Impact of Social Media on the Nonprofit Sector
Flickr Photo: clevercupcakesI recently got an email from an NYU graduate student in Public Relations, Paola Christina Lamarca. She's working on her Capstone and wanted to hear a few of my opinions about the impact of social media on the nonprofit sector. I answered a few questions for her, but I told her your two cents would be even more valuable.
So here are her questions and my answers. Tell us in the comments or your own post: what do you think? (If you write up your own post, leave the URL in the comments please!)
1. Do you believe the use of social media helps nonprofit organizations to achieve their mission and goals more effectively?
Yes. Social media is about relationships. At its core, nonprofit work is also about relationships. We can use these tools to build real relationships in a way that broadcast tools like email, direct mail, and advertising do not.
Social media is also about ease of organization: people can find each other and connect around any issue at any time, leveraging their networks to build a conversation or generate an action. Nonprofits can tap into that to engage their community, and the networks of each of those community members. That's how nonprofits work best -- and now it's easier.
2. Have social media activities increased competition for awareness, funds, and supporters among nonprofit organizations? Why?
No. If anything, it's helping us reach new audiences. Lots of research -- check out the Case Foundation report on the America's Giving Challenge -- points to the fact that the donors and activists we're engaging in social media are new to our organizations. We're finding folks who were really hard to reach before. It's opened up a whole new world for us.
3. Do you fear social media activities can overwhelm nonprofit organizations’ audiences with too much information and provoke a reverse effect among their target publics? By way of example, are you concerned about Facebook /Twitter fatigue or boredom?
Short term, maybe; long term, no. I think "Twitter fatigue" amongst the general population is a short term symptom of a problem that will work itself out. We're in the middle of a huge upheaval in how we -- and by we here, I mean everyone, not just nonprofits -- receive and process information. We used to get information from a handful of sources -- newspapers, books, TV, friends -- and relatively little information was being produced. In the last five years, more information is being created as access to data and information has opened up and the means for analyzing and publishing have democratized. Now we're hit with information from every angle. In the colloquial, it's freaking us out!
For example, when I talk about RSS readers to nonprofit audiences, I generally share my reader, with over 250 feeds. The very first question I get is, "How do you read all that?" The answer is that I don't. In the old model, it was expected you would and could consume all the information about your field of expertise. He who read the fastest won. In the new model, we have to develop a better set of skills around FILTERING information to know WHAT we need to read. As we develop those skills, I think the idea of social media fatigue will become less relevant.
4. Do you believe an organization should have a plan to avoid information overload or should this happen instinctively?
Organizations should plan to deliver VALUE via social networks, and that will take care of the problem. When the focus is on using social networks to give people information and calls to action that they want, the problem takes care of itself. People won't care as much about how many updates they get from you if the information is useful to them.
This means a couple of things for nonprofits. First, they have to measure what they put out into the social media space: what's getting retweeted, forwarded, clicked on? That's the high-value stuff. Second, they have to learn that it's not always about them. Organizations should share information that's useful to the group, no matter what its source. Both behaviors will build stronger networks.
5. Fifty percent of the nonprofits I surveyed said they have used social media for fundraising purposes (most of them have raised from $50,001 to $250,000). The same number of people considered ‘amount of online donations’ as an important criteria when evaluating the influence of their social media efforts. Having said that, do you believe organizations that integrate social media into their communications mix are more likely to increase overall donations they receive?
We certainly don't have an evidence of that correlation. What I can say is that the skill set that social media requires is the same skill set that will make stronger nonprofits over all. When nonprofits learn to look outside of their own organizations to create change -- when they engage and participate in networks all over -- they will become more effective, and that should translate to more donations. See Forces for Good on this topic.
6. How concerned should nonprofits be with social media metrics?
Very, but there are no great answers yet. We're still very early in our explorations of social media, and the metrics will follow. Right now, nonprofits should track what they can, and keep thinking about what metrics would be useful to obtain. Be active in the communities that are discussing metrics to help shape the future. Beth Kanter has some great social media ROI resources worth checking out.
7. What does constitute success when a nonprofit organization integrates social media into its communication mix?
That's going to depend on every situation, what each organization wants to accomplish, but I can give you some generics that organizations should keep in mind. An organization is successful with social media when they listen, deliver value, celebrate the network (not just themselves!), measure the impact, and iterate on their successes.
8. What are the limitations of social media for a nonprofit organization?
I'm not sure how to answer that question. I would say nonprofits shouldn't think of social media as just another "channel." It's not. The broadcast communication skills we have mastered don't work here. While we've figured out how to have one conversation with 10,000 people, we need to learn to have 10,000 conversations with 10,000 people.
