Dave Chase

I was asked the other day by a friend who works for a pretty big nonprofit (you can probably guess which one if you know me, or look at the sidebar) what social networking sites the nonprofit should focus on? My first instinct was to tell him the big three Facebook, Myspace and YouTube. The organization focuses mostly on young people so those seemed natural.

But he is a good friend so I figured I would give it a few minutes of thought and then the answer occurred to me.

None.

I have seen it too many times. A nonprofit (or really any company) sits around at a meeting and brainstorms 10 ways to reach out to new people, get more customers/members/donors and increase their website’s traffic. Maybe one of the staff members has a kid who uses Facebook so he or she suggests that. Or maybe one of the managers recently attended a conference and went to a Web 2.0 seminar where some web guru talked about how he or she tripled the companies web traffic using sites like Digg and StumbleUpon.

So, the company sets up a Myspace and a Facebook and submits a few articles to Digg. Then they watch their Google Analytics and their membership reports and wait for the big jump. And guess what happens?

Nothing.

It is a fundamental flaw in most peoples understanding of marketing with social networking. It is not a numbers game like traditional marketing where you put X numbers of letters in the mail and you get X number of responses or X number of checks or X number of sign ups. Social networking is about creating communities and communities within communities. Communities of people who share similar tastes, interests and ultimately want the same content.

Think about your own community. Say you are in a bowling league. You are at your weekly match against the Pink Ladies from down the road and a sales person comes in and starts bowling in the lane next to you. During your entire match, that sales person is trying to sell you a vacuum cleaner. Are you likely to buy the vacuum cleaner?

At this point you might be saying to yourself, “ok I don’t get it” and asking yourself:

How does an organization succeed with social networking?

In fact many organizations drive a lot of traffic to their sites and get a lot of memberships and a lot of sales from social networking but they do not do it by being the vacuum cleaner salesman at a bowling match. They do it by being a part of the bowling match, contributing to the bowling community and that’s it. No sales gimmicks. No flashing banners. Just being a part of the community.

The answer I gave my friend was this:

If you are going to dedicate the staff time and resources to go onto the social networking sites and become a part of the communities on them then I recommend starting with Facebook, Myspace and YouTube. However, if you are not going to dedicate those resources, then do not bother because it will not pay off for you.

The web has opened up a whole new era where people can Google something to figure out if it is real or not and where the most successful websites and even organizations are the ones that provide the most useful content and are, in the end, the most useful.

So, I do think that nonprofits should get involved with social networking because it is a great outreach tool. However, to succeed with social networking you have to do three things. First, be social. Second, network. And third, be a part of the community you are in, not just an organization trying to drive people to their website.