30 thoughts-social-not-for-profits

Page 1 | 30 thoughts from social not-for-profits | October 2011

30 thoughts from social not-for-profits

Max St John, Lead consultant, not-for-profit and public sector | [email protected] | 01273 764023


Introduction Social by the Sea is a one day conference that convenes some of the UK’s foremost not-for-profits to talk about the current challenges and opportunities presented by social media.

Digital and social technologies are starting to play a part at nearly every level of large organisations and this collaborative forum aims to help everyone learn faster by sharing their problems, ideas and tips on best practice.

For the first event WWF-UK, the RSPCA, Oxfam, Age UK and Marie Curie all made it down to Brighton for a day of lively discussions and this report aims to capture 30 ideas, challenges and current trends that came out of those conversations.


Our survey said… We surveyed all of our attendees, from digital, fundraising, campaigning, press, brand and programmes teams, across five of the UK’s foremost charities.

We asked them how important social media is for their organisation, how well it has been adopted and what impact it’s having on the internal culture.

We found that while over half believed that social media is one of the best ways to increase their charity’s impact, only 25% thought that social had been fully embraced by the organisation.

However, 55% of respondents thought that social media was changing the culture of their charity, showing that the impact is being felt despite its wider adoption taking time.

Conversations over the day showed that social media is now a part of most people’s day-to-day work but there are still big issues to address – from who ‘owns’ social media to whether team structures and planning processes need to change…


30 Thoughts

Advice & Best Practice


30 Thoughts

Get the basics right, first. Make sure that social media is built into all of the touchpoints (your website, printed collateral, email) you have with your audience. Don’t just link, share content – publish Facebook discussions in your supporter magazine, allow people to follow you on Twitter without leaving your website and sign up for your email newsletters through your Facebook page, for example.


30 Thoughts

Don’t leave social until last. Whether you’re redesigning your website or putting together the comms plan for a campaign, don’t wait until the last minute to work out how social media fits in. Make sure social media is part of the planning process and considered as a two-way channel, and you might produce a website or campaign which generates a community of advocates. Leave it as an add-on and it will end up as another channel for push messaging.


30 Thoughts

Ask them what they want. Don’t just assume you know what your supporters want to hear from you through social spaces – ask them, using tools like Facebook Questions, or SurveyMonkey, what they’re most interested in and how often they want updates. Use this not just to inform the kind of content that you publish but how your internal editorial process needs to work, to minimise the extra effort and to make sure people will get a respsonse.


30 Thoughts

Be rigorous. If you’re planning a campaign, it’s essential that social media is factored into your evaluation, and that you report on it with the same degree of rigor that you would apply to your other comms channels. Building social into your evaluation reports in the right way demonstrates that it’s a credible part of your organisation’s work, generates valuable insight into what works and what doesn’t, and builds confidence. But, make sure you that you…


30 Thoughts

Think before you measure. Social media is digital, so that makes it innately measurable, but measuring everything is time consuming and not necessarily useful. Don’t just report on Likes of a page or ReTweets because you can – think about your objectives and the metrics that might demonstrate progress towards achieving them, and if you can’t think of any, maybe you shouldn’t be measuring it at all.


30 Thoughts

Crises don’t wait for sign-off. Mandatory sign-off periods and multiple approvals don’t work for social media. Time and again it’s been shown that sticking to the old rules mean that a reputational crisis could be in full swing before the copy for a response has been finalised. Rethink the processes, ask hard questions about attitudes to risk, and make sure you can react fast enough to mitigate against potential negative situations becoming full-blown reputational crises.


30 Thoughts

Don’t lose sight of what works. We shouldn’t get carried away and prioritise social media over some of the tried and tested things that deliver. Testing and innovating always carries a degree of risk, so we need to manage that risk in a way that doesn’t compromise our ability to do what people support us for. Underpin your plans with what you’re confident will work for your intended audience and build the new stuff on top of that.


30 Thoughts

Protect your space. Everyone wants to talk to your Facebook fans – from Fundraising and Campaigns to your corporate partners. Think very carefully about the mix of messages and their timing, or risk presenting a very confusing experience and engaging with only a small number of people, in a shallow way. Think about how you can integrate your messaging or whether you need to segment your audiences into new communities.


30 Thoughts

Conversation vs education. Prompting and maintaining conversations is a lot more time intensive than simply educating audiences, but if you carry on doing what you’ve always done, you’ll always get the same results (while everyone else moves on). Make sure you strike the right balance between the push messaging that the organisation might be used to, and the thing that social media is best used for – asking, listening and discussing.


30 Thoughts

Don’t make an app for that. Innovating for the sake of it is not necessarily good. The important thing is to find the right solution to the problem, not simply the most innovative. Focus on the problem, the people and think about your strategy, before you start thinking about the tools or technologies you might use. This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be allowed the time or space to try new things for fun – serendipity can be powerful.


30 Thoughts

Appoint a curator. Empower and encourage anybody to create content for your social media spaces, but manage this through shared tools like a Google spreadsheet or an internal wiki – but give the power to publish to someone who knows and cares about your community. Let them decide what goes up, and when, and how it’s framed with your Facebook fans or Twitter followers.


30 Thoughts

Education can be organic. There’s a lot of learning to be done around social media, depending on who you are and what you do within an organisation. Formal training and social media drop-ins can be really effective but sometimes just identifying a few enthusiastic people within your organisation – and empowering them to help their colleagues ‘get it’ a bit more can be a low-intensity way of encouraging a change in skills and attitude.


30 Thoughts

Ideas and innovation


30 Thoughts

Innovation is not invention. Doing things differently doesn’t need to involve technology. Making social media work for our organisations or campaigns can be about changing the way we think about how communications are planned, or setting up new forums for conversations around social media. Celebrate innovation in all its forms, call it out and encourage others – don’t exclude people by making it sound like they have to invent robots.


30 Thoughts

Twitter is your new customer service channel. Your audience will use Twitter to ask you questions, regardless of whether you’d like them to call your 0800 number, and expect a fast response. Supporter care/customer service processes and teams need to know how to use the tools, how to talk to people and when there’s a question that needs their attention – the same way they do email or phone.


30 Thoughts

It’s ok to fail… as long as you learn from it. To innovate we need to try new things, and if we can’t do that with confidence we’re never going to make significant progress. Explicitly say that it’s ok to fail – make it clear that the lessons learned from failing are valuable in themselves but make sure that everyone can learn from it. Have a monthly confession session or a space on your internal wiki so people can be proud they got it wrong because they did something totally new.


30 Thoughts

Find your social champions. Give your supporter networks a greater voice and a bigger impact by finding who the ‘social champions’ are – the people who are passionate about you and confidently, proactively use social media to talk about you. Scour the country, bring them in, give them your support, create a toolkit and provide them with guidance. Harness their enthusiasm but be careful not to squash it.


30 Thoughts

Start small and iterate. Whether you’re trying to convince senior management that you need to invest more time in social media or get the customer service team answering queries on Twitter as well as the phone line, it sometimes feels like you’ve got a lot of work on your plate. Set your sights on small, achievable goals and you’ll feel like you’re making progress sooner, and with a lower risk of failure than if you’re spending months slogging towards a bigger prize.


30 Thoughts

TV is social, join in. Lots of people use Twitter while watching TV (the ‘two screen experience’) to share their thoughts and opinions with other viewers. Find popular programmes relevant to you or your campaigns, that have a lively debate around them and research the hashtags. Check out any earlier conversation, so you know what people are talking about and think about how you might join in.


30 Thoughts

Create a council. Social media steering groups, user groups or councils – whatever you call them, they’re becoming more common in larger not-for-profits. They convene what are usually disparate teams from across the organisation to share best practice, collaboratively solve problems and draw up new working practices or guidelines where needed. Anyone should be able to attend and over time they help build out capability and confidence.


30 Thoughts

Changing behaviour. Behaviour change is a major part of some campaigns teams’ objectives but can you measure it through social media? It’s possible to find indicators that demonstrate changes in attitudes (e.g. uplift in mentions of specific phrases) or use closed groups to run post-campaign qualitative research, but tying long term changes in behaviour specifically to social media is difficult, so look at the campaign as a whole.


30 Thoughts

Research can be quick. Qualitative research can take a long time and cost a lot of money but it’s vitally important if you’re going to do anything effective, especially if it’s a social campaign that you want people to engage with – find a small group of people to poll at an event you’re attending, or ask for feedback from your Facebook fans. Make sure you’re confident that you’re framing your message in the right way, and that it’s going to resonate with your audience.


30 Thoughts

Questions and challenges


30 Thoughts

What’s our accepted wisdom? Some metrics that are relied upon for getting investment are less than watertight (think Barb ratings and TV) but because social media is digital, there’s a risk we measure and report on things because we can, not because they demonstrate its effectiveness. What do you think social media is really doing for your organisation? How could you report on it, confidently, in a way that gets you more buy-in?


30 Thoughts

Is it the role or the person? If you actively want people in your organisation to get out there in social spaces and talk about their work, you can look for enthusiastic volunteers or make it part of their job description. Both require creating guidelines (however light or heavy) and providing support but adding it into new roles will also start changing the kind of people you hire and create a more social-ready organisation. A mix of the two is probably the optimum choice.


30 Thoughts

Change is coming. Sooner or later, job roles and team structures within not-for-profits are going to have to change. Coping with the immediacy of social media, changing audience expectations and making the most of the opportunities that digital tools present means we need new ways of doing things and teams with a different mix of skills – campaigners that do fundraising or digital teams that are customer services, PR and brand. Start thinking now…


30 Thoughts

Should you ‘segment’? Unlike email, you can’t selectively publish messages to specific social media audience segments, but you can create separate spaces for people who want different things from you. If you’re not ready to rethink how to integrate your messaging but want to engage more effectively with different audiences, consider creating an issue-specific Facebook page, for example. But plan for it - know why you’re doing it and how you’ll sustain it.


30 Thoughts

Who’s on call? Who should be doing out of hours monitoring of your social spaces and how? Many charities are employing one of two models: the external agency that monitors and reports on conversations with a prioritised digest of issues; or a rota of nominated staff members responsible for keeping on top of conversations. But is this sustainable? Is the ongoing cost justifiable and do we need to change some staff members’ core working hours?


30 Thoughts

What’s the R in ROI? Focusing on £ generated as an immediate attributable return for social media is often a good way to end up with frustrated stakeholders and stressed out fundraisers – think about other things that social is good at doing, that also demonstrate a return –signups to an email newsletter or capturing mobile numbers, for example.


30 Thoughts

Who’s the spokesperson now? Social media means that anyone in your organisation can be part of its external voice, and some charities are actively encouraging people to set up Twitter accounts. As a result, not-for-profits are organically becoming more transparent and developing a more representative voice. Just make sure you give people the support and guidance they need to get on and do it in a way that manages risk.


30 Thoughts

Where does social sit? If it is the sole domain of the digital team, you might retain quality and consistency but you could create a severe bottle neck. Let anybody at it and senior management might be nervously chewing their finger nails. Look at different models for managing the organisation’s external voice – can digital act as the social media support team and help build capability more widely, with the help of a monthly drop-in group to help, for instance.


30 Thoughts

Manage your partners. Corporate partners might be champing at the bit to pay for space on your Facebook page, but this can end up being a pretty big turn off for your audience. If you can get them to pay per mention of their brand name, or for another supporter action, this gives you licence to mention them as often as you need to, in a way that feels appropriate for your audience (as long as you’ve told them about it), with a financial return as a result.


About NixonMcInnes NixonMcInnes is a social consultancy that helps FTSE 350 companies, government and major not-for-profits take advantage of and adapt to emerging trends in technology, markets and the workplace.

For the past three years we have been recognised by Worldblu on the list of the most democratic workplaces in the world – living and breathing the principles of transparency, openness, freedom and participation. The same principles that are the key to success in social media.

We work in partnerships with our clients – which include WWF-UK, the RSPCA, Stop Climate Chaos, the Department of Health and the Central Office of Information.


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30 thoughts-social-not-for-profits