Why Nonprofits Should Use Social Media

When it comes to marketing, nonprofits – like many companies – tend to go for the familiar. What do we know? What have we done in the past? Direct mail? Check. A print newsletter? Check. A fundraising event? Check.

Whether or not these tactics have actually been successful in the past, they tend to be the typical course of action. Even if they are not cost effective or time efficient, more often than not, everyone at an organization can at least agree on the statement “that’s the way we’ve always done it.”

Unfortunately, today’s funders and constituents are no longer consuming their information in the same ways. Today’s marketing tactics are not familiar. So how does a nonprofit with limited capacity get up to speed?

5-Part Social Media Process (Amy Sample Ward)

Amy Sample Ward blogs about nonprofit organizations and have distilled the process of moving forward with social media into 5 parts. Don’t let the simplicity of her ideas fool you – these are the foundational building blocks of any social media campaign (or marketing campaign or…) but are so often overlooked.

Her 5 parts are:

1. Audience

2. Resources

3. Success

4. Technology

5. Evaluation

Read what she has to say.

I Heart PitchEngine

I’ve been using PitchEngine as part of integrated social media campaigns for my clients. We’re all still ramping up to have the multiple elements required for an effective social media release, however, here are some early examples of SMRs I’m working on:

Pick. Click. Give. – http://pitch.pe/2592

Rasmuson Foundation Individual Artist Awards – http://pitch.pe/2507

I feel like the SMRs are a living, breathing organism as we continue to gather the multimedia components and set up the social network and microblog presences to truly make it more effective.

Earlier this year, I wrote about PitchEngine for Web Worker Daily. Here are some excerpts. You can read the entire review as well.

Two years ago, a company called Shift Communications introduced the concept of social media releases that incorporated social networks, microblogs, audio and video elements into text releases. A year later, they expanded their concept to include social media newsrooms, spiffing up the traditional text-heavy online newsroom with more multimedia bells and whistles. PitchEngine is a freemium Web app and hosting service that helps non-techies – and even non-PR-types – to build their own social media releases and social media newsrooms.

…

PitchEngine is first and foremost for the person who wants to build a social media release but doesn’t have the technical skills. You can create as many brand accounts as you want for free. Brands represent you or your clients and projects.

Building a social media release includes integrating a company’s Twitter account, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., as well as easily embedding audio and video. The finished product has all the links and elements easily accessible in and around the main press release text. The release is hosted for free for 30 days and then expires and is no longer available which is a suitable duration for an effective PR campaign, however, also an incentive to purchase a subscription for a more permanent social media newsroom.

…

Sure, the biggie PR wire services will probably step up as competitors to PitchEngine in the near future but they won’t be able to be as social media savvy, nimble nor as affordable as Kintzler’s venture. There has also been a recent backlash regarding using social media for marketing and public relations as there is bound to be with the adoption of any social platform for commercial purposes. The conversation about social media marketing has only just begun.

Are you using social media releases for your campaigns, particularly for social causes? If so, how and where? We’d love to see examples!

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