Last evening's Government and Non-Profits 2.0:Social Media-Best Practices event moderated by Alan Silberberg, and including Debra Bowen, Beth Kanter, and Gwyneth Galbraith covered a lot of ground in one hour. But Lynne and I found the discussion surrounding how to get nonprofits to take baby steps toward social media to be of primary interest. Beth listed the typical barriers (or excuses if you prefer) provided by nonprofits to avoid participating in social media. She mentioned that nonprofits just don't have a culture for social media. Some the top-level baby steps that were discussed included wallowing in the problem, creating a social media policy, and taking small yet comfortable steps toward embracing at least one tool, perhaps Facebook or Twitter for starters.
We have been openly wondering if a more comfortable baby step might exist - one that allows the organization to leverage existing tools and involves their existing community. The goal would be to create a positive feedback loop, confidence, and a sliver of a social media culture before moving on to more open and uncontrollable pastures. In other words, create a really nice entryway to your organization's landscape before tearing the fences down.
So what are the existing tools? Our experience has been they consist of hard copy newsletters, eNewsletters, mailing lists, and maybe a blog. Despite the fact that email is starting to feel like driving your grandfather's Buick, it's still the lowest common denominator for online communications. So what if the existing publishing activities practiced by most nonprofits could result in push-pull engagement and participation by the community, rather than just pressing send and watching the Buick drive off into the sunset never to be seen again? How can we better address the challenges of taking the baby steps, such as publishing in the right format, publishing to the right people, and tracking the impact?
As a concrete example, I'll turn to a recent example blog/eNewsletter created by Beth discussing network weaving. I receive Beth's blog posts as an email compliments of Feedburner, but this could just as easily be a typical eNewsletter being sent by a nonprofit to their mailing list. Beth wrote "My question: Is there a network of peers who do network weaving for nonprofits to support external communications?"
Taking that question to the next level would be allowing the community to respond on the spot and share with the other members right within the context of the email or blog posting.
And a step further would be providing the option for people to see some comments from other readers to encourage their response.
Further into Beth's blog she writes "For starters, I'm going to ask Holly Ross at NTEN that we have a birds of a feather table at the NTC10 or if I get ambitious I will sign up to lead an affinity group meeting."
This could be followed up with:
A yes response would place the person into a new group that could be leveraged as an immediate communications channel and collaboration point. Beth's blog entry closes with some questions:
- Are you practicing network weaving skills in your nonprofit or network?
- What are you learning about network weaving?
- What inspires you about network weaving potential?
All of which could be replaced by a short survey in the email.
Now every email communication, no matter how formal or informal, could leverage best practices for encouraging participation, feedback, and more contextual dialogue. Commenting on a blog has a few of the above capabilities, but is reliant on the reader filling in the context and doesn't provide for the option to show the results of what the rest of the community thinks in a nutshell. For example:
The eNewsletter and the aggregation of results, comments, etc. at a single destination web page has an opportunity to provide evidence of a (hopefully) vibrant and caring community of supporters, donors, volunteers, and recipients. The organization has taken a baby step using publishing-related activities with which they are comfortable and familiar. But after a few of these transactions, allowing for less controlled conversation and dialogue may start to creep into the organizational culture. Not to mention that the dialogues are great initial content to point at when they do engage with Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels.
If these tools existed in the way I've described then I'd be using them in this blog posting. So I'm stuck asking for your comments here:
- Does it make sense to extend a nonprofit's existing publishing tools in this way (assuming it can be done without too much time and pain)?
- Are there any success stories out there where email is being used to bring polls, surveys, and conversation to the forefront in real time? Maybe inserting a Google Form or other 3rd party survey into an email?
- Does this feel like a baby step that might be a good tool to add into a social media starter toolkit?
