You Need a Social Plan Before You Start Playing With the Social Channels

As I mentioned in last week's post, a few weeks ago I had the distinct pleasure of presenting to about 60 members of the nonprofit industry at the Direct Marketing Fundraisers Association monthly meeting. My presentation was about demystifying social media for nonprofits, and the discussion across the hour was a combination of questions, challenges and sharing of best practices.

Last week I blogged about Facebook and "Doing It Right." Now, we're going to deal with the larger issue: As an industry, a large portion of nonprofits are not planning or measuring their social media.

Follow these steps to create a plan. Even if you are already running 100 miles an hour in a bunch of social channels, take the time to walk through the steps to ensure your prior decisions about those channels are right.

1. Where are you today?
This is a tough question but one that is important to take the time to answer. You should break this down into the following categories:

• What are your capabilities within your company?
• Do you have social-media marketing strategy assigned to someone, or is it perceived to be an add-on to someone's job?
• What do you all believe is your current success with your social media?
• Are there challenges with how you are doing things today?
• Is there something you really want to be doing but you cannot get done?

2. What does the organization want from social media?
Start from the high-level thinking, and move down when you dig in to this topic. What was the vision for getting involved with social media? Sometimes this can be as simple as understanding which department is driving the conversation. In other words:

• Does the organization want money?
• Does the organization want to engage a different audience?
• Does the organization want to grow its online audience?
• Is the goal to achieve greater awareness for the organization?

3. What do the key stakeholders in the organization want for their specific areas?
I know this sounds a lot like item two, but this is where the rubber meets the road. The individual departments that see social media as a way to achieve their goals need to be very specific about what they want. How do they define success for their staff time and funding spent in these areas? This is also important to make sure you don't have conflicting expectations or goals.