By Heather Shelby, Online Membership Associate, Environmental Defense Fund

Lately, there has been much debate about the value of social media and its so-called "experts". When it comes to nonprofits – and particularly, nonprofits on Facebook – we're all looking for the answer to the question: What's the ROI?

The truth is, ROI can be calculated in a variety of ways. If you're only focused on one aspect, you may be missing Facebook's larger value.

[Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from an article that first appeared in the June 2011 issue of NTEN:Change. Read the complete article in NTEN's new quarterly journal for nonprofit leaders by subscribing to the journal for free!]

By Chris Bernard, Idealware

It’s easy to get the impression that everyone is on Facebook these days, and maintaining a presence on the site is increasingly expected of organizations interested in engaging constituents. It seems like a logical assumption that Facebook should also be a good way to attract volunteers—but is that true?

“I treat an Internet presence like a garden. You need to cultivate it.”

“Facebook is a good way to attract new volunteers,” said Jayne Cravens, an independent consultant at Coyote Communications who has vast experience in online volunteerism. But she cautioned that organizations can’t just update their status to say that they’re looking for volunteers and expect their phones to start ringing.

“I treat an Internet presence like a garden,” she said. “You need to cultivate it.”

[Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from an article that first appeared in the June 2011 issue of NTEN:Change. Read the complete issue of NTEN's new quarterly journal for nonprofit leaders by subscribing to the journal for free! ]

By Chris Bernard, Idealware

The New York City Anti-Violence Project was founded in 1980 as a reaction to neighborhood incidents of anti-LGBT violence. All-volunteer run until 1984, with the addition of full-time staff, the organization also broadened the range of services it offered to include professional counseling to victims and survivors of hate violence, and services for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and HIV-related violence.

AVP still relies on volunteers for a number of tasks—as many as 125 different volunteers each year, half of them new. And while it employs several methods to attract and retain volunteers, it’s found Facebook to be a good way to help meet its volunteer needs.

[Editor's note: the following is an excerpt from the 2011 Nonprofit Social Networking Benchmark Report, sponsored by NTEN, CommonKnowledge, and Blackbaud. You can get the entire report for free here.]

It turns out that nonprofits of all sizes are able to scale their fundraising efforts on commercial social networks.

We identified a subset (27 organizations) of “Master Social Fundraisers” from amongst the survey respondents. Master Social Fundraisers are nonprofits that raised more than $100,000 on Facebook over the last year. Fascinatingly, the first characteristic that jumped out reversed many of our conclusions regarding organization size: 30% of the Master Fundraisers were Small organizations ($1 to $5MM annual budget) and 8% were Medium-sized ($6MM to $50MM).

By Andrew Cohen, Managing Director, Forum One

Email is the annoying little brother of online communities: pesky, poking, insistent. Yet email is the most effective way to noodge people to participate.

I realize this seems counter-intuitive. Email? That's so 1995. It's like saying you can drive faster by using better buggy whips. But online communities are just one of millions of destinations competing for your community members' attention. Your members need regular reminders to visit.

Emails are the best reminders.

NTEN friend Janet Fouts -- have you read Social Media Nonprofit Tweet yet? -- invited a few folks to share the big lessons they learned from social media in 2010. Because I learn something new every fifteen minutes on Twitter, I had a hard time narrowing it down.

In the interest of time (and for the sake of those who will start shaking if this post keeps them from Facebook for more than seven minutes), I narrowed it down to four:

Lesson One: I'm on a Horse
The Old Spice Man was a fantastic case study on the use of social media. These spots, which also aired on TV, showed us two things:

Elaina Buzzell, Senior Program Coordinator, NPower Seattle

Back in February, I saw a great post from Mashable on how to build a landing page for Facebook and instantly thought of it as a great way to promote an upcoming fundraising event. Here, I will walk you through the basics of setting up a landing page for your organization, and share some things that I learned while setting up ours. In this process, you will essentially be creating a simple Facebook application for your page, and you can do this with some HTML knowledge or a tool like Dreamweaver.

flickr: lydia mann

While the discussions on our Facebook page often lend themselves to dog clothes and bacon candy, September also brought us a few serious discussions.

When we opened up 11NTC session voting, our followers on Twitter started voicing their concerns about session designers campaigning for positive votes on their sessions. We're torn about that over here: we can see the benefits of requesting votes, as well as of keeping everything anonymous. So we decided to pose the question to the Facebook community.

flickr: ryancrNot to toot our own horn (although we love to do that around here) but do you know about our RoundTables?

RoundTables are monthly hour-long chats, free for NTEN Members, moderated by an NTEN member from the field of Consulting, Communications, or IT -- depending on which RoundTable it is. The events don't always have a set topic, but are open discussions for questions, sharing, and learning from your peers.

Here are some highlights from this month's particularly tool-loaded Communications RoundTable with Chad Norman of Blackbaud. Chad is an absolute rock star when it comes to social media and marketing. During the call we discussed how to manage a Facebook page & Twitter account.

Flickr: StrudelMonkeyYou know the MTV show, "Pimp My Ride", where hip hop star Xzibit knocks on the door of one lucky lemon owner and takes their car to the shop for a team of tattooed men to gussy up? In a way, I feel like I'm on that show --but my car is NTEN's social media platforms, and my Xzibit is all of you, our awesome community of social media users and experts.

While we don't work quite as fast as the electricians and mechanics on "Pimp My Ride", we're adding some bling to how we work with social media here at NTEN. On Wednesday, I attended the AMA webinar, "Leveraging Social Media to Make Your Webinars A Success". The event was free and full of great tips.

Here are three super easy tactics mentioned we'll be implementing right away: