Social Media Archive

How Many Hours Per Week Should Your Nonprofit Invest in Social Media?

July 11, 2012
To follow up on Monday’s post about why nonprofits should consider hiring a social media manger, below is an excerpt from Social Media for Social Good: A How-To Guide for Nonprofits that helps further explore the time commitment necessary to create and sustain a comprehensive social media stategy for your nonprofit. The estimates below allow for the time required to...

Five Reasons Why Your Nonprofit Should Hire a Social Media Manager

July 9, 2012
My last full-time, Monday-through-Friday job was as an outreach director for a small international development organization in San Francisco. Working within the confines of an almost non-existent online communications budget, my primary responsibilities were to maintain our website and publish a twice-monthly e-newsletter, quarterly print newsletter, and numerous print fundraising appeals through out the year. It was also my...

How Are Nonprofits Feeling About Social Media? Inspired? Bored? Overwhelmed?

July 3, 2012
Blogger, LinkedIn and Myspace all launched in 2003. We’re almost a decade into using social media and yet one of the most striking realities when I give in-person social media trainings is the wide variety of experience of the nonprofits in the room. Some nonprofits are just getting started and perceive social media as cutting edge online communications and...

11 Types of Photos Nonprofits Should Post on Social Media

June 25, 2012
My Return on Investment (ROI) from using Pinterest to promote Nonprofit Organizations is somewhere between minimal and better-than-expected, but using the site on a regular basis has fundamentally changed how I think about social media and the people who use it. In the same way that Twitter forced me to rethink online messaging in 2008 and onward, Pinterest has...

New Service! Social Media and Online Communications Audits for Nonprofits

June 3, 2012
Heather Mansfield, owner of DIOSA Communications, principal blogger at Nonprofit Tech 2.0, and author of Social Media for Social Good: A How-To Guide for Nonprofits now offers social media and online communications audits for nonprofits. The audits can be presented via a three-hour webinar or in person. With an objective eye and knowledge gained from utilizing online technology for nonprofits for more than...

11 Excellent Examples of Nonprofit Avatars

May 14, 2012
Every second of every day nonprofits around the world are posting status updates, tweets, and messages on social networks attached to avatars with cropped art work and/or unreadable text. Would you ever send out a print or e-mail newsletter, or sign off on a business card with a cropped or visually-defective logo and text so small that it was...

Is Your Nonprofit Guilty of #Hashtag Spamming?

April 9, 2012
A recent study concluded that only about one-third of tweets are worth reading and with Twitter now generating 340 million tweets per day, that’s approximately 266 millions tweets that would have been better left untweeted. Finding your Twitter voice is a skill and it takes a concerted effort to first track what tweets your followers react to (or not) and...

11 LinkedIn Profile Tips for Nonprofit Professionals

April 5, 2012
The following is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of the recently released book Social Media for Social Good: A How-To Guide for Nonprofits. These basic LinkedIn Profile tips for nonprofit professionals serve as a foundation for when and if your nonprofit is ready to utilize LinkedIn Groups and Company Pages. That said, I do not cover personal LinkedIn Profiles in my upcoming webinar How...

10 Pinterest Best Practices for Nonprofits

April 2, 2012
UPDATED July 19 :: With more than 19 million monthly unique visitors, Pinterest is now the fourth most trafficked social networking site in the United States – behind Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Even if your nonprofit is not quite ready to take the leap into pinning, at the very least you should sign up to reserve your first choice of...

HOW TO: Post Milestones to Your Nonprofit’s Facebook Page

March 26, 2012
On March 30 the new Facebook Timeline design will roll out to all Facebook Pages and one new function is the ability to post Milestones to your Timeline. I’ll be giving a comprehensive click-by-click tour of the new Facebook Timeline design and tool set in my upcoming webinars on Facebook and Facebook Apps for nonprofits, but a how-to get...

Eight “Thank You” Videos Created by Nonprofits

March 19, 2012
With each passing day your supporters, donors, activists and sponsors are becoming overwhelmed by the barrage of tweets, status updates, text messages, and emails being thrown at them on a daily basis. As a result, text-based “Thank You” messages are often unread and overlooked. That said, a video can often communicate your appreciation better than the written word and...