Large nonprofits usually have the expertise and resources necessary to launch and maintain successful online communications and fundraising campaigns. They’ve been able to hire some of the most well-trained and experienced staff, consultants, and designers that work in the nonprofit sector. Small to medium-sized nonprofits with small to medium-sized marketing and communications budgets may not have the resources that...
Watch Video Via BBC News Magazine: The internet was once considered a great equaliser, a platform that could bring strangers together, even across racial boundaries. But internet users of the same race have recently begun clustering on certain social media websites. Micro-blogging website Twitter has seen an upsurge in traffic from Hispanic and African-American audiences. These groups now claim...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Last month I donated online to 25 of my 32 Favorite Nonprofits in celebration of reaching the benchmark of following 100,000 nonprofits, nonprofit staff, and nonprofit service providers on Twitter. Usually I donate to one or two nonprofits at a time, but to go through a list of 25 nonprofits in less than two hours made it abundantly clear that...
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...
Until recently, I have gone to exceptional lengths to avoid getting video recorded. I have always felt very uncomfortable in front of a camera and even more so watching myself recorded. I’m usually the person behind the lens. Know what I mean? In fact, one of the reasons that I have pursued a career in nonprofit technology, ironically, is...
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...
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...
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...