1. Lay A Solid Online Outreach Foundation
The first question you should ask yourself as a fundraiser is, do you have your most basic online outreach in place? You shouldn’t be committing staff to Twitter, Facebook or any other social media application if you don’t have a decent website home page or can’t email supporters.
Before you think about social media, you should have:
- A well-branded, easy-to-use website
- The ability to process secure donations
- An email campaign tool that complies with federal anti-spam laws
- A website analytics tool (like Google Analytics)
- A listening tool (so you can monitor online conversations)
- Great follow-up for online donors and supporters
- Smooth integration between online and offline efforts
- Regular reporting on all of your efforts so you can learn and correct as you go
If you don’t have these things, visit our For Nonprofits page and check out our DonateNow and EmailNow (now with Social Sharing*) tools, as well as trainings and eBooks on all these topics.
*With Social Sharing on EmailNow, you can allow your audience to share your email campaigns on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; track the shares and resulting extra traffic to your campaign.
2. Create a Social Media Strategy Using the 11 Steps to Success and 6 Things to Avoid
If you already have all of the above, you may be ready for the next step: creating a social media strategy. If you’re actively conducting online outreach, monitoring results and listening to what people are saying about your issue, you will be able to put together a realistic strategy that identifies an audience you want to engage – and a goal for that engagement.
So how do you effectively harness the array of social networking tools to supercharge your fundraising and advocacy efforts? Before you even think of tweeting, view this presentation to see 11 proven steps to success and 6 common pitfalls to avoid.
3. Use Twitter to Promote Your News
When you’re ready to start tweeting, our friends over at PR Newswire have also written a great article all about how to use Twitter to promote your news.
