Lessons Learned When Your Community Revolts

There are three pillars to building an online community and engaging on social media channels:

1. Honesty, transparency, and being upfront.

2. Listening and being responsive to members of the community no matter how lame or silly you find the questions or feedback.

3. Thanking your community for their support, feedback and guidance. 

If you don’t practice these principals every single day somewhere along the way your community is going to revolt. And it won’t be pretty.

For example, yesterday, Planned Parenthood released a statement saying that the Susan G. Komen Foundation would not be renewing grants to support 19 local Planned Parenthood affiliates, which provided 170,000 clinical breast exams and 6,400 mammogram referrals to women in low-income communities through the Komen grant. According to Jessica Pieklo on the Care2 Cause Channel, last year’s grant totaled about $680,000.

Komen said that they cut their funding because Rep. Cliff Sterns (R-FL) launched a congressional investigation into whether or not Planned Parenthood was using public money on abortions. Since Komen has implemented more stringent eligibility standards to safeguard donor dollars “consequently, some organizations are no longer eligible to receive Komen grants,” said Komen in a press release yesterday.

How did the women’s community including many of Komen’s donors, Facebook fans, and followers on Twitter and Race for the Cure team leaders react?

They revolted.

Once the news began to spread, women and men of all ages flocked to Komen’s page on Twitter and Facebook and posted emotional and heart felt messages, expressing their sadness and anger over Komen’s decision to take away funding for breast cancer screening services.

What's more telling than this communal reaction is Komen's response to its own community's revolt. They went dark for 24 hours. Not a peep on Twitter or Facebook even as supporters continued to post thousands of messages on social networks and let's not forget the buzz that grew offline, around dinner tables, and office water coolers. Some members of Komen’s Facebook page even said that their comments were deleted.

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Email: Still Not Dead!

Mark Zuckerberg is a pioneer of the social web. Over the last eight years he’s led Facebook from a scrappy startup to one of the most powerful and influential companies. But when Zuckerberg says that email is going to die because young people prefer to text, you can’t help but laugh at the irony since providing your email address is actually how you register for a Facebook account. Despite how the web has transformed over the years, email is the one constant that has remained and is not going away anytime soon.

For example: Looking to sign up for more information about your favorite nonprofit? You need to provide an email address to sign up for their enewsletter. Looking to purchase an item on the web? You usually need an email address to check out and buy the item. Looking to make a donation? You need to provide an email address. Want to send a document to a colleague; chances are you are going to email it at some point unless everyone who you do business with is on Dropbox or Google Docs (which by the way you also need an email address to sign up for).

Email continues to grow and to be the dominant communications tool. And despite what Zuckerberg and some others think, email is not dying because social media is taking over. Both channels are important and should be a part an integrated communications strategy to reach activists and donors.

"Social media is a great additional engagement channel, but we find the level of commitment and responsiveness much stronger in email.  Email is still king in the demographic groups that are most likely to become donors," said Joe Baker, Vice President of Causes and Advocacy for Care2, a social action network which serves more than 700 nonprofit clients, across the spectrum of cause verticals.

Check out these email stats:

There are an estimated 2.9 billion email addresses.  In comparison there are 750 million Facebook accounts and 300 million Twitter accounts.

By 2014 there will be over 3.8 billion email accounts.

188 billion emails are sent daily, though granted a portion of those are spam. Over on Facebook, 60 million Facebook updates are made and 140 million tweets are sent through Twitter (and many of those could be considered spam too!).

**Learn more about improving your emails by downloading our free white paper, 12 Best Practices for Email Marketing.

Six Tips To Kick-Start Your 2012 Fundraising

Nonprofits receive up to 40% of their online donations at the end of the year since the holidays have people feeling generous, and donors also want to maximize those tax deductions before year’s end. But this doesn’t happen by magic – people donate money to your organization because they feel a connection to your organization and the issues you work on. They believe in what you do. That takes staying in touch with your donors all year, cultivating and deepening your relationships with them, and making sure your supporters have the information that inspires them to donate.

So how did you do in 2011? Is it time to make some resolutions for 2012, so you can raise more money in 2012? Here are some online marketing strategies Convio recently outlined in their whitepaper “Utilize Your Year-End Momentum” that you can start working on right now, so that when “that time” rolls around again, you’ll be better positioned to reach your online fundraising goals.

Build Your List

Make sure you’re capturing email addresses whenever and wherever you can. There are a few key ways to build your list. Paid acquisition is one of the fastest ways to build you list. Social action networks like Care2 and the Petition Site which has about 12 million unique site visitors per month, and is the 140th (on average) highest traffic website in the U.S does paid acquisition campaigns for hundreds of nonprofits. Their Petition Site has attracted 40,000 new citizen petitions this year alone.

Utilize the Google Adwords grants. As a 501C3 you can get between $10K and $40K worth of free Google Adwords.

Encourage those who respond to your postal mail, telephone appeals, and special events to sign up for your email list – offer incentives like special content, matching gifts, and online premiums.

Use Multiple Channels

Don’t be shy about reaching out to people across multiple channels. “Savvy organizations are adopting a multi-channel approach to convert online acquired prospects, using email first, followed up by mail, then telemarketing to maximize conversion rates. Our research shows that direct mail donors who also receive email give two times as much and renew at 10% higher rates than those just receiving email,” Convio said.

Segment Your List

The key to building relationships with your supporters is to know more about them. For example, what issue were they first recruited on? What campaigns have they taken action on or donated money to? Use that information to deliver the content most relevant to them.

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New Book "Share, Retweet, Repeat" Reveals the Secrets of Viral Campaigning

Books about online marketing are hit or miss. They’re either just too basic, or else they’re bone dry technical. But the latest contribution to the genre – “Share, Retweet, Repeat: Get Your Message Read and Spread” -- from veteran online marketing whiz John Hlinko, is a terrific read. In fact it should be scooped up by any Frogloop reader who aspires to getting their messages to “go viral.”

And that’s why we’re going to hold a February 1st drawing to give away three free copies of Hlinko’s book to Frogloop readers. To be in the drawing, all you need to do is write a comment on this post (a relevant one, please), and then click the button to share the post via Facebook or Twitter before midnight on Jan. 31^st. It will only take a minute and, trust me, you’ll be really happy if you win this book.

Hlinko’s book deconstructs the most successful online campaigns, dissecting their opening premises, their attention grabber “hooks,” their visual aids, their choice of messengers and their distribution and promotion tactics. In this way, he identifies which elements helped the most in making the campaigns "go viral." And his tips for using Facebook, Twitter, blogs and email are up to date and first rate. Most importantly though, this book is genuinely fun to read. It obviously was written to make us laugh while we learn.

It helps that Hlinko is possibly the most gifted wit in the progressive politics and advocacy space, deftly mixing satire and puns to grab you, make you smile, and get you to forward his stuff to your friends. Just read John’s posts on Progressive Exchange, sometimes in repartee with Sea Change Strategies Mark Rovner, and you’ll see what I mean. Or check out his bio, here. Hlinko is also a veteran of the commercial marketing world, having worked with leading ad agency creative directors. This enables him to provide great examples to illustrate points.

Along with Seth Godin’s books, and the great “Made to Stick” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, this new online marketing gem -- “Share, Retweet, Repeat” -- definitely deserves to be on your shelf of really useful books about creative messaging and marketing. You’ll read it at one long sitting and then refer to it again and again.

Below is an Exclusive Interview with the author himself.

FIVE INSIGHTFUL QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS WITH AUTHOR JOHN HLINKO

CO: OK here is my one serious question for you: In talking about advertising options, you discuss Cost per Thousand ("CPM") pricing and Cost per Click ("CPC") pricing. Why didn't you include "Cost per Lead" (CPL) pricing -- such as we use for Care2 clients?

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Infographic: Why People Use Social Media

NM Incite, a Nielsen McKinsey company surveyed 1,865 adult (18+) social media users about what motivates them to friend people on social networks, and what causes them to dump their friends. As nonprofits invest more time into cultivating people on Facebook and followers on Twitter, this is helpful data to review. According to NM Incite's research, the majority of social media users (82%) friend someone because they know them in real life - meaning real life friendships drive online relationships. I would not be surprised to see if this correlated similarly to social media users who friend organizations that they feel conntected to and are active donors or activists. Why do people unfriend or unfollow? 55% said that they dump Facbook friends because of offensive comments. 20% remove friends due to lack of interactions, so be sure you update your Facebook page regularly with engaging content and that you spend time interacting with your members on Facebook. Don’t just use it to post items and then walk away and not engage in conversation. Another 14% says that they remove friends due to political content.

Another set of survey questions had to do with what people are using social media for. While there was not a category related to getting involved with charitable organizations, it was interesting to note that 60% of people use social media to learn more about consumer products and over 60% read consumer feedback. 54% use social media to provide positive feedback and 51% use it to provide negative feedback.

How do people that follow your nonprofit on social media use it for commentary? Are you getting an equal amount of positive and negative commentary or is the majority positive?

Other interesting data of social media activity includes:

Is Facebook Good for Fundraising?

The answer really depends on how you define "fundraising". I recently had the pleasure of being a guest on Tony Martignetti's NonProfit podcast. The topic of this particular podcast was how nonprofits can best use Facebook. One thing Tony and I talked about was the difference between fundraising with Facebook and collecting donations with Facebook and how understanding the difference is absolutely critical.

Facebook stinks for collecting donations

Razoo recently published research showing that 33% of online donations come from e-mail appeals, while only 7% come from Facebook. Shocking, I know. However, it would be a mistake to conclude that Facebook is a waste of time.

Facebook is awesome for fundraising

Making a value judgment on Facebook based only on donations received completely overlooks the inherent value that Facebook offers.

Facebook creates awareness for your campaign

When was the last time you actually forwarded an e-mail appeal to a few friends? Exactly. Facebook's strength is in the reach that's created as users talk about your campaign. Your fundraising strategy should include ways to get people to converse about the cause. The more they talk about it, the more their friends become aware of your fundraising campaign.

Facebook helps begin relationships with donors

So let's say that one of your current Facebook fans makes a few comments on your page, and one of their friends becomes interested in that conversation. They click over to your page, add their own comments, and become a new fan. You just acquired a future potential donor! And although they probably won't donate to your cause any time soon, they might in the future.

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Why Social Media Can Suck

In the past 10-15 years the Internet and mobile devices have truly transformed the way we communicate with people both professionally and socially. We don’t send people letters via postal carrier much anymore. We email them, text them, tweet them and tag them on Facebook. It has also changed the way we do business. Organizations aren’t just raising money through direct mail and phone banking – they are raising money through email fundraising appeals, their websites, and, to an extent, through text-to-give campaigns. Businesses aren’t just sending households coupons anymore, they are offering daily deals on sites like LivingSocial or sending out discount codes on social networks after you “like” them on Facebook or follow them on Twitter.

And while a gazillion blogs ranging from Mashable to news networks like CNN are writing about how awesome social media is as a marketing vehicle and social connector (and yes there are some great case studies), are people paying the price by giving up their personal data without blinking an eye? Does anyone have a problem with Facebook dictating what they think that we think is important through secret algorithms? What about proprietary algorithms like Klout that provide social scores to show brands or people’s “influence”? As organizations continue to invest more and more staff and resources into them, they should understand that social media is not all pretty rainbows that lead to a pot of gold. Social media can totally suck too. Here’s why.

Copyright: Who Really Owns Your Photos, Video and Media?

A lot of organizations and people maybe surprised to learn that when you post media such as videos, songs, and photos to social networks like Facebook and YouTube, you grant them (and sometimes their partners) a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license, to use your work, reproduce it and distribute it including for promotional purposes. And guess what? Because it’s royalty-free they don’t have to pay you a dime even if they used footage of that awesome video you directed in one of their TV ads. Check out YouTube’s terms on section 6C (similar clauses can be found on many network's terms of service). And guess what, they don’t even have to notify you that they used it.  

Your Brand Or Profile Photo Could Be Used For Product Endorsements Without Consent

It seems that Facebook maybe thinking about giving third party apps or networks the right to use your name or pictures in ads in the future. If you dig into their Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, it contains a tiny clause and a link about your right not to appear in third party ads. It then leads you to another link and after a while you finally see a clause that says “Facebook does not give third party applications or ad networks the right to use your name or picture in ads. If we allow this in the future, the [privacy] setting you choose will determine how your information is used.” This could have a huge impact on nonprofits, brands, and people who could potentially be used in ads; serving as endorsements without ever realizing or granting the company or even political campaign permission. Check your settings now!

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