Non-Profit Chas

About a year ago, I created a Camp Fire USA Facebook page for our council: a tiny non-profit with a lot of history and not a lot of resources. I threw our logo up there, I tossed in a quick event, and that’s pretty much it. No real content to speak of. I invited one or two people to be fans, and they did. But since there was no content, there was no reason to share it, and the total fans grew to an astonishing 8 people.

Last week, I went back to the page and added photos, a video, and several events. I spruced things up. And then I invited another 8-10 people I knew who were passionate about Camp Fire and our programs.

Two weeks later…

Our fan count is in the 80s. It continues to grow by at least a few every day. We’ve gotten inquiries directly related to exposure on the Facebook page. Given our small organization and the cost (in time and money) this is a very inexpensive way to reach more people.

Realization #1: This is what I do.

I breathe marketing. I live on the web and in social media. I’m a digital-freaking-native. There’s no excuse for me to not realize how I could have been applying all of these skills to Camp Fire. That said, I’ve opened my eyes to the possibilities that I so very often advise my clients on.

Realization #2: Social networking is our marketing priority and we’ve been doing it the hard way.

People choose camp programs based on trust, price, and recommendations. We’ve got a very competitive price, so we’re left trying to build trust and get recommendations. Fortunately, our customers tend to be very passionate about our product. So we’ve spent a lot of our time and money trying to equip them to make recommendations for us via offline social networking (i.e., talk to your friends about us, here are brochures you can pass on). It’s been tough – people are busy, they’re uncomfortable with such a directed process, and so on. Facebook (and other online social networking sites) are effortless and natural. Parents of our campers are on Facebook. Their friends are on Facebook. What were we waiting for?

Realization #3: It’s a better ROI.

We have great retention rates for our campers. Kids want to come back, parents are pleased, and we stay in touch throughout the year so the return rates are wonderful. The challenge we have is reaching new parents and kids. We do all kinds of direct and indirect marketing to try and acquire new campers, but the aforementioned trust and recommendation factors leave us fighting an uphill battle. Social networking is precisely the approach we need, and it’s likely to pay off much better than a stack of flyers on a random store counter.

“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” Desiderius Erasmus

The Land of the Blind

Let’s make a generalization: If you work for a non-profit organization, you are living in the past. You’re doing something outdated, for reasons you can’t quite articulate, and at an unknown cost – especially consider the opportunity cost of doing something less efficient.

Fortunately for you, the eager non-profiteer, so is everyone else. Here are three stories (no names, to save face) of non-profits that might sound familiar:

Tools: the Legacy Computer

In 2006, one organization I knew had a very old computer sitting in the corner of the office. It served one purpose: to host a very old piece of donor management software on a very old operating system. Only one person knew how to use this software, and it wasn’t very helpful anyway. Not only that, but it was increasingly difficult to support the failing hardware. There were dozens of opportunities to upgrade or find a new system over the course of about a decade. The cost to the organization was measured in lots of time and the occasional hardware replacement.

Professional Development: It’s Getting Worse Every Day

“If you aren’t getting better, you’re getting worse.” Executives, employees, and board members need to invest some portion of their time in professional development to get better at what they do, or they’ll soon find themselves incompetent. Worse yet, they won’t even know they’re incompetent.

A large non-profit had very low turnover, which meant that hundreds of its employees had been in essentially the same job for 15+ years. These employees were more likely to be unhappy, but wouldn’t quit their jobs. They weren’t let go because they were technically doing their work, but they weren’t providing the value of their more engaged, productive counterparts. This meant that the more engaged employees were more likely to get assignments, sometimes overworking them. The cost to the organization is in lost opportunities, some unnecessary overtime, and higher turnover of the best employees.

Process: File, Print, Repeat

A few years ago, another organization needed to print about 900 letters to fold, stuff, and mail to constituents. One of the staff members dedicated an entire day to hitting File > Print and then printing a single copy. Once it was printed, she did this again. Two down. After a whole day of the most inefficient software use I’ve ever heard of, someone found out and pointed out that she could just hit File > Print and enter the quantity to print out. The cost to the organization was 7+ hours of this employee’s time, and the cost of her pay.

Be the King

Nearly every non-profit is under-resourced and over-burdened, leaving no time or money to invest in new tools, professional development, re-evaluating their processes, and so on.

What these non-profits rarely realize is that they could save money and time by investing in those resources. There’s an ROI on many of these things, and it’s worth investigating.

It doesn’t take much to gain a tremendous advantage over other organizations while freeing up your own resources. There are tons of ways to do it: books, seminars, networking, and lots of online options:

• Delicious.com general non-profit links
• Delicious.com non-profit technology links
• Idealware: Reports and Articles
• TechSoup – Technology Donations and Discounts
• TechSoup Learning Center
• NTEN Learning/Resources

• Non-Profit Blogs at AllTop.com

  Tip: If you’re new to reading blogs or you can’t find time to keep up with them check out my Feed Reader 101 post on how to keep tabs on thousands of articles each month in as little time as possible.

This week, I marveled at the power of social media:

• I posted a blog article about Laws of Client Work that got some link love, resulting in some nice traffic, new subscribers, and great connections.
• On eduStyle I got feedback from other higher ed web folks about some of our recently launched Notre Dame websites, revealing some browser quirks our team needed to fix.
• Brazen Careerist featured one my posts on their homepage, introducing me to new readership.
• Several of my friends and followers posted links to my stuff on Twitter, leading their followers to suddenly begin following me.

  How to take advantage of the social media attention

  1. Meet new followers. When I get a comment on my posts or a new follower on Twitter, I check out their profile or website. If they’re interested in me, I might be interested in them.

  2. Subscribe to your new friends. I like to give a trial run on new blogs and twitter users… if I follow a user, it’s because I am want their contributions – not just another number on my profile. Twitter isn’t about a high score to me. If it doesn’t work out – if I find myself skipping past their content regularly, I’ll unsubscribe.

  3. Listen. As I wrote in Shut Up and Listen to the Internet it’s easy to find conversations pretty much in real time. If you’re an active member of the community, no matter how small your role, you can be better prepared to respond if you know what’s going on.

  3. Participate in the conversation. I try to post responses in my comments, but I also make an effort to comment on the new blogs I’m trying out. My network grew a little bit, and it helps to strengthen those new ties by reaching out.

  4. Follow up with new, contextually relevant content that offers some value. My social media post did fairly well, so now I’m following up with my suggestions on what to do with it. It’s the second half of the story.

  5. Suggest something else. I always hate landing on a blog with a fantastic article and then discovering that they’re a one hit wonder. I might want more of the same. If you have other good content, offer a route to those posts or that might interest your visitors. I added my table of contents page as a way to do that, but I’m already planning on reworking it to better introduce new visitors to my blog. I love the “related posts” approach on sites like RailsTips.

  Keep the momentum

  The biggest tip of all is that you have to be consistent and maintain your momentum. You’ve done a lot of work to build your network and brand so far, so don’t let it slide by taking a month off and disappearing. Keep writing, keep networking, and keep the conversation going.

In my first job, I worked with a big healthcare client. They had built a new building and spared no expense. We worked with them to create a unique, powerful online community for their patients to communicate with doctors, staff, and each other. They would maintain an online journal (before the word blog was popular) and customize their experience. It was a social network for cancer patients. Six months and a lot of money later, we launched the site.

Nobody used it. Two years (and a lot more money) later, it still hadn’t been used.

Why? The client didn’t have time to mess with it. They never distributed logins to their patients. They never promoted it. They simply didn’t give it any attention. Eventually, it just disappeared.

Social media are just tools. And like any tool, you have to know how to use it, what it’s good for, and what it’s not good for. And as with any tool, you can come up with creative, unintended uses that might do the trick.

I caught myself feeling a bit disappointed today when I realized that I hadn’t really invested myself in a particular LinkedIn network. I don’t go back to check for posts, network with people, or create new content.

Then I thought about the dozen other social networks I don’t check regularly. LinkedIn, Ning, and Facebook groups… I can’t be the number one contributor on them all. Plus writing for two blogs, Tumblr, and Twitter. I’m spread so thin across the Internet that I don’t really have any effect in any of those places.

The question isn’t “should I do social media?”, but rather “how should I do social media?” And the answer is “as well as I can manage.”

I’m embarrassed to admit that Camp Fire doesn’t take online donations. In preparation for an appeal letter, I decided to buckle down and set it up. I’m going to use PayPal because we already have a PayPal account and it’s a quick way to take online donations without a lot of hassle.

How to Accept Online Donations

1. Sign up for a PayPal account, or sign in if you have one.

2. Go get a donation button:

Generate a button using their button wizard or grab the code and modify it manually.

3. Place it on your website. I created a donate now page I can use (and continually tweak) as a landing page. I also added it to the homepage and sidebar of our website so it was available from anywhere.

4. Options (beyond 5 minutes): I also took advantage of the custom thanks and cancellation page options to set up thank you messages and direct any abandoned donations back to our site. I wanted these to be in my control, not left to a generic message from PayPal.

5. Add conversion goals to your Google Analytics account. You do have analytics, right? Set one goal for getting people to your donate page and another goal for having them visit your thanks page (because they actually donated).

PayPal vs. Other Options

In the future, I’ll look to streamlining the process and moving as much of the form into my own site. I’ll let someone else continue to handle the transaction – I don’t want to store or even see credit card numbers. But I want as much of the experience and layout in my control as possible.

I’ve also looked into other services like Network For Good but the fees are higher. There is a trade-off, though – more customization, reporting, and fundraising tools. As we develop our online giving and have some expectations on volume, I hope to move to something more powerful.