Once the webinar recording is available we can fine tune this. It was a bad audio connection for me so I hope I can hear more from the recording.

[Beth Kanter]

Thanks for that David. It just dawned on me that working in the cloud - for us Babyboomers is a good thing - we can collectively fill in for our "senior moments." Now, if I could only remember the name of that polling app

[Ben]

Great post, thanks Beth.

I didn't know about the ability to join a page via SMS - that would be great for our charity if it works in the UK as we've got some events coming up in the summer.

TIP:
We're experimenting with the best ways of running competitions/giveaways in the most 'viral' way on the new Facebook format. Have tried using the discussion board etc etc but the best method we've found so far is to create a competition photo album with our logo in and invite people to enter by tagging themselves and one friend in it. It gets our logo on people's feeds and piques people's interest. Sounds a bit convoluted but it seems to work.

Thanks,

Ben

[Bobbi Newman]

One problem I've come across for pages - they are tied to the profile of the individual who crated them. If that person leaves the organization for any reason there is no way for the users to remove that individual without contacting Facebook. With groups its easy to for the users to promote new admins and then remove the necessary person.

[Karen Maunu LWB]

We have just recently had this discussion about having a Fan page with our Cause page. We had one in the very beginning, when we first started our Cause page but deleted it. With all of the recent discussion, we have revisited this again.

We have decided against the Fan page because we already have a lot of loyal followers on our Cause page (almost 13,000). We update our Cause page with updates almost daily and email to all members when we have news to share (we are careful to not do this too often). When we had two pages (Cause and Fan) people weren't signing up to both and so people were missing the messages and the ability to donate through our Cause page. We also receive quite a few donations through our Cause page....many a week.

If we are missing some great reason to have a Fan page, I would love to know.

Thank you so much for your blog!

[Jessica]

Bobbi: We've run into that problem too. We wrote a guide last year that's on scribd.com/jdstar in pdf and rich text format and cites many of the links Beth posted above. I worry about doing guides like this again because they go out of date. But seems that people are still favorite-ing it. So I thought it was topical to mention it here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/10738422/Guide-to-Facebook-Pages-for-Nonprofits

We would be happy to receive comments for updates. It's also in English and Arabic.

[Rhea]

Fantastic note taking. You must have done really well in school.

[david lee king]

Very timely, as I just held a Facebook Page meeting yesterday at my org! Cool. Will be scraping/using/borrowing from all these links!

[Carroll Burney]

Thanks, Beth! We have a group and I was curious if I should do a fan page, too. Now I know the answer - and much more!

[Elizabeth]

Wonderful resource - thanks Beth!

Can you clarify the RSS advice in #11? Are they talking about an RSS dump as the only activity on the page? For instance, if an org is active on FB but *also* feeds new blog posts to Facebook, would that be a problem?

~Elizabeth

[Will Zweigart]

Great roundup Beth. The one thing I haven't been able to find yet w/ Facebook Insights is a way to track external links to the page. It would be great to know who's linking to (and promoting) your page.

Any ideas on how to get that info?

[Jon Dunn]

There are several things needed going forward that will need to happen to continue to make NP's as successful as possible on FB (see: Vanity URL's for example).

But the fan page is hands down the best way to represent yourself, as an organization, on FB at this point IMO. Especially after the redesign - we are now "friends" with more than 26,000 supporters.

Groups, Causes, or any other way to represent yourself on FB are the condiments reserved for specific programming. Let your Fan page be home base!

[Therese]

These are some great tips, going to be starting my own non-profit soon, and saving this to my clips.

[Karen Maunu LWB]

What does a fan page give you that your Cause page doesn't? Once people join your fan page, do you give them a reason to come back and read you?

I would love to understand why we might want to do this, but still don't understand the advantages. Don't want to miss out, but also don't want to lose donors.

Thank you!

[Heidi Baker]

We use our Page to announce our regular travel training events; not sure that Causes has that feature.

And we use 'Poll' for polls (another app, 'Polls' was not good) but would like to know of a better solution, and one that can be placed on the Profile page.

[Jenny Ambrozek]

Beth, Thanks for pointing to our "Facebook Groups in Business Investigation". Collaborating with 10 extraordinary Facebook Group owners from 6 countries across 4 continents to collect and share data over a 3 month period was an extraordinary experience. Proving the power of Facebook only 1 of the Facebook Group owners was known to me before we began.

To your list of Facebook resources you might want to add Clara Shih's "Facebook Era" that also serves as an excellent example of using Facebook for marketing:
http://www.facebook.com/thefacebookera

I was fortunate to be at the "Business of Community Marketing" conference where Clara Shih did an exceptional keynote the day her book launched. Here is an excellent conference wrapup blog post from Kate Brodock (@justkate) http://www.othersidegroup.com/adcomments/2009/03/bocn-business-of-community-networking-wrap-up/

My "Facebook Era" review is posted at TheAppGap:

http://www.theappgap.com/book-review-clara-shihs-the-facebook-era.html

Clara's book is important for a host of reasons but especially for the practical examples, putting the "Facebook Era" in technology context, and pointing to the mindset changes needed to leverage the potential of a socially networked world.

[Anthony Wong]

Thank you for the great summary. Since they are making Fan pages more like personal pages, I wish Facebook would allow Fan pages to join Groups so that we can participate in a Group as an organization.

[phoenix bankruptcy attorney]

I am happy to pass this information on. I am involved in two 403-b organizations and this is one idea that can certainly improve the organization's ability to communicate and may fundraise.

[Colleen]

How can a fan page follow a cause? Is that possible?
Can a group follow a cause? How can I link the cause and the loyal following of fans?

[Laura Norvig]

I had not heard the advice that it is bad to dump an RSS feed into a fan page. I thought that was a good thing because it keeps the page fresh (and yes, with minimal effort). We'll have to re-think our strategy. Before they made the last big interface change, we had our RSS feeds coming in in a box on the right side of the page and that looked nice. Now it seems the only choice is dump it into the wall or dump it into a tab, and I really don't think anyone is going to click on the tab. So far for us, Facebook is a lot of work with minimal returns, but I guess we'll keep chipping away at it. We may have to experiment more with groups.

[Elena]

Hi Beth, What do you mean when you say: "Fan Page backend is like a cms and if you know a little HTML you can do some spiffy stuff"? I am an admin of a page and I don't see anything cms-like in the backend. I actually don't see any backend: on my page I can edit boxes, rearrange where they appear on the page, but other functionalities are just like for a profile...so since I know some HTML, I am curious where I can access this FB pages backend to do some spiffy stuff for my page!!

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