My Top Ten Tweeps to Follow

If you’re on Twitter and looking for fundraising gurus to follow, I offer my Top Ten Tweeps list.  (These are in no particular order.)

1. @PamelaGrow  Pam always has good info to share!

2. @BTalisman  Barb is an experienced fundraising consultant and offers a great blog and weekly blog-talk radio show.

3. @FundraisingNews  Stay in the know about all things fundraising and nonprofit.

4. @impactmax  Always a good source of info.

5. @rjleaman  Another great source of info.

6. @LJacobwith  Yet another great source of info!

7.  @nonprofitorgs And one more great info source.

8. @AuctionExpert Sherry posts about charity auctions.

9. @Philanthropy This is the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

10. @VolunteerSpot Awesome org that helps recruit and manage volunteers online.  Great tweets!

Top nonprofit bloggers to follow on Twitter

VolunteerSpot named it’s top 29 nonprofit bloggers to follow on Twitter this week and guess who made the list?  You’ll find me in the #8 spot!  Woohoo!  I’m so flattered that folks find my blog ramblings helpful and worthwhile.  Check out the whole list at http://ow.ly/vlqe.

And if you’re not following me on Twitter, you can find me at www.Twitter.com/SandyRees.  I post inspiration, information, and links to resources, similar to what you’ll find here on my blog, but slightly different.  After all, on Twitter, it’s only 140 characters long!

Are you participating in Blog Action Day?

If you are blogging, you need to participate in Blog Action Day on October 15.  It’s a way for us to all join our voices together to bring awareness to this year’s topic (climate control), but it’s also a way to bring awareness to nonprofit blogging in general.

Currently, nearly 2,000 blogs are registered to participate.  I think that’s pretty good, but more are needed.

Go to www.blogactionday.com to register and get ideas about what you can post on Blog Action Day.

Benefits of blogging for nonprofits

I just stepped out of a workshop where I taught a room full of Habitat for Humanity folks about using social media tools.  One of the things I talked about was blogging.

For a nonprofit, a blog is an inexpensive way to communicate with lots of people and open up dialog with supporters.  It offers a quick way to provide timely and regularly updated information and to answer any questions your readers may have.

Here are some of the benefits of blogging:

• Blogging is a great way to get attention for your cause and share information about your organization and your mission. You can link your blog to lots of other sites on the web and you can share a link to your blog in emails you send to your regular supporters.
• Blogging can be a team sport: you can get lots of people involved (staff, Board, and volunteers can all participate) in writing material for your blog. This can be a tremendous help if you don’t like writing or don’t have lots of time to write.
• Blogging is easy to do and doesn’t require a technological genius to get started.
• Blogging allows you to not only share stories about your work, but post photos, video, and audio fairly easily. This gives your readers a multimedia experience with you! If your mission has an emotional edge to it (saving the environment for example), it gives supporters a place to voice their concerns and opinions.
• Best of all, blogging gives you a new tool for cultivating donors and supporters.

If you do a good job of posting about your activities in your blog, creating an Annual Report is a breeze.  You simply go back through your blog posts to gather information.

Get social media tips

I’m interviewing Social Media Expert Terri Brooks today at 3 pm eastern to get her best tips on using Social Media.  It’s a free call and you can register at http://getfullyfunded.com/socialmediafreecall.html.

Here are a couple of articles I’ve written about social media:

A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook – 4 Simple Steps to Get Started http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Beginners-Guide-to-Fundraising-on-Facebook—4-Simple-Steps&id=2176868

How to Use Twitter to Support Nonprofit Fundraising http://ezinearticles.com/?How-to-Use-Twitter-to-Support-Nonprofit-Fundraising&id=2505675

Who do you speak for?

In the latest issue of Fundraising Success magazine, Editor Margaret Battistelli has a good column on using social media.  One point particularly sticks out at me and I wanted to share it with you.

She writes “The people who connect to your organization’s pages certainly don’t need to know what kind of potato chip you would be. But I’d bet they wouldn’t mind hearing from you more, rather than just from your organization.  It might just be in the language or tone of your messages – “we” or “I” vs. “the ABC Organization.”

This is such a valid point.  Sometimes we get so focused on make our organizations appear professional that we strip the personal touch right out.  When connecting with people through social media, it’s the personal connection that counts. Be yourself and share about your nonprofit’s work through your eyes.

Got a success story to share about how you’ve connected with people using social media?  Let’s hear it!  Click on the ‘comment’ link below and tell us what’s working for you.

Nonprofit Blog Carnival!

Here’s the April edition of the Nonprofit Blog Carnival. This month’s theme was Raising Money Online. 

So many nonprofits are looking to the internet as an inexpensive tool for raising money.  While it can be a great technique, there are definitely things that work and things that don’t. Here are some nuggets of wisdom about raising money online.

Oneicity has an some good tips in Steve Thomas’ post “Optimize Online Fundraising.”

Joanne Fritz has a great post about optimizing your website called “What Online Donors Want to See On Your Website.”

Jeff Brooks has a good post pointing out some critical mistakes in his post called “How nonprofits fail their donors on the web.”

Kivi Leroux Miller had a whole week on Online Fundraising at the Nonprofit Marketing Guide.  Check out “Super Online Fundraising, Step 6.”

My pal Sandra Sims has some great advice on the Step By Step Fundraising site called “Accepting Donations Online: Three great Service Providers.”

Katya Andreson has a post called “Nonprofit websites even worse than government ones.”

Abny Santicola posted a great piece from the AFP Conference in New Orleans.  It’s called “Six Best Practices for Balancing New and Traditional  Media.”

And here are some social media-specific posts that you might find interesting:

Mark Pitman has “A Case for Twitter, Facebook, and social media for healthcare fundraisers.”

Beth Bates at the Good Works Grapevine has a an interesting case study about fundraising with Facebook.  Her post is called “Has Your Organization Benefitted from Facebook Causes?”

Britt Bravo talks about philanthropy on Twitter in her piece called “Hugh Jackman Makes $100,000 Donation Using Twitter.”

Marion Conway talks about fundraising with Facebook in her post called “How Facebook is both horrible and ninja for fundraising.”

Jeff Brooks has an interesting perspective on the use of Twitter for nonprofits called “Twitter better for birds than nonprofits.”

Do Facebook Causes work?

There was an article in the Washington Post this week that talked about Facebook Causes and basically said they aren’t any good.  I finally got to read the article today and it made me mad!

Here’s my response:

I think the results we’re seeing with Facebook Causes can be attributed to two things: first, supporters are gathered by dangerously easy-to-accept invitations from friends and second a serious lack of communication.

It’s way to easy to accept a Facebook invitation to join a cause. How often do we join causes that we only remotely care about just so we don’t offend our friend who is asking? It doesn’t require anything of us to join, so we do.

Communication is also an issue. The nonprofits who are using Facebook are not doing a good job of developing relationships or communicating with people who are Facebook supporters. I wonder how many of us have joined so many causes we don’t even remember which ones we joined?

These two facts go directly against the grain of basic nonprofit fundraising principles. No wonder we’re seeing dismal results with Facebook causes! We have people joining causes who don’t really care about them then there’s no real effort to stay in touch with them. How many donations would we get with our offline fundraising strategies if we followed the same strategies?

Facebook causes could probably see some seriously different results if the nonprofits using it had a solid strategy in place instead of jumping in as a knee-jerk response simply because ‘everyone else is doing it.’ A well thought-out plan with a specific goal in mind would no doubt bring different results.

What do you think?  Have you raised money with Facebook Causes?  I’d love to hear your story or your opinion!

Write, write, write – Surf the Wave of Web 2.0

This is a guest post from my fellow fundraiser Barbara Talisman, President of Talisman Associates, Inc., in Chicago.

If you want your message to get noticed, be sticky, passed along or retweeted, you have to write about it.

AND just writing it isn’t enough, you have to find the forums to share what you have written.

AND each of those forums requires a different format.

Here are some quick and easy ways to get your message noticed. Your message(s) should:

1. Be urgent, interesting and engaging

2. Include a call to action

3. Ask others to help you push your message

So where to get noticed?

You have your own website. Be sure to start there and make sure all your messages are current and consistent. Sometimes it is easier to update your Facebook page and forget about your website. Ideally, pushing everyone to your website is the way to go. But it doesn’t always work that way. So you need to have different communication streams. Does your organization have:

· Facebook page, causes, groups

· Twitter – multiple accounts for different parts of your organization including your Executive Director

· MySpace – page

· Blogs – same as Twitter, different people within your organization should have their own blogs.

All of this should be linked to your website or your website to them.

Set a reminder for yourself. You and staff need to write good content often to get noticed. It is a little busy out there. Plan on blogging variations of your message 2-3 times a week. Twitter at least 5-7 times a day and update your Facebook page, group or cause page at least once a week. The good news is you can use http://Ping.fm to post on update to all your social networking sites.

So now you are writing – you need readers! Well you have a built in audience of donors, friends, volunteer, staff and all their friends, colleagues and acquaintances! Ask them to join you as:

· Friends on Facebook and MySpace

· Followers on Twitter

· Readers and commentary on your blogs

Some of these your folks are using Web 2.0, some not. You can be sure those who are have no intention of stopping. And don’t be fooled, while the under 26 crowd tends to be the majority using Web 2.0, there is a growing number of folk over 45 using it as well.

Get on the surfboard, start paddling and ride the wave.

Hugh Jackman offers $100,000 on Twitter

I saw this late last night on Twitter:

Hugh Jackman is offering $100,000 to a nonprofit that can passionately explain their cause in 140 characters or less.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandtechnology/technology/twitter/5156504/Hugh-Jackman-makes-10000-charity-pledge-on-Twitter.html

I think this is a great exercise in being laser-focused, concise and compelling.  It sounds easy at first, but once you start working on it, you’ll see how difficult it is to work with only 140 characters (for those who don’t know, a character is a letter or a number or a space or a punctuation mark).

Want to join in?  Get a Twitter account if you don’t already have one www.twitter.com.  Send your response to @RealHughJackman  That’s it.

I’m working on one for a client that could desperately use the money. I’d love to hear if you’re planning to participate and what you come up with.

Help with social media for nonprofits

Have you ventured into the world of social media yet?  Does your nonprofit have a blog?  Do you twitter?  Have a presence on Facebook?

If you don’t and know you should, but don’t know where to start, I have a wonderful resource for you.  My friend Terri Brooks is a virtual assistant and provides these services to small businesses and nonprofit organizations.  She’s very good and her prices are affordable.

Check out her site at www.tastingtheinternet.com and sign up for more information.  Or visit her on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/group.php?gid=51769032326 and sign up for her group there.

For that matter, visit me on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/profile.php?id=513711420&ref=name and send me a friend request so you can get all the latest!