Social Media 4 Good » Strategy

Non-profits and social media: how to leave the competition behind

Timo — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 16:27:51 +0000

I’m a firm believer that you get what you pay for and in that respect I find little encouragement in the “2012 Nonprofit Social Networking Report“. According to the report, non-profits and NGOs are still very reluctant to allocate resources to their social media activities. However, this is also a chance for those who are willing to make the investment.

If you haven’t done so yet, please take a look at this infographic which sums up the key findings of the report nicely.

Time is more valuable than money

It is good to see that around 45 per cent of NGOs say that they have a budget for social media. However, money is not the main resource you need to build a successful social media presence – it is time: time to listen to your followers and to engage them.

Full-time employees working on social media (Source: 2012 Nonprofit Social Networking Benchmark Report)

Unfortunately 67 per cent of all respondents said that they only have one quarter or less of an employees dedicated to social media. To me that sounds like someone simply added “social media” to the job description of a person in the communications or marketing department and decided that that was enough. Well, it is not.

Their reluctance is your chance

The good news is, that this also means that it is comparatively easy to zip past the competition.

Think about it: by dedicating a single full time staff member (and no, I’m not talking about interns) to social media, you have more resources at your disposal than 80 per cent of all non-profits! Considering that the report also says that each Facebook follower can be valued at around 214 USD, this should be a no-brainer.

Granted, small non-profits might not need someone to work eight hours per day on Facebook and Twitter; maybe someone who works 50 per cent really is enough for them. However, even then I would argue for a dedicated social media person, rather than someone who has this as part of their portfolio – and anything less than 50 per cent is simply not serious.

What is your opinion? What is the minimum number of resources a non-profit should invest in social media?

New project: Social Media in Emergencies Guidelines

Timo — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 15:11:03 +0000

Two weeks ago I left Liberia and moved back to Germany. My next project: developing “Social Media in Emergencies Guidelines” for a UN agency.

It’s something I’m really looking forward to, particularly since the focus is not on fundraising, but on story telling, advocacy and outreach. If you have any resources, links or know of any people who I should be talking to, please leave a comment or send an email to timo.luege AT [the email service run by google]. Thanks!

Case study: social media staff guidelines for the Red Cross Red Crescent

Timo — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:27:19 +0000

A while ago I posed the social media staff guidelines that I created for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Since then, I have been asked by a few organizations to talk about the process of getting there. It seems that more and more organizations see the need and usefulness of having such a document.

Below you find a presentation I have given on two occasions on that topic. At the bottom of my previous post you can also download the social media staff guidelines.

I decided to use Camtasia this time to create a presentation that includes the audio, which is why it’s embedded as a YouTube video. Of course you can also download it from Slideshare as powerpoint without my explanations.

I hope you find it useful and please tell me what you think.

Haiti earthquake: The Red Cross Red Crescent social media response

Timo — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 02:50:02 +0000

To say that the last days were“intense” would be an understatement. From the minute the earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement pulled out all stops to help the people on the ground.

Communications is only a small part of that response and social media an even smaller part. Nevertheless – here are my observations:

Convergence is already happening

As soon as the extend of the destruction became clear, American Red Cross asked the public to donate 10 USD through text messages for the Haiti response. Within the first day AmCross collected 800,000 USD. After six days they had collected 21 million USD. Since the appeal was not only spread through social media but also through mass media, it is difficult to measure how big a part social media played. But I think that the effect was significant. Because unlike when seeing the message on tv or reading it in the paper, many users didn’t have to switch device to take action.

What I mean is this: Since many people in the US use Twitter on their mobile phones, and since the donations happened through text messages, very little effort was needed on their part. They received the call to action on the same device they needed to take action.

Ease of use taps donors’ wallets

Other Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had similar text messaging programmes. But while these also raised money, none of them were as successful as AmCross’s. I’m convinced that the reason is primarily that mobile phone technology and internet use have converged more in the US than in other countries. (I’d be really interested in insights from Japan on this point)

NGOs and non-profits should take note of this development and design a mobile phone strategy as soon as possible, no matter where they are. (see also: “Time to get mobile“) In the US it is already necessary, because donors will soon expect this level of ease of use when making a donation. And outside the US, organizations have a chance to be slightly ahead of the curve when convergence comes to their country.

Content rules

Investing in photography and videos pays off. The public and the media have an immense hunger of exclusive footage from the ground. In the first few days quality is not that important, but that quickly changes and the higher the quality to start with, the better. Because we had good content, we were able to pitch our photos to media and got noticed online.

1 million views on Flickr

Not the best photo in the world - but seen 70,000 times.

All photos in our Flickr set about the Haiti Earthquake combined generated over 1 million page views within 24 hours on January 14^th. It was highlighted by Yahoo! (which contributed the majority of impressions) but other media paid attention as well. In the first few days, BBC Online mentioned it on their live blog every time, we uploaded new images. We also got a substantial number of requests from media who wanted high-resolution versions of our Flickr photos.

Return on investment

As far as ROI is concerned I should mention that most visitors stayed within that set and did not click on other photos or through to our site. So while this was very successful to generate awareness, it did not generate substantial funds for us. However, since Flickr’s community guidelines forbid actively asking for donations, there was no call to action under these pictures either – merely “Find out more at http://www.ifrc.org/haiti/ ”. And besides, our role as a Secretariat is primarily to highlight the work of National Societies – so for us that still is a success.

Quick and easy tools to help spread the message

We’ve also made our Flickr set available as an embeddable slide show and share the code on Facebook and with National Societies. I have no information whether this is being used a lot, but since it only took two minutes to set up I think it was worth it.

CNNireport: From online to on-air

Finally, we uploaded the photos to CNNireport, CNN‘s “citizen journalist“ portal. While this did not generate a lot of views online, CNN used a lot of these images on air.

Video: be creative

Video was – and is – much more challenging. Not only are videos more difficult to produce, there are also bandwidth issues. While photos could be sent from Haiti by mobile phone, there simply was no bandwidth to send high quality videos in the first few days. However, AmCross showed that simply having someone on camera who can talk intelligently about the situation on the ground can be enough – even if that person is far away: Tracy Reines, director of international response operations, did short video messages in the first few days in which she explained what the Red Cross was doing. Her first video was seen more than 200,000 times on YouTube. Unfortunately there was also an incredible amount of extremely racist and obnoxious comments which makes me believe that it might make sense to pre-censor comments.

3. Facebook, Digg and Reddit

We routinely post new content to our Facebook page, to Reddit and to Digg. We have never been able to generate much attention for our content on either Reddit or Digg, Facebook however was a surprise to me. It was surprising to me how little impact it had. Our stories on Haiti got pretty much the same amount of “likes”, comments and shares that most of our day to day stories get. I would have expected much more. Something I didn’t do – and maybe that was a mistake – is create an album with photos on Facebook, similar to what we did on Flickr. Maybe that would have worked better.

Crowdsourced mapping for Haiti.

4. Crowdsourced mapping

I actually want to do a separate post about this topic, because I find the crowdsourced maps that are available about Haiti extremely impressive. We haven’t been actively involved in this ourselves, but I think we have to find a way to include these resources at an operational level. For the time being, please take a look at: http://haiti.ushahidi.com/

5. What did your organization do / learn?

These are my first thoughts and experiences from a social media perspective. I’m currently on my way to Panama to assist our regional office with supporting our teams in Haiti. This will be general communications support – not social media specific – and I’m sure I’ll be too busy to blog once we have landed. But I’d love to hear from you: what your organization has done or learned about social media in emergencies. And even if I don’t have time to write, I’ll find the time to approve comments. So please share your knowledge!

P.s.: Actually I’ve been to Panama for four days now – but didn’t get around to posting this before today. It’s great to see how the Red Cross Red Crescent is doing everything to help the people in Haiti. And it’s a real privilege to be part of that team.

Flickr for non-profits – 8 lessons learned

Timo — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 07:45:11 +0000

I have been using Flickr for about two years to increase visibility of the work of Red Cross Red Crescent. Today, I’d like to share some of the lessons I’ve learned.

Why Flickr?

I believe that most non-profits spend too much time preaching to the choir. Flickr is a great website to show what your organization is doing or why it is doing it to people whom you haven’t reached so far.

1. Know your audience

Quality is important

A large group of Flickr users is really passionate about photography. A second important group is people who are looking for free stock photos that they can use in presentations etc. Both groups have in common that they are looking for high quality photos. Respect that and be extremely critical about which photos you share. I ask myself every time “Could this photo be on a postcard or on the front page of a newspaper?” and try to post only those photos that meet this standard. Please note: photos of conferences or internal meetings never meet that standard.

2. Newsworthiness beats quality

This photo attracted 15,000 views - most of them in the fist 24 hours.

The only time when you can forget about quality and simply post whatever you have is when you have fresh, exclusive photos from a breaking news event: when cyclone Nargis hit Myanmar in May 2008, we were the only organization that had current photos from the affected areas during the first few days. As a result, the photos attracted more than 70,000 views in 48 hours.

Update: Please read this post about the impact we had with Flickr after the Haiti earthquake.

To a large degree this was because Yahoo! decided to link to them directly from their news homepage, but I’ve have seen similar, smaller surges when we had photos from other, hard to reach areas. Timing is essential for these kind of photos: to be successful you have to be lucky and fast. Once Reuters and AP get their photographers on location, interest in your less-than perfect pictures will wane fast.

3. Less is more

On Flickr, if someone likes your photos, he can add you as a “contact”. This means that his personal profile page will show your latest photos. However, it will only load a maximum of five photos. I have found that there is no significant difference in extra traffic beyond five photos. Unless the photos are urgent, you will gain more by spacing them out over a few days.

Tip: It seems like you can batch-upload and prepare all photos at once as long as you keep them “private”. I think that the trigger for showing up in your contact’s photo streams is not “last uploaded” but “latest photos that have been made visible.” In other words: I might upload 16 photos at once but then switch them from “private” to “public” four or five at a time over the next days.

4. Understand what you want to achieve

Flickr is not a good tool to fundraise or even to drive traffic to your site. Most people will stay on Flickr and not make that extra click to your donations-form or your site. This can make it difficult to measure impact. I consider Flickr to be a valuable tool to showcase the work of the organization and to increase visibility, particularly with people we normally can’t reach.

In addition, National and local Red Cross Red Crescent societies and branches can take our photo feed (through RSS or the API) to highlight the international work of the organization on their websites without any extra work on their part. I think this a good idea for any non-profit or NGO that has branches.

5. Groups, groups, groups

Almost every time I hear someone complaining that his/her Flickr stream doesn’t attract enough people, the reason is that they are not using groups. Think about it: most people don’t go to Flickr with the intention of seeing your photos. Most of them want to see photos that have a certain topic and it is in these topical groups that you find your audience. So, if you are an animal-rights organization, upload those puppy-photos to one of the many “dogs” group. If you work in DRC, upload your photos to the “Congo” group etc. I normally add each of our photos to at least ten groups.

Tip: Be on topic, but be different. You want your photos to stand out from the crowd so try to surprise people. Adding Tsunami photos to a “beautiful beaches” group or photos of malnourished children to “children portraits” is absolutely acceptable and can be very effective. Just make sure that they fall within the topic of the group.

6. Appreciate the work of others

You should also consider creating your own group and ask others to contribute to it. As administrator of a group you’ll see a new comment-button under all photos on Flickr, which makes it very easy for you to ask others to add their photo to your group. Ideally this will make them join your group and become a regular visitor and/or contributor. As the size of your group grows it becomes more and more likely that others will be exposed to your issues.

7. Flickr needs attention

I find that traffic to our photo stream falls very rapidly once I haven’t uploaded anything for a few days. Each time I let that happen, I slowly have to work the traffic back up from 40-50/day to 500-600/day, which is realistic for us outside of newsworthy events. This normally takes four or five uploads or about a week.

8. Use creative commons licenses – with care

A good example of the kind of photo to which we assign creative commons licenses. The photo shows our work and the branding is subtle.

I’m a big fan of creative commons licensing and believe that you should license your photos on Flickr accordingly, if you have all the necessary rights. The biggest advantage is that it allows people to spread your message without any hassle on their part. It also means that your photos show up when someone is looking for CC-licensed material using Flickr’s or Google’s image search. However, the important thing is to only license photos under CC that actually contain your message.

You should also think about how you would feel about seeing your photos in a competitor’s annual report. In our case that means that I only apply a CC license to photos that contain a visible red cross or red crescent emblem. Basically I don’t want another organization to be able to use one of our non-branded photos without having to ask for permission first. I am far more flexible when it comes to photos that are branded, since it is in our interest that these photos are shared as widely as possible.

What I’m missing

What I find disappointing about Flickr is the lack of integration with Facebook. There are a number of apps, but none of them do what I want. What I’d like to see is something akin to the existing “Blog this” feature in Flickr that would allow me to selective add photos to the album of our Facebook page. I’m also missing a “share this” button that would allow visitors of our photostream to post a link and a thumbnail to their own Facebook news feed.

Finally: “Social Media 4 Good” has a Facebook page!

Timo — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:19:50 +0000

I’ve used the New Year’s break to do some minor housekeeping on the blog. Among other things, I updated to WordPress 2.9 which has some really interesting new features. I also (finally) created a Facebook page for the blog so that you can see updates in your news feed – if that is something you want.

I had been hoping that “Networked Blogs” would help me to get the word out, but so far I’m a bit disappointed. While I get some traffic from the Networked Blogs-directory, I don’t find it an effective tool to promote individual posts. Currently my page has only one fan – me. Since this is a bit depressing it’d be great if you could add yourself. Thanks and I hope you’ll have a happy 2010!