Social Media

Facebook Marketing Cheat Sheet

You want to learn everything you can about marketing your nonprofit via Facebook. But you don’t have all day to learn it. No worries. I’ve done the searching, so you can do just the reading.

Quick & Dirty How-Tos

• A Simple 6 Step Plan to Creating a Facebook Page That Works
• How to Create a Cover Photo for Your Facebook Timeline
• How-to Start Marketing on Facebook

Idea Mega-Lists

• 22 Ways to Stay Connected to Your School's Alumni on Facebook
• 8 Ideas for Social Media Rewards
• 50 Social Media Content Ideas

Stats & Research

• Nonprofits Value a Facebook Like at $214.81
• The World is Obsessed with Facebook
• Stats on Facebook 2012 [Infographic]

You can also check out Sarah-the-intern's "How to Increase Facebook Engagement" for more ideas.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

I don’t know about you, but I grew up in a house that really prioritized thank you notes.  There were other things that were stressed, but I think writing thank you notes was one of the most important lessons that my mom instilled in us.  She made writing thank you notes enjoyable—good note cards, fun pens, festive stamps.  And she also saved the particularly nice or well written or beautiful thank you notes she received.
I think there is a great lesson that non-profits can learn from my mom (well, there are many lessons you can learn from her, but this one is particularly fitting).  If someone makes a donation of time or money to your organization, you should send a thank you note. 

• Consider asking board members to write thank you notes (yes, this is the online marketing and fundraiser in me suggesting handwritten notes sent offline) to major donors, sustaining donors, or first time donors. 
• Set aside 20 minutes during your next board meeting and supply the names and mailing addresses of folks who would be a good fit for a handwritten note.  I received one from another organization last month and was so pleased that there was no ask in the note, just a plain and simple thank you. This really stuck with me.
• Make sure your donation auto-responder is alive and well.  Double check that it is visually pleasing, and provides an overview of what will be done with a donation.  Make your overview tangible and very specific (“We’ll serve 71 guests dinner with your gift.”) 
• Consider the timeline of your note.  Use the one year anniversary of someone becoming a sustaining donor to thank them, or perhaps sending them an e-card thank you note on their birthday.
• Thank people over social media! If an organization gives an in kind gift, tag the group in a photo or tweet. If someone becomes a sustaining donor or a first time donor, ask to tag them and put a real face on the people who are helping to support your organization.

Please tell me I didn't just hit send

Ok, I'll admit it. I really love the show The Newsroom on HBO. I recognize that it's got its flaws, but frankly, I like it. Time will tell how it all plays out (am I the only one who thinks it's rapidly getting closer to real time?), but I was particularly struck by an event that happened in the second episode. Without hopefully giving out any spoilers, a character accidentally sends an email out to the whole company that was only supposed to go to one person. Cringe-worthy, indeed, this is the stuff of nightmares of anyone with email access. But, from time to time, it's bound to happen - and sometimes a lot more publicly.

To err is human...

As it turns out, no one is immune. Particularly now, in the 24-hour-news-cycle-oh-yeah-and-twitter times we live in, a public gaffe can potentially lead to some pretty nasty backlash. I'm sure most of you can think of several cases in the last couple of weeks alone where an easily made mistake has led to some pretty loud public outcry, with some pretty widely varying results.

So, how does a person or organization recover from an error like this? Well, there are a few articles offering advice, and all of them say pretty much the same thing: own it, communicate it, fix it, and learn from it. Easier said than done, I know, but it turns out, they're right. Hiding from a problem, victimizing your organization, blaming others, and committing common mistakes more than once are really the worst ways to reassure the public that you know the landscape - even if you truly are being wrongfully presented.

Those who fail to plan...

Now, I'm not suggesting that you go rolling over every time the public doesn't like what you're organization is doing. Nor do I think you necessarily need to send out a retraction when your email blast has something that's poorly formatted. Only you and your organization can and should decide when to execute on a correction if and when you feel its necessary. But, given the evolution of communication, it's just good business sense for your organization to have some sort of contingency plan, just in case things go awry. Then, you can just cross your fingers and hope you never have to use it.

I'd love to hear more from our readers about who has either dealt with this sort of thing, is dealing with it now, or has started working on their plans. It's a new era of communication, and the learning curve is steep, so any information you can share would be great!

Why don’t my friends like me on Facebook?

...Well actually they do. But lately, I've noticed an interesting trend: I post something on Facebook that I think is fascinating, hilarious, or some deep revelation into the mysterious world of Miriam Kagan, and my social sphere reacts in...dead silence.  Failed in my effort to get instantaneous gratification at my own personal awesomeness through likes and comments, I am subsequently delighted and confused by friends who say things like "your Facebook status the other day made me laugh out loud" or "you know, it seems from your Facebook posts like your coworkers are really funny" a few days later, when we are say having coffee.

While my inner social addict silently pouts—"if you liked my status so much, why didn't you actually 'like' it and show the rest of my social universe how awesome you think I am?”— the fundraiser and strategist in me can't help but think how this kind of behavior and interaction applies to ways nonprofits are trying to engage with their constituents.

Advice abounds about tricks and tips for engaging the social sphere.  You should use certain key words. Post your comments in the form of a question.  Post photos—people like pretty things.  Ask for photos – people think they are good at taking them. Respond to comments. Retweet. Pin things.  Pin things in a very specific way. Make videos. Annotate them. Animate them.  And all of these are certainly appropriate tactics to be found in the social marketing toolkit for constituent engagement. 

The part that's still very tricky for most is measuring the impact of these activities.  So we start with the industry-wide best practices: How many people like you on Facebook? How many should? Is 10K enough, too little, too many?  Not sure?

Try calculating a ratio of how many people comment and/or like and/or share your posts divided by how many like your page.  So maybe that gets you an “engagement” ratio.  Similarly, how many retweets? Hashtag mentions? Video views? Clicks on embedded links? Conversions? If your embedded donation form isn't getting traffic, does that mean your FB page has no ROI?

A little trickier, but doable, is calculating your most engaged supporters' social media reach: if they repost your post, how big is their network? If they share your video? Retweet you?  What is your followers' average Klout score?  Metrics, metrics, metrics.

But there is a different kind of reach that is much harder to calculate:  the word of mouth/human network reach.  How do you measure the impact of motivating and activating your network offline or via word of mouth and the direct or indirect influence social media efforts are having?  How do you value the actual impact of your “inactive” social media connections? 

Marketers are certainly working hard to figure this out.  Media mix attribution models attempt to measure the relative influence of “supporting” channels to ones where an action or purchase is actually made (maybe I saw the promotion on FB but didn't click on anything, then bought an item from the catalog).  Social CRM and social media appends attempt to connect social media with constituent and consumer profiles to track integrated interactions (note: this is mostly only possible for consumers with relatively lax profile settings. As in, if you can't find me on Facebook, you can't connect me to the Miriam you have in your CRM). 

While measuring the ways humans chose to spread information and WHY on any given day they chose a specific method to do so may never be a 100% data driven, there are some additional approaches to consider in trying evaluating the indirect influence of your social media efforts:

• Qualitative research/focus groups. Basically:  if you want to know, ask people.  Put together a focus group or two.  Get a good cross section of your constituents—not just those who are most engaged, and ask them.  Does social media influence their “offline” behavior/engagement toward your organization? How? How often do they actually pay attention to your various posts/tweets/pins even if they don't do anything to let you know they are reading them?
• Qualitative research part II.  Surveys: Basically, ask people again. Online.  Use Facebook surveys. Use actual surveys. Listen to people's feedback.  “They all say they like our Twitter account, but none of them retweet any of our posts!”   Perhaps that's ok. The easiest way to fight those kinds of arguments inside your organization is to remind folks that it's important to listen to what constituents are telling you they like/need to build stickiness.  Wave those survey results around.  
• Think creatively and take advantage of indirect attribution opportunities even if you don't have a fancy attribution model (and yes, those are things are both awesome and fancy), and can't match 70% of your constituents to a social media profile. For example: think about your online donation thank you page and autoresponder.  We like to put all sorts of stuff in those: matching gift info, connecting to social media, other ways to get involved, etc. How about adding a link to a quick post-donation survey (you know, like the commercial folks do), to ask a few questions about the transaction experience...and sneak one in about anything that influenced your donation decision? If someone chooses say "Facebook", ta-da, you are able to attribute their decision-making.

And PS:  not that you asked, but my most popular Facebook post ever  (generating over 30 comments and a subsequent 5 hour debate over dinner with some friends), was from a question I remembered a professor asked us during an ethics and values class in college: “If someone handed you an envelope that had your entire future written down in it, would you open it and read it?” Would you?

E-books for Social Strategy

E-books and e-readers are a growing part of the attention ecosystem. Long-form journalism is finding new legs through social recommendation (#longform, #longreads) and time-shifting apps. Nonprofits struggling to communicate complex issues in 140 characters can benefit from deploying e-books and other long-form content as part of a thoughtful mobile and social media strategy.

Who is reading?

Owners of e-reading devices have similar profiles to audiences most nonprofits are trying to reach for fundraising. According to a recent report from the Pew Internet & American Life report, The Rise of E-Reading:

Compared with all Americans 16 and older, “e-reading device owners” are more likely to live in high income households and have more educational experience, and are also much more likely to be more tech-savvy in general… more likely to read in general, and to read a book on a typical day… more avid readers of newspapers and magazines than other Americans, and are more likely to read long-form content of any kind for pleasure. (emphasis mine)

29% of Americans age 18 and older own at least one specialized device for e-book reading – either a tablet or an e-book reader.

Also, it bears stating the obvious: smartphones are also e-readers. Don't think of e-books as being read exclusively by owners of dedicated e-readers like the Kindle or Nook, but instead think of any mobile screen. The audience for an e-book may be larger than you thought. 

What content makes sense?

As chronicled in Forbes.com and elsewhere, long-form writing on the web is making a comeback. Many readers are using time-shifting apps to collect web content and read it later. In addition to purposefully written longer articles on your website, e-books are an opportunity to reach your audience with long-form content. Examples of content that could be produced in e-book format or targeted to long-form readers include:

• Strategic planning documents (audience: potential board members, funders)
• Annual reports (audience: board members, major donors, individual donors)
• How to guides for volunteers
• Action kits for activists
• Extended versions of stories you already tell in abbreviated form: people your organization has helped, backstories on issues, extended interviews with volunteers, etc.
• Compilations of blog articles on a particular topic, such as work in a particular country or region, or stories related to a particular event. See this recent tweet from the White House, linking to a #longform article about the Joplin tornados.

Depending on the organization, other opportunities may present themselves. For example, distributing an exclusive work (or excerpt) by a well-known author in e-book format may be a way to generate donations or signups. Furthermore, new outlets for long-form journalism (Atavist, Longform.org, Longreads, Matter, PostDesk (UK), among others), should be part of your media planning.

TheNextWeb.com blogger Alex Wilhelm writes that "Long-form content is headed back to the business model of the pamphlet, with short works selling at low price points and in large quantity." According to Wilhelm, the key success factors for e-books are: locational convenience, formatting, and curation.

"By locational convenience I mean that people [with e-readers] often use them where they lack an Internet connection (the train). Therefore, to have something downloaded and ready to go is a real value. In regards to formatting, most ereading devices have browsing capabilities, but that doesn’t mean that they render pages well, or quickly. A well formatted ebook has none of those issues. Finally, curation means that things are assembled in a very specific way to give a cohesive and user-friendly experience."

An example of this kind of content curation is veteran nonprofit blogger Colin Delany's recent e-book, How Campaigns Can Use the Internet to Win in 2012, available in Kindle-optimized format via Amazon.com, and as a free PDF.

Why is formatting important?

As a consumer (not a standards expert), my experience is that PDF meets only the minimal requirements to be called an e-book, mainly for reasons of usability. While almost every e-reader can display PDFs, the end-user has no control over text size, background color, pagination, and other aspects of the the reading experience that make e-books a compelling medium. This is especially true for smartphones (currently your largest potential e-reader audience), where reading PDFs is possible but very tedious, with each page requiring zooming and scrolling.

How to publish an e-book?

Unfortunately, there isn't one publication standard that works across all e-readers. The major purveyors of e-book platforms (Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble) all want to make it easy for you to produce content, and make it sound as easy as uploading HTML or Word Documents. Because Amazon.com has the largest audience of e-readers, many independent publishers with limited time and energy are going the route of publishing in Amazon's Kindle-optimized format. One of the long-form content aggregators mentioned above, Atavist, offers a publication platform that looks promising.

If you are looking for deeper examination of the fragmented state of e-book publication standards, Nick Disabato fires a #longform broadside from A List Apart in two parts: the current state, and a look to the future. Nonprofits with limited resources would certainly benefit from industry adoption of standards as he urges.

Are you already making use of e-books and #longform content? Please let us know in the comments.