A dashboard is a visual way to bring lots of data together easily (hopefully automatically) into an at-a-glance overview of a situation. Nonprofits can use dashboards for all sorts of purposes, including fundraising results, program participation, management reports to boards, and much more.

One very popular use of the dashboard concept is to monitor social media conversations about your organizations and issues. Sure, you can spend all day logging into and searching  Twitter and Facebook and Google to see what’s happening, but why not have all of that data sent to you automatically instead?

Christina Johns

Christina Johns, online media manager for the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews uses Netvibes. Here’s Christina’s explanation of how it works for her organization:

“I use the  dashboard ever morning when I get into the office. Each tab is customizable for your organization. I’ve dedicated a tab for important topics to my organization. I pull in RSS feeds from the various websites that contain information relating to our mission.

I’ve also dedicated a tab to my organization’s Google Alerts. This pulls all alerts for the various keywords into one place and updates automatically. I’ve also used Google Translate and set up Hebrew keywords to monitor our organization in Israeli media well.

I created Twitter searches and then grabbed the RSS feed for those terms, and made a tab in my dashboard for Twitter mentions and lists of relevant topics to my organization happening within Twitter. I use the same RSS concept to pull in Flickr alerts, Myspace and Facebook. Basically using RSS feeds, I’m pulling anything that relates to my organization or topics related to our mission into one place. It saves me an incredible amount of time when the info comes to me instead of me trying to locate it on each individual site.

Netvibes also allows you to share your dashboard with others (Google Dashboard is very similar; I just prefer Netvibes). This has been an excellent resource for us. I share my dashboard with our editorial director and other members of the communications team. We can easily forward stories or Google Alerts to one another right from the dashboard.

Did I mention it is also free?”

Thanks, Christina, for sharing your dashboard with us!

Here are some resources to help you create your own social media dashboard:

Say What? Build a Social Media Listening Dashboard for Your Nonprofit (from NetWitsThinkTank)

Top 10 Social Media Dashboard Tools (from Socialbrite)

Make Your Own Conference Dashboard (from Chris Brogan)

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This week is online fundraising week at Nonprofit Marketing Guide. I’m teaching a webinar on the basics on Tuesday, followed by the advanced session on Thursday by Alia McKee of Sea Change Strategies. Alia will share her eight steps to online fundraising success. Want a taste? Alia has written a guest post about #6, which is listening to your supporters. Really listening. Read on, and join us this week for the  basic online fundraising and/or advance online fundraising webinars. (Want to do both? Get the All-Access Pass.)

Guest Post by Alia McKee, Sea Change Strategies

One of my favorite cartoons shows a lady stretched out on the couch at her shrink’s office. The caption reads, “Maybe I’m depressed because I have to pay someone to listen to me.”

The cartoon says it clearly. People want to be heard. We want to think our feelings, thoughts, and opinions matter to the people in our lives – and very importantly to the people behind the causes we choose to support.

Too many nonprofits drop the ball when it comes to listening to donors. A survey once a year just doesn’t cut it. You might think, “Well since most nonprofits aren’t doing a good job of listening, I’m safe, right?  There’s no competition.”

But there is expectation – and believe me it is increasing with each new generation.

Enter in the opportunity! You have a chance to set the bar – to distinguish yourselves from other organizations with their head in the sand. You, on the other hand, will have your finger on the pulse.

So what should you do? This list is by no means comprehensive, but it will get you started thinking about simple and creative ways you can listen to your donors.

The Basics

– Answer your general email. If a donor or activist responds to your general mailbox – they should receive a timely and thoughtful (no form letter) response.
– Surveys – surveys are great tools for soliciting feedback – but do so with a purpose. Use the survey to inform a donor reactivation campaign strategy, benchmark your organizations net promoter score, or find out how the economy might affect your donors’ giving plans this year. A survey just for a survey’s sake is a waste of or your time (and your donors).
– Report back what you learned – this is critical – donors want to know that you’ve heard them.
– Charity Navigator and Guidestar both allow donor user reviews – think Yelp for the nonprofit set. Your donors may be talking about you there. Read those reviews and respond as appropriate.

Social Networks

– There are a lot of social networks out there. The key for a small nonprofit is to focus your resources. Maybe you can’t tackle Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Gather, Ning, and an organizational blog all at once. But choose one or two and do them really well. You can always ask your donors where they spend their virtual time and go from there.
– When I say do them really well – this is where the listening part comes in. Social networks are all about two-way (five-way, hundred-way, maybe even thousand-way conversation). Don’t think of them as just another push channel. You’ve got to respond to what people are saying if you want a real community.

Advanced

– Online discussion panels – think of this as a virtual focus group for particular subsets of your donors. It’s cheaper than a focus group and creates intense cultivation value among participants.
– Passion Panels for high value donors. This is an intensive, invite-only online community that aims to increase giving engagement by providing a high-touch relationship with the organization. Panels can also can provide ready advice on messages and programs and track longer term trends in donor thinking and attitudes.

OK – so with that said, now it’s my turn to listen. Please respond to this post and tell me other ways that your organization is listening to your donors. Share a case study of something that worked – or maybe something that didn’t. I’m all ears!

Join Alia on Thursday to get your advanced online fundraising questions answered.

Get all of our webinars and e-books for one price with the All-Access Pass! Get a full year for $465, or 90 days for $145.

Last week, Lindy Dreyer (SocialFish.org) and I hosted a free half-hour webinar called “What’s the Buzz? Find Out Who’s Talking About Your Organization and Issues Online”  – or what’s called “social media listening” by the Web 2.0 cool kids.

We talked about why you should be listening to online conversations and how you can use what you hear to improve your nonprofit’s programs and marketing. We also walked through how to set up several easy, free listening tools.

If you missed it, you can watch the recording: What’s the Buzz? (Windows Media Video .wmv)

You’ll also find some good follow-up links here.

Get all of our webinars and e-books for one price with the All-Access Pass! Get a full year for $465, or 90 days for $145.