Our group worked on a guide for Safe Harbor’s social media and website. With our research, I learned an incredible amount about practices to help fund raise and promote a nonprofit through Facebook, Twitter and blogging. I realized how important it is to conduct these social media practices with a strategic plan that always begins with research.
In our proposal, we wanted to start by first showing the client why they needed social media:
“More and more nonprofit organizations are becoming involved in social media. Social media allows a free outlet for nonprofits to increase awareness of their organization and issue by building relationships with people all over the world. Most importantly we would like to see Safe Harbor create an empowered online community of Safe Harbor supporters.
People now desire to have interactions and real conversations with companies and brands they support. In a 2008 Business and Social Media study it was found that 85% of people wanted companies and brands to have a presence on social media. Twitter and Facebook have huge numbers of people using both and blogs are increasingly becoming a more popular destination for news on certain niche companies.
Nonprofit organizations like Safe Harbor should not miss out on this opportunity to engage with supporters online, receive free media placement, increase donations and overall make the issue of domestic violence better understood across the state and country.”
We included best practices for Twitter, Facebook and blogging. I consider myself somewhat social media experienced, but, creating this “how to” taught me a few things. All three have a common theme of marketing that medium. Advertising your Facebook, Twitter and blog are imperative to increase your audience. Below, I’ve listed some facts and tips I learned about what I consider the most helpful medium for nonprofits; Twitter.
Twitter:
–As of September 2010, Twitter has over 145 million registered users, with over 300,000 new users and 600 million searches per day. Users are an even male and female ratio. The peak on Twitter is the 18-34 years of age group, with an even number of older and younger users. Twitter users are generally less wealthy than those on Facebook and LinkedIn. Therefore, in this medium, asking for support through actions and participation is more important than requesting donations (Aronsson, L. & Male, B., 2010).
–Make sure your tweets are not protected. You are on Twitter to spread the word, not to protect it!
–Use RainMaker to encourage followers to give to your cause “at the speed of a tweet.” 
RainMaker is for for nonprofits that want to tap into the power and convenience of social networks, letting their supporters bring even more attention to their cause and it appeals to followers because they are able to donate to causes they are passionate about, while spreading the word and encouraging other people It’s as easy as setting up an account on RainMaker and letting your followers know that you have this account. Anyone who has their Paypal account and Twitter account linked to RainMaker, can tweet with a #hashtag for the cause, a dollar sign for the amount and “@” the “rainmakerapp” account. The donation has gone through that quickly!
–See who is reading your links. When you post a link to Twitter, it is important to see who follows that link to read more about your story, especially when most of the links you will be posting will warrant activity to your website. URL shorteners like BudURL and Twurl are free sites that allow you to track the last five links you have tweeted.
As I mentioned before, it is important to do research to ensure efficient social media efforts. We researched other Twitter and Facebook accounts of nonprofits like Red Cross and Meals on Wheels to evaluate different effective methods for promoting their respective causes. In addition, we created a website recommendation document based on our critiques of the website. We knew this was important for Safe Harbor to focus on their website because, with an increased social media presence, the organization would be driving more traffic to their website.
We wanted to give Safe Harbor and idea of the types of tweets, posts and blog entries they should use so we created numerous examples that we coordinated with annual events, statistics on domestic violence and statistics on the shelter itself. We gave them a detailed calendar of annual events for the Safe Harbor shelter to note throughout the year. For example, days like April 6th-National Day of Hope, we suggested Safe Harbor tweet and post appropriately to honor the hope that women in domestic violence still have.
We hope that, with our documents full of guidance, Safe Harbor can have a much more visible and impactful presence online that will encourage support of their mission and allow victims of domestic violence to seek their help.
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