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...
There’s a sixth upgrade I want to add to the recent blog post Five Recent Upgrades That Nonprofits Need to Know About – you can now request to change the name of your nonprofit’s Facebook Page by visiting: Edit Page > Update Info > Basic Information > Name > Request Change: Until recently, you could only change your Page name if...
Like nonprofits, I am generally thrifty. Spending $30 on one “Promoted Post” on the Nonprofit Organizations Facebook Page felt like a significant expense. Was it worth it? Would I do it again? Sorry Facebook. The answer is no. Not for $30 anyway. The Return on Investment (ROI) was not significant enough to make me a convert. For $3? Absolutely!...
If there is one thing that nonprofit social media managers are learning (or should be learning) from utilizing new media it’s that technology is now constantly in flux. As soon as you learn and become comfortable with a tool set, it’s replaced with a new one. The best social media managers will adapt quickly, embrace a state of constant...
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...
Soaring tablet use and an online commons increasingly battling information overload has fundamentally changed web design as we know it. Bigger pictures, less text, larger fonts, and easy-to-tap and click buttons and navigation are the new Web design aesthetic. That said, consistency in Web design is becoming more complicated with each passing day. Do you attempt to create one...
Every morning I begin my day with browsing those that have followed @NonprofitOrgs from the previous morning before. I then follow in return those that are nonprofits, nonprofit staff, or nonprofit service providers and today I followed my 100,000th nonprofit: Furry Feet Rescue in Walnut Port, PA (@FurryFeetRescue). To commemorate reaching 100,000 (which took three years, 10 months, and 100,000...