Congrats to Book Winners - Twitter for Dummies, Web Analytics 2.0 and The New Community Rules

I'm pleased to announce the winners of the last couple of book giveaways.  In return for receiving the book, the winners have been offered an opportunity to write a guest post about what they learn so the wisdom can be shared.

If you were not one of the lucky winners, don't give up.  I have a stack of books that I'm hoping to give away in the coming weeks - all social media related.

I offered a copy of Twitter for Dummies in this post asking for examples of small nonprofit using social media.  It was one of my commented posts.   The lucky winner is Bridget Steele who works for the Learning Centers.

Earlier this year, our nonprofit ventured into the social media waters by starting a blog.  Outside of time, our small department launched the blog at virtually no cost. We checked out library books on building and maintaining a blog, taught ourselves some basic web design techniques – again from library books and online articles – and chose a free blog hosting service.

Our cause, providing free after-school training for children with dyslexia, encompasses centers spread across several states. The blog launch came in the midst of the economic crisis when these centers were facing unprecedented fundraising challenges. Our goal was to provide center staff and their volunteer boards with fundraising tips, inspiration and the opportunity to feel connected to headquarters and other volunteers. We got into a rhythm of doing three posts a week and have been posting faithfully since May.

We saw the real value of the blog when we began using it to provide information on a proposed name change for our charity. Through a rebranding study we had all but settled on a new name, but the negative feedback we received through the blog alerted us to regional problems with our choice that we never would have thought of ourselves. The issue sparked good dialogue among our volunteers, brought our highest readership numbers yet, and showed supporters that we were listening when we chose to rule out the name choice completely.

With our 100th post coming at the close of this year, our staff would agree that the blog has been a great success. We haven’t attempted Twitter yet, but if we win the book we might just give it a try!

The New Community Rules was reviewed in a guest post by Angus Parker of Wiser Earth. The lucky winner is Dawn Crawford.

My secret for rocking the social webs for the nonprofit I work for - Colorado Children's Immunization Coalition @ImmunizeCOKids - is real relationships. I cultivate real relationships with the people that follow/fan/subscribe us by interacting with them, asking them to post on behalf of our cause and keeping them informed on the latest news. It can seem overwhelming but it's critical for NGOs to build real connections. Our only commodity is people so we have to foster those people on the other end of the social media ID. 

I did a review and interview with Avinash Kaushik on his new book, Web Analytics 2.0.   The lucky winner is Ira Wise who is the Director of Education from Congregation B'nai Israel.

This book sounds fantastic. Our congregation is just beginning to dig in with analytics after seven years of flying by the seat of our pants. And now that we have two blogs (and hope to begin a "Social Sermon" in the spring, we are beginning to formulate a general strategy and policy for engaging our members, potential members and fellow travelers through social media. Hope to learn more from Avinash