The time is ripe for the early adopters in the nonprofit sector to embrace m-Advocacy, otherwise known as mobile advocacy. Odds are a year from now pitches to subscribe or join “Mobile Action Networks” will be commonly seen in Facebook Status Updates, Tweets, blogs posts, homepages, and e-newsletter subject lines. As social media taught us, those nonprofits who act...
As I have said many times, I was a reluctant blogger. I did not think the Internet needed another blogger. But I was wrong. So wrong. Blogging has transcended my ROI (return on investment), primarily from simply featuring my e-newsletter “Subscribe” option and social networking icons in the upper right column. Sadly, the vast majority of nonprofit blogs do...
You got to give it to the social good entrepreneurs. Seemingly every week a new fundraising or cause awareness tool hits the Web for nonprofits to experiment with, and though donation processing fees must be applied or ads sold for these social enterprises to be sustainable, it’s clear that their motives are altruistic. That said, here are six new...
While writing Social Media for Social Good: A How-To Guide for Nonprofits, I visited over 500 nonprofit homepages looking primarily for links to their social networking communities. A rough guesstimate would be that less than 30% of those homepages included links or icons to their Facebook Page, Twitter Profile, YouTube Channel, etc., and of those, many placed them along...
Over the last 18 months I have subscribed to over 50 nonprofit text alert campaigns from a wide variety of organizations, but it wasn’t until this past April 28th that I finally received a text alert from a nonprofit that linked to a mobile website: That the text came from the Humane Society of the United States was not...
Finding your Twitter voice is an accomplishment only earned through a process of trial and error and conscious experimentation. Even the best social media managers often go through an initial period of puzzlement and frustration as they try to figure out how Twitter works and what to tweet. That said, the nonprofits below have discovered a nice balance of...
Nonprofits pioneered social media. They were on Myspace and organizing via Facebook Groups years before corporate brands, higher education, and broadcast and print media. That said, I am starting to worry a little bit that nonprofits are falling behind on mobile communications and missing out on some exceptional opportunities to tell their nonprofit’s story to the mobile masses. One of the...
It took 2 years, 10 months, and 50,000 clicks of a mouse, but yesterday @NonprofitOrgs followed its 50,000th nonprofit on Twitter! I start each morning browsing those that followed @NonprofitOrgs the day and night before, and follow those that are nonprofits and nonprofit staff in return. There a handful of nonprofit service providers in there too. That said, I’ve...
On the Mobile Web, it’s 1999 all over again. Those nonprofits that are pioneering mobile websites today will reap the benefits of Mobile SEO tomorrow. Mobile search engines like Google Mobile, Yahoo! Mobile, and Bing Mobile are hungry for mobile content, especially fresh content. That said, the uber vast majority of nonprofits have not even considered launching a mobile...
Integrating your nonprofit’s Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 campaigns is essential for success in online communications and fundraising. Rather that keeping them separate, once they are merged to compliment one another, your nonprofit’s ROI begins to grow exponentially. To begin, here are five ways to integrate social media into your nonprofit’s website: 1) Add social networking icons to your...
Unlike the Q&A site Quora, Facebook Questions allows brands to ask and answer questions. On Quora you have to be a person, but Facebook Questions uses your nonprofit’s Page and avatar as your Facebook Questions identity. Quora is great for professionals and those that want to spend time building their personal brand online, but I think Facebook’s decision to...
Your nonprofit’s social media campaigns are only as good as the social media manager running them. Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare are not miracle-producers. They are simply tools that can result in high ROI for your nonprofit, but only if the person sharing Status Updates, Twittering, and Checking-in on behalf of your nonprofit has the right skills, experience and training...
Ninety percent of your nonprofit’s success on Facebook is dependent upon the Admin who manages your Facebook Page. If she or he doesn’t have the personality or passion to elicit Comments and Thumbs Ups in response to their Status Updates, then the ROI from your Facebook Page will be minimal. Community building on Facebook and other social networking sites...