A recent survey by  Harris Interactive and Virilion unearthed some surprising results about donor preferences for receiving information.

A majority of donors, 51%, were, "not at all interested" following organizations that they care about through blogs, social networks, and RSS. In fact, only 6% of donors reported using social media to track organizations.

Presenting nonprofits with somewhat of a paradox is the fact that 52% of respondents think its important that nonprofits use social media to connect with supporters.

When asked what types of information they would prefer to receive through social media, "Donation/Information Requests" ranked last, preferred by only 22% of donors. The top three choices were News and Announcements, Success Stories, and Volunteer Opportunities.

The survey, taken during late December of 2007 and early January of 2008, included 2,275 adults who reported donating, volunteering, or advocating on behalf of a nonprofit in the 12 months prior to taking the survey.

Though these results are somewhat inconclusive, the survey highlights the importance of knowing what your donors want and keeping in touch with their preferences.

Click here to read the full results and details. 

Thanks to The Chronicle of Philanthropy for their article that brought our attention to the survey!

 

The always excellent Beth Kanter tipped us on this interesting post from the Compete.com blog  that demonstrates the overlap that exists between users of social networking sites.

How is this valuable?  Well,  theoretically, if you believe MySpace is a place for donors, your presence there also reaches 64% of Facebook users, 65% of Bebo, and 69% of Hi5.   As you can no doubt gather, you might not need to invest valuable time and resources into all four, because a lot of the audience is redundant.

So, which one social network should you consider for your next campaign?  Beth points us to a great post on Read/Write Web about some demographics information on the users of the different networks.

Choose wisely and, as always, make sure it's worth it.

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Thanks to everyone who sponsored, presented, attended, and called in to today's brown bag session.  A special thanks goes out to today's speakers: Suzanne Rainey and Andrew Cohen from Forum One Communications and Hillary Zwerdling with M&R Strategic Services.  You can check out a wrap up of their presentations by clicking here.

 Also, we'd like to give a shout out to the wonderful people at OneWorld.net and Interaction who also sponsored today's event.

 If you couldn't make it or call in, click through for some of the great takeaways.

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Post co-authored by James O'Malley and Justin Perkins.

With estimates up to 200 million members globally and 12% of all internet traffic, MySpace certainly earns the title of the "top dog" of social networks. Despite the more recent shift of attention to Facebook in the past 6 months by the nonprofit community, there are still remnants of a goldrush by nonprofits over the last year to build a presence on the uber-popular site. But was there ever any gold? And is there any left?  And what is the optimum combination of videos, pictures, text, friends, and other widgets? And is it even worth it?

Á la our Causes analysis awhile ago, we examined 150 nonprofit profiles on MySpace to see which functions people were using, how those features were working, and how much money their profiles were raising.

Whether you've stacked your profile with all the cool widgets, videos, and badges or you're still trying to figure out who "Tom" is, read on to learn what others are doing and how you can maximize your MySpace, or see if you even want to spend your time there.

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Mobile downloads, embedded video, and search engine optimization marketing might make us all bubbly inside, but a recent report in The McKinsey Quarterly posted on eMarketer showed that good ol' fashioned email was still the most popular digital marketing tool.

A survey of 311 marketing executives found that 83% used email, ahead of display ads, paid keyword search, and branded sponsorship. Furthermore, over half of respondents said they planned to increase their email spending in the next three years. Paid keyword search saw the greatest increase in spending, with email, branded sponsorship and referrals rounding out the top four.

What does this mean for you? For starters, make sure your blasts are readable, that they cut through the noise, and that they aren't labeled spam - it works!

To date, grantees generally avoid the Web 2.0 tools, at least according to a recent study by The Overbrook Foundation and Allison Fine examining how (and if) grantees were using Web 2.0. 

There are a ton of interesting findings in this report, including:

• Overall, the grantees are firmly entrenched in the Web 1.0 world, using the Internet for information, not interactivity.
  
• Only a small handful of grantees, such as WITNESS, the ACLU, Breakthrough, and WNYC Public Radio, significantly use social media to converse with constituents.
• Most grantees aren't using even common-place social media tools.  For example, only half of them have blogs, but only half of these groups allow comments on them.
• Survey respondent and group discussion participants often felt a "common struggle" in understanding which Web 2.0 tools are critically important to their work and were at a loss as to where and how to get help for selecting and using new social media tools.

These findings are intriguing, especially given the recent article by GEO that states grantmakers are beginning to increasingly use the Web 2.0 tools.  Hopefully, both grantmakers and grantees can meet somewhere in the middle of Web 2.0! Web 1.5 anyone?

 

If Web 2.0 was a local swimming pool, nonprofits would be the older kids hanging out by the diving boards while grantmakers still paddled around the shallow end.  Increasingly, however, grantmakers are swimming towards the deep end of Web 2.0, using social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, online video, and text messaging to accomplish their own goals.

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