Social media’s hidden virtues

For most nonprofits, the benefits of using social media have been clear for a while.  There are no end of great examples of how Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other services have helped nonprofits to communicate with their audience, engage supporters in conversation and create online ‘communities of interest’.

Some have taken an organic approach, while others have more carefully considered strategies, but most are are managing to add value in some way through their social media activities.  However, I think that some of the less obvious benefits are being overlooked…

Creating a virtuous brand cycle

As the web becomes more social, the corporate website is just one of many potential points of contact with supporters.  It retains a crucial role in providing authoritative information and setting online standards, but this is not enough to ensure that people keep on coming back.  Nonprofits must recognise that we are becoming used to engaging with an organisation’s brand in a number of places, where varying degrees of control can be exercised.  This idea needs to be acknowledged within any digital strategy.  Websites should showcase the best of the the social media activity across the web (not just feature an incoherent Twitter feed!), encouraging us to interact with the organisation in whichever place suits us best.  The various social media channels should be offering interesting and appropriate ways for audiences to engage, provide community, and promote relevant content within the website.  Facilitating users journeys between these points of contact with the organisation will increase awareness and brand loyalty amongst audiences.

A good example of this type of thinking was on a recent project for Leukaemia & Lymphoma Research in which we designed and built a new ‘social media browser’. This browser includes a compact display of social media feeds from Facebook, Twitter and Justgiving and can be integrated into event pages and creates a focal point for activities for that event across all the key social media channels.  Each of these channels in turn signpost back to the website to complete the cycle.

Helping to devolve publishing

Web teams are incredibly busy, often taking responsibility for creating and publishing content relating to all aspects of an organisation.  Where charities have regional and local structures, this burden becomes even more challenging.  Even when there is will to devolve some of this work, practical hurdles can get in the way.

However, often some of a nonprofits most interesting activity is taking place at a local level.  Whether it is a quirky fundraising event, a local campaign that has created some buzz, or a particularly vivid case study that demonstrates impact.  Often information about this kind of activity is being created and shared within social networks.  Rather than trying to change this, nonprofits should start to look for ways in which they can harvest the best of this content and promote it through their own websites and beyond.

On a soon to be launched website for the UK Youth Parliament, we took this approach.  Social media is at the very heart of the organisation with young people running election campaigns through Facebook; live blogging from inside parliament and tweeting campaign successes and challenges.  Campaign pages have been designed to aggregate this kind of activity, avoiding the need for any duplication of effort and ensuring pages stay up to date.  Website users are able to vote for campaigns using the Facebook ‘like’ function which both ranks the campaigns within the UK Youth Parliament website and promotes it through individuals Facebook pages.

Avoiding expensive website development

In the past, sophisticated website features such as forums, video players, photo galleries, and event registration systems had to be built in to content management systems.  While this approach had some advantages, it often increased license and hosting costs, and offered  limited functionality.  Where these features were not available, custom development could be expensive and risky.

It is now becoming increasingly viable to avoid these pitfalls by using hosted social media services to achieve the same functionality at a fraction of the cost and very often with much better results.  Through the use of API’s, RSS feeds and embeddable widgets, organisations can access well developed and tested features backed up by a stable and powerful hosting environment.

Most of our clients now use Vimeo or YouTube to deliver video through their website, where  adding a video to a page involves the simple addition of the URL to a page.  There are no streaming costs and in most cases the user gets a much better experience.  We have used Flickr to create stylish ‘lightbox’ style image viewers.  And on a recent project, we have used the EventBrite API to create a event system at a fraction of the cost, and a much more sophisticated suite of options than we would have been able to had we developed the system ourselves.

A final thought

A good social media strategy will demonstrate that any activities will provide a return on investment.  Making this case can be difficult, given the intangible nature of much of the value added but by ensuring some of these ‘hidden’ virtues are considered, it becomes a slightly easier task!