We decided to pick today's Member Appreciation Month winner from the NTEN LinkedIn Group (a group exclusively for NTEN members).

In case you haven't yet explored the different features of LinkedIn and LinkedIn Groups for professional purposes, I'd like to offer a few quick tips for using Groups at your own organization: 

• Creating a group on LinkedIn is easy.
• You can  grow your LinkedIn Group by opening it up to anyone on LinkedIn. We often get requests from folks wanting to join the NTEN group who have never interacted with our organization before.
• You can also invite your current supporters and constituents by linking to your LinkedIn Group on your site or in an email.
• We like LinkedIn because it's a controlled group -- perfect for a membership organization or for  organizing specific groups of supporters.  The group manager can approve or reject requests to join the group.
• Use the Discussions and News features to engage your group.  Group members can ask questions or share online articles without directly emailing each other. It might take some time to build the right interaction here: these shouldn't be the same messages you'd send in an email.  Think Q&A topics, poll your group for feedback on an issue, or share special updates or information with this group.

We've only recently begun to develop NTEN's group on LinkedIn, but we're happy we already see LinkedIn working on adding to and improving the features for groups. Here are a couple of key things we've found:

• We've gained new members through our exposure as a group on LinkedIn. It's a new outreach tool that requires little effort! Those who request to join the group who are not already NTEN members get an email from me introducing them to NTEN and membership.
• We can communicate special or crucial issues to this group as a sub-group of our membership, so that we don't always have to send yet another email. We recently reached out to our LinkedIn Group to remind them of our Bring-a-Friend initiative, and that we were closing in on a special membership landmark.

We currently have 423 members in our LinkedIn Group -- less than 10% of our total membership -- so it was easy to throw a (metaphorical) dart and pick today's Member Appreciation give-away winner:

Jill Murphy (You can see her LinkedIn profile here!)

Jill's getting a free webinar on us because we're thankful for the work she does for the nonprofit community, and we're proud she's a member of NTEN.

If you want a cool NTEN badge on your LinkedIn profile like Jill has, join our LinkedIn group!