Shabbir Imber Safdar and Shayna Englin, Englin Consulting, LLC

Everybody's on Facebook, so clearly your non-profit should be there, too, right?

Probably, but given limited resources it's important to get a better handle on the specific value your organization's investment of time and resources on Facebook is delivering toward your bottom line. It's time to make it accountable.

Commercial marketers, who blaze the trail 2-4 years ahead of us nonprofit marketers, have been using the marketing funnel as an accountability tool to focus their marketing efforts. Marketing funnels are visualizations of how specific marketing efforts move would-be customers to make a purchase. In one simple graphic, it shows how effective your marketing is and where you can apply changes to achieve increasing results.

One approach to making your Facebook efforts accountable and more forcused can be found in the marketing funnel.

Here's the concept:

That bottom part of the funnel is what nonprofit communicators often forget when we think about social media. We forget to answer the question, "Why are we spending resources – staff time, money – on Facebook?” (or Twitter, or Foursquare, or Tumblr, etc.)

The funnel should resolve in Facebook delivering something of specific value to your organization -- something that furthers your mission: volunteers, money, or some other resource that lets you make the world a better place.

Spend a little time clarifying your funnel, specifically that last bit about measurable value and the second to last bit about how Facebook users will get there. For example, if your Facebook funnel delivers donations, then will you use Causes or collect donations on your website? If you're using your own website, the second to last bit is about clickthrough to your site.

Once you've got your funnel in place, you can then set to measuring each stage. Typically once you measure you'll find a bottleneck where people are not effectively moving from one stage of the funnel to the next. Here's an example of how you can take an abstract funnel like the one above and apply it to your organization.

This is a very typical Facebook marketing funnel for nonprofits that primarily raise money to fund the mission-oriented work they do. Here's another version that makes the numbers clearer:

Now you have some clear metrics of how effective your Facebook efforts are at delivering value to your organization's bottom line, and you have for a sense of where to experiment to improve your results. You might try starting at the top of the funnel. Ask yourself, what kinds of material must I create in order to get more of my fans to click thru to my website? Should I write longer, shorter, more frequently? Experiment for 3 weeks and compare the results. If its improving, keep on keeping on, and if not try another experiment.

But wait, these are terrible results! If I share this with my colleagues they'll kill the social media program entirely!

By and large nonprofits (and most for profits) have not figured out how to make Facebook produce results for their organization's bottom line. Your colleagues already know this, and eventually someone in a position of authority will reallocate resources to reflect this reality. First they are likely to start changing the tactics you're using to improve the results. It's in your interest and the interest of your organization to confront the results and start improving them of your own volition.

The best part of this is that experimentation in this area is free. We describe a number of techniques for identifying more or less effective Facebook tactics in our free ebook "Is Your Nonprofit's Facebook Page Worth It?"

Read it, see if you can clarify your Facebook marketing funnel, and have fun testing!

Shayna launched Englin Consulting, LLC with over a decade of experience identifying and mobilizing supporters for non-profits, causes, and political candidates. Reach Shayna at shayna@englin.net.