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Social Media for Social Good – Casey Golden, Small Act

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A few weeks ago, I attended an event at the Foundation Center on Social Media for Social Good. Being a sucker for these subjects, despite my experience, there’s always something interesting to learn. Particularly from case studies, and how nonprofits (a sector I’ve had little exposure to), are employing social communications.

The keynote speaker was Casey Golden of Small Act, a software and consulting company that helps nonprofits and associations better manage their social media. If you’re interested, here’s his video presentation and slides. While touching on many principles I’ve spoken about before, here are some notable things mentioned.

In a customer relationship lifecycle, the first donation isn’t the hardest to get. It’s the second. 75-95% of all donations are one time, and represent what Casey calls the “guilt gift”. Between the 1st and 2nd stage is the donor cultivation process, where it’s crucial to develop an emotional connection with the donor where they can become interested in your cause and in which a 2nd gift comes from the heart. After that, 3rd and subsequent donations become dramatically easier.

Although participating in the social media sphere is quite easy in terms of publishing, while listening and engagement take more work, there is a lot of noise out there. I couldn’t agree more. While people who are interested in your brand can actively seek out or passively subscribe to your media updates across channels on their own terms, the available media stream is huge. The more they passively follow other brands, amongst whatever other activities they’re online for, the less your brand’s messages will get noticed. So while email subscriptions don’t offer the same level of continuous engagement, they are the most reliable format for delivering a focused message that’s by far more likely to be seen, and which can be personalized to the user’s interests.  For this reason, it’s best to think of social media participation as the outer rim of a customer relationship funnel.

So while there is a lot of noise, friends do filter the good stuff out through curation and sharing (social media, email, voice). Relevance to pre-existing interests is of course extremely helpful. But no matter what, great messaging principles (like Chip & Dan Heath’s SUCCES) and stories get people’s attention and can draw emotional appeal. Examples include Charity Water’s use of short form videos, and St. Jude’s Hospital focusing on people, “It’s not Cancer, It’s Jenny.”

This type of approach, continuously used, allows nonprofits to then grow their relationships with donors. Bring them along your journey and allow them to experience your impact through visceral communications including photography, video, and damn good text stories. Find your core supporters online and promote their related, positive contributions in social media channels and email. “Make a deposit in their emotional bank”. Give them content they’d want to share, knowing that people are MUCH more likely to share good news versus calamitous, negative content. After all, the content we share is a reflection of who we are, and I’m prone to think that we’d be more willing to share positivity, no?

Track and organize your relationships. This comes down to software mostly, in tracking who the more active voices are in your immediate and related communities. If you know what’s important to them, then you can target them with relevant content and requested actions, on an individual or group basis. A few cool examples Casey shared were from the Humane Society that runs themed weekdays including “Take Action Tuesday”, and community photo albums associated with “Mutt Monday” and “Feline Friday”.

Lastly, here are Casey’s tips to start building:

  1. Focus on a single campaign
  2. Find key, core influencers who are passionate
  3. Ask questions and engage folks
  4. Provide updates about what’s happening on the ground
  5. Celebrate campaign success and the people’s contributions

Doing this allows you to build trust, good will, and makes future contributions more likely.


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