Competing Priorities and Not Feeling Focused

The Nonprofit 2.0 session on “Dealing with Silos Inside Nonprofit Organizations” was packed with lots of discussion about staff managing competing priorities. “We suffer from initiative-itis,” said one nonprofit campaigner.” For example staff is feeling pressure to constantly send out appeals to different email lists about a variety of campaigns and priorities. Is this really the right strategy for nonprofits? Who at the organization can help set the priorities and not say “yes” to everything?  Is it senior leadership? Do campaigners need to take a more active role and push back? Having to manage so many priorities makes it difficult to get the real work done day to day.

Advice From Group Members.

Can you talk to senior leadership about focusing on 3-5 campaign priorities for the year and make an organizational commitment to stick to it?  Can you gather evidence from other organizations who have been successful operating this way and show the ROI?

Can you bring in a consultant to reinforce what staff is already saying? Sometimes a consultants advice resonates with senior leadership.

Competition and Branding

Regional organizations that have several chapters across the country are struggling to see the big picture of working together to acheive the organization’s mission. They compete with each other, instead of collaborate.

Because there are so many chapters, several staff is running different programs and they don’t connect it to the larger mission. Some of these organizations are also struggling with having a unified brand. One chapter even designed their own logo

Advice group member gave.

Provide website and branding templates to the affiliates. This will make it much easier on the local chapters and help the organization scale nationally. “It’s a groundswell,” said Michael Kusie of Hillel International. Organizations like National Wildlife Federation developed a branding committee to develop brand guidelines that all departments must use.

Alternatively, a group member said you could stop trying to act like the “brand police” and develop guidelines that are very flexible.

Managing Failure

Do we ask the right questions after we failed?  Why did it fail? Was it because of lack of resources and capacity issues? Was the organization working on too many issues at the same time and campaigns got diluted? Did we burn out our constituents? You need to answer these questions honestly and openly. Read more on “Dealing with Silos Inside Nonprofit Organizations” »

Jean Case of the Case Foundation’s Townhall:

• Organizations need to stop being afraid of taking risks and top leaders need to start being more fearless.
• We don’t talk enough about what doesn’t work.
• Thought: how can staff guide leaders to stop squashing innovation, to be fearless? 
• “We should celebrate when we fail, because it means we’re really trying.”
• “Let’s begin a conversation about failure.” 

Paull Young of charity: water’s Keynote:

• If you’re a small nonprofit, help make your story your constituent’s story.
• “The impact of celebrity is overrated.”
• Paull Young has a quote on his desk: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. ~Samuel Beckett
• How can we influence others? 
• You can’t call yourself transparent. Other people have to. 

• If you are RT’d, then someone who wants to publicly align with your messaging. Reach out to your constituents. 
• It’s imperative that you don’t just RT, but ask questions. Don’t talk AT people, have a conversation. 
• You control the expectation when someone follows you on Twitter.
• “Become a real subject expert in your field; find your niche.” -Danielle Brigada, NWF
• Use Google Analytics to find out what bloggers are already blogging about you, and your interest area.
• Make time each day for outreach.
• Create accessibility.
• We are all pinched for time; get in a habit of quality vs. quantity.
• Make yourself very easy to find.
• Tools: wefollow, followerwonk, topsy, sprout social, small act,
• Update organically with quality.
• Your goal is to get people to share and engage.
• Follow people who mention you.

Blogger Talks About Metrics 

• Behavior, how many pages does the person go to?
• Outcomes – for each blog reference, how many converted?
• How do you tell your board that bloggers own a category or keywords in Google?
• Branding vs Money or Action.
• What do you want to learn?
• This will help you hone in what you want to analyze.
• ROI is different than a business depending on what you are.
• Analytics report every month, overly redundant.
• When declines aren’t actually a bad thing
• How do you design dashboards that are useful?
• Use a more multichannel focus.

• Not just visits to the website, but how many from each other site? Which of the categories declined? Have a better sense of where they are coming from and what they are doing once they get there.
• Schedule out a lot of tweets and posts with evergreen content – then look at what worked
• Crowdbooster and Social Flow Social Bro – will tell you best times of day to tweet. Timely 

• Building dashboards:
  • Figure out business goals. (Brand awareness, donations, etc)
  • Figure out sub-goals
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) – indicate that you are meeting your goals.
  • ROI – staff time, dollars, vs. how much you are getting.
  • Adjust these on a timely basis.

Metrics and ROI

• Use Google Analytics
• Social fundraising and social media. Barrier – every nonprofit is strapped for cash. Need a template, these are the metrics we want to measure, invest that time to see what they want to get out.
• What can we tell the nonprofits to get them started?
• How do you use your analytics to actually inform?
• Not putting value to anything – how to use them to actually improve
• (the mission list)
• What are you doing with your metrics?
• What tools are people using to measure, what dashboards?
• Minimum effort in to put maximum effect?
• Dashboard to consolidate anything
• Actionable insights and different tools

Tools:

• Google – just got a lot better at social.
• Omniture
• Radian6 – very expensive and sort of a beast (measures sentiment and tone), not as flexible.
• Hootsuite – mostly social
• Crowdbooster – right now mostly free, easier than Facebook insights, what time to post
• Social Flow – paid model
• SmallAct Thrive
• Google Alerts
  • The question is what are you measuring?
  • No one tool is going to be able to do it all.
• Tweetdeck – put client relevant terms in tweetdeck columns. Or Hootsuite
  • It’s work, it’s not magic. 

 Quality over quantity – want a presence on there every day, but also want to avoid redundancy. 

• Can geo-target for specifically applicable places.
• Content is king. Takes time and energy.
• Photos rule the social media realm.
• Measure what matters.
  • Make sure to consistently reevaluate your KPIs – if you’re trying to feed one specific metric, it will change your entire strategy of outreach.
  • KD Paine – Measure What Matters
  • Facebook comments, Disqus, Livefire – people sometimes more likely to comment because they are more familiar.
  • Facebook has a new plugin that will show you the content that they like on the page.
  • Social affinity is important for trust.
  • Kissmetrics– Amazing content on measurement
  • Lunametrics – Traffic, Analysis, Action
  • Google is also doing more social things.
  • People who have javascripts
  • Opens won’t be accurate but clicks will be. Email clients won’t track you unless you have photo enabled
  • Custom reporting.
  • Google Adwords has a program now for nonprofits. Can have a client service person if you spend $50 – @RobPierson has a contact
  • The Overlay in Google analytics – like a heat map.
  • Excel spreadsheet – all links. Percentages of clicks. Conditional formatting to look at trends. Can also do scaling, with colors. Take those cells overlay on your email and look at where and what people are clicking on.
  • ListManager

• What we’d like to improve upon/learn how to do:
  • Create a community as well as provide info
  • Use social media to source back to webpage
  • Engage older users online
  • Attract new youth
  • Engage current members
  • Help those engaged in social media to move to our page
  • Provide membership association more opportunities
  • Keep site fresh, return visitors after new visitors 

• Most effective ways to measure engagement?
  • Tracking likes, post likes, share likes, retweets, etc.
  • Find out what happens to retweets after (how many do they reach? Re-retweeted?)
  • Google analytics (where people entered, from where, countries, etc.)

• Effective surveys?
  • Incentives (e.g. giftcards, subscriptions)
• Google+?
  • Ranks pages higher when searched- do it
  • People aren’t there yet, seize while still a new frontier
  • Search engine optimization plus
  • Time commitment with low yield as of yet
  • Don’t use RSS feeds
  • Discovery Channel used it well to promote shows, contests, etc.
  • Very entry-level (more personal connections)
  • More influential
• LinkedIn
  • Higher rising rates
  • People don’t actively update
  • Useful to have?
    • Within industry, not to draw in
    • Good for advertising job opportunities
  • Average wealth is higher (potential donors)
  • A self-created, private group can work well, but needs a facilitator
  • Lots of self-promotion, not much dialogue (not good- remember, personal connections are key)
  • Organization and people are there, if you map networks you can make connection maps within the company, for ex.
    • Individual staff members have networks, so you can bring those together
    • Most likely greater than the organization’s “friends”
    • Think of Paull Young’s letter writing to top 10, can do this on LinkedIn
    • “Map” of networks will automatically color code
• How to engage communication/interaction once set up?
  • Questions
  • Examples of things that have worked for some:
    • (Controversial, instigative) article every day with a question, opens responses
    • Creating hashtags during news events for Twitter conversations
    • Pop culture anything
    • Niche conversations when pre-scheduled (ex: the Historic Buildings society has a twitter discussion every Thurs at 7, for one hour, on a specific topic with specific questions—apparently it works very well!)
    • Give a stat, then ask a question: “Today is Leap Day, what are you going to do with your extra 24 hours?)
    • Use lots of stories: PERSONAL, PERSONAL, PERSONAL
      • People join these things because they are looking for a community of sorts—so give them one!
    • Blogs garner comments as well, but take a lot of time
• Pinterest
  • How is it even helpful?
    • Promote blog with photography
    • As an organizational timeline
    • Quotes on pictures
    • Historical photography from movements
  • Can drive back to the website, or to a blog from searches unrelated
  • Demographic = women 25-60+ (keep in mind!)
  • Consider audience, and then cater to it
  • Fundraising? How?
• How to do a “Digital Campfire” on Twitter
  • Worked for the Historic Building group
  • Pick ?s a few weeks out
  • Blog post/tweet/fb status reminders a week before and the day of
  • Have 2 moderators, pose the questions
  • Retweet the good ones, start some too
  • Repost the entire convo online afterwards with [slurp150]
    • Slurp150 will transcribe the whole thing for free
  • Tweetchat is also free, and will make it easier for the moderator during the hour (ensure hashtags work, ignore spacing, etc.)
• Companies mentioned that are useful:
  • vocus – tracks social media hits
  • hootsuite
  • smallact
  • thrive – matches email to twitter
  • xobni
  • rapportive 

• First: PLANNING IS KEY
• How to prepare:
  • Budget
  • Tech support
  • Do your homework (research analytics)
• Rebranding? Does it help?
  • No expectation that it will drive traffic
  • Will give a fresh feel, however
  • New sight, new actions, new audience (maybe)
• Research is your friend
  • Testing, backup
  • Can back up your presentation for a redesign (to stuffy higher-ups)
  • Hard to argue with
  • Also, it gives you info that you want!
    • Info about your audience
    • What works, what doesn’t
    • Knowledge of what your users are doing
    • Clues as to what colors, setups work best, etc.
  • But…it can be $$$
• Targeting a new audience
  • You want to expand your audience pool, but first you need to be more specific
    • Who are you looking to grab?
    • What does that demographic like? Do that!
    • Get to know your target audience
  • Establish this target audience and your goals FIRST.
    • This will help with:
      • Functionality
      • Content
      • Appearance
  • Start with a project mandate—kind of like a mission statement for your redesign. Now, don’t make any changes that are not in line with the mission statement. Be tough.
• Social Media
  • Align your campaigns, keep unity between different forms
  • When attaching social media buttons to a website, make sure to put them in the most present and accessible spot
    • Find this through research/analytics
    • Test it out
  • Again, ESTABLISH AN AUDIENCE, then cater to it
• Keep in mind
  • The web is outside of your site. Your site is not (usually) a destination
    • It’s a presence, a place to get info, but not a place to hang out
• What works best?
  • There are ways to increase list, size, visitors
  • Planning is key
    • For a redesign, recommended to begin testing a year out
  • Drupal is a great site, will help you build and perfect yours
  • ***compatibility with mobile**** is huge
  • As is ***responsive design****
  • Mobify – will help you add on mobile-friendly service to your current site if you missed it the first time/what to perfect it
  • Think about dynamic sites
    • Change automatically (dates, articles, etc)
    • Think about the time commitments you have
• One last thought: PLAN. Research. Combine, and stick to the mission statement. Voila! 

Who is invited?
Are you working in the nonprofit community? Are you an online advocacy guru, a fundraiser, or grassroots organizer? Perhaps you manage a communications team and want to dive into social media but you’re a little old school. This event is for you! We invite nonprofit staff and do-gooder consultants from a diverse array of fields to come join us at NonProfit 2.0. This includes people who work in:

* Online Advocacy and Outreach
* Grassroots Organizing
* Social Media
* Fundraising
* Communications
* Nonprofit Technology
* Nonprofit Consulting
* Public Affairs
* Programming
* and more.

What is an unConference?*
Following the keynote sessions – at 10:30 AM we start with a blank wall and, in less than an hour, with a facilitator guiding the process attendees create a full day, multi-track conference agenda that is relevant and inspiring to everyone in the room. All are welcome to put forward presentations or propose conversations that you would like to have with others and:

* questions you want answered
* information you want to share/present
* a project you would like help on

What happens During Sessions?*
As sessions happen people volunteer to document the outcomes on a wiki (The notes of what was said is even better). Photos of any whiteboards are also important along with any slides that were presented.

End of the Day
At the end of the day everyone gathers in one place to share highlights of the day.

Why Charge?
The $45 fee covers event costs. While leading the organization of NonProfit 2.0 as a way to educate the local nonprofit community on social media and contributing some financial resources, the founders do not want to go in debt on the community’s behalf. Secondarily, PodCamp Boston 2008 received more than 1000 registrants and only a few hundred showed up. The resulting financial loss was significant. We want people to commit to their registration, and there is no better way than to charge a cover. The event is significantly cheaper than most events at this cost, and folks will get a big bang for their buck.

Please note that net proceeds will be donated to a local charity. Catering will be provided by DC Central Kitchen.

Questions Asked and Problems

• Blogging takes a lot of time
• It’s hard to motivate team to blog
• How to re-motivate people to blog
• Hard to demonstrate success of blog
• How to start conversation on blog
• How to market blog
• How to motivate readers to read the blog
• Is it worth the time to create a new blog for a program or use the larger organization blog

Tips

• Repurpose content- write about reports and what organization is doing
• Write shorter blog entries. Break up long entries into different posts.
• Create an editorial calendar
• Figure out where blog fits in communications strategy
• Share web metrics with team
• Use the blog to drive people back to website
• Link to other bloggers
• Comments on blog keeps blogger motivated
• Start commenting on other blogs
• Ask people to comment on your blog
• Ask questions on blog entries to start conversation
• Comments are not the only way to measure success – look at web analytics, likes, and re-tweets
• Connect with people connected with organization
• Need to know your market to know how to market your blog
• You can experiment with blogs
• Content ideas- Tell failures, Q & A with experts
• Link to older blog entries on blog
• Put a live feed on the website. It looks like the site is updated. The feed could be from the blog or Twitter.
• It doesn’t matter if the blog is built on website or third party. Do whatever is easiest.

Notes by Meg Biallas on June 3, 2011

Crowdrise “If you don’t give back, no one will like you”

Twitchange “Team up to change the world, one tweet at a time”

Downside of using celebrities to boost your campaign — they can’t help when they get busy. (i.e. The Jonas Brothers stopped tweeting a Crowdrise campaign).

“To be an influencer, don’t tweet one thing and step away. You have to be passionate at what you do.”

Facebook and Twitter are not the answer to our problems. Wolfe says its key to build a good email list. Social media is meant to support the email lists.

So many NPs are focused on the dollars, but the “bodies” are important, too. Need to get people in the door, and get them to stick around.

@StaceyMonk, EpicChange (Interviewed by Allyson Kapin of RadCampaign)

1. FrogLoop is Care2’s (blog for nonprofits)
2. Monk went through period of loss, divorce, etc. But realized life was about not about getting ahead, but more about love/making a difference.
3. Epic Change is about telling stories that change the world.
4. Stacey asked people on Twitter (in 6 days with 6 volunteers). “Tweetsgiving” began – (Instead of using fear). $11,000 raised in 48 hours. Built classroom.
5. To Mama With Love Campaign – all created out of love.
6. Our intentions matter.
7. Resources flow from love.
8. Giving is a sacred act. That’s not what our job is; it will never move people. You have to create more meaningful experience.
9. Embedded giving: buy coffee and 10% goes to charity. It’s not the same experience.
10. Donor community and beneficiary communities stay separate, but it’s not moving the world forward.
11. How does EpicChange sustain itself? It has a strong volunteer community (time and/or money). They’ve been able to outsource certain functions.
12. When you rely on volunteers who are not as committed as you are, how do you handle that? What are the challenges?  Takes years to develop an effective program. You need a large enough pool. Also, you’re not always in control. People better than you do things better. “You have to let people do their own dance.”
13. Change is an art – not a science. A lot of things can be scaled, commodified. PEOPLE can’t be commodified.
14. Easy to be optimistic about how social media can help people be heard. Stacey not as optimistic anymore. 1) There’s too much noise. 2) Everyone talks about themselves.

Generation Divide with Technology

Baby Boomers tend to read every single word on a webpage

“Click here” is actually very effective with the older crowd.

Email communication works – especially if it acts and looks like a personal letter

Internet Engagement – Older folks visit trusted sites, especially a single site (Rather than providing a variety of scattered links).

Go step by step – (i.e. “Login means your email address”).

Board meeting: meet them where they are.

some board members have been doing things for decades; how do you help with the transition