Social Media Study Finds Most Nonprofits Have Presence on Facebook But Raising Little Money

According to a recent social media study conducted by NTEN, Common Knowledge and ThePort, nearly three-quarters of 980 nonprofit professionals surveyed are finally integrating some social networking into their online marketing and communications. Below are key highlights from the study:

• 74% have a presence on Facebook with an average community size of 5391 members.

• Four-fifths of survey respondents said that their nonprofit has at least one-quarter of a full-time staff person spearheading their online social networking. Over 50% say that they intend to increase social network staffing over the next 12 months.

• Social networking is generating very little revenue. (See Frogloop’s recent article on Facebook Causes). On Facebook, almost 40% of respondents raised money via fundraising, but 29% have raised $500 or less over the past 12 months.

• 30% have built one or more in-house social networks, with 86% hosting communities of 10,000 people.

• Not surprisingly, the communications and marketing departments are most likely to take charge of the social networking efforts, with fundraising and senior management following.

The study also discusses how nonprofits continue to question whether it’s better to build a community on a popular social networking platform like Facebook, or to build their own in-house social network. My personal opinion on this subject is that creating your own custom social network can be very staff intensive and expensive. Your audience is already using major social networks like Facebook and Twitter so that is where you should have a solid presence. The concept of “build it and they will come” does not work. So unless your nonprofit has a large and active online community with full time staff to manage it, building in-house social networks is not going to be a good ROI.

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Comments

[Kimberley Le Sueur]

I definitely agree. People think that by creating their own social media site that everyone will just flock to them. That's wrong. By joining already established groups you can target a lot more people fairly quickly. Why not take advantage of a group that already has established members??

Thanks for this post.

[Valyn Perini]

I run the OpenTravel Allliance (www.opentravel.org),and as a not-for-profit trade association serving the travel industry, it doesn't make sense for us to be on Facebook. We did create a group on LinkedIn and a Twitter account. We're in early stages for both, and the point for us was to raise awareness of the organization. So far, so good, as a fair amount of conversations have started on both platforms. We're also doing our first show on blogtalkradio.com; we'll see how that works out.

We think of these sites as new marketing channels, albeit interactive, to use to reach our various audiences. Nonprofits, like all organizations, need to research each channel, then approach the appropriate ones strategically. It takes work and planning, like anything else, but is manageable.

I agree with Allyson's assertion that an in-house social network is unworkable for most smaller organizations; necessary tasks would include IT support, database management, web design and member service, all expensive. Plus LinkedIn and Twitter are hugely popular and hugely utilized; why not take advantage of that instead of competing against it?

[Caitlin Jennings]

There was a really interesting article about nonprofits and facebook, specifically the causes feature, in the Washington Post recently: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042103786.html. I thought what the nature conservancy rep said at the end, about how social media should be viewed more as a branding tool than a fundraising tool, really helped clarify the expectations nonprofits should have when using social media.