Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of presenting at the Pittsburgh 2009 Non-Profit Summit presented by the Greater Pittsburgh Non-Profit Partnership and Grantmakers of Western Pennsylvania. Fellow panelists included Cynthia Closkey of Big Big Design, Jessica Knoche of HDS Pittsburgh, Bernadette Turner of Addison Behavioral Care and John Denny of Pittsburgh Social Venture Partners. Both sessions posed great questions about how non-profits can better be served with social media. Some take aways from the event included:
- It’s important to: decide on a social media strategy based on surveying your audience; develop realistic and measurable goals; and constantly evaluate and adjust your social media campaigns to attribute the most energy towards activities that are helping reach those goals.
- Infuse social media strategies throughout all levels of your organization, however realize that implementing a quality strategy requires time dedication from key individuals.
- When trying to sell senior executives on social media initiatives, most will ask questions about the return on investment. A good comparison for this is comparing a website to social media. Most companies and organizations spend thousands on new websites. Websites, while important, only provide two dimensional communication. General corporate websites do not allow for interaction between the organization and those who visit the site (aside from a mail link or contact form, of course). Social media provides direct interaction between companies/organizations and their audience. What would the return on investment be if a company could interact with all members who visit their site? How would sales be affected? How would donations be affected? That’s the benefit of social media.
We’ve developed the Pittsburgh Non-Profits blog to provide resources for non-profit professionals. The presentation is posted here.
Filed under: Social Media Tagged: | campaign management, Pittsburgh Non-Profit Summit, Return on Investment, Social Media
