How Can Nonprofits Use the Social Web During the Giving Season?
The folks over at NetSquared have been wondering: How can nonprofits use the social web during this giving season? I can think of dozens of examples. But I think that there's a larger opportunity here than simply starting a widget fundraising campaign or the like.
The big opportunity is this: amplify your authenticity.
In day-to-day fundraising, it's all about building relationships. Unless there is a big news headline, people give to the causes and organizations they have relationships with. And the relationships that work best are the authentic ones, those that are honest and real.
As nonprofits, we spend an enormous amount of time trying to build and prove our authenticity. We create charts to show how much of every donor dollar we spend on program. We labor over our storytelling. We strive to deliver our stakeholders the kinds of content they want, in the way they want to receive it. In short, we work really hard at building authentic, honest relationships.
This is very high-touch, slow-growth work.
What's amazing about the new tools -- whether you call them web 2.0, social media, new media, or whatever -- is that it allows you to turn all this high-touch work into a fast-growth strategy.
Once you've built meaningful, authentic relationships with your stakeholders, you can give those stakeholders some of these new media tools and let them do the rest of the work for you. THEY find the people that they know care about your cause and THEY introduce those people to your organization. Because those new invitees have been brought to your organization by a person whom they already trust as authentic, they trust you more from the get-go. In other words, get your stakeholders to vouch for you, and you end up with automatic street cred.
See? High-touch AND fast-growth.
Which is not to say that you don't have to worry about building and maintaining your authenticity. You still have to do all that if you want your stakeholders to stay engaged. But now you can leverage all that work to do so much more for your organization.
