Really engaging with stakeholders is critical to creating stronger organizational relationships, but it is relatively difficult to really engage followers on Twitter. Having a conversation with followers is one of the easiest way of engaging, but it is hard to have a conversation with every one of your followers (especially if you have more than 100). Here are five ways that nonprofit organizations are creating spaces for real engagement on twitter.

1. Engage Followers with a Live Chat

Hebrew University joined Twitter a month ago and wanted to find a way to connect with their followers. Two days ago they held their first live twitter chat with Maya Sigal, a victim of the 2002 Hebrew University cafeteria bombing. The live chat coincided with an anniversary ceremony honoring the victims of the bombing to be held the following day.

According to Molly Livingstone of Hebrew University’s Public Relations and Development Department,  “we wanted to take the academic institution and make it a more personal place. We want to engage and have a community.  We decided that a live chat is a great way to reach out to people. We wanted our first live chat to be with Maya Sigal because the terrorist bombing was personal attack on the University itself.”  According to Livingstone, the live chat resulted in many new followers, and more direct messages to the University. Livingstone views direct messages from followers to mean that the University has created a  more intimate relationship with a follower.

2. Ask people to sign a petition

Several online platforms enable people to create and start petitions on Twitter. Act.ly and tiny petition are among the most popular of the platforms. Greenpeace USA has started a petition to get Trader Joe’s to adopt a sustainable seafood policy.

Here is a screen shot of the petition on act.ly:

3. Integrate Tweeting Into Your Organization’s Programs

The National Wildlife Foundation’s Wildlife Watch program is “a citizen monitoring program where the public reports animal, plants and natural phenomena sightings online to NWF.” These tweets help the scientists that study wildlife track animals around the US and monitor their activity and health.  The NWF asks people to send a tweet to @wildlife_watch with the hashtag #NWF whenever a person sees wildlife. According to Danielle Brigida, the program gets about six tweets a day. Now that’s engagement. Here is a sample of recent Wildlife Watch tweets:

4. Involve Followers in Program and Organizational Improvements

The Peery Foundation has invited its funded organizations, partners, and enthusiasts to participate in their strategic planning process on Twitter. Anyone can tweet ideas, at any time, or participate in a Twitter dialogue about the Foundation’s future using the hashtag #PFWhiteboard.  Here is a screen shot of tweets from a recent online strategic planning session of the Peery Foundation, run by @davepeery and @jessamynlau:

For more examples of philanthropies that crowdsource, check out this article from Modern Giving.

5. Find and Interact with Volunteers

ActionAid Australia is seeking volunteer bloggers to travel to a remote area of an ActionAid country and train locals to use social media (blogging, Twitter) to end poverty. Better yet, they’ve set up a challenge, the Toto Challenge (The Overseas Training Operation) and tweeted the heck out of it. They’ve asked people to nominate bloggers via Twitter, they’ve asked the nominated bloggers to interact with them on Twitter, they’ve asked people to vote, and they keep asking. They have taken this idea from the blog to twitter and back. It’s a great concept of how to promote your program on Twitter, and also use Twitter for engaging people in the program. Here is the list of volunteer bloggers that have been nominated to take the challenge.  Action Aid Australia has used the challenge to find and interact with volunteers on Twitter, as shown here:

These are but five ways that organizations have used Twitter to meaningfully connect with followers. Twitter offers so many possibilties for conversations and engagement. How has your organization used it for real engagement?

Image by p_champie

Last week I gave an “introduction to social media” presentation to the Board of Directors of a multinational nonprofit organization.  This was the normal “what is social media” overview, a review and overview of the popular platforms (Facebook, Twitter, You Tube, blogs, etc.) and summary of how to get started in social media.  By the time I was 10 minutes into the presentation, I had heard three objections to using social media, and these objections kept coming at me throughout the entire time I presented. It has been a long time since I was in a room of people scared of social media. I’m going to take this opportunity to address their objections one at a time. At the end of this blog post, please tell me if you think I’ve satisfactorily addressed the concerns, and how you might add to these responses.

1. It’s not safe! What about the BU Craigslist killer? (someone REALLY asked this question in the presentation)

The”BU Craigslist killer” was actually Philip Markoff, a Boston University medical student who looked for massage ads on Craigslist and then attacked the women giving massages. In essence, how is this any different than if Mr. Markoff had responded to a newspaper print ad?  Did social media promote the massage ads? NO. Craigslist is not social media, but an online classified advertising site. In this instance, for massages. Is one of your nonprofit’s core services providing massages in hotel rooms? If yes, then you might have to worry. But if your core mission is about helping save the whales, or feed the homeless, or provide rehab services to veterans, then you really don’t need to worry.

When I asked my Twitter followers for their responses to this question, my personal favorite was from Teresa Boze, who wrote: “I’d tell them most household accidents happen in the bathroom… watch out for the toilet bowl monster.”

On a more serious note, if your organization promotes conversation on sites geared to teens, then you do have a responsibility to ensure that the conversation includes safeguards against teen predators. Just as in real life, if you bring teenagers together, there should always be a responsible adult present.

2. What if our biggest rival pretends to be us online?

Sheena T. Abraham responded (via Twitter) to this objection with “that’s why you have to build your own online credibility as much as you can, build trust with the online audience.” This is one great answer to the question! If an organization builds its own relationship online with its stakeholders, then this is what will likely happen when a rival impersonates the organization:

• the real organization’s stakeholders will notice and alert the real organization of the problem
• the phony organization will not have the ability to create a phony online profile because the real organization has already claimed its online profiles at KnowEm. The truth is that “it’s almost impossible to get your brand name or username back once it’s been taken” on a social media site, unlike buying back a website domain name, according to the KnowEm blog.

Secondly, listening for mentions of your organization online will alert you to this phenomenon, and your organization can quickly address the issue of the “phony brand name.” I cover this topic further in depth below.

Go get your social media online profile and begin to engage!

3. Social media means a lot of work and we don’t have the staff time to do that.

I hear that. I’ve worked at nonprofit organizations with two staff people, with 20, and everything in-between. No matter how many staff people your organization employs, they will always be overtaxed, overworked, with no time to do social media. This will never change. It is the nature of not-for-profit organizations. A good social media strategy takes into account how social media will help your organization better fulfill its mission (engage with stakeholders) and create real benefits to the organization  (listen to members, engage with stakeholders, vet new program ideas, measure responses, etc.) With that in mind, how do you not have the time? Amy Sample Ward writes on Twitter that “organizations want a person or department to “own” the task/responsibility instead of seeing it as a tool to aid all departments’ work.”

Carie Lewis from the Humane Society of the US (she’s their Brand Ambassador) holds a 9-minute staff meeting every day to inform each and every one of the HSUS employees about “what’s going on that day – PR, what people are talking about on Twitter, etc.”

Wendy Harman, of the American Red Cross, writes that “We distribute a daily social media update email that contains a sampling of most relevant mentions.” Everyone must be involved. No more silos.

If social media activities let your organization to grow, soar, and be more efficient, then determine your staff time and resources and create a social media strategy that will accommodate organizational limitations.

4. There is no place in our organization for social media.

Organizations are used to placing departments in silos. The organizing department…organizes the community. The fundraising department… raises money. The research department…researches. Where is the “social media department?” The organizations that implement social media most effectively include everyone in social media, whether it is merely apprising them of the latest activities or including them in the strategy sessions. Social media is the entire organization’s “new website”…its composite brand identity. Every department must be involved in some way.

Amy Sample Ward again writes (via Twitter) to those that argue “there is no ‘home’ for social media in any of the organization’s departments, obviously I would argue there is home in ALL of the departments for it.”

5. People will attack us online with negative critique.

I have news for you: if you are worried about this, then they are already attacking you online. If your organization is worried about negative critique, then the best thing that you can do is to be where your critics are…online. The dissatisfied clients/customers of your nonprofit organization will find a way to critique your organization no matter what – via Twitter, blog posts, commenting on forums and discussion boards, and many other places. The very best action your nonprofit organization can do is create a social media presence, listen for any and all organizational mentions online, and develop an online presence. By developing a loyal brand following online, your organization is positioned to respond quickly to all negative remarks, and leverage the loyalty of your followers to pass along your online responses. For more detailed suggestions on how to engage in proactive reputation management, see a prior post on this subject.

The final thought comes from Danielle Lanyard via Twitter: “nonprofits were built on an old corporate model where nonprofits are defined by differences from competition vs. a collaborative model which is social media.” Social media leverages the collaborative experience, knowledge and information of everyone online to fulfill the organization’s goals. The knowledge gained, productive collaborations, extended organizational reach, and increased stakeholder (and donor!) engagement should far outweigh fears about using social media.

Thanks for reading! Do you have other suggestions for overcoming objections to social media? Have you heard these objections before? Are there other objections that you want to add, and how you have addressed them? I welcome your participation in this conversation!

Please also visit Amy Sample Ward’s blog,  who continues this conversation by inviting her readers to contribute their own Comeback Lines to Social Media Objectors.

image by roadsidepictures

There is no such thing as a local business anymore. Nor a local organization.

Consider the local mini mart, the most local of all types of stores. In general, people won’t walk more than 10 minutes or 1/2 mile to their local food mart. Why does the mini mart owner need to interact with his customers via social media? If people want something, they’ll just go there. It’s a fair question, easily answered by another:

What is Local?

I respond: Local is a Mindset. So is Social.

Local is You Talking. Social is Engagement and Conversation.

The local mini mart owner/manager is thinking old-school: bricks and mortar, customers searching for twinkies, chips and coffee, and lottery players seeking millions.Re-think your mindset out of Local and into Social about the same customer.

This time, the customer is sitting at home, wishing she had a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream. Does the local mini mart have it? Send an email or a Tweet. Can she swing by in her car, illegally park on the sidewalk (hey, they do it all the time in my neighborhood) and get out in 2 minutes? You betcha – IF – she could submit her order via Twitter with an approximate purchase time, and could be sure it would be ready when she arrives. What if she told her friends via Facebook that she was heading down to the local mini-mart for ice cream? She could take orders from them if they were also coming over to her house later. The Facebook update is free publicity for the online or email ordering feature at the local market. That is Social. Not Local.

A great example of a local shop using a Social mindset is Houston’s CoffeeGroundz, which created a Twitter account (@coffeegroundz) and unexpectedly realized that they could do a brisk business with Twitter takeout orders. You can read the whole story, in detail on Pistachio Consulting’s blog, here. CoffeeGroundz is a great example of Social, not Local.

Consider the PTO, the local Parent-Teacher Organization of the local elementary school, the most local of local organizations.  A tired parent receives a note about his child, or an email from his child’s school, about the meeting. He goes. The typical meeting consists of parents talking about why the school isn’t doing something or that it should do something better. The PTO wants new ideas, wants to use them, and hopes to involve parents in school improvements. Maybe you attended, maybe not. Either way, you get an email update about what happened. Are you engaged? Are you ready to act? Nope, you’re happy eating mint chocolate chip ice cream and can’t be bothered. The PTO is too Local.

Now consider the Social PTO. The Social PTO is all about making it easier for  you to engage, act and motivate others to create real changes in the school.

You receive the next PTO meeting invitation via one or more of these methods:  email, a group text message on your mobile phone, a Facebook Event invitation, and/or a listing on the PTO’s chat group (such as a Yahoo or Google group). You are asked to contribute ideas to the agenda ahead of time via an online site. You are asked to invite others to the meeting through the Facebook share application, and you proudly display the meeting as a Facebook Event on your profile.  If you can’t go, you can follow the meeting either via live web video, updates on the group site, a #hashtag on Twitter, or real time Facebook group updates. You are able to text your questions to the the vice-chair during the meeting with an assurance that they will be addressed. The meetings are more efficient with the use of pre-sent questions and agenda submissions. The PTO has created easy, potentially viral methods to further engage and recruit people and their ideas. You are engaged and ready to act. The PTO is Social, not Local.

Next time you are about to go to your neighborhood meeting, send a Tweet on Twitter asking if anyone wants anything from the local mini mart. I’ll take some mint choco chip ice cream, please.

It’s all Social now.

image by FelipeArte

I recently wrote about methods for measuring “Blog Conversations” on your blog.  Blog conversations are the dialogue between an author and his/her readers, or between readers themselves on a blog. For any organization, direct conversations with stakeholders reading a blog have important benefits across all sectors: programming, efficiency, fundraising, program delivery, volunteer activity, organizing, and management.

For the non-profit organizational blog, engaging stakeholders is the goal.  Your organization is not just its name, but a real company with real people who engage in the blogosphere, and want to be involved in every part of the organization. Give them that opportunity.

Here are some of the types of blog posts that could increase the level of blog conversation on your non-profit blog. These are just a the starting point; I’d love to hear about other ideas that could increase the level of “blog conversation!”

• Use the blogging platform to crowdsource new ideas. Float ideas and listen to how they are received. Use the reader feedback to tweak your ideas for new programming, organizational change, program delivery, organizing campaigns, and almost any other organizational decision where involving stakeholders means that your decisions will be better received.
• Involving donors in the blog conversation brings in the money.  Why not ask your donors why they donate and what would make them want to donate more in a blog post? You will certainly bring them into conversation on the blog, and guess what…people they know might read it as well.
• Ask small and big donors to guest post about why they donate. Ask them to ask their friends to read it.
• Review activities and ask for feedback. Did your organization just hold an annual meeting? Did participants just complete a big training program? Did you hold a clean-up day in the neighborhood? Have you just completed a large fundraising campaign? How was that last speaker series received? Any type of initiative that your organization has completed should elicit feedback. Send the blog link to the participants and ask for their feedback. One upside is stakeholder involvement: their opinions are valued by your organization and they are more likely to continue their involvement. The second upside is that you can respond to the concerns of your stakeholders. The last is obvious: feedback improves activities!
• Use the blog as a call to action. Once you’ve got an active and involved readership, you can ask them to act. Ask for a needed donation and blog about whether or not the post readers moved to donate.  For this strategy to work, though, your organization needs both people who read the blog and people who actively comment on the blog.  Many organizations post calls to action. But are the readers involved enough to move from their chair, pick up the phone, and call? Or look at another website? Creating posts that involve readers will lead to an increasingly involved membership overall…who will act when called upon. Blog conversations bring in new volunteers. They demonstrate that your organization is active, committed, and open. Volunteers want to participate, be recognized and become involved in an organization that includes their voices.

Non-profits need to change the relatively static, or “passive” non-profit blog into an active, participatory medium. I have seen too many blogs where the organization just posts its activities and nothing else. If that is the case, why not save time and effort and just send out an e-mail update?

What do we want out of Twitter? Can the Mr. Tweet help non-profits Twitter better?

I recently signed up for Mr. Tweet, a personal assistant of the robot sorts, who facilitates my search for Twitter connections. A day after signing up, I received a personal email: “Hi there! Mr Tweet, your personal Twitter assistant is ready for work” with a hyperlink for me to follow. After clicking the link, I viewed this screen:

My Twitteristics

Mr. Tweet analyzed my Twitter profiles according to a few key measurements:

• number of links tweeted
• number of conversation tweets
• if I usually reply to non-followers, and
• if I usually follow someone back

In addition, Mr. Tweet also recommends people that I should follow based upon who I am already following.  Recommendations include the “Twitteristics” of each person, and a list of who I also follow that follows the recommended person.

It made me think a bit about what the non-profits I work with want out of Twitter. It’s engagement.

For a non-profit organization, there are a few key reasons to use Twitter:

• to connect with key donors, foundations and their influencers
• to deepen stakeholder commitment
• to publicize your organization and bring in new stakeholders
• to listen for key words and respond
• to meet and connect with potential collaborators
• to converse with colleagues in the same field, and cross-pollinate ideas through Twitter

The National Wildlife Federation’s Danielle Brigida recently elaborated on its Twitter strategy and successes here. It is a fascinating, well-thought out interview with Social Ch@nge. The NWF uses Twitter to listen to conversations, repair reputation issues, publicize articles and events, nudge people towards their social media hubpage, and increased online activism. That’s quite impressive, and shows the potential of Twitter for non-profits.

How can Mr. Tweet help your non-profit? Mr. Tweet can help non-profits find people to follow who might become collaborators, who are colleagues, or possibly donors/investors. Mr. Tweet can help you find key influencers as well. What Mr. Tweet does best is recommend people based upon who you follow — its algorithms are set to analyze the types of people on Twitter that you already follow.  If you mostly follow social media thought leaders, then Mr. Tweet will recommend more of the same. Likewise, if you mostly follow people in your industry. If you want to publicize your organization and bring in new stakeholders, Mr. Tweet’s suggested “influencers relevant to you” could re-tweet, make introductions for you or provide relevant connections.

However, If you are looking for non-profits Twitterers, in general, then you might want to check out Chris Brogan’s creation, Twitter Packs to find others with your specific industry interests or in your specific location. The non-profit Twitter Pack list is here. Or, quite simply, look at the people you consider important colleagues/stakeholders/collaborators and with whom they converse regularly.

Mr. Tweet is a fine robot assistant, but not perfect. If you use it after you’ve been on Twitter a while, then the application will have more information to draw upon. However, it can’t do it all. It can’t find those quality influencers and connectors that everyone you know mentions, but Mr. Tweet may not know. It can’t recommend people outside of your areas of interest, and it doesn’t make introductions.

What would I love Mr. Tweet to do? Add a section showing the websites people in my network most often recommend or link. Show me conversation circles: what are conversational clusters and who usually participates?  Lastly, who (not in my network) most often tweets about others in my network? This information would be valuable to me for finding new connections, new websites and information about my industry, and enhancing my ability to participate in relevant industry conversation.

You have to do all that work yourself. What Mr. Tweet is, is  your general research assistant. And that’s a good beginning. I look forward to hearing if non-profits are finding Mr. Tweet useful, and other suggestions for finding non-profit Twitterers.

And…I look forward to making connections!

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photo courtesy of Richard Moross

About two weeks ago, I had the privilege and pure luck of attending a “Breakfast with Jeff Pulver” in Jerusalem. What is it? It’s a networking event (note: no actual breakfast, just coffee) similar in feel to speed dating. Every attendee gets a “toolkit” with a name badge, tiny rectangular stickers for tagging (you can fit about one or two words on them), a pen, and some postage stamp sized post-it notes. On your name badge, you are supposed to write a tagline, and this is your introduction to people when you meet them. After no more than 5 minutes of conversation, you are to “tag” their body with the tiny stickers, and move on. If you’re naturally reserved, the name taglines break the ice. Additionally, once you’ve been “tagged,” those tags offer more discussion topics.

I was struck by how seamlessly we incorporated social media tools (tagging, blog bylines, favorites) into our real life meeting. I was also struck by the utility of these tools in “real time,” if also the total geekiness I felt using them! But let me say, I loved it. I met the people behind intriguing websites (The Big Felafel, Israel Innovation, Green Any Site) and others that offer interesting collaborative possibilities.

I left there wondering what other social networking tools or habits we can use that can bring us together in real time and pondering the implications for the non-profit sector.

What about gathering donors/foundations/funders and non-profits together in a room with some small blank “tags,” asking them to network with real-time tagging? After a while, people could form tag clusters which might open up interesting collaborative possibilities and funders could easily identify target markets.

What if we found people whose blogs or sites we want to link to and put “real time links” on them? Wouldn’t that open up interesting possibilities for NGOs and others? The local organic farming association might link to an environmental cause, a website developer, a PPC guru and the export representative from the local government.

What if we mapped out a social network influence chart at the meetup? Everyone would group or “link” to others that already link to in our on or offline networks. Looking at the influencers and links might offer more social media networking possibilities after the meetup. Would we find out more about our donors, members or collaborators that could help non-profits to do their work more effectively?

By the way, can you guess my tagline? “Good questions lead to profitable answers.” What’s yours?

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Two-way communication, photo by Jacob Botter

In my last post, I spoke about assessing your current communications strategy before you begin your social media strategy. I’d like to expand on that by sharing with you my own questionnaire that I use at the initial client meeting. I use this questionnaire to consider how the organization currently engages, listens and respects its stakeholders. I also look at the overall communications strategy that the organization uses (or lack thereof). My initial questionnaire is as follows:

1. Who are your stakeholders? Please describe each stakeholder group including their relationship to the organization, total numbers, demographics and activities with your organization.

2. What is your current communication strategy with each group? How do you communicate with them (by email, newsletters, reports, general meetings, proprietary closed online network discussion, surveys, etc)? How often?

3. What are the methods/tools that your stakeholders can use to easily communicate with you?

4. How do you integrate feedback from your stakeholder groups?

What I am looking for are the answers to these specific considerations:

• does the organization communicate regularly with its stakeholders groups (all of them!)?
• does the organization make it easy for the stakeholders to communicate with it?
• does the organization invite critique and ideas?
• does the organization integrate stakeholder feedback?
• does the organization have a communication strategy for each stakeholder group?

I then divide each organization into the following categories:

• Limited Communicators: those who do not engage in routine stakeholder communications and do not have an existing communication strategy.

• Hyper-focused Communicators: those who communicate regularly with just one or two stakeholder groups, but not all of them. This is usually the case of an organization that prioritizes communicating with funders or a membership base, but ignores regular communication with other stakeholder groups.

• Passive Communicators: those who create rote, one-way, regular, informative communications. Examples of these would include an annual report, announcements in the newspaper of the general meeting, email alerts in times of need, or publicity events.

• Tactical Communicators: these organizations have implementing many dynamic communication tools (blogs, yahoo member groups, facebook groups, etc) but have not elaborated their goals for the communication strategy.

Often, organizations are a combination of two types.  Categorizing organizations helps me to understand how they currently view their stakeholders and currently communicate, and whether or not they have a communication strategy.

Once I’ve assessed an organization, I work with them to elaborate specific strategic goals they they want to achieve with each stakeholder group. Once these realistic goals are set, then we create a cohesive communication strategy that integrates improving current communications and defining what (if any) social media strategies would meaningfully move the organization towards achieving its benchmarking goals for each stakeholder group.

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