Category: Uncategorized

Social Networking Tips… Beth Kanters Question. My answer

Beth used Facebook to ask for our time saving tips for professional and organisational social networking. She asked specifically about tools etc to help work across mutliple sites (something which I can’t answer) but I can offer some basics, and getting the basics right will save wasted time:

1 Guiding principle number one is to make sure your work and what you do on the network are compatible. Don’t go chasing audience for the sake of numbers if that takes you away from your core purpose. Doing so will just increase the number of people you might bore or irritate and waste effort.

2 Guiding principle number 2 is that social networks are fundamentally about people relating to people – not people to organisations. So be yourself. If you are bad tempered, arrogant, rude and ignorant, then please ask someone else to do your online social networking- and don’t give me that look either.

3 Don’t play the games or the just for fun stuff – cos it eats your life, clutters up your profile and gives a mixed impression. (This does not apply to scrabulous, or ……)

4 Use pictures where ever possible. Include people’s faces, names and link to them.

5 Groups or fan groups on Facebook are good because they allow your network to bring new names and faces into your orbit. Before you set them up have a plan of action for communications or invitations to act over, say, 3 months. Don’t make the demands too onerous or frequent – make them entirely relevant. Between invitations to act add links etc to keep the group ticking over.

6 Add links to other people’s work. You just need to to make a brief comment. It is quick and shows your breadth of interests. It is also generous – and generosity oils social networks. Indeed, generous networkers will hat-tip facebook notes etc.

7 One thing I don’t do – but think I should – is have a monthly stock take of online profiles etc. I should set aside half a day when I do my accounts, order stationery, update profiles and clean out apps and groups I don’t use any more. So plan an online-offline house keeping session.

8 If someone called Beth Kanter invites you to collaborate online – do it.

Interestingly Beth cites Amy Graham who talks about how she uses her feedreader to keep track of herself on online social networks. I’m already finding myself slipping behind – which is not the point. Better respond to David next re netsquaredUK.

Online Fundraising Tears of Joy the Private Eye Way.

I used to find the back pages of Private Eye puzzling. Rows of personal ads asking for money to help people “travel” “pay my mums nursing fees” or “finish university”. Why would you bother to send a cheque?

I think I understood them a little better when a year ago I threw a few dollars at Volunteer Evolution because I wanted to trust the idea behind her ambitions and it wasn’t a big deal for me financially.

This all came to mind when Jon Bounds alerted me to I Am Not A Drain on Society. A week ago this anonymous medical student added a donate button and eloquently explained:

This is sheer desperation. I mean it. I’m financially crippled, and unless I manage to magic up some cash at warp speed, there is a distinct chance I may get suspended from medical school.

Earlier today they wrote:

I want to say a huge massive thank you to all of you! Between all of you who have either donated, or sent messages of support, you have all reduced me to tears of joy. Basically, I needed £1000 up front to the university to allow me to register as a 2nd year student and get my loan for this academic year. On top of this £1000 I owed them a further £1600. So courtesy of you wonderfully generous individuals, I have now raised £1700 in donations.

So how does this work? I have some ideas:

In the same ways as the Private Eye personals which appeal to people for whom a donation is small fry and the subject has some personal resonance.
Trust built up over a period of blogging to establish a real relationships.
Good writing and entertainment are rewarded (like Radiohead making money from trying to give away their music, but the again possibly not).
The ease of the mechanism. Push button donations are simpler than going to a post box.

It certainly doesn’t appear to be the blogosphere buzzing. Technorati reckons the blog has barely received any links in the last week and Google blog search was telling the same story. It is interesting that only two people I could find who sympathies are other blogging public servants Walking the Streets, Random acts of reality and The Thin Blue Line.

So what have I missed?

Net2ThinkTank: It's the shopping season – so get your supporters shopping for your cause.

Britt Bravo at Netsquared has thrown out this question: How Can Nonprofits Use the Social Web During the “Giving Season”?

The truth is that this is the shopping season – so make the most of it with something that’s a touch web 1.5.

Sign up for an affiliate site and encourage your supporters to use it for some of their Christmas shopping. Over at the Birmingham Conservation Trust we opened this shop through buy.at. We chose it because it has a number of key high street brands which have a lot of public trust – which is important when you are thinking about how people may perceive your charity.

You can buy everything from a case of wine for Christmas through to the holiday you’ll need to recover afterwards, the clothes you’ll wear to the works Christmas party and even those utterly useless presents bought for uncles you barley know.

We don’t litter our website with affiliate links but simply encourage our networks to use it for their shopping. You can apply all of the tools of web 2.0 to encourage people to support you at no cost to themselves. Add it as an item on social networking sites, send the link to friends on facebook who share an interest with you or live in a neighbourhood relevant to the charity, perhaps even use it as a url when you leave comments on people’s blogs.

Be warned, it can be difficult to get people into the habit of using your affiliate site.

On www.buy.at/birminghamconservation we have one stationery trader, Euroffice, who offers 8% on just about all purchases. With deals like that why not talk to businesses you know and ask them to start consider routinely using the service to buy their office supplies.

Of course the more flexible your affiliate provider is the better for you.

I’ve got mixed feelings about perfiliate who runs buy.at.  You can’t create links to specific products or traders – which seems a little complacent on their part. For example the National Trust will pay us £20 for everyone who signs up to them through our buy.at shop. That’s a natural tie in. If we could email a link to that offer direct to our mailing list it could allow us to raise money quickly with minimal effort. But we can’t – the best we can hope for is that our supporters will wade through a series of links to. So any suggestions for a better affiliate welcome.