SXSW- Contacts and Tools Worth Talking About

At SXSW I talked to more people than I could possibly list here but here’s some of the interesting people, organizations and products I found throughout the week.

Most interesting connections:

• Spoke with Dan Trieman of GameSalad, a games development platform that is free and easy for nonprofits. “Game creation for the rest of us” Very interesting for any nonprofit (or anyone really) looking to create games.  Haven’t had a chance to play with it yet but will in the next few months.

• I Tour U iPhone app seems promising for nonprofits, libraries, museums. You can create a spoken tour of a given space. While there’s obvious implications for museums and libraries helping to explain their collections a less obvious use would be to tell the story of homelessness through a tour. How far does a person have to go to get their laundry done? Where do they shower? How far is that from the other social services they use? Giving people an idea of the amount of time it takes to be homeless could be powerful. There are ways other organizations such as conservation groups could also use this app to tell their story.

• Photo Philanthropy- Connects photographers with NPO’s around the world to tell their stories and drive action for social change. A good resource for the NPO community as a picture can be worth a thousand words.

• Erik Bjornard from Animoto. A GREAT tool for getting into storytelling with pictures and words.  A simple tool to make a talking slide show.  Also looking to play with this more in the next few months.

Panels

• the AgChat forum which discussed how farmers are using tech (as a percentage more farmers use/have smart phones than the general populace).  Watching this made me think that I should get more involved with this community.  Food issues and farming is definitely still in my blood, even if I’m not working on a farm anymore and haven’t had enough time to do much urban farming lately.

• The Tell/Sell panel was great… see previous blog post!

• The best bit of information came from the panel put on by BAVC called Sexy Dirty Data. They have partnered with a Google developer to create the Impact Dashboard which I personally think will be THE tool for nonprofits and others to use to tell their stats story. The tool not only helps you track your stats from numerous social media sites (Facebook, Google Analytics, Twitter, etc) but it’s also open source, allowing you (and others) to build widgets to track other stats and allows you to track stats of in person/real world events by entering data that can’t be found elsewhere. To quote the site “it’s a super user-friendly cloud app with a Python backend that collects, hosts and visualizes your data in real-time, right on your website and your phone.” From what I can see it does exactly the job nonprofits are trying to do each time we write-up a stats report, showing the key features of what we’re doing in a visually appealing way that also speaks to funders, supporters and other nonprofits. It allows you to enter key tracking points to tell your story (did that jump in twitter have to do with a specific event? You can put that information into the tool).   I’m more excited about this tool than any other tool I’ve ever seen.  I hate stats, usually because they don’t tell stories without more work than necessary (so much work that often it can take away from the actual mission work) and this tool takes away my gripes.  I haven’t had a chance to play with it but I can’t wait and will definitely talk more about it as soon as I get my hands on it!  Sign up to get updates here.

Summary
To be overly blunt I personally think that SXSW Interactive is the best conference I’ve ever attended. Because of the focus on new technologies and the desire for businesses and others to get their work out at SXSW there’s a higher level of panelists and information than you’d find elsewhere. Many of the topics of discussion at SXSW become topics at other conferences several years later. If a nonprofit really wants to know what’s heading their way this is the conference to attend.

SXSW Rocks!

If you’re not sure what SXSW is you can find out more here.  While it’s about great music and films it’s also about Nonprofits and great panels unlike anything you’d find anywhere else.  OK, sure, you might find these panels elsewhere but where will you find 20+ panels and events happening in any given hour?  SXSW is the place to go fill your brain with good information.

Nonprofits aren’t the only people at SXSW Interactive of course.  This means there are a number of panels and events aimed at a larger or different audience.  The Tell/Sell Panel was one of them.  Meant for professional bloggers and journalists the panel focused on what makes a sellable blog or story.  It should be easy for anyone to see that this is a valuable question for nonprofits as well.  While we might not be looking to publish a book about our life story, we are looking to “sell” our story to our constituents, funders and others we hope to support our cause and looking outside of our nonprofit world at the bigger picture of what works and what doesn’t makes a lot of sense if we wish to expand our audience.

So here’s the 7 top take aways from this panel:

1. People like lists.  They especially like lists of 3 or 7 total items.  Why?  Who knows, it’s just what research has shown are the golden numbers.  I should note that while I intended to make this list exactly 7 items long it turns out it was without me trying… I guess it really is the magic number!
2. Make bulleted lists rather than huge chunks of text.  It’s easier to read and digest.
3. PICTURE (S)!  Include them.  No one likes to stare at just words.
4. Some topics require more space and more time.  Don’t worry too much about the length of your post if the topic needs more information to really make sense.  Obviously don’t be overly wordy if it’s not necessary.  Tell your story in the words it takes.
5. Don’t write anything if you’re worried about what someone will think.  Editing a controversial post to make it “acceptable” will destroy it’s content, feeling and meaning.  If you’re worried it might offend someone it’s probably a good post so go ahead and be controversial if that’s what needs to be said!
6. Basic storytelling applies to nonfiction, blogs, etc.  Beginning, middle and end.  Conflict is necessary.
7. Think about how to market your story so your publisher (or in our case your funders, your constituents, your supporters, etc) can sell it for you.  What products/organizations/businesses/etc have you mentioned?  Those people can be marketing partners.

It may seem crass to think that we’re trying to “sell” our work but if we don’t think about what we’re doing or trying to do in that light we won’t actually sell it to anyone.  We really do want “buy-in” for what we’re “selling” which is our mission.  With out that buy in we can not have impact.

Last word: “Don’t let outside forces determine your brand”  Trying to keep everyone happy will destroy your organization and ruin your passion.  Know who you are and be a rock star!

Meetings

Here’s a radical idea. What if meetings weren’t required. What if you never had to go to another meeting? How many of you are mentally jumping for joy just thinking about it? Hmm… seems like there’s a problem if we are constantly doing something we don’t want to do. How much positive comes from being mentally “tortured”?

But we must have required meetings! We need to talk about our projects, what we’re doing and we can’t have people show up only when they feel like it.

Or can we?

Let’s pretend for a moment that meetings aren’t required and today I’ve told you about an upcoming meeting where the Dali Lama will be present, or President Obama, or Lance Armstrong, or whomever you just love. You’d be there in an instant wouldn’t you? I wouldn’t need to require you to be there.

Now what if what we were talking about was whether or not your job was going to be continued, or what your deliverables on a project would be? Likely you’d be there too. You’d simply have too much to lose not being there and as long as you felt your voice was being heard, too much to gain by showing up.

So here’s the idea then. Make your meetings invaluable, make them not to be missed, make people want to show up and get stuff done and you won’t need to require anyone to be there. If you have to require people to be there then your meetings are just not valuable. So why are you spending time doing things that aren’t valuable. Aren’t you worth more than that?

Turns out Seth Godin and I were on the same page when I wrote this. Check out his blog post here about where you get great ideas. If it’s not in a meeting then why are you having meetings? To get stale, boring ideas?

Photo LSE Library CC license

Free=creative

Hmm.. looks like this never got posted so I’m posting it late. Is that cheating? Probably!Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything. The great news about going to NTEN is that I get to go. The crazy news is that I’m insanely busy getting ready for it!

Oddly though not too busy to check out the new game Urgent Evoke. Don’t know what it is? Think game for change. Learning through playing which is a fantastic way to learn something new…. learning should be fun. My first mission was to read a blog post and post my own blog. I did that and you can check out the game and the actual post I did here but because I think there’s enough important stuff in this I’ll post the text here too. Funny how a game can inspire thought eh?

“Innovation (often) comes from constraint (If you’ve got very few resources, you’re forced to be very creative in using and reusing them.)”

I loved this post as I’ve found that to be true in the nonprofit I’ve started, Seattle Free School (www.seattlefreeschool.org). We don’t take cash donations from anyone ever (and it’s not because we’re rich and funding it ourselves. Our total out-of-pocket cost is about $10 a year for website domain registration).

While it might seem that running this way would create a ton of problems it has, in fact, done just the opposite. By forcing us to be creative the entire act of running the school without money has become a learning experience in itself. One that we’ll be talking about, teaching and sharing at the upcoming Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp event in Berkeley http://www.craigslistfoundation.org/events/index.html

My favorite answer to “how do you run without money” has become “what do you need money for?” Sadly, most people don’t see it as a question to cause thought but as something offensive. Of course you must have money to run.
• You have to pay for marketing or no one will know who you are (we’ve been in virtually every major print publication in the city of Seattle including both big glossy magazines – we’ve never paid for marketing).
• You have to pay for space because you can’t find it for free (we’ve never paid for space and in our first year alone we had over 70 different classes).
• You have to make people pay- no one will show up to a class they didn’t pay for (our largest class thus far was 125 people).
• Most importantly you have to pay for people to run the thing because no one works for free (no one at Seattle Free School has ever made a penny doing it and there are lots of people teaching, posting classes, spreading the word, working behind the scenes, printing flyers at home and hanging them in their neighborhood).
In fact we all suspect that because we don’t take cash donations people are even more willing to help than they might be if we did (there’s no proof for this… we didn’t do a control group of Seattle take-donations school). So often people come to the facilitator class, the class you take to learn how to teach with Seattle Free School, not even knowing what they want to teach, just knowing that they want to give back. That’s pretty amazing. And over and over again we’re always impressed with what can be done without money.

Can this work for everything? No, of course not. People need to eat. Some organizations need equipment. And indeed the places we use have to support the spaces we’re using (when people insist on giving us money we instead tell them to give to the places we use to support them… just cut out the middle man and give to the places who need the cash). But it can work for anyone to get started with something, and if nothing else starting with this sort of mindset keeps you very creative and very good at knowing what you should pay for and what you can get without a huge expenditure. Often it’s more than you’d expect:
Our website is hosted for free by a friend from Second Life that we’ve never met in person.
Our new website was designed by a local community college (Seattle Central Community College) after they came to us and asked to redesign our free site.
We’ve had people offer server space for an email listserv when our email program broke due to too many followers (we’re at over 1200 currently).
We’ve had people come out of the woodwork to do scripting and website help when we couldn’t figure something out.

People care. People are powerful. Don’t believe anything else.

To check out more about gaming and learning just watch this

I Love My Phone

I know it may seem weird to be writing a post conference report about my phone but bear with me, I’ll get to the point. I promise.

When I first got my iPhone I was in the middle of a very intense training session. I didn’t want to open the box because I knew that then I’d want to play with my new fancy toy and that because it was fancy, it was surely going to take a long time to learn. After all, my horrible no-feature phone was still a huge mystery to me, getting it into speaker mode require something about standing on your head, doing the hokey-poky and pressing an endless stream of unrelated and unmarked keys in bizarre combinations that often I couldn’t get correct even while staring at the instructions.

You can imagine my surprise when I opened my iPhone and absolutely everything about it was totally intuitive; I didn’t have to fight to learn anything. Speaker is the speaker button that only shows up on the screen when it‘s an option, the map is easy to use and if you’ve used a Google map before you’re got all the knowledge you need. It’s not to say there weren’t a few issues but never before had a piece of technology been so easy to use right out of the box.

I’m telling you this because this bit of technology has indeed made my life easier and better and that’s the theme of this post.

The very first panel I went to was a fantastic panel by Susan Tenby and Janet Fouts. It was on listening and had a bunch of great resources on listening (that thing I keep talking about as being important in social media… no one wants to listen to a blow hard who isn’t ever interested in what anyone else is saying). There’s lots of tools out there and at least a few interesting ways to use them, one of them I’m guessing you haven’t thought of yet because honestly I hadn’t.

At CVM we’re always pushing for people to send broadcast messages. We know they work, we know that our clients want this information and yet for many of us it’s just too hard. There’s too much effort getting the information to broadcast and frankly we don‘t have the time. And that’s where WE are failing. You see the iPhone isn’t the only place technology makes our lives better. There’s tons of tools out there that can do your work for you.

How many of you spend hours searching for job fairs, homeless stand down events, Vets events? You need the info and you know that google can find it for you. But here’s the deal, you don’t need to go to google, you can make google bring this information to you. If you haven’t set up a google alert yet on your organization’s name it’s time. But it’s also time to set up alerts for things like “homeless” and your city, or “job fair” and your city. Now just like any google search sometimes you’ll get information that you don’t want, and sometimes you’ll need to change your search terms to get closer to what you are looking for, but then you do that every time you google search something now don’t you?

You can use Twitter search and hash tags to do the exact same thing. Indeed twitter’s best use is that of a news feed so why not have it feed you the news you want to broadcast out instead of spending hours each week going out to find it?

We all know that we need to work smarter, not harder and so let’s start using these fantastic tools to help us. Let’s sit back with a glass of sweet tea and have these fantastic computers serve us up with information on a tray. Let’s use our time wisely so we can enjoy ourselves more and stop wrestling so hard to get information. (Yes, I am sitting in Atlanta sipping sweet tea at this very second.)

I’ll be writing more about the conference in the next few days including posts about great panels, horrible panels, information learned, meetings made, having fun and everything else. But for now let’s get the machines doing the grunt work. We have too much to do with great ideas to waste our time with data.

PS. If you don’t know how to set these tools up or want to know more about how they can help you just let me know. I’m more than willing to help. And for those of you that need some time to think about it I’m going to be presenting a small session on this at the CVM conference this fall, so you can see it in person.

Psychology for the win!

You could almost call this a follow-up to why ROI is stupid but I won’t as this post is about the most important paper I’ve seen thus far on raising money and getting people to care about your nonprofit. No, I’m not kidding. THE MOST IMPORTANT.

OK, I will admit that I love psychology maybe even more than social media primarily because they both deal with the same thing, people, how you think, how I think, why we think that way, what causes us to do what we do, you name it. And then because this paper talks about both psychology and social media then of course I think it’s the most important thing out there to date. But it’s also the one session at NTEN that I was super upset to miss and so I’m really glad I got to read it. Let me tell you why.

We talked a bit about numbers and ROI and statistics already and maybe you’re thinking “but I need this data to sell my story and promote my nonprofit. No one is going to donate if I don’t give them the hard statistical data of my impact.” Well the trouble with that idea is that you’d be far more correct to say “No one is going to donate if I DO give them hard statistical data of my impact.” Yes, you read that right. While the research doesn’t actually say that no one will donate with data, far FAR fewer will donate than if you just left that junk out. How about them apples?

So what then do you use to get people to donate? The short of it is this:
-a story about ONE person and one person only
-the story does not include any statistics
-the story does not include information about anyone but that one person

That’s the gist of it. But you should really read this paper because there’s a lot more to it then just that and besides, you totally think I’m lying to you about that statistics stuff and the research is probably the only thing that will make you even consider that there’s truth to it.

Best yet this paper offers checklists of what to do in your marketing and fundraising efforts.

You’re also questioning that one story thing aren’t you? Surely we will donate more when there are millions of lives at stake. No, no we won’t. Why? Because right this second think about what millions of people look like, see all their faces, get a feel for what that would be like to stand beside them. You most likely can’t and you certainly can’t picture that many faces, not just this second. But if I tell you to think of a small child you know, their face, what it would be like to stand next to them you’ve got it, right this second. And that’s what it gets down to, we want to have the feeling we can help and to have that feeling it needs to speak to us in a way we understand. We feel powerless to help a million people, but that one little girl? I can definitely help her.

Interesting isn’t it? Logically I should want to save millions and so should you, but we are human and so instead of using numbers to appeal to robots and computers that crunch numbers rather than emotions, start using stories to appeal to humans who care more about emotions and being able to make a difference than we do about problems that we feel powerless to solve. It’s not that we have tiny little brains, it’s that we want to make a difference in a way we can understand and grasp.

Here’s the ebook. Let me know what you think.

Writing for the Web or The Conundrum of Hierarchical Language

Alright, so you’ve decided to give this social thing a try… but where do you start? Honestly that’s up to you and where you feel most comfortable but one thing you’re going to need to figure out fairly quickly is how to write for the web.

Twitter of course is tricky. 140 characters isn’t a lot of space to write your thesis, provide supporting evidence and come to a well founded conclusion. But it is a great place to get the basics out to people about events, other quick info and links to other places where you might have some of these writing components (though hopefully not… we’ll get to that). For those of you that don’t know bit.ly is your friend when it comes to twitter. It’s a great site that not only shortens the big long url of your blog or link to something manageable but it also tracks the number of clicks your link has had…. And on twitter it also let’s you see how often your link has been reposted, just in case someone doesn’t include your information on their tweet. Make sure you register and sign in so you can track all your link clicks no matter what computer you,re on. Great stuff which will give you a feel for ROI without any work at all…. Just the kind of research I like… easy, quick and free!

Facebook can work for longer posts to fans of your page or members of your face book group but as mentioned in my earlier post about Haiti, not everyone on twitter is on Facebook, so linking directly to it from twitter may not be the best choice. That’s where a blog may come in.

Hopefully we all know that posting on a blog every month is simply not enough. If you’re a nonprofit and you post once a month or less your telling your audience that nothing important is going on at your organization, obviously, or you‘d be writing about it right? The only exception to this would be something like a Haiti disaster, where people understand that you’re obviously too busy to post. But likely that’s not you, so either blog or don’t. Don’t make the mistake of telling your audience that you’re boring or eventually you won’t have an audience. (I regularly purge blogs I’m following from my list if they don’t post for a long time).

But then how do you write a blog. Well, let’s start with how you don’t write a blog. Now note, if you’re writing a technical blog or something that’s not writing to everyday people this may differ but for most of us, most nonprofits this will be true: You don’t write as though you’re writing your college thesis or a grant proposal or any other stuffy nonsense. We didn’t like writing them back when we did write them and we certainly don’t want to read one from you now.

OK, so good… but what does that mean? It means writing like a normal human. It means talking to me like YOU are talking to me, not like your organization is talking to me… it can’t really talk on it’s own now can it? I don’t need or want stuffy writing. And more importantly, all that stuff does in general is alienate people and puff up the egos of people who want to feel better than others. Don’t believe me? Let me tell you a little story. It’s a true one.

Back in High School I had a very arrogant teacher. I had to write a paper for this class and I decided to have some fun with it, and his ego. I wrote my paper the way I normally would but then I did something different. I took out a thesaurus and a dictionary and changed all the little words to big works, cross checking to make sure the big words I didn’t know fit into the sentence. Then I turned it in, an OK paper, filled with huge words.

You probably guess what happened though it’s worse then you might have thought. When he returned papers he verbally graded each paper in front of the class and commented (because arrogant people aren’t all that concerned about people’s feelings or appropriate privacy) and when he got to mine he went on and on about how it was the BEST paper he’d ever read. It wasn’t of course, but those big words stroked his ego and made him feel smart. It was everything I could do not to laugh at this outright though I am still chuckling about it now. It worked and should you be talking to this person or someone similar please do whip out every big word you know. It will work like a charm.

If this is what you do with your writing then please stop. That paper didn’t get better by putting big words in it. And more importantly, these aren’t the people you’re writing for. Let me ask you this, are any of the people you serve just learning English? Are any of them struggling to read? Are any of them just normal people without a dictionary sitting beside them? Is there anything about your message that needs these words? Might it be best to figure out a way to say what you want to say without big words and long sentences? The smartest person in the room isn’t the one talking to a bunch of PhD’s about brain surgery in a way that only a PhD could understand, it’s the person in the corner, explaining brain surgery to a 10-year-old. That’s true intelligence.

Most importantly though, it’s these normal people who are going to do the most work for you, the ones most likely to spread the word about your organization. Big, important, arrogant people are far too busy being big, important and arrogant to help you.

So of course I have a great article I’d suggest you read on this topic so you have a better idea of how to write for the web. The short of it? Keep your content centered on your audience and what they want or need. Think of writing like a conversation between you and your reader and of course, keep your language plain. There’s nothing worse than hierarchical language to turn people off, and unless you’re my old teacher you just stopped reading at that obnoxious, long h word.

ROI is stupid

Let me say, I love math and statistics. In the past I’ve actually spent time figuring out how quickly I could get out of debt if, say, I didn’t eat at all for a year, or only ate a little bit, or didn’t ever drive or lived in my car or…. Looking at these kinds of figures, seeing the return of the actions I take, I love that. But when it comes to small business, small nonprofits and people, I think ROI is a massive waste of time.

Before I go too much further let’s define what I’m talking about by ROI for those of you that may not know (and let’s say this is my definition from what I’ve learned since the time that I didn’t know!) ROI stands for return on investment (think cost/benefit analysis). It means measuring and analysing the amount of return (in terms of money, followers, publicity, whatever) for the amount of investment (in time, money, whatever). The idea sounds great. After all, don’t you want to know if what you’re doing is paying off, or if what you’re considering doing is going to be a good use of your time? Of course you do.

But here’s where my problem with ROI starts. You’re NOT an idiot. Really.

Think about your regular life. Don’t you do this examination all the time? You went to a party last night. You dressed up and bought some new clothes. It either went really well and you met some people and had a great time, went OK and you made a few connections or went horribly, you met no one and you poured red wine on that new white sweater. You file that away in your brain as either worth your time or not. You didn’t need to do a bunch of analysis… you knew it inherently. And there’s a couple of other things you know inherently too.

First, you know that asking about the return on your investment at the beginning of a relationship is a big fat no-no. You don’t ask your date, on the night of your first date, where this relationship is going. You might get an idea that this person is NOT for you, but even then we all know people who thought this about the love of their lives when they first met them. Besides, this is just an analogy. We’re really talking about social networking, not dating… spending a bit of time with something you don’t like isn’t quite as painful as spending time with a person you don’t like!

So we know to wait a bit before we jump to conclusions or expect results. We also get the idea that, just like relationships, we get out what we put in. We don’t expect a person to provide everything we’ve ever wanted and needed with no effort on our part. For that matter we don’t expect one person to provide EVERYTHING we’ve ever wanted and needed ever. That’s why we have more than one friend…. And when it comes to a business or nonprofit that’s why we have different tools. Some are good for raising money, some for growing connections (that might later raise money), some are good for spreading publicity (that might later grow connections or raise money). We don’t expect one tool to do everything and while it’s nice to think that one day, way off in the future we’ll find that special service that has everything we need, in the end we really don’t want all of our eggs in one basket do we? What would happen if that service died. It’s good to have at least a few different tools to lean on.

And this is why I hate that horrible, “but what’s the ROI on this” discussion that happens every time some new idea is presented. It doesn’t take into account our own innate intelligence. And it tries to turn everything into numbers.

Here’s an idea… how much time did you spend trying to determine the ROI on something? How much more useful would it be if, instead of analyzing the return on something you haven’t even started, you spent that time actually DOING it? If you spend a huge amount of time in analysis before action won’t you often kill any enthusiasm you might have had for the idea by beating it to death with math and analysis (and endless talking!)? How well will that idea go over if there’s no energy left in you to be excited about a project? How well will that relationship go if, from the very second you met the person, you’re only thinking about where it’s going? What if that person doesn’t wind up being the love of your life, but in an unexpected turn through them you find a job you really love? Is that a waste? If you have such specific goals for your ROI you’ll miss all the kismet opportunities that come about unexpectedly.

So here’s my idea instead. Be smart. Plug in to a tool, whatever it is and spend some time there. Get a feel for it and take a personal note of your sense of ROI for you. Do you feel like you’re spending too much time on something? Hmm… are there ways to spend less time? Can you ask other people how they get a task done quicker? Can you learn something about it to make it faster? Then, after spending some time there, ask yourself if you think you’re gaining something from it. If not are other people in love with the idea? What are they doing differently? Can you get some feedback of ways you might change what you’re doing so you’re getting better returns? And finally, if this tool just doesn’t fit with who you are and what you love, is it time to break up?

Trust yourself. You already know the answers.

These thoughts were brought out by the recent Idealware report on “Using Social Media to Meet Nonprofit Goals: The Results of a Survey”. Not because they were really using too much math, but because they were asking nonprofits how they felt about a tool. Not very good “science” probably but likely just as valid. To summarize, it’s the same thing we all know… Facebook good, Twitter better. Here’s the link.

So, what do you think about ROI?

I’m going!

Well thanks to a whole lot of people pulling a whole lot of strings I’m going to NTen!  I couldn’t be more excited.  There are so many different breakout sessions I want to go to that I’m working from this point forward on cloning myself.  I’ll be sitting on the panel of “Cross Platform Events That Rock” with the greats, Susan Tenby, Evonne Heyning and Megan E Keane.

While I’m there I’ll be writing regular posts about all the great things I’m learning (and for you CVM peeps, I’m also working on a presentation for our conference that I’m so excited about I could burst… yeah, I’m excitable I guess!) but in the meantime I’ve got lots more info to share with you.

One of the great mistakes I see nonprofits and others making on twitter and Facebook is being too impersonal.  Most people think that they’re speaking for their organization but we the people, you and me, we want to talk to people, not nameless entities.  Sure, big huge corporations might get away with this, but us nonprofits, we really need to stay away from being a faceless, soulless thing.

But maybe you think that those posts that seem too personal are just dumb.  “White is the color of the breakfast jelly bean” happened to be a much-loved post I made one morning.  Why loved?  Because most everyone has been there… eating candy or some such horrible non-breakfasty food early in the morning.  It established me as a human not a robot and it gave people something to relate to.  No, I don’t post like that every day, but that day I was exhausted and it just came out.  Not planned, just real.  So try that… be not planned, just real.

This article also speaks to my other issue with nonprofits on these social media platforms.  I can’t tell you how often people come into Second Life, one of the many social platforms I use, and immediately want to raise money.  They don’t even know what Second Life is but they want people to immediately give to them.  Really?

Would you do this in real life?  Just walk into a room and start asking for cash?  I doubt it.  Why would you do that anywhere?  It’s rude, but more importantly it doesn’t work.

When you focus on donations you’re completely missing the point- this will be a major point of my CVM Conference presentation… if you don’t believe me now I guarantee you’ll believe me after coming to the conference.  What you really want is people talking about you.  This is way more powerful than just asking for cash.  As Laura writes “would you rather chat with someone who has the potential to make you one sale or chat with someone who has the potential to promote your business to hundreds or thousands of others”  Substitute sale with donation and business with nonprofit and ask yourself this question.  The answer is obvious isn’t it?

Finally, you may get pushback, from others in your organization or maybe your own fear, about losing control of your brand, of your message.  Well, again, get over it.  You will lose control.  It’s usually not a bad thing.  Enter Mister Splashy Pants…

My new love

Yeah, OK, so my new love is twitter.  I think you all got that by now.  Some of you are probably thinking “but I tried that twitter thing and I hate it!”  Or maybe you just don’t have time for another social media tool.  That’s fine.  While I suspect you’d probably learn to love twitter with just a few tweaks in what you’re doing there (and I’ll get to that eventually with this blog) there’s no reason you have to jump right in if you’re not ready.  It’s fine to find the place you love and hang out there for a while.  Just make sure you’re open to new ideas and change when the time comes.

Everyone loves Fans!

So on that front, many of you have already started a Facebook fan page for your organization.  That’s GREAT!  But you might be wondering what you’re doing there and that could be a very good question.  Just today on twitter I was asked “ What Facebook tips would you share with organizations starting on Facebook? What makes a great FB post? How often? Random ideas?”  Seems like everyone has questions on this.  Of course I intend on sharing a great article I’ve found with you but first let me tell you some answers, as I see them, to these questions.

First, just like ANYTHING you do, know your audience.  This is getting redundant isn’t it?  Are the clients you serve following you on Facebook?  No?  Then why would you post as if they were?  See, you have a problem.  Either you need to get your clients following you on Facebook (which might not be possible depending on where your clients hang out) or you need to start talking to the people who are on Facebook.  If you don’t do these things eventually you’ll have no one following you on Facebook (or better yet people who have muted you, making you think they’re listening when they really aren’t).  If you’re not talking to me about things that I at least sometimes find interesting I’m probably going to stop being your fan.  It’s just the way it is.

Second, don’t spam me!  I have around 300 friends on Facebook.  With fan pages it’s probably more than that.  If I log on and see that you’ve FILLED the page with posts I can almost guarantee I will stop following you.  Why?  Because even if ALL of that information was completely important to me, I’m overwhelmed by it.  I won’t read it all and most likely I’m going to miss anything I find important because I actually won’t read any of it.  I’m too busy trying to mute you.  So space out your posts and know you’ll have a much better chance of people really reading what you’re writing, which is sort of the point isn’t it?

OK, some other great ideas for firming up your Facebook fan page strategy are here.