A Primer  on Social Media  for  Nonprofits

By Frank Barry

5 Steps to Start Leveraging Social Media

1. Pick an existing goal to pursue. Identify something your organization wants to accomplish. Many organizations find that social media provides good support for building cause awareness, connecting with new supporters, soliciting online gifts and cultivating supporter relationships. If you are just starting, pick one of these and let that objective guide you every step of the way.

2. Make success someone’s job. Or at least make it an explicit part of someone’s job! Treat social media like you do your other communication channels: Figure out where responsibility for your social-media programs should reside in your organization, and assign responsibility. Making an overt assignment lets a person or group of people on your staff develop the focus, comprehensive view and skills needed to leverage these new  techniques.

3. Listen. With your team identified and your initial goal in mind, you might be tempted to start doing something. Resist, at least until you have two more pieces in place. The first is your ability to listen in the social-media channels. Organizations like yours are already participating; seeing what they do gives you inspiration, cautionary information and a sense  of what you need to do to differentiate your  organization.

4. Establish a baseline social-media presence. After establishing your organization’s ability to “listen” in the social-media channel, the second step is to establish a baseline presence that you can use as a foundation for your subsequent social-media campaigns. The places you choose to engage should be places that make sense based on your objective.

● Create an organization Facebook page. This provides an outlet for any of the more than 200 million Facebook users who already want to connect with your organization on Facebook in a simple way. The first version of your page can be very simple, and you can launch it in minutes. To get started, it doesn’t need to do much more than greet your supporters and provide a link back to your website.

● Create a Twitter account. This gives your organization a voice to speak with in the micro-blogging world. To get started, send updates about newly available Web resources, events or programs your supporters are interested in. Include links to the root content on your website.

5. Evolve. Now you have an objective, dedicated staff, a way to listen and to measure results, as well as a foundational presence in the social-media landscape. Reflect on what you’ve learned in your first few weeks of watchful monitoring, review the program examples talked about in the Pursing Objectives section here (No. 1) and formulate the plan for your first social-media campaign.

Having a social-media strategy is not its own objective. Rather, social-media strategies can support your existing objectives. Reflect on your organization's current objectives: Do you want to cultivate supporter relationships, build cause awareness, do online fundraising or connect with new supporters? Those are all goals social media can help support.