Social Media for Non-Profits : A Lesson

After some hectic weeks and hard-laboured efforts to pull my organization out of some financial mess that they were venturing into, I am now back blogging. So I thought its best to talk about my experiences in the last few months with my work, The Social Media!

Few months back, we started a service for Non-Profits in the US to sign up with our SMM program and get to develop their Donor Database considerably. SMM is Social Media Marketing. The idea was to promote the Non-Profit’s ‘Message’ with the help of the easy access to the world population that we have on the Social Media portals. The approach had to be personal and the goal was planned to be donations. 5 months down the line we failed miserably in getting donations galore for our Non-Profit clients as we had promised earlier. Our Business model also suffered majorly since our costs were to be recovered from the share of these donations. Now, about the lessons learnt:

• Twitter is an extinguished tool now. It has not got the ability to attract attention towards a message being prompted there. More importantly it’s way too fast to catch another person’s attention. If you tweet about your non-profit then your followers would read it and at the best ‘help’ you by retweeting it. But as the statistics often showed us, a link tweeted was opened lesser times than been retweeted. But, having said that, it still remains the best tool to make an online conversation and gather individual attention if used in a personalized manner.


• The variety of Facebook is not properly used in most Social Media promotions. And we did the same mistake. Facebook is powerful and that’s not because of its huge reach which has propelled it to become the world’s second ranked website after Google. Their power is from the diverse ways of reach that they have envisaged for their users. The Apps like games and Causes, their Fan Pages and their Wall are all tools to reach out to more and more of the Facebook crowd.


• An Online campaign is never fruitful without an offline stimulus. There has to be some worthy good for the people who are promoting your cause or donating for you. The campaigns should be planned in such a way that they bring out a Viral motive to promote the cause. What that ‘motive’ is, would be the challenge.


• And finally, the most important aspect where we did miss out was to Phase the entire service program. Whatever campaign SMM or SEO that you run for a Non-Profit, the Non-Profit’s would not cease to send Email Messages or Appeals for donation. So, it was important for a SMM Campaigner of Non-Profits to store the contact details of all relevant donor prospects in one Database and reorganize a plan to utilize that data to convert them as donors.

It’s important for us to know that Social Media is just a buzzword and whatever way of campaigning works in gaining mass attention is to be treated in a dedicated yet unique manner because that is a SOLUTION. Every detailed aspect of such a campaign should be attaining a database of probable donors. That’s a step one should look at first and then move to the challenging part of conversions. I’ll write more in the nature and ideas in Social Media. Thanks for reading.

Beautiful Mind : Graeme Cowan

I came across Graeme in a bizarre manner. It’s another example of what the internet has made us; I love to call it “the neighbour effect”. I’ll not get into that story because here I intend to talk about another Beautiful Mind who became an online acquaintance of mine a few days back, Graeme Cowan.

He is a survivor, an author and a life mentor. I found his story very interesting and inspiring and immediately wanted to interview him for the blog. He obliged and I am really thankful to him for that. Graeme had a history of depression bouts and the last one which lasted from 2000 – 2005 was the worst one which even his psychiatrist acknowledges as one of the most difficult cases he had ever treated. But, he came back from the brink and since then he has tried to make an impact on all the depression ridden people in Australia with the help of his books, BACK FROM THE BRINK and BACK FROM THE BRINK TOO. In the interview I learnt from him about his plans to take the book and his endeavours outside Australia and reach out to millions of depression sufferers around the world. His long struggle against the world’s 2nd most fatally consequential disease prompted him to write these books which comprises of more than 250 interviews with people from different strata’s of life who have all gone through the anguish of depression and how they overcame it. These stories are possibly the best medicines to recover from depression. As Graeme puts it, stories of such people who overcame depression made him get better with every such interview.

His plans to take the books outside of Australia are what keeps him busy these days. I discussed with him, his plans which includes a trip to the US later this month. He hopes to find a publisher in the US so that the books are available in the US, by the end of this year. He would be visiting New York for the Book Expo America and signing copies of his books. Catch up with him there if you want to. He would also be meeting my friends in Chicago who would try to help him with his fine efforts. Interestingly, he has tried a lot of ways to promote himself and the books he wrote via his website www.iambackfromthebrink.com and visual media interactions in Australia, but he is yet to start-up a whole hearted social media attempt for promotion. I was particularly interested to know what kept him away and he reaffirmed the issues like lack of time and staff to manage a social media campaign as the primary concerns. It was a very interesting chat with him where he could foresee the effects of social media and I too was thrilled to help him. You can get in touch with Graeme by mailing him at graeme@graemecowan.com.au and on Twitter @DepressionCure.

This is a very precise interview that Graeme gave to the show, Wake Up ! WA

Beautiful Minds - Social Media : Wayne Mansfiled

Today, I got a chance to speak with Wayne Mansfield from Perth, Western Australia and it was great to know more about his ideas on internet marketing and social media in particular. He is a pioneer in email marketing since 1997 and has tried all the tricks to capture the attention of a regular netizen and convert them into business prospects. The concepts he shared were valuable and can be used by most non-profits around the world to gather a larger reach; and use their own smart ideas to convert that reach into donations.

Here are the excerpts from the 26 minute long interview.

aweblander: Thanks, for agreeing for this interview Wayne. Let me begin with your definition of social media.

waynemansfield: Well, social media constitutes of what we know as twitter, facebook, linkedin, youtube, myspace, blogs and all that. It is quicker and easier to build a personal one on one relationship with these tools than with the traditional internet marketing tool – the email. Social media works well for people interested in conversations and can be used in a very smart way to market a brand or product.

aweblander: Since you mentioned email marketing and you have such vast experience in that field, how do you see the impact of social media when compared to email marketing?

waynemansfield: I have been a involved with internet marketing for the last 15 years and with my experiences I can say that email is and will be the most strong tool for marketing on the internet. So, social media with all its good virtues will have to inflate the email databases of a prospective marketer. Social media’s impact has been huge and in the last few years. twitter, linkedin and youtube has helped me to reach out to about 25 million users online. I have 56,000 followers on twitter which helps me to reach out to 7 million users and my 6,500 level - 1 contacts on linkedin fetched me visibility to more than 18 million users. Also, our videos uploaded on youtube have an average of 30,000 views on a 24 hour basis. So, as you can see the numbers are incredible and social media with its wings of viral marketing can really make it big for an internet marketer.

aweblander: Where do you see social media 5 years from now?

waynemansfield: Ow!! it certainly has a long way to go. It can be really valuable if used smartly and restrictively. If you have followed my work on facebook or twitter, you can probably understand what I mean. Friendships are one thing and business another. Social media with its personal touch could help one to create an online influence which could also help to grow opportunities from a business perspective. So , yes depending upon how it is used I do believe that social media will flourish in the coming 5 years.

aweblander: Coming back to non-profits, if you had an opportunity to raise funds for a non-profit via social media, how would you be doing that?

waynemansfield: I do donate to http://www.kiva.org/ and help other entrepreneurs to revive themselves. Incidentally, I got to know Kiva from a Canadian friend of mine called Mike whom I had met online as well. Also, we have a charity of our own that funds the education of children from sick households who could not complete their education due to various issues .And we had major success with social media in raising funds for them. What we do basically, is have different identities on social media websites and share stories about these students. A recent graduation party that we attended for Corridors College was mentioned on twitter and facebook and it brought in a lot of attention from the online folks.

aweblander: This would be my penultimate question. Is it difficult to manage a social media campaign given the amount of activities involved and its interactive nature? I mean email marketing is one way traffic where one would not be flooded with instant replies, whereas social media thrives on immediate response. How do you think this can be tackled without a huge support staff?

waynemansfield: Its true that managing social media is tough and that’s why objectives have to be very clear. I limit my twitter usage for half an hour before the start of work everyday and half an hour before I end and that’s usually is enough for me to keep the network buzzing. But for a campaign where one has to write a blog and post videos on youtube and microblog all of them via twitter and facebook, it becomes really difficult to manage all that. I use tools like tweetdeck and friendfeed which helps to manage these social media activities from one dashboard. Infact, I would recommend tweetdeck highly because with the upgrades they did last week, now one can also update their facebook accounts from there as well as follow their facebook friends. Our developers have been working on a dashboard to pull in data from the social media websites and help manage the activities. So, to answer your question, it is indeed difficult to manage social media but certainly some tools are there online to help you do that.

aweblander: And finally Wayne, would you like to share your social media contact ids with us.

waynemansfield: Yes of course. I am not personally involved on facebook, its more of a corporate account. However on twitter and linkedin I am waynemansfield. And our newsletter portal – The Maverick Spirit, which is very popular all over this part of the world is http://www.au1865.com/. This is my way of remembering the registration number of my first car. You can also get access to my active blog @ Confessions from a Boy from Margaret River.

aweblander: Wayne, thanks so much for your time and thoughts. It was wonderful to know so much from you.

waynemansfield: no problem. Let me know when you get this posted. Bye.

My lesson from this interview was that skypecap records video sans the sound for skype 3.8.0. So, I ended up recording a mute interview of Wayne from skype. And you all are missing all the good words he spoke about my questions ;-). But, it was good that I was noting down his views as well. Sorry about it Wayne. But, thanks a lot again for taking out the time.

Beautiful Minds...Coming Soon !!

I know, I know. I am sorry for not having blogged for so long. But I do have an excuse, and a very good one at that. I was busy knowing people who are absolute inspirations to the field of work I have made myself belong to. And, I am so enamoured with the concept of helping non-profits with social media and any online web 2.0 medium that I have hunted out my role models here. Tony Hsieh, David J Neff, Beth Kanter, Wayne Mansfield, Jamie Inman, Jordan Viator and so many more such beautiful and awesome minds are all my role models. I wish and I hope to get them to talk more and more about their unique ideas and how those can be linked to non profit causes with the internet as the medium. I am loving this. The sea of knowledge that these wonderful minds have, can be translated into technically strong web-apps and get help for all the creatures of god!! Isn’t that amazing! Guys...I am not being spiritual here...just being human. Anyways...keep reading my blog where I promise to bring you at least one interview every week and I would live all the conversations tagged with them. Follow me @sumitory001 and mail me sumitroy001@gmail.com if you want to know more. Thanks. Keep helping !

In pic (clockwise from L to R): Jordan Viator, Tony Hsieh, Beth Kanter, David J Neff, Jamie Inman and Wayne Mansfield.

Understanding Non Profits

I spent most of last week gathering an impression of the Non Profit philosophy in the US. We’ll be soon working upon a Fundraising Product which would include multiple machineries to popularize the cause for an NPO and subsequently encourage donations. Frankly, the study left me amazed with the innovative methodologies that the NPOs are following for publicity and fundraising. Also, there still are lots of unheralded opportunities that can be utilized to propagate a cause.
I was much interested in the web aspect of these Non Profits which is governed by using the Web 2.0 methods like social media, social bookmarking, SEO etc. This interview clip from the David J Neff (great work mate) made me sit up and take notice of this Non Profit - WEB 2.0 model.

It’s absolutely amazing to find role models on the web and learn from the good work they have put up. For a beginner like me who knows social media but isn’t much aware about the Non Profit concepts, David is brilliant. He keeps things simple and effective. It has been a real education following his work on the web. So here’s what I learnt:
1. Establishing a Web presence.
- To begin with, the tools from Facebook, MySpace or Youtube can help to establish a web presence. This helps to organize a future collaborative reach for any cause. If the person (brand) is active and popular then the chances of the any petition reaching out to a wider audience increases.

2. Promoting specific actions or petitions.
- People check their email when they want to read and write. They log in to Facebook or MySpace when they want to take action. For many, an email petition is an annoyance to be deleted, while Facebook applications are fun, social, and available when you're ready to click a button, add your name to a petition, volunteer a little something about yourself, and compare your responses with friends. If you know and respect their culture, social networking sites can be an effective way to encourage people to take action or spread the word about your cause.

3. Consolidating existing, unofficial social networks related to your cause.
- Joining is more effective than Creating. That’s the mantra for social networking. Wasting time to popularize an ideal petition community may just end up killing your time. There are communities and networks which echo a similar cause and have a sizeable list of followers. It’s wiser to use it instead of creating a new community.

4. Informal outreach that blends the personal and professional.
- Befriending your professional rivals (on the web) and ideating together with them increases the possibilities to network online. This can always be used to help promote a professional cause.

5. Researching VIPs, potential associates, and others.
- Just the way I found David. Tons of information is available on these social networking sites. This is the best way to learn and upgrade knowledge (best practices).

6. Encourage and respond to constituent feedback quickly.
- Social networks are a great way to test your commitment to open communication if you want to get quick and honest feedback. Make it as easy as possible for people to find you and make requests (either within the site, or privately), and make sure you respond quickly, personally, and where appropriate, publicly. This creates a viral effect of dependency for any fellow networker to rely on you for most future assignments.

It’ll be great to know more about Social Media ideas in Non Profits. Ill be writing more on this soon.
Thanks again David for all your online materials.