| Empowering Nonprofit Organisations

Posted by: Steven Sam | June 16, 2012

Triadic Model for Positively Engaging Your Audience on Social Media

nonprofit24 model for engaging audience on social media

The triadic model of engagement captures the interaction between your organisation and its online community members. It attempts to highlights how your organisation can engage positively with its online audience on the social media platforms, what content to engage with and who produces these contents. The diagram above illustrates the triadic model of engaging on the social media platforms.

1. Engagement

Engaging on social media with your audience is a win-win scenario for both parties. It’s not just about what your organisation can benefit but it’s also about what’s in it for your audience. Engaging your organisation on social media takes two forms:

Passive—i.e. joining existing conversation to build your reputation, increase your organisation visibility, and make yourself known to the online community. You can do this by visiting and contributing helpful information, Re-tweet and comments in discussion forums, on Facebook pages and on blogs.
Proactive—i.e. starting a conversation about your organisation’s mission and vision, events and other related topics to your organisation’s goals (e.g. clean water, food, poverty reduction). You can set up a group on LinkedIn, Facebook and a blog. In addition to other engagement strategies, the key to doing this will not only build inroads with communities, but turn a little-know organisation into a thought leader locally and globally.

2. Content

As a nonprofit organisation hoping to engage your audience profitably, your initial goal should be providing valuable contents that provoke engaging conversation, earn visibility and reputation. This does not mean that you will not market or promote your events or fundraising campaigns, but you have to do it cleverly. As I mentioned in my earlier post, the rule of thumb for succeeding on social media platform is engaging your audience first and all other activities will follow. Once your audience are actively engaged in conversation or discussion about your organisation brand, activities, works, and goals they are likely to accept or involve in your marketing, fundraising campaign or any other activities.

Therefore, now that you know how to engage your audience i.e. either passive, active or both, the next question is how or what content should I tweet or post to my facebook page. I have come up with three engagement strategies based on what I called ‘mixed approach’ which consist of General Information, marketing/promotion, and company information. The mixed approach suggests that you content shouldn’t only based on push marketing or promotion, but rather also providing content based on your organisation information and general information related to your works/industry. I have provided examples of what content you should generate under each categories below. These examples are taken from the perspective of our organisation (WAF); you can expand them based on your organisation works or preferences.

Marketing/Promotion

Event sign-up—e.g. upcoming events
Advanced notice of coming events—e.g. News and invitation letters
Member Reminders
Fundraising campaign
Contests—e.g. fundraising, promotional or awareness contests
Award finalist’s promotion like in case of our organisation (WAF).
Live events promotion—Posting and commenting on videos and photos on during the events, hashtag conversation on twitter and live blogging.
Written and video testimonials of participants, key-note speakers and award winner

Organisation Information

Post event pictures and videos on your social media sites from past events.
Blog about past events and post up relevant pictures and videos within the blog post.
Your organisation’s news—e.g. news about staff, new hired, occasions, and celebrations by both staff and/or organisation.
Membership, sponsorship, and other stakeholder support news.
Press Mention—e.g. if someone else has written about your organisation or your organisation is mention in another press, let your community members know about it.
Award and Recognition of you organisation by other organisations, governments, or communities.

General Information

Industry news related to your organisation activities/mission/goal/works from other sources—e.g. like in the case of our organisation (WAF) food, water, starvation, hunger, water and food innovative initiatives.
Re-tweet and comments in discussion forums, on Facebook pages and on blogs.
Post questions to community members to trigger or get the conversation going.
Request for help and suggestions
Personal information about the authors behind your organisation’s networking sites to build confidence, increase transparency, and reputation on online and among community members.

3. Content Management

When it comes to producing and managing content on social media, most often asked question is who will produce the contents and owns the conversation? Is it the social media management team, IT department, marketing, PR or employees?

As I also mentioned in my earlier post, Social media is about Conversation, Sharing, and Engagement, therefore everyone can have role as a team in order to:

Spread resource load especially in dealing with frequent absences of staff members.
Avoid one-person attachment syndrome—i.e. community members developing relationship with just one person and not your organisation. What happens if that person leaves your organisation?
Avoid limiting the potential of your organisation success on social media by relying on one department or individual in planning, producing contents, and implementing WAF social media strategy.

Therefore, in my opinion, although it’s the responsibility of the social media management team (particularly for large organisation) to produce contents and manage your social media sites, the following group of teams can also play an important role for the success of your social media campaign. As long as all departments or individuals producing contents and engaging with your community members either during or after work abide by the rules of engagement specify on your social media policy.

Social media management team
Marketing
Public Relation
Search Optimization
Client/Customer Service
IT Department
Organisation Team—the Individuals

In conclusion, although your engagement strategy is not limited to this, integrating this triadic engagement and content strategy into your main social media strategy and implementing it will surely helps your organisation stand out in the midst of the noise in the social media platforms and garner positive reward on your investments based on your social media objectives or goals. In my next post, I will exploit valuable steps needed to raise funds using online platform.

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Posted in Social Media

Posted by: Steven Sam | June 5, 2012

14 Steps on how NGOs can benefit from Social Media

Some of the key steps on how your organisation can benefit from Social Media are listed below:

1. Understand the concept of Social Media

Social media is an online channel that involves engagement, conversation, sharing, and creating relationship with beneficiaries, donors and other key stakeholders. Therefore, engaging your organisation on social media is not about ‘you have to be there’, rather ‘what can you do there’ and how can you use it effectively and efficiently to the advantage of your organisation and your audience. As a result, your social media effort should not be considered either as an add-on or a stand-alone social marketing and promotional channel for your organisation, but rather as part of your multi-channel social marketing and communication approaches operating consistently in alignment with your organisation’s main communication and social marketing strategy.
2. Understand social media tools

As social media is increasingly becoming popular and appealing to different types of users, equally, different type of social media sites that allow users to generate their own content have also emerged. Understanding these channels enables you to find what works, what spread your message the most effectively and also engaging with the right audience at the right place. To give you quick and better understanding, I have grouped these channels into eight main categories:

Social Networking Sites: On social networking websites, community members socialize, create profiles to represent themselves, share photos and videos, comments on each other’s walls, add fans, tags photos, invite friends and form groups etc. Examples of mainstream social networking sites include Facebook, Myspace and Linkedin, Freindster.
Social News Sites: On this site, community members are allowed to submit blog, news stories, articles, post videos, and photos. The submitted item with the highest votes by community members appears on the front page of the site. Social media sites are great for driving traffic to your website especially if your submitted piece appears on the front page. Digg and Reddit are the most popular example of social news sites although there are other niche social news sites such as Kirsty, NewsVine and PopUrls etc.
Social Sharing Sites are great places for creating online buzz around your organisation’s activities, events, and campaigns. Community members on these sites share videos and photos, and tag photos. YouTube and Flickr are the most popular social sharing sites.
Social Events Sites: Sites like Meetup, Eventful and Yahoo!’s Upcoming provide handy tools to let the world know about your event either physical or virtual event. Some of these sites especially Upcoming allows you to integrate photos and videos from flickr and yahoo and share with other community member.
Blogs — Allows creators to generate and publish contents about their thoughts, ideas, photos, interests, opinions. It is a great tool for NGOs to reach out and share their works, thought and opinion to interested audience. WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad are examples of free blogging sites.
Microblogging — this differs from traditional blogging because the content consists of a short message (usually 140 characters) often sent direct from your laptops or mobile phones. Twitter and Plurk are examples of microblogging sites.
Forums and Message Board — Forum and message board are the forefathers of social media where community members engage and hold conversation around a specific topic and brand in the form of posted messages. Members ask and reply to questions, post discussions, read and response to post by other members.
Wikis—allow visitors to easily create content and share their knowledge, expertise on any topic. It’s a great way to drive traffic to your website by creating a wiki around your organisation’s product, activity or service, but its involve a lot of work to verify information, keep members active and control spam. Wikipedia is an example of wiki.

3. Define your Target Group

A good marketing manager is someone who can clearly identify their customers by age, name, and even tell you what they do, where they live, their income level and their likes and dislikes. Therefore, equally like offline marketing, understanding who your target audience is , what they do in the social media space and where they hang out do not only helps you choose the right social media tools but also saves your organisation resources, time, and money when implementing social media strategies. It also helps you get positive ROI (Return on Investment) because you will be engaging in conversation with the right audience in the right social media space.

Forrester’s six distinct groups of social media users (Creators, Critics, Collectors, Joiners, Spectators, and Inactives) and groundswell’s profile tool are a good starting point to identifying where your target group is in the social media space. Secondly, carry out research to enables you know where your audience is and what they are doing.

4. Research

Please research, research and research! Bypassing this step of your social media planning is a serious mistake any organisation will make. Unlike physical community, members in the virtual community are dynamic—they either move from one site to another or belong to different communities. That is why continuous researching is very important. In addition, as I mentioned above, research helps you identify who your target audience is and where they hold conversations. Research also enables you to continuously modify your strategy based on your target audience actions on different social media platforms and further guide you to know what your competitors are doing and discover new techniques and tools that will make your campaign more profitable.

5. Analyse Your Competition

Online competitive landscape is different from the offline, you might say that we are the only NGO providing clean water in a particular community, but it is not true in the online space. Take some time to search and see who are your potential competitors, what are they doing in the social media space, how are they engaging their audience, what are their strengths and weaknesses, what are they lacking and what can you do better to engage your audience and benefit from your effort? A good place to start is by using keywords or phrases that you think your target audience might use to find you online using search engines. You can also use social media channels (e.g. twitter, facebook, youtube etc) to search for your competitors.

6. Set Goals

Most social media channels owned by organisations are overly promotional rather than conversational; this is because they don’t have clear goal or vision why they are in the social media space. It’s a mistake to make social media as a goal in itself, remember it is not the question of we need to be there but rather what can we do there and how can our organisation benefit? Setting clear and concise measurable goals helps you evaluate the success or failure of your social media effort; goals also serve as guides to check the success of your strategy, and save time and resources for your organisation. In addition, your social media goals assist your organisation’s goals and objectives, therefore, your social media goals have to be clear and concise and in consistent with your organisation’s goals and values.

Unlike offline channels, goal setting for social media campaign is complex because different social media channels appeal to different users, therefore, you cannot treat all social media channels the same; your goals and messages have to be different for each channel. A good starting point for setting your goals is to first research to find what works for your organisation, what spreads your message faster, identify who your target audience is and what social media channel are they hanging out and then set goals based on those channels.

7. Get Your Strategy in Place

Once you have a clear understanding of the concept of social media, you have visited and review some of the social media tools, and you have a well-defined target group and concise goals or objectives, you are ready to set your social media strategy.

An organisation without a social media strategy is a like a fisherman without a compass navigating on the high sea. A well formulated Strategy should operate consistently with your main marketing and communication channels. It serves as an overall guide to determine why your organisation is in the social media space, how you can engage your audience, what relevant and engaging content you should provide for your audience, what channel you should use, what you want your audience to do once they join the conversation, and how you should evaluate your success or failure. A good point of departure is to determine how your social media strategy should support your main communication and marketing strategies and also taking into consideration your social media goals, target audience, potential online competitors, resources and choice of channels.

8. Get your Social media policy in place

Social media policy is equally important like your strategy, because the success of your strategy highly depends on your social media policy. I recommend you work in collaboration with your legal department or organisation’s lawyer to set rules and regulations of providing contents and engaging with your audience on the social media platforms. Make sure that every departments or individuals producing contents and engaging with your community members either during or after working time must abide by the rules of engagement specify in your social media policy.

9. Get your Website in order

Once you have your social media strategy in place, the next step is to make your online office (website) ready to accept your visitors. Your website is the main power house for the success of your social media effort. Largely because most of your social media activities have to be linked to either your home page, landing page or specific pages on your sites based on the intended action you want your audience to do once they come to your website. Therefore, avoid flashy website design and complex functionalities; keep your website design simple, easy to navigate and rich in valuable content to your users. Customise your landing pages, use Images and other multimedia tools, but avoid flash video. Although flash video is a great way to communicate your message, it’s unfriendly to search engine and often limits your search visibility. In addition, one of the most parts of designing your landing page is ‘call to action’, this will prompt your visitors to take action once they are on your sites. Therefore, always make sure that you include call to action for example join us, donate, join the campaign, become part of the solution her and so on.

10. Select Your Social Media Tools

There is a common perception that social media is free, easy and quick. It may be true for creating of your social media sites and posting of content, but real success of your social media campaign may not come over night, it’s quite demanding. It needs time, resources, and valuable contents to keep it running and actively engaging your followers. That’s why spreading your organisation across all social media platforms is not a good idea, it’s advisable to examine your available resources, time, and the ability to produce an engaging content on ongoing basis before selecting your social media tool. Do not go for sites that you cannot maintain even if your target audience is actively engaging on them. I recommend you start with sites that your resources can maintain. After increasing a compelling online presence then you can add more sites if you have the resources.

11. Maintain Brand Consistency

Avoid a strict separation between your brand (organisation) website and social media sites. Consistency of your brand identity (e.g. logo, avatars, colour, and brand related theme) across your social media platforms and main brand website builds confidence and trust and make your visitors feel at home once they are on either your brand website or social media sites. In addition, make sure that all marketing or branding messages communicated online and offline are consistent, so that you will not fall victim of reaching your target audience with different messages from the same organisation.

12. Maintain Honesty and Transparency

As I mentioned above social media is about sharing, and engaging in conversation, as a result community members are interested to connect and engage with real and honesty people in your organisation whom they can share their ideas, feelings, emotions and everything about your organisation or services. Therefore, in order to earn respect and gain more credibility with your followers, it’s recommended that: 1) you inform your audience right from the beginning who you are and why are you joining the community, 2) complete your profile by filling all necessary information about your organisation and personal information about the person handling the account, 3) maintain brand consistency, 4) engage with your audience in way that positively reflect your organisation, and 5) do not trick your audience with positive fake review, tweet, or blogging about your organisation activities.

13. Engage in Conversation not marketing

Most organisations think social media space is just a place for push marketing, events promotion, or fundraising campaign, rather than building conversation and engaging audience around information related to their organisation activities. If you have this thinking in your mind, my rule of thumb for you is that ‘engage first and all other activities such as marketing, event promotion and fundraising will come later’. For tips on how you can engage your audience profitably, watch out for my upcoming post title: Triadic Strategy for positively engaging your audience on social media.

14. Set monitoring Platforms

Unlike offline community, members on online community are dynamic and the discussion about your organisation or services happens with or without you. Therefore, in order to garner your organisation some type of return on your effort and also secure your brand on social media platforms is to listen to conversations. You start by monitoring keywords of your brand, services, work, activities, and events. If you do not have enough funds, you can start with the free version of monitoring tools such as Google alert and Twilert. In the long run you will consider using other industrial paid version (e.g. Radian6, Techrigy and HootSuite etc.) for better result.

The success of NGOs on social media platform is by no means limited to these steps. Please share with us if you have more important steps.

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Posted in Press Release

Posted by: Steven Sam | May 30, 2012

Aegis Group Provides Free Online Service for NGOs

Aegis Media employees are able to donate their marketing and media skills directly to grassroots NGOs. Photograph: Aegis Media

The advancement in information and communication technologies is not only revolutionizing and creating new opportunities for businesses but also providing free-cost digital tools to NGOs to operate and deliver efficient service to their beneficiaries. Thanks to Aegis Group for making it possible for NGOS to get access to free online digital tools. As part of their corporate social responsibility, a digital platform GlobalGivingTIME launched by Aegis Group 2010 has today become one of the major online volunteering community engaging some 12,000 of the company’s employees in social issues and good causes.

The online platform provides free support, advice, and expertise to Nonprofits who lack the administrative and technical skills in HR, IT, design and much more. It’s very easy to get started on GlobalGivingTime, all need to do is to create an account, send your problem request and a volunteer will get in contact with you straight away.

Source: The Guardian

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Posted in Online Media

Posted by: Steven Sam | May 26, 2012

Web 2.0 Facilitates China’s Grassroots NGOs

Anhui, Sichuan, Shanxi

It is no doubt that the advancement in information and communication technologies has open new door of opportunities to NGOs to recruit volunteers, raise fund and deliver efficient service to their beneficiaries. For the past years NGOs in China have used the internet as a conduit to motivate and encourage large groups of volunteers to participate in key social and economic development areas such as health, environment, education and services for the disabled etc. A typical example is the ‘One Kilogram Project’ (http://www.1kg.cn ) organised by a group of youth with extensive experience in Volunteering and travelling to “improve the quality of life and education for children in the improvised areas of China”

Despite an ongoing debate about whether web 2.0 for example the social media could be used as a silver bullet by NGOs to raise funds, with a carefully tailored strategy, China’s Grassroots NGOs have exploited this new media to raise funds, lower the cost of operation, promote recruitment, publicity and communication. For example, One Kilogram project with an unstable funding used its network of people on the Internet and its popularity in the virtual community to save money and recruit volunteers.

Although no formal external evaluation of the 1Kg project has been carried out, an unconfirmed source suggests that:

More than 200 volunteers from all over China have joined.
More than 20 travel events have been organised since the initiation of the project in 2004.
More than 10,000 school items including 3000 books (15 books per volunteer) have been donated to school.
In addition to donation, 1Kg projects has also organised awareness and motivational activities such “I have a dream,” “Write a booklist,” and “Have a lesson for the children” to assist impoverished students.

Based on its strategy and using different new media tools such as blog, flickr, mobile phones, children’s book—China’s largest book review website, One Kilogram project remarkable success highlights some of the potential benefits NGOs can derive from the use of new media as part of their multi-channel communication and social marketing approach.

Source: http://www.columbia.edu

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Posted in Social Media