Tactics for Building and Nurturing Community Online
1. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Tactics for
Building and Nurturing
Community Online
- Internet Fundraising Summit -
2. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
About Michael Wilson
• CEO & Founder - Small
World Labs
• Small World Labs Genesis
• Board of Directors – Texas
School for the Deaf
Foundation
3. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
About Small World Labs
Small World Labs
Community Platform
Social Business Strategy
Community Engagement
Services
8. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Engagement Pyramid
Source: Groundwire
Leading
Owning
Contributing
Endorsing
Following
Observing
9. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Engagement Pyramid
Source: Groundwire
Leading
Owning
Contributing
Endorsing
Following
• Attend event. See commercial or flyerObserving
10. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Engagement Pyramid
Source: Groundwire
Leading
Owning
Contributing
Endorsing
• Receive and read direct communicationsFollowing
• Attend event. See commercial or flyerObserving
11. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Engagement Pyramid
Source: Groundwire
Leading
Owning
Contributing
• Simple, transactional actionsEndorsing
• Receive and read direct communicationsFollowing
• Attend event. See commercial or flyerObserving
12. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Engagement Pyramid
Source: Groundwire
Leading
Owning
• Thoughtful & habitual contributionsContributing
• Simple, transactional actionsEndorsing
• Receive and read direct communicationsFollowing
• Attend event. See commercial or flyerObserving
13. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Engagement Pyramid
Source: Groundwire
Leading
• Invested in the mission and successOwning
• Thoughtful & habitual contributionsContributing
• Simple, transactional actionsEndorsing
• Receive and read direct communicationsFollowing
• Attend event. See commercial or flyerObserving
14. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Engagement Pyramid
Source: Groundwire
• Leads others in carrying out organization’s
workLeading
• Invested in the mission and successOwning
• Thoughtful & habitual contributionsContributing
• Simple, transactional actionsEndorsing
• Receive and read direct communicationsFollowing
• Attend event. See commercial or flyerObserving
15. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Engagement Pyramid
Source: Groundwire
• Leads others in carrying out organization’s work
• Subject matter expert, group leader, refers membersLeading
• Invested in the mission and success
• Answer questions, join & participates in groupsOwning
• Thoughtful & habitual contributions
• Volunteer, contribute contentContributing
• Simple, transactional actions
• Likes, ratings, sharesEndorsing
• Receive and read direct communications
• Provide contact information, followFollowing
• Attend event. See commercial or flyer
• Visit website or social media updatesObserving
16. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Engagement Pyramid
Source: Groundwire
• Leads others in carrying out organization’s work
• Subject matter expert, group leader, refers membersLeading
• Invested in the mission and success
• Answer questions, join & participates in groupsOwning
• Thoughtful & habitual contributions
• Volunteer, contribute contentContributing
• Simple, transactional actions
• Likes, ratings, sharesEndorsing
• Receive and read direct communications
• Provide contact information, followFollowing
• Attend event. See commercial or flyer
• Visit website or social media updatesObserving
19. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Observing: Website & Social Media
• Quantity
– Page views
– Visitors
– Total time on site
– Post Reach
• Quality
– PV/session
– Avg. time on site
– Bounce rate
23. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Observing: Advertising
• Google Grants
– Up to $10,000 per month
– 501(c)(3) organizations
– Adwords on Google only
– http://www.google.com/grants/
• Facebook & Twitter
– Paid ads and sponsored posts
30. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Following: Email
Do: Use a consistent, recognizable From Name
Don’t: use “info” or “admin” as your from name
31. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Following: Email
Do: Use a consistent, recognizable From Name
Don’t: use “info” or “admin” as your from name
Do: Use a monitored return path email address
Don’t: Use <donotreply@organization.org>
32. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Following: Email
Do: Be descriptive, accurate, short
• 50% of readers decide to open based on
subject line alone
Source: Vertical Response
38. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Following: Canadian Anti-Spam Law
AREA CASL CAN-SPAM
Communication Type Commercial Electronic Messages
(CEMs): email, text, IM, social media, voice message
Email
Opt-In Express Consent Unsubscribe Only
Fines Up to $10 million (Businesses)
Up to $1 million (individuals)
Up to $16K per
violation
Unsubscribe
Mechanism
Unsubscribe from all types of
communication
Unsubscribe to
list/campaign
Timeline July 2014 “Government Action”
July 2017 “Private Right of Action”
Currently active
39. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Following: Canadian Anti-Spam Law
AREA CASL CAN-SPAM
Communication Type Commercial Electronic Messages
(CEMs): email, text, IM, social media, voice message
Email
Opt-In Express Consent Unsubscribe Only
Fines Up to $10 million (Businesses)
Up to $1 million (individuals)
Up to $16K per
violation
Unsubscribe
Mechanism
Unsubscribe from all types of
communication
Unsubscribe to
list/campaign
Timeline July 2014 “Government Action”
July 2017 “Private Right of Action”
Currently active
CASL EXCEPTIONS for CEMs sent by:
• Registered charities with fundraising as primary purpose
• Political parties seeking contributions
42. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Following: What Do We Do?
• Rollout started May 29, 2013
• Segment past and current email
campaigns
–Gmail vs. Not
• Compare
–Open, Click, Conversion rates
–Pre & Post May 29
–Pre vs. Last Month (rolling inbox activation)
45. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Following: Facebook
Like Box Like Button
• Become your Fans
• Establishes connection for activity
feed updates
• Likes your specific website or web
page
• Single transaction
46. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Following: Facebook
Like Box Like Button
• Become your Fans
• Establishes connection for activity
feed updates
• Likes your specific website or web
page
• Single transaction
EXCEPTION
• If you place your Facebook page as
the URL parameter
50. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Following: Twitter
• Follow People
– Donors, supporters, affiliates
• Give people props
– Use mentions: @username
• Give retweets & favorites
• Use hashtags #
• Use Trends panel for ideas
52. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Following: Cross-Channel
• Links
– Website (or integrate within your website)
– Other Social Media Accounts
– Community
• “Follow Us” On Best Practices
– Lead with “Follow Organization/Us [On]:”
– Use alt text to show destination URL
– Distinguish from your “social sharing” buttons
58. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Endorsing: Facebook Visibility is the Exception
No
84%
Yes
16%
See Your Posts
No
95%
Yes
5%
Visit Your Fan Page
Source: Socialbrite
65. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Endorsing: Retweets
• If you want retweets, do the math
140 Characters Total
– “RT_@username:_” (6 characters + username)
– Room for comments
• General Rule of Thumb
<110 Characters
66. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Endorsing: Twitter Stats
• 1 in 20 Tweets is Retweeted
• 97% of Retweets happen within 1 hour
• Tweets with 100 characters or less have 17% higher
interaction rate
• Tweets with links are retweeted 86% more often
• Tweets with #hashtags have double the engagement
Sources: Sysomos, SEOmoz, Buddy Media, Bit.ly
69. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
• Applause Rate: # of favorites per post
• Conversation Rate: # of replies per post
• Amplification Rate: # of retweets per
post
• … and Per Follower
Endorsing: Twitter Metrics
77. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Online Community
• Central area for Followers,
Fans and other top
supporters
• Your website or community
in your website
• Toolset for customized
experience
• Capabilities for deeper
engagement
Social Hub
on Website
78. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Online Community: Capabilities
• Custom profiles & member data
• Discussions & knowledge sharing
• Collaboration groups
• User generated content
• Personalization
• Applications
• Workflows & approvals
• Document collaboration
• Event organizing
• SEO impact
79. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Community Examples
Donor Community
Volunteer Community Mission Support
Social WebsiteMember Community
Event Community
80. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Engagement Pyramid: Bottom Phases
Source: Groundwire
•Simple, transactional actions
•Likes, ratings, sharesEndorsing
•Receive and read direct communications
•Provide contact information, followFollowing
•Attend event. See commercial or flyer
•Visit website or social media updatesObserving
111. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Supporters Want Engagement, Not Just Asks
As a donor to charity, what do we nonprofits
do that REALLY annoys the tar out of you?
112. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Supporters Want Engagement, Not Just Asks
As a donor to charity, what do we nonprofits
do that REALLY annoys the tar out of you?
My biggest pet peeve is probably the lack of
engagement for anything other than asking
me for money… much comes from my
frustration as a donor - that I am not asked
for my opinion, my dreams, my ideas.
117. @SmallWorldLabs | #ifsummit | @WilsonMichael
Questions & Answers
Michael Wilson
CEO & Founder
Small World Labs
512.474.6400 x11
mwilson@smallworldlabs.com
@wilsonmichael
@SmallWorldLabs
Notes de l'éditeur
A little background on me
I’m the CEO & Founder of Small World Labs
Genesis of Small World Labs (Deaf Parents, Access to World of Mouth, Internet Technologies, Connect People, Make World Smaller Place: Hence Small World Labs
In addition to my responsibilities at Small World Labs, I also on the board of the Texas School for the Deaf Foundation
Small World Labs provides Small World Labs Community, an online community and social collaboration platform designed to provide nonprofits with new ways to engage, connect, and collaborate with their top supporters online.
We also provide a range of upfront and ongoing services to help ensure that every community project is successful
And with that as prologue, we’ll get started!
Today we are going to talk about how nonprofit organizations can build and nurture communities online, the tools that enable this, and the best practices for using them.
We are going to cover a lot of information. Some will be basic and some advanced. But my goal is that everyone of you, regardless of your sophistication level will leave today having learned something new that you can put to use with your organization.
Given our focus on real world community building tactics, we will use some for this presentation, so if you want to tweet during this presentation:
[give twitter & hashtag info]
To effectively carry out their missions,
nonprofit organizations need to be able to reach out to people and bring them together
We call these people your constituents. Similar to how congressmen have constituents that they serve, you have constituents that you serve.
These constituents are often broken down into 4 areas:
Your supporters
Staff
Mission (the people, issues, and causes represented by what you do)
And your partners
And the better your organization can reach out to, engage with, and collaborate with these groups, the more effective you can be at achieving your mission.
So we want to engage our constituents.
And the engagement pyramid, which is on the screen behind me, is a very effective way of adding structure to and thinking about this engagement process.
We are going to use the engagement pyramid paradigm throughout this presentation, so let’s go through it a little
Your constituents start off in the observing role.
They become aware of your organization through some method, by seeing information about your organization, hearing about it from someone else, or some other manner
Then they officially take a step and follow your organization
As followers, they now receive your direct communication
Next, they become endorsers.
As endorsers, they take their first public action on your part
But these actions are of the simple and transactional in nature.
The next stage in the engagement pyramid is owning.
As an Owner, a person is fully invested in the mission and success of your organization. They think of it as their own and truly want you to succeed.
And the top end of the pyramid is leading.
At this point, you have developed your most valuable supporters, your leaders. They carry your mission out to others, and lead others to do the same.
Which when used effectively, help move your constituents up the engagement pyramid
And that’s what we are going to talk about today, how to use specific online tools to move your constituents up the engagement pyramid
With a heavy emphasis on measurement so this becomes less of an idea and more of a science
So, where do we start?
We’ll start at the bottom and work our way up, just like you do with your constituents
This the most basic level, here you want to make sure that you’re taking a data driven approach, looking at your:
Website Analytics: which you can get For Free with Google Analytics, which has a ton of options and capabilities.
Social Media Analytics: which you can get For Free in the admin panel for your Facebook Page or in your Twitter account.
This is basic stuff so we won’t spend much time on it, but a key point is that you want to make sure that you are analyzing your OBSERVING performance by:
- QUANTITY (or aggregate) measures
As well as
QUALITY measures
Quality being the measures for how engaging each visit is on average
For organizations that are using Twitter, there are ways to improve the appearance, or observation, of tweets containing links to your organization’s web pages.
Who here knows what a Twitter cards are?
And the way you do this, is to log into your twitter account.
Then look under the Twittter ad settings (they don’t make it easy to find)
Or you can just go straight to analytics.twitter.com
And then you’ll look under the analytics tab for “Websites” and you’ll get the code to paste into the <head> section of your website
The code also contains display options so you’ll want to look at those
The last area we’ll look at for the Observing stage is Advertisting.
Who here is using Google Grants for their organization?
If you aren’t, this is one of the first things you should do when you go back to the office.
Go to google.com/grants
You’ll have to go through a registration process. But after you do so:
- Google will give you up to $10,000 per month (technically $329 per day) to use on Adwords
If you are already using Google Grant, you want to make sure that you are:
Maximizine the usage
Optimizing the results through ad & campaign variations
Facebook & Twitter have advertising options through paid ads & sponsored posts, but given the Google Grant, we aren’t going to go into those today
The first step in following online is to get the visitors contact information through your website. That enables you to establish ongoing 1x1 communication.
How you do this matters
Awebber Communications, an email marketing agency, made the modification above to one of their client’s web pages,
which started with what you see on the left: a BUTTON to click to go to a request information form
and changed it to the INLINE FORM that you see on the right.
This simple change, moving from button to inline form, produced a 73% increase in subscriptions
And you can go a step further.
Here you see a sign up form from UNICEF
But notice that they also give you a reason to sign up “Sign up for eNews”
And for people that wonder more, they include a “why subscribe” link …
And I’m sure you’ve all come across our friends, the light box.
While these can be perceived as interruptive or annoying, the reason they exist is because they are very effective.
The lift from lightboxes varies, but many organizations have reported a 7X increase in subscription rates when moving from an inline form to a light box form.
Source for 7X increase: Mike’s Life blog: http://www.mikeslife.org/content/using-lightbox-increase-subscribers
Now that you’ve built out your contact list (also known as a house list) and you have thousands of people that want to hear from you, it’s time to use it.
And using it starts with email. There are a lot of information and best practices out there so I’ll just concentrate on the basics and the items that have the biggest impact.
The first thing you have to accomplish is to get people to open your email. That’s based on having an effective;
From Name
From Email
Subject Line
Preview panel text
Also make sure that you send it from an actual live email account. People will reply to your emails. Some organizations make the mistake of using donotreply email addresses that are unmonitored or don’t exist. This causes a breakage in the potential engagement loop.
Extra time spent on the subject line text is worth it.
50% of readers decide whether or not they are going to open an email based on the subject line alone.
Make it descriptive, accurate and short
While this email from the American Heart Association provides text that helps place the email in context.
The AHA email is more likely to be opened as a result.
And when people click, be aware that most of them will see your email without images.
Images are important to include in emails, but make sure that your pre-image load view is still understandable and legible…
Has anyone heard of the CASL – the Canadian Anti-Spam Law?
Your emails to your constituents are likely being filtered to the Promotions Tab & out of the default view, Primary inbox tab
And this is having an impact.
MailChimp ran an analysis of all of their email sends to gmail and analyzed the pre and post Gmail effects
Overall, they found a downward impact of about 10% on a relative basis for Gmail Accounts
So… it’s not a killer, but it’s not nothing
Next, if the results aren’t good, or you want to improve them anyway, segment out your gmail users and create an email campaign just for them
That alerts them to this change, and tells them how to move your emails permanently to the Primary inbox
I’d consider using something like: Subject Line: Gmail Users – Don’t Miss Our Updates
Here is one from The Outnet, a women’s fashion outlet that communicates this message
Also… send your emails out a little earlier. People now are likely viewing their promotions tab less frequently
Next we’ll look a little at how to gain followers via Facebook
Here we have the Like Box and the Like Button
Both can exist on your website but do different things
[Does anyone here know how these two function differently when a visitor clicks “like”]
However, and this is a little advanced
If you want to get Facebook Fans from your website and don’t want to use all the real estate that the Like Box requires, you can modify the Like Button code and switch out the URL of the page it is on for the URL of your Facebook Page
Facebook users can also Like your Facebook Page from the Facebook Page itself
Another way you can promote your Facebook Page is through Facebook Page Administrators
All Facebook Page Administrators can proactively invite any or all of their friends to like the page.
And because of this, you may want to give Facebook Page administrator access to more people at your organization so they can do this too
To build your follower base on Twitter, you want to do a few things.
First, find people to follow. Find people that are relevant to you, like your donors, volunteers, and affiliate partners
Everyone loves to see their name in light, so use @ mentions in your tweets
Give out retweets & favorite people’s tweets
Use hash tags, which cause your tweets to appear in hashtag streams that non-followers are watching
And check your Twitter Trends block to see if any trending hashtags are good candidates for you to follow or include
In the offline world, people talk about multi-channel marketing and communication.
That extends into the online world with creating an integrated, multi-channel, online approach.
This starts with including links to:
your social media accounts on your website or community
links to your community or website on your social media accounts
and cross links across social media accounts.
Make it easy for people to find you everywhere.
As it relates to how to include these, we have some “Follow Us” Best Practices
Distinguish your “Follow Us” from your “social sharing” buttons with the lead in ”Follow Us” or “Follow Us On”
The next stage is to take this direct relationship and convert your followers into endorsers, those people that provide an implicit endorsement of your organization by liking and sharing your information
Social media channels are fantastic for the reach that they have.
There are more than 1.15 billion accounts on Facebook
And 500 million Twitter accounts
The way to take advantage of that reach is to make your content and your updates engageable.
Here we have a pretty creative image that’s been uploaded by American Heart Association.
Notice that they aren’t bashful about asking for endorsement. Their request to “Share this post if you’ve ever felt this way” lead to 2,154 likes
They’ve also taken advantage of the “highlight” option to make the image span both columns
Another best practice for building engagement on your Facebook page is using images,
Notice the two posts by American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life on the same day, both contain links to pages on the cancer.org website
The one on the left doesn’t contain an image
The one on the right does
The posted link with the image gained 25% more likes and 187% more comments.
People react more when some sort of visual queue is included.
And to take that concept even further, when you add images, be sure to include associated links. Here you can see on the Small World Labs Facebook page, instead of sharing a link, which brings in a smaller image & autopopulates a link and description, we uploaded a photo and linked to their online community in the text description area.
And you’ll notice that we ended the post with an interaction “Let us know if you’ll be there”. Always encourage engagement.
But there is no guarantee that anyone is going to see this post. The reason for that is something called Facebook’s Edgerank
Have you ever wondered why some organizations’ and some people’s posts and don’t appear on your personal Newstream?
Facebook uses an algorithm called EdgeRank that it uses to determine this.
The specific algorithm is confidential, but it calculated by the product of:
Affinity – which is a numerical value of the relationship between the viewer and the creator
Weight – which is based on the interaction the update has (how many likes, shares, comments, etc.)
Decay – how long ago the original post was made
And because of all of that, it can be difficult:
to make your posts appear on their newstreams.
to keep people coming back to your fanpage
Only 16% of your Facebook Page’s fans see your posts, on average
And less than 5% of them ever visit your page after liking it
Source: Socialbrite May 2012
Next we are going to look at the admin area for Facebook Pages
How many people in the room are admins for their organization’s Facebook Page?
Okay, then you are likely familiar with this.
Facebook provides an admin console area at the top of Facebook Pages with recent posts, and other sections
A key thing is that Facebook lets you export the data into Excel
Which you can see here
And it’s helpful to export to Excel because you can create derived statistics and your own dashboards.
When analyzing results across social media, the three metrics I like most are:
Applause Rate: Likes per post
2. Conversation Rate: Comments per post
3. Amplification Rate: Shares per post
However many people stop at these. The problem is how to compare performance over time if your audience is growing.
To do this you need to use the downloaded reports and normalize these metrics on a per fan basis.
Last thing to note is that all data is based on Pacific Time. So you downloads of per day information is going to be Pacific Cost time zone based
Also you want to be sure that the meta data on your website pages is set up to populate correctly.
On the left we have the results of well formed meta data:
- The page title is pulling in the title of the video being shared
The description of the item shared is populating
And an image thumbnail is available
On the right we have the results of poorly formed meta data
The page title is generic (Spotlight Event Details is the same generic title for all event’s pages)
There is no description that populates
And finally there isn’t an image available that is specific to what is being shared, only the overall site logo
There is a much higher likelihood that the user will abandon the share at this stage.
If you’re sharing your own pages, be aware that you can edit any of these fields, except for the URL. So you can edit the page title, image, and page description included
If you want retweets or replies, you need to do a little math
Twitter limits you to 140 Characters Total
You need leave 6 characters plus your username for retweets, as well as room for comments
So if you have 6 characters, plus 15 for the username that’s 140 – 21 = 119
General Rule of Thumb
<110 Characters. Under 100 if you can manage it.
Next, we have some Twiter statistics:
Overall, 5% of tweets are retweeted
and virtually all of those happen within 1 hour of the original tweet
There is a slight inverse correlation between tweet length and retweet frequency, with tweets under 100 characters being interacted with 17% more often
Links are big, having a link tend to increase engagement by 86%, and if you’re including links, remember our comments from before, the more you can link to your web properties and content, the better
hash tags are big as well. Having a hashtag produced a correlation to the largest engagement lift, doubling the average
Sysomos - http://mashable.com/2010/09/29/twitter-replies-retweets/
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/calculating-and-improving-your-twitter-clickthroughrate
Now if you want to look at your own stats, twitter has recently released it’s own native twitter analytics.
To access it, go to analytics.twitter.com, and use your existing twitter login credentials
You’ll get a report like the one you see here that includes the number of
Favorties
Retweets
Replies
For your various tweets
It also includes the ability to download the data via CSV
Which I’m a fan of because you can’t sort in the onscreen reporting display
And again, I like to look at these 3 key performance statistics across social media channels
The next step in the engagement pyramid is the contributing stage
At this point, your constituents start to provide more thoughtful and more habitual contributions
And this is where we start to see the engagement pyramid narrow considerably, when we are looking specifically at social media channels.
Take this recent post by the American Heart Association
This post got:
477 likes
84 shares
And 7 comments
But when we take into consideration AHA’s 375,000 Facebook Fans…
That means that only:
0.13% of Fans liked the post
0.02% of Fans shared the post
0.002% of Fans commented
So in this specific case, only 1 in roughly 54,000 “contributed” a “thoughtful” comment
So what do we do?
What do we do to increase the engagement at the top end of the engagement pyramid? For our contributors on up?
That question takes us to the next tool that we’ll look at for building online engagement…
And that tool is an online community or social website platform
And to help explain what an online community is, I’m going to play an intro video for one particular online community
This is for American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life community. This community is specifically for event participants, but the engagement concepts transcend across all community types
An online community serves as a central hub to bring together your top supporters that have been observing, following, and endorsing your organization.
It is your website or is a part of your website. Places where you have 100% mindshare
And it provides your constituents with a customized capabilities for deeper engagement.
From a feature/function perspective, the capabilities include:
Custom profiles & member data
Discussions & knowledge sharing
Collaboration groups
User generated content
Personalization
Applications
Workflows & approvals
Document collaboration
Event organizing
And the potential for strong SEO impact for open community pages
Some examples of communities are:
Action Center – UNICEF’s community for volunteers
Cor Vitae – AHA’s community for major donors
Relay Nation – ACS’s community for Relay for Life event participants
Professional Online Network – AHA’s member community on the association side
Amplifier Hub – CaringBridge’s mission support community
Blended communities put together as the organizations entire web presence (TSDF)
Is anyone here familiar with Greenlights, the nonprofit consulting and strategy firm based in Ausitn?
Is anyone a part of Greenlights’ 501community? That’s also an example of a community we power.
Now, let’s look back at the engagement pyramid
again the strength of social media is in the bottom phases: Endorsing, Following, and Observing
Which are a bit more PASSIVE in terms of overall engagement, but KEY for CULTIVATION.
But online communities also provide capabilities that extend into these bottom phases, so we’ll look at them through this lens
First of all, pages and sections of an online community can be set to be open.
For example, here I’m showing the discussion and video pages from the Institute of Engineering and Technology
This openness, not only helps with observers by giving them something to read and view…
but also drives greater traffic by improving SEO, the rate at which your site appears in organic searches on search engines
And here is how this works
When organizations do paid SEO (hiring an SEO consultant or firm)
[is anybody’s nonprofit that is here doing paid SEO?]
all of the concentration is on a small set of keywords that are searched more often. And the goal of paid SEO is to get your organization to appear on the results pages in Google for your top search term.
However, over 70% of actual searches take place less than 50 times per month. This is the long tail of search and it’s where most searches take place
User generated content, those discussions I just showed and other user contributed content, provide a wealth of related keywords that increase the liklihood of exact term matches, which makes your organization appear at the top of long tail searches.
Next, we’ll look at the following stage:
An online community also gives visitors another reason to sign up and follow your organization
Which can also be extended with profile fields, enabling you to learn even more about you supporters
Greenlights is a small nonprofit organization based in Texas. They provide the 501community to their members and supporters. Here we are looking at one of their community pages, and we see the familiar social sharing buttons
[click 1]: And if anyone clicks, it shares the page to their preferred social network. Basic stuff
[click 2]: However here it gets interesting. Because Greenlights’ Community Platform has integrated social sharing, the share that was just made not only shares out to Facebook or Twitter. But also into the activity stream into the community. And now the page is brought to the attention of other members, as well as the concept of “Oh, I should share this too!”
[click 3]: And furthermore, with Small World Labs tracked social sharing, Greenlights can provide leaderboards with its top social sharers, introducing competition and recognition for this
[click 4]: Which leads to more social shares & more exposure on 3rd party social networks for Greenlights. We’ve seen this integrated, community-driven social sharing increase social shares by 115%
[click 5]: And all of this data is tracked and available in reports for Greenlights, helping them understand their supporters better
Up to this point, we’ve been focusing on the masses, more people but less engagement per person
As we move up the pyramid – you start to get greater contributions from each supporter.
To videos (which you see on the Institute of Engineering & Technology community)…
To jobs (which you see on the Primary Care Progress community)
As well as photos. On the right are a number of photos that have been contributed by members of American Cancer Society’s online community
[click 1]: And on the left is one particular photo that a user created and uploaded
[question] Anyone recognize the photo or meme of a video still?
Yes, this is a meme of Psy’s Gangnam Style video.
And while this might seem hokey, this type of stuff is great for generating social shares & views, as well as building camaraderie amongst members, which increases energy and retention.
At the owning phase
You are looking at options that enable your supporters to invite their friends and colleagues to join as well
As well as attracting and managing volunteers.
Operation Smile, the international nonprofit that sends oral surgeons and nurses overseas to the developing world to perform surgeries that repair cleft palates for children
Using their community, they move potential volunteers through a 3 stage credentialing process
And match them with specific medical missions that are comprised of groups of 5-30 persons.
Operations Smile uses a collaboration group for each medical mission to help get their volunteers prepared by seeding each group with interactive background information for the trip
The ability to ask questions and get answers before the trip
And see a directory of the other volunteers they’ll be working with
And even manage post mission trip evaluation forms online, to help with quality control.
When you think about owning, these volunteers are really committing a lot to the organization’s mission.
And all of the recruitment and logistics are handled online
The top step of the engagement pyramid is leading.
Here I’ll use another example, one with a member of the Greenlights 501community.
This is Manuel. He’s a Greenlights’ board chair. He also works at Bridgepoint Consulting, a financial advisory firm, and is also involved with a few other nonprofits in town.
He’s stated that he’s passionate about:
Community Involvement
Education & Research
Environment
Health
Historical Preservation
Human Services,
And Religion/Faith-based causes
He is the type of person that a nonprofit wants to get more involved and to become a leader.
Here Manuel is helping lead a discussion about board development at small nonprofits
Providing his opinion that leading a strategic planning process is one of the best services that a new board can provide for a new or small nonprofit.
Here he’s providing advice on the responsibilities of a board member vs. an executive director; he’s a tenured board member with lots of great advice.
Here he’s responding (along with a number of other people) to a request for suggestions on how to make the most of the Greenlights Board Summit – an annual event
Here he’s giving input on how to set up Quickbooks for a nonprofit and provides a location where nonprofits can buy software online at discounts – again, with his financial expertise.
Here he’s providing his perspective on a Harvard Business Review article on Collaboration that was shared by Matt Kouri, the Executive Director
And these are just some of the ways that Manuel is helping lead others
Think about what it would mean to your organization to be able to develop leaders like Manuel
And Greenlights recognizes its leaders and their participation.
Members earn “points” for participating in the community.
On the left here is a leader board of the 501community’s top contributors…
And on the right you can see some of the rewards that Greenlights gives to leaders as they hit certain milestones
And the development of leadership isn’t limited to key individuals, it can also be spread across the crowd.
Here is a question by MusicMom11 on the American Cancer Society’s Event Fundraiser community, Relay Nation.
MusicMom11 says I “Needs fundraising ideas”
[click 1]:You ask a simple question like that on Relay Nation and you get over 100 ideas and comments
[click 2]: along with three new resource files created by other users specifically around new fundraising ideas
And this works well for not only traditional event fundraising, but also for Do It Yourself, DIY events where your fundraisers are coming up with their own ideas.
Developing a community base for ideas, support, and leadership can not only keep supporters more engaged, but also make them more effective.
Don’t list
Here are some of the examples included here:
Holding a spaghetti dinner with the Lady & The Tramp them with pictures of people spaghetti kissing
Valentines Day Candy Basket for the workplace with a donation per guess of the number of candies inside
an Office Sponsored “Jean’s Day” where people pay $5 to be able to wear jeans to work
A guy makes cement castings of leaves and that he sells for Relay (with a link to how he does them on his personal website)
A garage sale (that was said to have gone very well)
Hosting Dine In nights a restaurant that will donate 15-20% of the proceeds
and many, many others
http://relaynation.relayforlife.org/discussions/viewtopic/87/175?post_id=408#p408
So, all of this talk about contact forms, social media, online communities and engagement.
Why does it matter?
A little while back, Marc Pitman, the founder of FundraisingCoach.com asked a question on LinkedIn to donors. He asked:
“As a donor to charity, what do we nonprofits do that REALLY annoys the tar out of you?”
He received 108 responses.
I’ve included one of those responses here by Hildy Gottlieb.
“My biggest pet peeve is probably the lack of engagement for anything other than asking me for money… much comes from my frustration as a donor - that I am not asked for my opinion, my dreams, my ideas. “
Everything we just went over today is geared to make the difference for the Hildy Gottliebs of the world out there.
And it’s not just donors, but all of your constituents
And that engagement impacts all areas
We’ve found that the average online community member spends 300 to 900% more time on your organization’s web presence…
And those same community members tend to:
Refer 78% more supporters & constituents
Contribute 437% more dollars to your organization
Become more loyal over the long term, remaining active supporters at a 49% higher level
Volunteer 228% more
And share your content to social networks 115% more often
So if you’re looking for true, measurable impact, this is gold
And that concludes today’s presentation.
And with that, we’ll open it up for questions…
If you’d like the PPT, just grab me afterward or send me an email.