CHAPTER SIXTEEN

NOT-FOR-PROFIT AND CAUSE-FOCUSED
GRASS ROOTS SOCIAL MEDIA

Not-for-profit and cause-focused groups of all sizes are discovering that social media opens up opportunities to expand their donor and volunteer base while also engaging and educating the community and prospective clients about their services and outcomes.

We’ve seen the dramatic stories about microfundraising on Twitter after tsunamis or natural disasters, and bigger projects on GoFundMe or other crowdfunding sites. If you’ve been on Twitter, Pinterest, or Facebook for any length of time, you’ve probably seen pictures of cute, adoptable dogs and cats from rescue organizations and shelters all over the country.

These are just a few of the ways cause-centric organizations are reaching out successfully, and it’s time your group got on board.

Social media is a natural outreach for cause-centric organizations because it’s where the people are. Direct mail is expensive, and though it can still be effective, printing, postage, and handling costs can be daunting. Many modern donors look askance at “free” calendars received through the mail or slick, heart-tugging direct mail letters, because they know the costs of engaging a direct mail copywriter and producing giveaways eat away at any donated funds. Likewise, savvy donors are suspicious of telephone fundraisers, either because of security concerns about not sharing credit card information over the phone, or because they know the costs will be deducted from donations.

On the other hand, social media feels more real and personal. Although there may be paid staff creating and posting the stories, pictures, and videos on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, the costs aren’t as glaring as with direct mail and telemarketing. More importantly, social media creates a level of engagement and connection that can’t be duplicated offline. And whereas older donors may still be receptive to mail and phone, a younger generation is likely to be less so.

People in their 20s and 30s may not be making major financial gifts, but socially conscious young adults are ideal volunteers, and organizations that get them in the habit of giving now are likely to create a life-long donor relationship. Overwhelmingly, this demographic doesn’t use landline phones (making them more difficult to reach by telemarketers) and prefer e-mail to postal mail. But they are on social media daily, and what they see and what friends recommend influences behavior.

Social media is also an effective way to reach the over-40 demographic, as more and more adults engage online at all ages. Recognize that a growing majority of all but the very youngest and very oldest people are active on one or more social media platform, providing you with new opportunities to connect and engage.

Whether you’re a long-established organization or a new, small group, branding should be a major part of your social media presence. Young adults may not automatically recognize your organization’s name and mission, even if it has been around for a century. Or they may have a vague—and outdated or incorrect—notion of what you do that falls far short of your current mission, leading to missed opportunities for support. Older potential donors and volunteers may be stuck in the past when it comes to thinking of your organization, not realizing that your mission and scope of services may have broadened or shifted dramatically with time. People who don’t know what you do can’t be passionate about your cause, and without passion, it’s much more difficult to engage people as donors, supporters, and volunteers.

Credibility is another issue to address for today’s audiences, who have become wary with online scams and news stories recounting the actions of unscrupulous charities. Expect potential donors and volunteers to check you out on sites like Charity Navigator with an eye toward how funds are used. Savvy donors know to ask how much of the funds raised actually go to client services (as opposed to marketing and administrative costs), another reason why slick direct mail or telemarketing can raise a red flag.

Your outreach on social media needs to tell a compelling story about the need and your organization’s response. To engage potential donors, volunteers, and supporters, you need to awaken a passion to solve a problem. You’ll also need to engage the heart (action, passion) as well as the head (credibility, awareness). Fortunately, social media’s multi-media capability makes it easier than ever to use photos, videos, audio, and short vignettes to capture attention, educate, and make an emotional connection.

Social media also enables cause-centric organizations to expand their influence through the viral nature of online content. Unlike direct mail, social media enables your target audience to share content they find meaningful, so you gain access to each person’s fans, friends, and followers. That can increase your reach exponentially, with the additional benefit that forwarded and shared content carries extra credibility because it is being passed on by a trusted source, a personal connection.

Now that you know how social media can extend your organization’s reach and deepen its relationship with donors and volunteers, let’s look at ways to use individual platforms.

LINKEDIN, FACEBOOK, AND TWITTER

Use LinkedIn for the business side of charity. Stay connected with your board members, donors, corporate sponsors, and volunteers, and realize that when you engage them about your organization, you are also engaging their personal networks of contacts as well. Craft your outcome stories with an eye toward enticing corporate sponsors and encouraging corporate volunteerism. Use photos, videos, and short text stories to make your mission and results real. Share metrics, and talk about how your work not only benefits the recipients of your services, but also the community as a whole. Realize that although the business audience on LinkedIn may appreciate heartwarming stories, posts that emphasize return on investment for time and donations are likely to be more effective in wooing new partners and keeping existing partners engaged.

LinkedIn is also a great place to thank your corporate sponsors, donors, and volunteers. You can’t thank people enough in a public forum. Use photos and video to make it personal. Thank organizations and individuals. Every thank-you post not only builds goodwill, but it also showcases the “who’s who” that is involved with your organization, which may prompt others in their circle to want to join the action. Creating share-worthy posts means your corporate colleagues are promoting your organization to their circles of influence, which is a form of endorsement.

Do a little detective work on LinkedIn and see who your donors, sponsors, and volunteers are connected to. Doing so makes it very easy to ask for a warm introduction, either in person or online, to others who are likely to be demographically perfect for your organization. Identify a wish list of people you’d like to approach and who might be best to ask. Be on the lookout for “superstars”—high profile or high net worth individuals and/or celebrities who are connected to your sponsors, donors, and volunteers. Leveraging a personal connection to someone with a massive public platform can create huge PR benefits for your organization. Celebrities are overwhelmed with requests from strangers, but may be very open to getting involved with your organization if asked by a family friend, old college roommate, or cousin.

When you’re in the midst of responding to a crisis, don’t forget to post urgent needs for cash, goods, services, volunteers, in-kind donations, trucks, equipment, specialized skills, etc. on LinkedIn. The business audience on this site can make things happen with a phone call, and may be very willing to step in to help on a local, regional, or national/international level. Resources that seem huge to your organization may be a minimal expense (and a deductible one at that) for a large organization. I witnessed first-hand the lengths that a large department store chain went to after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita to locate their displaced employees and help out with privately marshalled truckloads of essential food and supplies that got into stricken areas faster than most other aid organizations. Combine the desire to be a good corporate citizen with personal or organizational ties to a region in addition to the benefits of positive PR and you may find that your LinkedIn connections can move mountains in an emergency.

Facebook and Twitter connect you to the general public, including noncorporate volunteers. Both sites can be powerful in helping you tell your story to a large number of people with the use of compelling videos, photos, and short-but-heartfelt text. Although outcomes and results still matter, the people you’ll reach on these sites will respond to emotion and stories about the impact on individuals, families, and communities. The warm and fuzzy approach counts for a lot in winning hearts and getting likes or shares. Tug at the heartstrings in appeals for help or stories about happy endings facilitated by your organization.

Stories are the source of your social media success. They’re effective when you share them, but they are even more so when they’re captured on video featuring the real people whose lives are better because of what your organization does, and the volunteers who help make that happen. Encourage your clients and volunteers to share their experiences, and reward them by thanking them and sharing their content. Do casual interviews and profiles of your volunteers and the community organizers who help bring people together. When they post and share them, you reach their friends and followers with the power of a personal endorsement.

Use Facebook and Twitter to share in-the-moment urgent needs that can be met by regular people—canned food, winter coats, bottled water, supplies for disaster areas, homes for shelter pets, and the need for emergency helpers with special skills such as doctors, nurses, EMTs, utility workers, construction professionals, truck drivers, and so on. When individuals rally their friends, family, and community to the cause, encourage them to document with photos and videos—a situation where selfies are awesome! Thank them publicly and profusely, utilizing photos and videos as well as text.

VIDEO RULES THE ONLINE WORLD

Facebook Live, Periscope, and Snapchat can help you and your volunteers show the devastation from a disaster, go live at a food drive, fundraiser, or resource collection point, bring viewers the real-time experience of building a Habitat for Humanity house, filling grocery bags for a food bank, or other project. (Always respect the privacy of your recipients and never show faces or give names without permission and a signed release form.) The objective is to bring your social media audience into the situation, sharing the urgency or encouraging them to get involved.

Most cause-centric organizations spend a lot of effort educating people about their mission and the need for their services. Social media makes it easier than ever to share photos, video, stories, and testimonials in a compelling way to awaken urgency and spur action. You can also share photo memes and short tweets and posts on tips or facts related to your cause, promote a hotline, or share links where people can access resources. Not only can you reach a wide audience with your information, but you can also track engagement through the likes, comments, shares, views, and retweets. A short video is particularly good for communicating essential tidbits and attracting maximum social media attention.

When you hold fundraisers, set up a “red carpet” photo spot with a backdrop of your logo, like you see at the Academy Awards or Comic Con, and encourage your donors to take and post selfies in front of the backdrop. People like to be caught doing something good.

Don’t wait for the media to discover your fundraisers, community projects, relief projects, and urgent needs. Tag bloggers and local, regional, and national media on your tweets and posts. Upload video from disaster sites and relief efforts to sites like CNN and Huffington Post. Cultivate social media connections with sympathetic reporters and bloggers, and become their source for information pertaining to your organization’s cause. Here’s a place where everything I’ve talked about concerning branding, credibility, and influence comes together. Reporters will be more willing to tap you as a subject matter expert on your cause if they recognize and trust your brand, if your organization has a record for credibility and good behavior, and if you are visibly connected (and, therefore, informally endorsed) by other influential people the reporter trusts.

MONITOR YOUR BRAND

Guard your organization’s reputation to maintain your credibility. One great way to do that is to use social media to listen. Several years ago, one international charity went through a scandal that disillusioned many donors and supporters. Even though the organization had a lengthy history and well-known brand, its credibility took a big hit. Instead of stonewalling, going defensive, or mounting a feel-good PR counteroffensive, the organization went on social media and asked people to talk to them about the crisis. They purposefully engaged in an online conversation that was sometimes uncomfortable, answering with transparency and honesty. It was a first step in restoring the organization’s trustworthiness. Though it’s best not to ever need to do damage control, when the worst happens, realize that social media can be the place to begin to rebuild trust.

Use tools such as Google Alerts to assure that you see when your organization’s name is mentioned online. Hire someone to set up a Wikipedia page about your organization, and check the page periodically to make sure crowdsourced information doesn’t introduce incorrect information. Google your organization regularly to see what comes up in the results. Go deeper with tools such as IceRocket, SocialMention, and Topsy to dig into how your company is showing up on Facebook and Twitter. Consider an inexpensive reputation management program such as Reputology to help you gather information easily.

Although it would be nice if everyone agreed on social causes, the reality is that cause-centric organizations often have vocal opposition, and may face hostile comments or even detractors who post false information. If your organization has a controversial focus, proactive and consistent reputation management is a necessity. You do not want negative comments or misinformation to gain momentum and become difficult or impossible to rebut or correct. Though dealing with an online crisis is uncomfortable, the potential for disaster from doing nothing is far worse.

SOCIAL VALIDATION

Social validation happens when people follow what other, more influential people are doing and do likewise. It’s the principle behind celebrity endorsements and high-profile product placements, and it’s alive and well online—and easier than ever for you to harness for your organization.

We’re used to thinking of social validation in terms of highly influential people—politicians, athletes, TV and movie stars, and other “famous” people. There’s certainly still value in tapping the traditional forms of validation, such as high-profile speakers at an event, or having a well-known celebrity as a spokesperson. Yet today’s online generation is more skeptical, realizing that most “spokespeople” are really paid endorsers. Live events have limited attendance, and traditional media such as newspapers, magazines, and TV are waning in their influence.

Social media can provide social validation when an influential person with a large online following generates or retweets favorable content about your organization. Here’s where it pays to know about connections your senior management, board members, loyal donors, and clients may have with famous or highly visible people. Asking someone to tweet or retweet requires much less time, effort, and commitment than recruiting them as a spokesperson, but one tweet from a celebrity can reach millions of people from a source they deem credible and worthy of emulation.

Although your radar should always be on the lookout for big fish, don’t overlook the cumulative power of highly connected but not-famous people. Many bloggers, podcasters, subject matter experts, and gregarious individuals have built large online followings on the basis of their personality, perspective, and valuable information. They have high credibility with their online followers, and can have a reach in the tens of thousands or more. That individual following might not match that of a single Hollywood actor or actress, but when grouped together with similarly well-connected online personalities, the numbers quickly add up.

Another benefit of targeting “nearly famous” influencers is the ease of access. Getting to a major celebrity often involves going through layers of gatekeepers (unless your board member happens to be a close personal friend or family member), and can involve lengthy negotiations. By comparison, reaching out to “famous enough” influencers is as easy as sending an e-mail or a direct Twitter message. You’ll spend some time identifying likely partners and compiling contact information, but your interactions will be direct, not filtered through agents and go-betweens.

Before contacting any influencer, ask yourself what’s in it for them, and why they would want to agree. Social validation is most effective when the influencer has a personal, sincere connection to the cause. It can backfire spectacularly if the public suspects that any kinds of quid pro quo considerations have been made that aren’t explicitly made known.

Take time to read the blogs and social media feeds of the influencers you think might be a good fit. Ideally, the person should be known and well-regarded by the audience you want to reach. This is where demographics come into play. If you’re trying to reach young adults, the celebrities and online personalities with the most influence may be completely unfamiliar to your board members.

Look for natural connections. Does the person you’re researching already have an affinity for your type of cause? Are they already talking about issues in your realm? Pay attention to more than just their content. Is the social persona of the individual something that would favorably represent your organization? An influential person with an interest in your cause might still do more harm than good if they are combative online or if the rest of their content is at odds with your organization’s brand.

Resist the temptation to just tag famous people and hope they’ll respond. That is viewed very negatively and likely to result in complaints to the social media site and/or a backlash. Influencers are highly protective of their credibility and following, with good reason. They will not appreciate being tagged in posts that run counter to their opinions, so do not presume or suggest endorsement without their permission.

When is it appropriate to tag someone on Facebook or Twitter in relation to your organization? If the person is attending your public event, serving as a spokesperson, or involved with your organization in a public way, tagging is okay and desirable. If you’re retweeting them, quoting them, or referring to their work or to an article, media interview, and blog post featuring them that somehow relates to your mission, then tagging is perfectly fine. If they begin to engage with your organization by retweeting, liking, and commenting on your organization’s posts and a relationship develops, then tagging them on important content occasionally (don’t abuse the privilege) may get a high-profile retweet. Just go slowly, feel your way, and don’t wear out your welcome.

CAUSE-CENTRIC CROWDFUNDING
AND PEER-TO-PEER CAMPAIGNS

Social media has proven extremely effective for fundraising, especially from young adults. Being able to respond to a request for targeted donations on a mobile phone with the click of a button appeals to donors who are at home in an online world. Not only is giving via social media easy and immediate, but it lends itself to going viral with a little gamification.

Big donors have often been public about their philanthropy, either for social recognition or to inspire others to follow their example. New peer-to-peer fundraising software combines the reach of social media and the challenge of gamification to enable ordinary people to make a public declaration of their support for a favorite cause or organization and encourage their friends to join them—or even compete to hit goals. This is so much more than posting “please support this cause.” Peer-to-peer fundraising empowers individuals to make a difference in the world for a cause that fires their passion.

If you’re an organization person and the idea of turning individuals loose to fundraise gives you the willies, realize that peer-to-peer campaigns are nothing new. They are behind every charity walk-a-thon and 5K challenge, every kid selling wrapping paper or fruitcake, and every college student collecting spare change from motorists or dancing for 24 straight hours. From that perspective, these new online sites provide far more accountability and tracking than putting a jar on the counter of the local coffee shop. Even more importantly, peer-to-peer social media fundraising campaigns are easy to share with an individual’s worldwide network of friends and colleagues, and they create social value out of good-natured one-upmanship.

Charitweet enables people to donate as little as one dollar directly to the charity of their choice—and challenge their social media followers to match their donation. Charitweet only works with cause-centric organizations vetted through CharityNavigator, and emphasizes transparency.

Classy is a mobile app/social media tool for peer-to-peer fundraising and crowdfunding, including event registration capabilities. It grew out of its founders’ experiences organizing a pub crawl for charity, and seeks to make it easy for people to rally their friends to raise money for causes about which they are passionate. Classy can also be used by cause-centric organizations to hold ticketed or online fundraising events with their template pages, making it easy to get up and running without proprietary programming on your own Web page.

Similar sites include FirstGiving and CrowdRise. All of these social media tools are second-generation improvements similar to GoFundMe, with slicker interfaces, better mobile apps, and more built-in resources. CrowdRise is primarily for peer-to-peer campaigns, but can be used by organizations as well. FirstGiving also supports organization-drive campaigns and peer-to-peer. If you’re looking for an enterprise scale, cloud-based solution, check out Blackbaud, which offers a suite of products to run all of your online fundraising along with templates to make it easy.

All of these sites offer a wealth of free resources to help organizations and individuals make their fundraising efforts more effectively.

Peer-to-peer fundraising enables individuals to make a statement about causes they care about, and use social media to make a personal “ask” (which anyone familiar with donors knows is the most effective way to raise money). Social media fundraising rewards people for doing the right thing, something traditional campaigns do for big donors, but which is rarely done for small and micro donors. By going public with their peer campaigns, individuals gain a sense of ownership over the results, and an emotional investment in the mission of the organization.

Social media can be a powerful tool for cause-centric organizations, enabling you to increase your reach to donors, sponsors, supporters, volunteers, community leaders, and clients. Take advantage of what LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites can do to help you cement your brand, extend your influence, and reinforce your credibility.

THE LAST WORD

Tap into the power of social media to extend your connection with volunteers, donors, and community leaders. By leveraging social validation, gamification, peer-to-peer fundraising, and crowdfunding, as well as the power of in-the-moment photos and videos, your organization and its mission can become more compelling than ever.

NEXT STEPS

1.   Connect with your executives, donors, key volunteers, and supportive community leaders on LinkedIn. Make a list of who is connected to big fish with whom the organization should connect. Strategize on the best way to ask them.

2.   Investigate crowdfunding and peer-to-peer options and see what works best for your organization.

3.   Review how your organization is already using social media. Come up with a site-specific/audience-tailored strategy that utilizes storytelling, results, photos, and videos to create compelling, sharable content.

INTERVIEW WITH CHARMAINE HAMMOND

Charmaine Hammond is a professional speaker and best-selling author with Hammond International Inc., Team Toby, and the Million Acts of Kindness Tour.

Q:  What have you learned about social media effectiveness for cause-centric organizations?

A:  Social media was a critical component of our Million Acts of Kindness Tour. We drove from Vancouver to Toronto and then to Michigan and the West Coast back to Vancouver, 10,000 miles over six weeks. We used LinkedIn to attract and connect with prospects and sponsors. It’s a powerhouse social media platform. Decision-makers for corporate sponsorship aren’t doing business relationship building and networking on Facebook and Instagram. They are on LinkedIn. Offline, it is a challenge to connect with the right person, the decision-maker, and ultimately get past the gatekeepers. But LinkedIn reduced my time building relationships by at least 60 percent because I could get directly to the right person.

We received an exceptional amount of attention from traditional media on our tour—radio, print, and TV. Social media allowed us to further the reach of our traditional media. For example, following a TV interview, we would preschedule 30–50 tweets about the interview (with the link) on TV or radio over the next 60–90 days. We also requested our champions and colleagues to retweet the clips and links. Social media helped broaden my reach and influence, strengthen the tour’s credibility (especially when you have well-known people retweeting you), and make a difference.

I used Periscope a lot during our tour. One day when I was out walking our dog Toby and picking up dog poop in the dog park, I talked on Periscope about how workplace messes often get left and are not attended to, and we have to clean them up just like the poop in the park. I was amazed at the degree of interaction this video created. I discovered that people like seeing a little slice of life and then having it relate to a bigger topic of life or business—drawing comparisons. We got feedback from our poop bag sponsor that they loved the videos and the degree of engagement these live streams created.

I asked people to take pictures of us or themselves at our tour events and to live tweet or Facebook post them. They appreciated when I suggested which hashtags to use. Within three minutes, tweets were going live at our events to audiences we would not normally reach.

Using HootSuite to preschedule posts on Facebook worked very well because we knew that every day we would have photos and videos circulating that also supported our sponsors and the charities involved in the campaign. This helped us remain consistent while we were traveling, and was especially helpful when we had periods of time where we had no Internet access to post live. We also ensured that we regularly posted live tweets and posts whenever we could.

I learned that some social media platforms didn’t work for me. The take-away was that when you’re supporting other community organizations, pick social media platforms you really like to use, and are skilled at using. It is better to be highly effective with two or three platforms than to be on many and have infrequent posts or not feel comfortable with the platform.

We chose to use Facebook—my personal page, my professional page, Toby’s page, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter to build a bigger following and share our message. We tried to be thoughtful about not overlapping audiences so as not to fatigue our followers. We staggered the posts and content from platform to platform so that we did not overwhelm people with too many posts at once or too much repetition.

Instagram was great for sharing graphics and hashtags, tagging sponsors, and using location tags. We wanted to create a sense of tribe on Facebook and Twitter. I could share content easily from my cell phone on those sites as well as Instagram and Periscope. Now we have added Facebook Live to the platforms we regularly use.

I learned the value of pictures, video, and of doing Facebook polls to get people engaged. The real issue is to get people engaged enough to share your content. We learned to improve how we encouraged audiences (at our events and speaking engagements) to share during presentations. At one event, I announced a challenge for everyone to do three live posts during the event and that we would pick a winner. People were excited to take on the challenge—more so, they were happy to help! We had to ask and remind them throughout the presentation and get them to use the hashtag and our Twitter handle. We put the hashtag and our handle on the nametags, slides, banners, and signs.

Q:  What did you discover about social media’s value with sponsors?

A:  Social media was a significant priority for our sponsors and partners—both nonprofit and for-profit. The sponsors appreciated having access to our audience and they get to engage with my followers. We took a lot of photos and videos in front of the Fraserway RV–sponsored motor home with the big logos of our sponsors along the side of the RV. In fact, we made the RV our photo and interview backdrop. We were careful and selective about the photos and videos done in front of the RV, because we wanted to represent the sponsor(s) and their brands well.

Posting and tagging is informal endorsement. Commenting and sharing on sponsor pages for programs that weren’t part of our tour also helped to share who they are and what they do. We tagged high-level influencers and media on positive posts about sponsors and charities on topics relevant to our message, our sponsors’ message, and the tour to increase visibility for our sponsors.

Realize that sponsors use LinkedIn to check you out. Many entrepreneurs have poor or incomplete LinkedIn profiles and it will be important for them to devote time and energy to strengthening their profile, as many people go to LinkedIn before they go to your Websites.

We approached local businesses during the tour at every tour stop—banks, vets, stores, salons, etc. We told them about our local pet rescue charities and asked them to sell cut-out paw prints—we called it Toonies for Toby (the paw prints costs $2 CAD, a coin called a “toonie”) and they posted the paw prints on their walls, then took photos of the walls and all the paw prints. We built goodwill with local businesses and charities. We posted the amount of money earned and gave 100 percent of those donations to the charities, then shared that news with pictures on social media.

Because there were so many different types and levels of sponsors—the wrap for the RV, gift cards, poop bags, cash sponsors, technology partners, dog treats, etc.—messaging was very diverse. We tried to keep it from feeling fragmented—kept it anchored on the core message of a million acts of kindness—and we used our tagline in memes and on posts to help with consistency.

Social media has provided nonprofits with a whole new way to communicate their story and demonstrate the impact of what they do and who they serve. Whether it be video, photos (for example, at events and fundraisers), or live streams, social media allows nonprofits to build relationships and share their stories.

Social media allows nonprofits to thank sponsors and donors, show donors/sponsors and their following how the support/funding has been utilized. This was very powerful.

Nonprofits use social media to promote events (for example, Facebook event pages), and build a strong following. They can also tag media, which is a way of getting notifications to media in an immediate way.

Social media has huge benefits to the nonprofits who have learned to use it correctly (for example, doing memes with tips and resources).

INTERVIEW WITH SHAWNE DUPERON, PHD

Q:  What did you learn about social media’s impact on cause-centric organizations in your work with Project Forgive?

A:  The best way to get people involved is to share your stories. Most nonprofits post pictures of their volunteers. Share stories. Tell people what problems you solve. What do you inspire people to do? Share 60-second videos (or shorter). Touch people’s hearts. People give to organizations that touch their hearts.

We did 40-second clips from our documentary. The documentary is free. We told people, if this inspires you, please donate.

The biggest change is that with social media, nonprofits can be more impactful than ever before.

The escalation of the use of video is mindboggling. They might soon be the biggest thing on Facebook. Always use subtitles, so people can get your message even if they have the sound turned off.

Twitter lets you share video. And of course there’s YouTube. YouTube is powerful because of its user base, but also because it is a true search engine so your content is more findable. LinkedIn is searchable too. Facebook is not a search engine. It changes the algorithm frequently, and punishes you for having a successful strategy. YouTube doesn’t seem to be doing that. Tumblr is good for reaching the 18–24 age group, and so is Snapchat. It all depends on your demographic. Stay where you are seeing success.

A benefit for nonprofits of using LinkedIn is that they’ll find philanthropists and corporate sponsors on LinkedIn that they won’t find on Facebook.

Twitter is really gossip influence. It works well when an organization needs to raise money to deal with a catastrophe. Use trending hashtags. But you’ve got to build trust before you ask for money.

Try stuff. Experiment. You could set a new trend. Facebook Live is becoming essential. The analytics go way up when people watch video, and you can take those metrics to sponsors to convince them to underwrite you. When you use video, use one person on camera talking directly to the viewer; it’s very intimate. We’ve found that when it looks like a TV news interview, it’s not as successful because people mistrust the media and institutions.