socially marketing

I’m going to try to answer the question in the headline today as part of a deal I struck with Britt Bravo. Britt is serving as an alpha tester for socialmarkets and in return, I’m writing this post for the Net2 blog. Frankly, I’m not comfortable with this question because I’ve almost always hesitated to give people fundraising advice. So… take my advice with a grain of salt. Be aware my advice is really useful only to the very small nonprofit and not some humongous one like Red Cross. I’m going to put on my Executive Director hat now and tell you how I use it for socialmarkets. To tell you the truth, I don’t really use the “Social Web” if you define it solely in terms of Facebook or change.org. I don’t even use Causes on Facebook.

I’m still focused on using older Social Web techniques like blogging, Web sites and volunteers. You won’t see any advice on this list to sign up on Facebook or Twitter but I use those too. They’re just not my most important tools right now. I’ve found that execution is more important than the technology you use. And if I had my druthers — I’d rather have 10 Beth Kanters doing pitches for me than 1000 friends on Facebook. So think of this document as a way to find your volunteer champions and building an offline network. It’s really preparation for the online network that I’m planning on building for socialmarkets.

To me, the social web is about creating change with as few social interactions as possible. I know that sounds crazy but hear me out. We’re talking about reaching thousands or even tens of thousands of people with your marketing or fundraising strategy. In lieu of one on one interactions between myself and the huge audience I want to reach out to, it’s best to imagine a generic person that more or less represents portions of that audience. This means breaking up the strategy into three different stages — broadcasting, narrowcasting and one-on-one interactions depending on how generic you make this imaginary listener to be.

Above is a list of the tools I use with the size of the layer roughly corresponding to the number of people I hope to reach with that tool. Just refer back to that graphic as I discuss how these items are used.

Broadcasting

Broadcasting is the easy part — at least on the Web. Set up a Web site and assume that people will come. The current socialmarkets website is not particularly good. It serves only as a placeholder for the real Web site that’s coming along on the 21st of November. However, you’ll find that even on that site there are numerous articles and even another blog that discusses what it’s been like to start up the site. With a well-designed site and a decent URL, it’s fairly easy to get visitors even from the start.

Our biggest coup in the broadcasting phase was getting socialmarkets’ President, Jeff Tuller, up on NPR. This is traditional mainstream broadcasting. The ROI is still pretty tremendous for NPR. It gives you instant credibility with all the other media you’re going to employ. And how did we get the NPR hookup? Volunteers. And how did we get this volunteer? The Web site. Yeah, it all ties back to the first thing we ever did. The Web site. Don’t ever knock or discount your own Web site. Even with the tiny number of visitors we get for the site (less than a thousand per month), it’s still nearly a thousand people per month that I’ve never met. And how did that volunteer meet the NPR reporter? A wedding — the ultimate social networking event. [Shout out to Rachael Barrett! She's our marketing champion] Offline still matters more than online but you can’t even start an offline network without a Web site.

Efficiency Tip

Here’s a not-so-nice but pretty standard way of using the Social Web: look up all your new contacts on LinkedIn. Most people with a substantial career stake in the nonprofit sector are already on LinkedIn. If you get an e-mail from someone through your contacts box or as a signup, Google them and then use LinkedIn to find out more. This will help you decide which part of the nonprofit sector they’re coming from and you can plan your engagement with that person accordingly.

Narrowcasting

Blogging is the narrower version of a generic corporate Web site. It allows you to fine-tune your message just for supporters or people you want as supporters.

As you probably already know, I like blogging. It focuses my mind on an issue for about an hour and I really get into it. What’s even better about blogging is that you start a conversation with your potential volunteer champions. Because of the nature of socialmarkets (we’re just a nascent nonprofit) fundraising is really a matter of having connections with foundations and philanthropists. Many of these connections are still offline so you have to get introduced to them so the Social Web is somewhat useless here in terms of direct connections.

However, socialmarkets found its fiscal sponsor through a tremendously long set of circumstances that actually started with the Non-Profit Tech Blog. Because of my blog postings on salesforce.com, I was invited to the salesforce.com Nonprofit Roadmap Summit earlier this year. By chance, I met with Douglas Yeager of what was then Community Foundations of America and is now called GivingNet. That eventually led to a meeting with GivingNet and that led to their fiscal sponsorship of socialmarkets.

I’ve told people that the direct ROI on blogging is low. However, the indirect effects of blogging are pretty good. Somehow, people take you more seriously if you have a well-designed blog. It’s even more impressive when people have been reading your blog for some time. No, it’ll never make you a rock star but at the very least you can get a word in edgewise.

Another indirect return on blogging is all the research that goes into it. There’s a lot of research that happens when I write — any kind of semi-controversial thing I say needs to have some data behind it. It also allows you to piece together the social landscape of the people you’re meeting for the first time. And this part is not entirely available on the Web yet either.

Another great example of the combination between Internet narrowcasting and offline networking are parties. Use Evite or Google Calendar to get people to show up at your parties. socialmarkets is in a unique office space known as Studio Guild. Our officemates are from different companies and they know some interesting people. We were lucky enough to be graced by Clay Shirky’s presence during a recent officewarming party.

And no, you can’t ever go wrong with personal or group e-mails. It’s a great fom of narrowcasting and we plan to use it more when we get our CRM chops together.

Efficiency Tip

Don’t try to make Joomla into a blogging platform. It doesn’t work as well as Wordpress and you end up wishing you were working on Wordpress. We ported everything associated with our blog over to Wordpress last month.

One-on-one interactions

If these new people that you meet via the Web or blog pass all your criteria, then it’s time to get your chat on. Use Meebo. Everybody has an IM client that they like but Meebo is the one IM client to rule them all. And if you and your new contact is simpatico, you can then move to Skype as your final piece. That puts you one step short of a real-world interaction with that person. Your relationship may hang there for months, even years but it’s still totally worth it. This is how you maintain interactions with your constituents in an asynchronous mode — use chat. You won’t always have time to e-mail or call but there’s always time to chat.

Sometimes, it’s much easier to go to a real-world interaction because I live in New York. Everyone comes here eventually. That’s how I ended up meeting Martin Smith from justmeans.com. We eventually did a pitch at JustMeans’ first Social Venture Pitch Night.

Efficiency Tip

When people e-mail you using a Gmail account, they get automatically entered into your Gchat contacts. Go ahead and chat with them using Gchat and if they’re ok with you, add them to your Meebo list.

Conclusion

So there you go — just use the basic Social Web. Use your Web site, blog and learn how to maintain your social connections using a chat client and e-mail. Oh yeah, and the total cost of the Web site, blog and IM clients? $9/month. The Web site has to be paid for but everything else is free. Our Joomla templates cost us $75.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 11:17 am and is filed under Non-Profit Tech Blog, net2thinktank, volunteering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.