Nonprofits Look to Shake Up Their Social Media Game

Tweetsgiving, The Girl Effect and (Lil) Green Patch. Mention these campaigns at a cocktail party of social media experts in the nonprofit world and you’ll get a knowing smile and instant conversation about what made them a success.

There are many notable examples of nonprofits using social media effectively to fundraise, engage communities and build momentum for a cause.

The Nature Conservancy teamed up with an application provider to launch (Lil) Green Patch on Facebook in 2008 and managed to grow one of the most popular—and charitable—apps on the site. The initiative engaged 6.3 million people and saved over 70 million square feet of rainforest in Costa Rica.

Tweetsgiving, an initiative of nonprofit, sparked widespread support by tapping a near universal mood of giving around Thanksgiving Day in 2008 and managed to raise $10,000 in just 48 hours to help build a school in Arusha, Tanzania. (http://tweetsgiving.epicchange.org/story/)

And, The Girl Effect, a viral video developed by the Nike Foundation and the NoVo Foundation in partnership with the United Nations Foundation and the Coalition for Adolescent Girls, emotionally engaged women and men around the world in thinking about what’s possible with its simplicity of message—that all it takes is one girl to change the world.

Although many large and small non-profits are effectively using social media with success, many non-profits are struggling to fully harness its benefits. Resources, lack of consistent content, time limitations and technology trepidation are just some of the reasons many nonprofits haven’t fully found the ability to drink from the “fire hose” of social media.

“We’ve been doing social media for about a year and at first we were flying by the seat of our pants,” said Danny Preston, development director for pci media impact, an organization that brings grassroots health, empowerment and environmental education to communities in the developing world through the medium of radio soap operas.

“We rushed into it because everyone was doing it and we felt we needed a presence online but we weren’t able to build a following at first because we lacked consistent content and didn’t really understand what engaged our following. You really have to understand how to have the right voice and to focus. We’re finally beginning to gain some traction,” Preston adds.”

A larger nonprofit, Healthy Babies, Healthy Mothers, a broad coalition of public/private sector organizations, has focused on lowering our nation’s astonishing infant mortality rates through social media, and has developed an innovative text messaging program called Text4baby. The effort helps mothers through “a nurse in a purse” get good advice throughout their pregnancy and into the first year after giving birth. But, Judy Meehan, executive director, thinks the organization is just tipping its toe into the vast opportunity of social media.

“We are looking to build a more comprehensive strategy that takes our organization to the next level and allows us to maximize our public/private sector platform,” Meehan said.

The Nature Conservancy has an established social media team and a network of on-the-ground supporters who maintain a robust and content-rich communication with their followers. Still, the organization would like to be doing more.

“We have a really great base and it is night and day from where we were at our beginnings. Still, we’d like to be doing more, said Amy Ganderson, online marketing manager at The Nature Conservancy.

Most nonprofits are doing the basics and experimenting but few would say they’ve mastered social media and harnessed its full potential. Even the Word of Mouth Marketing Association admits many of its members are still learning the basics.

“This is such a new and evolving area that there are many experiments happening. Some have hit the mark. Others haven’t, but there have been valuable learnings for our industry in how to do social media well as a result. That’s why it is so important for us to share successful case studies, said Tarah Remington, WOMMA’s membership director.

To tackle this issue, WOMMA just launched MatchUp4good this month, a campaign to help diverse nonprofits by providing pro bono social media counsel from WOMMA members. Through the campaign, WOMMA’s 300-plus members will be able to “pledge” hours of free counsel to nonprofits by registering on the WOMMA Web site. Members who pledge support will be featured on the WOMMA/MatchUp4good landing page and on the Web site of Rx4good, the organization doing the matching. Those who participate will be invited to provide a case study of their initiative at an upcoming WOMMA meeting in the fall.

“WOMMA members can give as few or as many hours of their time as they can commit,” Remington said. “What’s important is that we begin to connect those non-profits that need and want social media support with the tremendous experts who are doing such innovative things in social media.”

A number of diverse nonprofits representing health, the environment, education and nutrition have already registered for MatchUp4good. They include: AIDS Action, COPD Foundation, Keep America Beautiful, LUNGevity Foundation, Meals on Wheels, PCI Media Impact, Pro Bono Counseling Project, Reach Out and Read, StopAfib, Text4Baby, Virtual Training Systems and the Zephyr Foundation.

Idil Cakim, former WOMMA board member and senior vice president at Golin Harris, has registered for the campaign.

“This is a time when many organizations need our collective support and generosity. I’m thrilled to be involved and hope many of my friends and colleagues in WOMMA will also choose to participate,” Cakim said.

MatchUp4good launched at School of WOM, May 24-26, at the Swissotel, Chicago, with a special panel devoted to “purpose-driven” giving. Anyone interested can go register.

“We hope that a large percentage of WOMMA members and conference participants sign up at this event so we can move from matchmaking to measurable outcomes as soon as possible,” Remington said.

Measurable outcomes in the non-profit world can mean significant, positive and personal impact on people in far-flung places around the world. With the mere gesture of a click to “send,” we can key in to social change from our own private corner of the world and tackle some of our biggest social issues—poverty, education, disease and hunger.

As one MatchUp4good participant, Meals on Wheels put it, “We need help getting more Facebook fans, though we’ve grown tremendously in the past six months. We want thousands more to keep up to date on our work to end senior hunger.”

Ending senior hunger, engaging girls in changing the world, building schools in Tanzania—not bad goals at all.

Ann Moravick is president of Rx4good. She can be reached at [email protected].