My default content strategy for nonprofits is the Three Gs: Be Genuine, Generous and Grateful. Seems the being Generous part is the hardest, so I’m going to try to give you more examples of how nonprofits can be generous to their supporters.

It can start with identifying a problem your supporters are having. Take, for example, Facebook’s new Timeline profile layout, including the 850 pixels wide by 315 pixels high cover photo. It’s an odd shape for most of us! I went through about 10 pictures before I found one I could use on my profile.

Now this problem isn’t related to any particular nonprofit cause, so it may not be an obvious thing for you to jump on. But it’s a simple problem many of your supporters have, and by providing cover images, you show your generosity (while increasing your organization’s visibility).  A few nonprofits have already jumped on this, and you can too!

I noticed that Beth Kanter is sporting a cover from Best Friends Animal Society on her profile today (Happy Birthday, Beth!)

The Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano put their supporter’s endorsement center stage with their cover images:

Here are a few others:

Tearfund

Natural Resources Defense Council

Ocean Conservancy

If you don’t want to brand the images as your own, you could simply offer some that allow your supporters to identify themselves as caring about or identifying with your issue in some way:

Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness

There is some rumbling about how cover photos aren’t supposed to be for promotional purposes. But I wouldn’t worry about that as long as your intent is just for your supporters to label themselves as caring about your cause. I wouldn’t add fundraising messages though — stick to basic “I support this” language if you use it at all.

If you want to join in, here are a few quick tips.

• Pick beautiful images that your supporters would want on their own profiles. Include your very best stuff.
• Obviously, get the size correct (850 x 315)
• Overlay your logo, perhaps a phrase like “I support the (your name)”, and your Facebook or website URL
• Put them all in a Facebook album that you can link to.
• Explain how to use the photos: Supporters will need to save the image to their own computers and then upload it into their own album on their profile, and then make it the cover photo.

John Haydon offers more detailed advice on how to do this, including a template.

Cover photos will likely come to Pages at some point, so even if you don’t create cover images for your supporters, start thinking about what you want  on your nonprofit’s Facebook Page.  Hopefully Facebook will make it easy on all of us and keep the photo dimensions on Pages the same as on Profiles!

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Kate Antoniades

In today’s guest post, Kate Antoniades shows how planning ahead and paying attention to what your fans, friends, and followers react to can make all the difference in your social media marketing. She also proves that social media can work at the local level.  Thanks Kate, for sharing a super easy way to improve your Facebook strategy!  ~Kivi

Guest Post by Kate Antoniades, Communications and Social Media Coordinator at Lollypop Farm, the Humane Society of Greater Rochester

Earlier this year, after a couple of years of keeping my Facebook and Twitter plans for Lollypop Farm in my head or scribbled on Post-its stuck to my monitor, I created a social media calendar in Google Docs. It’s become a very useful tool for planning ahead and for keeping track of what I’ve posted.

Soon after I started using the calendar, I began tracking the feedback rate for each Facebook post—the percentage that indicates the comments and “likes” per impression. (Each time a post appears in someone’s news feed, on the page itself, or in a page badge, Facebook calls that an impression.)

With about two months of data, I decided to use the feedback rate to find out exactly which posts made the greatest and least impact. Other factors, like the time of day or day of the week that something is posted, may affect feedback, but that was beyond the scope of what I wanted to examine.

I found that the majority of the 20 posts that fell below a .05% feedback rating could be placed into three categories: mentions of various events and classes (those that were unrelated to pet adoption), notices of holiday closings, and news of job and volunteer opportunities. We feel that these are important messages, but they don’t seem to grab the attention of our supporters as much as we’d like.

The 10 posts that topped a 0.75% feedback rating (ranging from 0.78% to 3.21%) were all one of two types. Many shared news of pets being adopted (either a single animal or many animals during a successful adoption event). Here’s one example of responses to an adopt-a-thon that found homes for a record number of cats and kittens:

The other posts that had a lot of impact—including the single most popular post of the two months I reviewed—were related to an online contest for animal shelters that awarded five platform dog beds. Our supporters got really excited about this contest because it offered them an easy way to help the dogs in our care. With just a couple of mouse clicks, they could vote and encourage their Facebook friends to vote, too.

We ended up winning the contest, and Facebook was certainly a major factor. These were some of our supporters’ reactions to the good news:

The conclusions I can draw from this close look at feedback rates aren’t earthshattering, but they serve as good reminders: Our supporters want to hear good news, specifically about pets being placed in new homes, and they want to know easy ways they can help.

Looking at these numbers has prompted me to share more of our “happy endings” and not let them fall through the cracks when I’m trying to encourage people to register for class Y or attend event Z.

The “easy ways to help” posts might be a little tougher to find—since the assistance we most often need involves adopting a pet, making a donation, or volunteering time—but perhaps I’ll suggest that our supporters search the web using GoodSearch or do their online shopping through iGive, both of which can send small sums of money our way.

Fortunately, I’ll get a good idea of how these posts are received—simply by checking the feedback rating.

Kate Antoniades is the Communications and Social Media Coordinator at Lollypop Farm, the Humane Society of Greater Rochester (Fairport, NY).

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I use Hootsuite to automatically send new blog posts to both Twitter and Facebook. That is, until May of this year, when the Facebook integration failed. I’ve tried to reconnect the two accounts a few times without success (yes, following Hootsuite’s instructions), and then I forgot about it until last week. It’s been almost three months since the blog posts appeared automatically on our Facebook page.

This creates a few interesting questions:

• What’s been the impact on traffic to the blog?
• What’s been the impact on the Facebook page?
• Should I get the posts flowing to the page again with or without Hootsuite?

Here’s what the data says . . .

According to Google Analytics, traffic to the blog from Facebook didn’t change much at all. Apparently, not that many people were really clicking through before, or people are finding the blog links elsewhere on Facebook now. The amount of traffic to the blog from Facebook is really, really small (less than 1% of our total traffic), so I’m not that concerned about this either way.

I’m much more concerned about what Facebook Insights says.

Our active users have been growing steadily from the beginning, but you’ll see that when the blog posts stopped (which represents the majority of our wall posts overall), our active users started declining. If I had made a concerted effort to post to the page every day after the outage, perhaps the decline wouldn’t have occurred. But the reality is that I posted non-blog updates to the page just about as much before and after the outage. So I do think the differences here are attributed directly to the blog posts no longer appearing.

The page interaction data is even more startling. In the three months prior to the blog posting outage, we had a total of 242,636 post views and 312 post feedbacks.

In the three months after the blog posting outage, we had only 71,777 post views and 180 post feedbacks.

Again, if I had changed my manual posting behavior, and updated the status of the page personally every day, perhaps the drop wouldn’t have happened. But I didn’t, which tells me that a lot of the interaction on the page was around the blog content.

This data tells me to get this fixed, but I wanted to get some anecdotal support too, so this afternoon, I asked directly on the page if I should put the blog posts back on — and 100% of the people who commented in the first two hours said Yes!

So we have our answer! I’ll get the blog posts back on the Facebook page, with or without Hootsuite’s help. It will be interesting to see if/how the numbers recover over the next few months.

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I had a great conversation with Susan Gordon, director of nonprofit services for Causes, last week. If you aren’t familiar, Causes has built free, customizable fundraising pages that integrate with Facebook, Twitter, and other channels (and the Causes.com site of course). Causes recently overhauled its integration with Facebook, making it much easier for small nonprofits to use Facebook for fundraising right on your own Facebook Page. And it looks much better too.

(I still firmly believe that fundraising should not be your primary goal for using Facebook and social media. But that said, I do believe that Facebook Causes is a great way to raise lots of small-dollar donations for a specific project.)

Let’s look at some of the recent changes to the Causes tab (It’s not really a “tab” anymore on your Page, but a link in the left-hand sidebar.)

First, the overall design is much cleaner and more direct. You can now include image galleries and nice big donate buttons.

Here’s what your tab can look like for a specific project (it looks a little different if you are fundraising for the organization overall):

Here are a few other changes:

• You can now set up a customized thank-you note that will go out automatically to your supporters.
• You can download first and last name of the donor, along with their physical address (if they didn’t opt-out) and which project they donated to.
• While you can’t download their email address, you can email through the Causes backend directly to donors. This is an actual email, not a message on Facebook. You can segment these emails by project or when the donation was made.
• You can also track who is promoting your cause for you.
• You can rename the tab from “Causes” to “Donate” or anything else you want.

Of course, just creating the tab isn’t enough. You have to promote it, and this is where small nonprofits can often outpace the big ones.

“Time and time again, we’re seeing small nonprofits have big wins on Causes,” says Susan.  ”We firmly believe that social media is a level playing field for nonprofits where having the best-funded marketing department isn’t nearly as important as storytelling and investing in community.”

Because smaller nonprofits are often much closer to the on-the-street action, Susan believes they are uniquely positioned to tell a compelling story about the impact of their work and to build meaningful relationships with supporters through social media.  She says the Prem Rawat Foundation (with 5,395 Facebook fans) and the Love Without Boundaries Foundation (with 4,322 Facebook fans) have become two of the top fundraising nonprofits on the Causes  platform. While their Facebook fan numbers look relatively small, Susan says Prem Rawat has amassed 463,737 Causes members and Love Without Boundaries has built up 39,679 Causes members.  Even though they’re small, they’ve grown their communities through Causes by telling fantastic stories of impact, which has encouraged their supporters to recruit their friends.

Susan says these new changes will help small nonprofits give their small-dollar donors a “big donor experience.”  All together, these new tools make it easy and time-efficient for small nonprofits to run effective online fundraising campaigns.

Here the instructions for how to add the Causes tab to your Page.

Coming Soon  . . .

Stay tuned for future posts on (1) how to get your fans to use the Birthday Wish feature in Causes to raise money for you and (2) how to raise money through social media even when you don’t have “cute” or “heart strings” projects.  Susan will also join us for a free webinar on June 21st on how small nonprofits can use Causes (registration opening soon — mark your calendar now!).

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Facebook changes the way it works so often that I can’t keep up. So while I will occasionally offer a webinar or two on Facebook basics, I’ve decided to partner with people who actually like keeping up with the changes and who are focused on helping nonprofits with social media:  John Haydon and CharityHowTo.

John is teaching several webinars on Facebook in the next few weeks at CharityHowTo, and thanks to our partnership, you can save 15% on the registration fees by using the coupon code KIVI.

Facebook Foundations for Nonprofits – Critical Tactics for Success

Thursday, March 3, 2011 (1:00 – 2:30 pm ET)

Creating Custom Facebook Tabs for Your Nonprofit Facebook Page

Thursday, March 10, 2011 (1:00 – 2:30 pm ET)

Proven Tactics for Growing Your Facebook Fanbase

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 (3:00 – 4:30 pm ET)

Facebook Foundations for Nonprofits – Critical Tactics for Success

Tuesday, March 15, 2011 (1:00 – 2:30 pm ET)

John has also launched a new website I think you’ll find helpful called The Nonprofit Facebook Guy.

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A flurry of questions came in at the end of today’s webinar on Writing for Social Media, so I’m going to try to quickly answer a bunch of them here. I didn’t get permission to use people’s names, so I’m sharing these questions anonymously.

We have both the Facebook Page and the Group.  I know you said stick with the page.  Do we somehow fold our group members into the page and close out the group?  Does that sound like the right way to proceed?

Now that Facebook has made Pages more like Profiles, they are the way to go. Unless you have a subgroup of folks who really want to talk with each other about something specific (groups can be private, for example), I’d say ditch the group. Just post to its wall and send a few messages to members to explain that you are shutting it down on a certain date in favor of the Page.

When writing blog posts, I am asked to always link it back to our organization so it is the focus.  Should this be the case?

It sounds like your blog might not be on your website? If it is on a separate domain, than frequent linking back to the main site is important. But be sure that you are linking to others just as much, especially to other blogs. It’s fine to have lots of links in a post, both to your site and to blogs or websites of others.

What kind of frequency do you recommend for Facebook posting? What’s enough and too much?

Of course, it all depends on your strategy and what you are using your page for. But as a default starting point, I’d say once a day is good. You could even get away with every other day. On the other end of the spectrum, I’d say more than two or three times a day might be too much, unless, again, there is a real strategy behind it. The culture of Twitter is quite different, where multiple updates during the day are the norm.

There are often concerns about compliments and retweets being seen as endorsements. How do we get around this?

This sounds to me like there might be bigger issue with someone not really appreciating how social media works and how it is different from other more traditional forms of communication. To address this issue, I would sit down and look at real examples and scenarios and try to get a better sense for what people think is OK and what is not. We have two webinars coming up in February that will help with those conversations: Social Media Fear Factor-Getting Over What’s Holding You Back and Creating a Social Media Policy for Your Nonprofit.

I set up a Page for my nonprofit. When the nonprofit does anything on Facebook, it shows up as me doing it, not the nonprofit. For example, I just “liked” a few pages, and it shows up on my personal profile, not of the nonprofit’s page. However, when I add another page as a favorite of nonprofit’s,  it shows up on nonprofit’s page as a favorite.

(2/10/11 Update: Big changes at Facebook! I recommend this post by John Haydon to understand those changes. The answer below no longer applies.)

Unfortunately, what you have described is exactly how it works! While Facebook has made organizational pages act much more like personal profiles do, Facebook does not recognize the Page as a person who can go around and do things on Facebook. So, while you may think you are “liking” something as the Page, you are really doing it as an individual who just happens to also be the Admin of the Page.  You can, however, have your Page mark other Pages as favorites so they appear in the sidebar on your page. It’s confusing, and annoying, but that’s how it works, at least for right now.

We are a research based intermediary so we don’t have pictures of kittens. How do we make facts interesting on Twitter w/out stories? Trivia?

Trivia could be a good approach. Even though you are an intermediary, I would encourage you to work with your organizational partners to identify some stories you can tell that highlight the importance of your work. Even stories about how you help the staff people at your partner organizations is better than nothing.

How much overlap is OK between Facebook and Twitter? Can you post the same stuff in both places?

You’ll find people who will argue with me on this, but I say, yes, you can post the same stuff in both places as a baseline, as long as you aren’t overdoing it on Facebook (The Twitter community is more accepting of frequent updates than the Facebook community.) Then you might supplement with additional material that is really best on Twitter, and do the same with Facebook. But I think some repetition is fine, and actually a good thing.

How do you set up a custom shortened URL?

I use a service called ShortSwitch, which turns links at kivilm.com into my custom short links. You have to have a dedicated URL of your own to use the service.  There are a few others services like that, as well as several programs that you can host yourself on your own server. Search on “custom short URL” and you’ll see a bunch of options.

Thanks for all the great questions!

P.S. Here’s what’s coming up next in our weekly webinar series . . .

January 27: Writing to Raise More Money

February 3: Writing Thank-You Notes That Inspire Future Gifts

February 8: The New & Improved Nonprofit Annual Report

February 16: Social Media Fear Factor: Getting Over What’s Holding You Back

See the Full Webinar Schedule through Mid-March

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You have to be genuine, generous, and grateful in social media to succeed, which means you have to be a real person. But if you go too far in putting yourself out there — what some people would call building your personal brand — you can overshadow the nonprofit cause that you are representing. Finding this right personal/professional mix is challenging, especially for small nonprofits.

I interviewed Geoff Livingston of Zoetica Media yesterday to get some additional perspective on this for you. During the conversation, we talked about how several nonprofits are handling this, including the National Wildlife Federation, the Humane Society of the United States, LiveStrong (Lance Armstrong Foundation), and Goodwill of Greater Washington DC, as well as some corporations.

Personal-Professional Mix in Social Media with Geoff Livingston from Kivi Leroux Miller on Vimeo.

Kivi Leroux Miller interviews Geoff Livingston about the personal – professional mix in social media, including the notion of personal branding. Cases discussed include National Wildlife Federation, Humane Society of the United States, LiveStrong, the Goodwill Fashionista and more.

What’s your experience with finding the right personal – professional mix? What do you see in the nonprofit sector that’s working, or not working?

Share your thoughts and stories in the comments.

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Yesterday I attended a workshop organized by one of my favorite bloggers (and NTC roomie) Nancy Schwartz on how you deal with branding issues for your organization within social media. The panel featured Danielle Brigida, National Wildlife Federation; Felicia Carr, National Parks Conservation Association; and Wendy Harman, American Red Cross.

Nancy created a wonderful guide to the session (Word doc) that contains even more great stories and tips than came out in the live event, so download that. What I found most interesting is the debate about whether to centralize or decentralize your brand online. Of course, there is no right answer and you need to sort out what’s best for your organization. Here’s how these three groups are dealing with it.

Danielle at NWF says they are branding many of their individual programs online (Ranger Rick, a campus ecology program, Green Hour for families, etc.). While they hope all the talk about these programs feeds back up to the overall NWF brand, they believe that allowing their supporters to segment themselves and talk about their very specific interests within NWF is a good thing, even if it dilutes the overall NWF brand.

Danielle says that because they are decentralizing their social media presence, they are also empowering and trusting their staff and giving them the ability to represent their own programs online without a lot of heavy handed management. One additional benefit of this approach is that various programs within NWF retweet and link to each other, introducing fans of one program to many others.

In contrast, Felicia at NPCA believes that brand confusion for her organization, particularly with the National Park Service (a federal government agency) is a big problem for them online. She would prefer the NPCA logo to be on everything and does not want individual program managers to set up microsites or their own pages on Facebook. She prefers the more centralized approach.

Felicia also shared a story about how a fan had created a fundraising Facebook Cause for NPCA, but had included a huge National Park Service logo. In contrast to what Clay Shirky suggested – that people will not blame the nonprofit when fans get their facts wrong – she found the opposite to be true. The National Park Service was quite miffed with NPCA, even though they had nothing to do with the Facebook Cause page and had already asked the fan to take off the logo (without getting a response.)

Wendy at American Red Cross says that chapters and individuals had created so many different pages and groups on Facebook that Facebook actually asked the central office to consolidate the American Red Cross presence. There were so many different pages that it was actually hard for users to find what they were seeking. She has worked hard to make sure that there is a consistent look and approach for the American Red Cross across multiple social media sites, and after a brand revitalization project, has created a handbook of standards and is now teaching employees about how to use it.

Need more on nonprofit branding? Nancy is your source.

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