Roger Burks, Mercy Corps

One of my biggest takeaways from last year's Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) in San Francisco was this oft-repeated advice on social networking, specifically Facebook and Twitter: you can't make them come to you. You have to play in their space.

For my particular organization -- Mercy Corps, a large international relief and development agency -- that didn't seem like such a compelling prospect. After all, our goal is getting people to come to our website to take some sort of action for us, preferably a donation. We'd long since launched Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube pages, but our approach seemed like obligation and maintenance rather than active outreach and engagement. In our one attempt at soliciting action through social media, we'd tried getting our Facebook fans to donate through Causes, with next-to-no success.

So, I came back from the NTC with this revelation that things had changed -- that we had to do something different with our social networking strategy -- and yet a lot of cynicism about what a bigger time investment in social media was going to do for us. My colleagues shared that doubt.

Another big reason we hesitate to go all-out on social networking sites was just how much we'd invested on the Mercy Corps website -- in terms of creativity, time and organizational buy-in -- and how tirelessly we'd crafted that website to reflect our personality, our mission, and, again, the fact that the most important part of our team's strategy was getting folks to make a donation or take some other action.

But then, in our ongoing conversation about social media, my colleagues realized something: we didn't have to reinvent the wheel. We didn't have to do anything radically different from what we were doing on our own website.

We simply needed to make Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube an extension of what we were already doing and saying. For Mercy Corps, that meant storytelling.

So we used Facebook and Twitter to syndicate the stories and other content we published on our website -- particularly the Mercy Corps Blog, a new feature we launched last May. We used YouTube to publish videos that supported and extended that content. In nearly all cases, we linked back to our website.

Social media became another place to tell our story, to engage readers and attract new supporters. And, during the Haiti emergency response over the last month, we've seen some encouraging results.

Since January 12 -- when the earthquake struck Haiti -- we've:

• Gained more than 9,000 fans on Facebook
• Picked up 1,300 new followers on Twitter
• Had 5,319 click-throughs to our website through bit.ly, which we use for shortening URLs on social networking sites
• Raised more than $18,000 through donations sourced from those who've come to our website through Facebook or Twitter

More anecdotally, in reading the comments we've received through social networking sites, we've realized that our fans and followers are coming to us for updates on Haiti. They appreciate the reporting. The stories and photos we post not only tell them about what we're doing, but keep them informed about the general situation on the ground. Social media, indeed.

So we're bringing what we do best to new audiences on social networking sites. We're playing in their space and, sometimes, even getting them to come visit our website and take action for us.

And we didn't have to change who we are one bit for the sake of social networking. We just had to keep telling our story.