Facebook now also recommends pages in the news feed, but only if your nonprofit has opted-in to have your page recommended. Until today page recommendations only occurred when individuals liked a page, but now recommendations are also given when individuals like a status update in the news feed. Facebook has not officially announced the new functionality, so it may...
Thanks to Microsoft Citizenship Asia Pacific, I’ve had the great honor to present a series of online fundraising and social media trainings to over three hundred non-governmental organizations (NGOs) throughout Asia Pacific over the last three years. The experience has made me acutely aware that access to information about trends in nonprofit technology, online fundraising, and social media often...
With the launch of new a LinkedIn Groups design, the company resolved one of its most pressing problems – LinkedIn Group spam. Group management had become cumbersome and time-consuming for many admins of medium and large groups. Flagging irrelevant discussions as promotion posts or deleting them altogether can take up to thirty minutes a day and if you didn’t invest the...
Nonprofits were the early adopters of social networks. The were active on Myspace, YouTube, and creating Facebook Groups long before most of the companies that are often praised for being the pioneers of social media. One of the reasons was that social networks were free to join and lacked monthly fees. Enterprising nonprofit staff (usually GenXers) with a love...
The number of low-cost or free online resources and tools available to nonprofits today is astounding. Many nonprofit professionals are overwhelmed by the all choices and as mobile media continues to grow, prepare to be mind-boggled by all the new technology options that will be available to your nonprofit in coming years. That said, to be alerted of new...
With more than 225 million registered users worldwide, LinkedIn pages have the potential to be very powerful for nonprofits. The vast majority of nonprofit staff, board members, volunteers, and funders use the site on a regular basis to network and make connections. Thus far most nonprofits have concentrated on using LinkedIn groups to build their brand inside the LinkedIn...
Some nonprofits have thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of LinkedIn Company Page followers, and yet have not customized their page or posted a single update. LinkedIn Pages launched in 2010 and since then the company has slowly rolled out upgrades and new features. So slow in fact that LinkedIn Pages have fallen under the radar of...
Launched in 2007, YouTube’s Nonprofit Program has gone through multiple changes over the last six years. Initially the program was only offered to qualified U.S. nonprofits and the benefits were limited to premium branding functionality and the ability to add a Google Checkout donate button to nonprofit YouTube channels. Today, however, the program has been expanded to Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Ireland,...
A well-promoted mobile alert campaign is hard to find in the nonprofit sector. If a nonprofit is going to invest in mobile alerts, then mobile opt-ins and short code and keyword pitches should be integrated into multiple communication channels such as print, web, email, and social and mobile media. Yet strangely, it rarely happens. Mobile alerts and text-to-give campaigns...
Some of your best learning on social media occurs when you just start clicking around and see what happens. That’s how I discovered three of the four functions below and when I give in-person trainings on Facebook and demonstrate these functions (with the exception of hashtags since the functionality was just launched last week), there are usually quite a...
This blog post officially launches the research stage of writing my second book which will be published and shipped in Spring 2014. A follow-up to Social Media for Social Good: A How-To Guide for Nonprofits, this book will place much more emphasis on using social media and mobile technology for fundraising. That said, I am very curious how social...
There absolutely is a math to social and mobile media. If your nonprofit has a good content strategy in place and understands the power of integrating all your nonprofit’s communications channels (website, email, Facebook, texting, etc.), then as your numbers grow on social networks so will your e-newsletter and mobile lists which in turn significantly increases your fundraising success. It’s...
Over the last two months I have opened more than 200 pieces of nonprofit print materials and 95% of them are in the same format and structure of those that I was writing and publishing in the late 1990’s. Like press releases, print fundraising appeals and newsletters seem to be taking little account for the rise of social and...