Your Favorite Time-Saving Tips for Nonprofit Communicators?
I’m devoting a chapter in the upcoming “Nonprofit Marketing Guide” book (available Spring 2010) to time. One of my 10 realities of nonprofit marketing is that it takes more time than money to do it well. This particular chapter is only about half-written, so please help me finish it!
What are some of your favorite ways to save time, manage your time, or otherwise work more efficiently on nonprofit marketing?
I don’t want this chapter to be full of generic time management advice. I want it to be specific to the workload of nonprofit communicators.
Here are a few of the topics I know will be in the chapter:
- Content creation strategies that help you repurpose what you create.
- Using tools that help manage social media (e.g. syncing status updates, scheduling blog posts and tweets in advance).
- Keeping up with “best practices” (BTW, I’m sick of that phrase – got a better one?) and “big brains” (smart people you can learn a lot from), so you spend your time on what others have already proven is most likely to work.
- Some easy ways to measure return on investment (defined loosely – not just financial return) so you see what works best for you, helping you know what to do more and less of in the future.
- Prioritizing the typical list of communications tasks most nonprofits are trying to implement (e.g., I’d put getting your thank-you letters out above getting your newsletter out).
What’s your experience on these topics and others related to time? I have plenty of room for good anecdotes in this chapter, so please add your perspective on these, or entirely different time-saving tips, by leaving a comment on the blog (if you are reading in your email box or rss reader, click on the headline to go to the blog.)
Besides a full-time job in communications, I volunteer on a number of boards and manage some of the social media & communications efforts for those, including @Bike2WrkSpokane (the one I manage most actively), @FriendsofFalls (kind of quiet), and @YesforKids (which will be a very quiet account between levy/bond campaign cycles), as well as the @WSUSpokane account for my campus.
I couldn’t do any of this without Tweetlater. I particularly like coupling that with the use of RSS feeds into Google Reader to find things to tweet about beyond the marketing-heavy things that people tune out (or won’t follow in the first place).
As an example, my goal for @Bike2WrkSpokane is to have it serve as both a local resource with news about upcoming rides and other Spokane-area bike stuff, and a link to the larger cycling community. The tweets go onto our Web home page, so it’s also a tool for keeping the site fresh.
I subscribe to a few really good cycling blogs and others such as Planetizen that regularly have urban design topics (an interest of mine beyond cycling-specific news). With a quick scan in Google Reader, I find some good news items, shorten the URLs, and post them to tweetlater on a schedule that ensures I’ll at least have one or two tweets a day, whether or not I have time to log in and join the conversation in person. Ditto for RTs of items I see either on that account or on my personal account, where I follow some people who tweet about bike stuff.
For link shortening I use twurl right now but may change. I track all shortened links in a spreadsheet so I can count clickthroughs to see what draws traffic. By keeping the spreadsheet, I also have a quick list of things I have found tweetworthy so it’s easy to go back and find a particular post.
It’s pretty low-tech, and fairly time-consuming to do the copy/paste and then check the results (so I only do that every 4-6 weeks now that I know the patterns of behavior). I plan to switch to something that has those stats built in, but twurl was what I started with.
For me those clickthroughs are ROI when they come to our site, since I’ve drawn eyeballs to our content. I’m also able to compare clickthroughs to other people’s content vs. ours, to see if we’re providing value as compared with other info sources (which increases likelihood we’ll get an RT & thus have our account name spread further).
I’m also able to compare clickthroughs from Twitter vs. Facebook, email and other communication spaces/tools for the campus. I haven’t done much to make our Facebook page an active space and it doesn’t have nearly as many friends as our Twitter account, which is reflected in the clickthroughs.
I also think that’s a reflection of the differing communication cultures in those two social networks, which is something I’d think about as a nonprofit in determining where to spend your limited time. Twitter for me (in all accounts I manage) has been far more effective in getting clickthroughs–it’s a sharing culture. People aren’t necessarily on Facebook looking to go somewhere else.
Looking at whether your content gets picked up by others is a measure of your content’s value, and also helps spread your name/visibility to new people who may become followers/friends/fans (and eventually members and donors).
@BarbChamberlain
Thanks for sharing this great example, Barb!
As a consumer, I’m a bit dismayed by tweetlater because the tweets aren’t part of a real time “conversation.” Sure, people miss others’ tweets all the time, but a big part of the fun is knowing your “friends” are participating with you right then. I like the spontaneity, the right-now energy and enthusiasm about one’s projects, of tweets.
In my nonprofit career search, I had to come up with many ways to save time in order to balance the job search while developing my social media platform (as this was the arena to which I was applying). These are some of the strategies that helped me in my success to being recently hired into a social media position at Alzheimer’s Association:
- I focused on the two primary sites that I anticipated less social media savvy job hirers would be on (Twitter and LinkedIn) and linked between the two by featuring my LinkedIn profile on my Twitter homepage, and vice versa. I also included a link to both sites on my Facebook profile.
- I use the “favorite” feature on Twitter to note key websites that I’d like to visit later but might not have time to at the moment. Filing through these all at once saves alot of time.
- I utilize the “Folders” system on Gmail to give an extra easy tag to those posts I really like, and categorize them according to personal or nonprofit or for the particular organization that they might help, since I am affiliated with multiple.
- I LOVE newsletters sent to my mailbox. it is an easy way to scan, instead of poring through blog posts, and is also great for archiving my favorites.
- Webinars are a great way to get information fast and also that I can refer back to. I love that I can listen to the webinar and then if a section of the talk doesn’t pertain to me, I can go about my business using other browser windows until another part of the talk interests me.
- My ALL TIME favorite time saver is podcasts. There are amazing resources out there that allow for listening on the go: at the gym, in traffic, etc.
Looking forward to your book.
Feel free to contact or follow me on twitter @LindsaykReene.
Nettie,
To clarify–Tweetlater absolutely doesn’t substitute for real conversation. I couldn’t agree with you more about the importance of that.
My challenge as a volunteer is that I can’t be on Twitter in real time on a daily basis for all these accounts. When I’m able to log on evenings/weekends and engage in some conversation, I do that.
With Tweetlater, by providing content on a regular basis I’m creating a profile that tells people what they’ll get if they follow our accounts. For me personally, if I am followed by an account that appears to update only sporadically, I generally won’t follow back because I can’t see the personality or the content value.
For the campus account I manage as part of my job, I generally check a couple of times a day, do some RTs, respond to @ messages, and engage in the conversation a bit. It’s one of many tools and tactics and I can’t be there full time.
The accounts will continue to evolve. At this point I don’t think we have a lot of our actual members or supporters on Twitter for my volunteer accounts, so it’s used more to publicize our existence and our events than it is an engagement tool. We get nice RTs from local media accounts and @VisitSpokane (our CVB), which amplifies our visibility.
We have our social media account information on our web sites and are promoting them as the best place to get the most recent news (it’s a lot easier to tweet than it is to update the web site). As more people who are affiliated with these organizations get onto Twitter, the two-way conversations will grow.
I also use email to the Bike to Work Spokane list of participants, which is effective in sharing news with a targeted list and keeping us in front of them until it’s time to register for next year. Email is still very much a social tool and I engage in direct 1-to-1 conversations with lots of cyclists by keeping that line of communication open. This has made me a “go-to” for what’s happening with cycling in the Spokane area, which adds value to our organization.
I haven’t spent a lot of time building value into our Facebook accounts–an occasional message or event is about it. The problem is I only have so much personal bandwidth
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The #1 time management tool is deciding where your audiences are and spending the time there, rather than being spread so thin you’re not engaging effectively in any of the spaces.
@BarbChamberlain