Why have few nonprofits made major investments in inbound social marketing?
How come nonprofits do not seem to understand the ROI or value of integrating social media across the organization?
When will more nonprofits have a dedicated person for inbound social marketing?
Why do many nonprofits think of inbound social marketing as an optional or add-on part of their overall marketing, PR, and donor development strategies?
As I thought through these questions, several possibilities came to mind based on my experience with nonprofits across the country:
The entry cost for social media management and inbound marketing tools seems too expensive for many donation-based nonprofits.
Determining the ROI for inbound social marketing campaigns means having a solid handle on existing data trends and intensely tracking and comparing the impact of social marketing campaigns across all channels.
Integrating social across the organization is rarely heard of and usually relegated to the marketing department – never being considered for customer service, donor development, public relations, support, R&D, nor sales.
Dedicated resources cost, yet if you want to do inbound marketing right it is worth the investment to get the right person or team in the door to monitor and manage it daily.
Inbound social marketing is here to stay and works best when it is integrated across all departments: operations, HR, marketing, PR, IT, broadcasting, customer service, and development.
Certainly, some will push back on these ideas it is built on my experience interacting with nonprofits. It is unfortunate, but I can count on one hand the nonprofits that have a dedicated resource for inbound social marketing.
This is where Heather’s book comes in. Every nonprofit C-Level should read this book. While a few may see this resource as a primer, everyone will get nuggets of wisdom to apply to their organization. An excellent companion book for ROI and social analysis would be Social Media ROI by Olivier Blanchard.
Start With Benchmarks
Below is a list of benchmarks that Heather has seen through her years of experience with nonprofits. While these are not strictly to be adhered to they are excellent goals to shoot for.
5000 fans/followers as a first tier goal
10,000 fans/followers as a second tier goal
$2,500 – $10,000 annual budget for:
eNewsletters
List building
Donation landing pages
20% email opens as a first tier goal
25% – 35% email opens as a second tier goal
eNewsletter of 500 words with 1-2 updates per month
$12.48 is the average value of an email subscriber
Online giving should equal 25% of all organizational giving
40-50 hours a week for social media management
Best Practices
I have also included a list of best practices that Heather recommends. Look at your organization and weigh these in light of your current situation.
Facebook
6-10 posts per week (1-2 day)
Goal is for 1 comment and 3 thumbs up per each status update per 1000 fans
Ads equal $1.07 spent to acquire a fan
Twitter
“Old school” retweet 80% of the time
Auto-RT (retweet) 20%
25% of all tweets should be replies and retweets
4-6 tweets a day (20-30 tweets a week) 8am-8pm
YouTube
1 video per quarter (3-4 per year)
Create a “Favorites” channel
Customize and brand your YouTube page
LinkedIn
1-2 updates per week
2 hours a month participating in online groups
Comment or participate 1-2 times per month to get your name out
Goal of group size should be 5000
Rotate “Manager’s Choice” discussions 2 times a month
Send group announcements 1 time a month featuring 3 articles
Launch a sub-group after the main group has reached 5000 members
Blog
Post 1-2 articles per week
Post summaries from events 1-2 days afterward
Choose only 1 category per post
FourSquare
Create a FourSquare Business Page
Add a reward for checking in or stopping by
Mobile
Link to mobile channels from mobile site
Text message open rate should be 90%
Send no more than 2-3 text messages per month
Expect to budget $10,000 to build a custom smartphone app
Promote apps for 2-3 months per year
Heather’s book if full of good information and how-to advice. You will especially like the checklists for getting started and tactical planning.
If you’re part of a nonprofit, purchase a copy of Social Media for Social Good and begin implementing the information immediately. If you have already been involved in social media marketing then compare your benchmarks for success to those above. You do not need to start with a big budget but in today’s world you have to be involved with inbound social marketing. It is not too late to catch up and you surely don’t want to get left behind.
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In March 2013, the U.N. said 6 billion of the worlds 7 billion people had mobile phones. Of this number over 1 billion had smartphones. Although there are some slow adopters due to cost and bandwidth issues, the fact is mobile is here to stay. And the mobile web is a maturing part of doing business in today’s world. Are you engaged?
Most organizations have a mobile-friendly web site. This allows for audio and video playback and touch interface navigation. While that is a start it is only the bottom rung of the ladder. You need a strategy, a mobile design, and well developed site to compete for the eyes of mobile savvy users.
Brian Fling’s book, Mobile Design and Development is a good place to start. As Fling says, “I wrote this book to be a beginning—your beginning in mobile—and to give you all the information you need to know in order to start thinking of your site, application, or business in the mobile context.”
Brian Fling. Mobile Design and Development (Kindle Locations 305-307). O’Reilly Media.
Before you dismiss this book as too basic, be sure to check out the chapters on:
The Mobile Ecosystem
Designing For Context
Mobile Strategy
Mobile Web Apps versus Native Apps
Adapting to Devices
The Future of Mobile
Everything rises and falls on strategy and a good mobile strategy is the key to a successful mobile design and roll out. In the case of mobile, context is king! Understanding your users and, consequently, their needs will get you most of the way there. Based on proper personas you can assess the needs of your mobile audience and begin to define goals for meeting those needs. You will most likely have a large list of needs and related goals. Don’t be tempted to develop them all. As Fling notes, “keep it simple.”
Without going into too much more detail, suffice it to say there are many good nuggets of information for application in Mobile Design and Development. This book should definitely be amongst your personal library.
If you are amongst the bleeding edge tech hounds that need to be first for every little gadget and upgrade, you might want to rethink updating to iOS 6 until Apple has worked out the kinks. In our culture of “it’s shiny, it’s new so upgrade now!” this particular case can be hazardous (or at least VERY stressful) to your health.
Amongst many of the issues reported, those of us that use our smartphones for business and work will find these issue noted below particularly painful:
Apple Maps – yes, 3D is cool but tell me where I am and how to get where I need to go = fail!
Passbook – nice idea but doesn’t work = fail!
WiFi – the most egregious of all because it’s not connecting = major fail!
Music – disappearing artists, songs, and playlists = fail!
While we love the hype, the energy, and excitement of new Apple roll outs, this kind of roll out is embarrassing. My recommendation is to wait until the kinks are worked out and then upgrade to iOS 6. You’ll be less stressed and your family and friends will like you.
This is an article I wrote for the Five Q blog. Enjoy!
With the rise of mobile devices–laptops, tablets, and smart phones–having a clear mobile strategy is a must. If “strategy” is doing the right things, and tactics are “doing things right”, then there are multiple things to consider when creating a mobile strategy.
Data Analysis
Good decisions are made with good data. Reviewing your mobile trends in your web analytics tool will help you see trends as well as learn more about your mobile audience.
Key items to review in your analytics for mobile:
Mobile traffic on your website
Mobile devices used: iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, etc.
Mobile browser usage
Top entry pages
Top exit pages
Bounce rate and more
Having a good understanding of how mobile users are accessing and viewing your web content will help you better set the direction for your goals and metrics.
Goals and Metrics
All good strategies begin by identifying your key goals for building and delivering your mobile brand. Some examples could include:
Expanding your reach
Increasing sales/donations
Usability for mobile users
New market outreach
Once your goals are established, then you can set your clear and concrete metrics for success. Some metrics for success could include:
50% increase in page views for the website
100% increase in time on website site
25% increase in donations
20% increase in contact form inquiries
Adding 1,000 new Twitter followers
Increase to 5,000 new Facebook fans
Remember that your goals and metrics should be grounded in data as well as flexible enough to adjust to keep pace with the activity your users are experiencing on their mobile devices.
Best Practices
Now that your goals and metrics have been established, you can consider some best practices in developing your comprehensive mobile strategy:
Mobile Visitor Goals and Mobile Surfing:
Visitor’s goals will be different when visiting the mobile website than when visiting the desktop website.
A Nielsen study from May 2010 showed that Americans spend the bulk of their time on their mobile phones checking email, visiting social networks, and reading the news.
Mobile users will often be interacting with mobile websites in 5-7 minute chunks of time.
Therefore, they will have less time and desire to read content.
Mobile Content:
The best mobile websites do not simply make the original website viewable in a mobile browser, but restructure the website to meet the needs and goals of the mobile user.
Content blocks need to be shorter than they are on the desktop version of a website.
Navigation needs to be limited to meet the immediate information needs of mobile users and should be action oriented.
Mobile Donations:
Making a donation may not be the first thing a mobile user thinks to do, but if the timing and ask are appropriate to the channel, increasing donations via mobile is an attainable goal.
For text message donations, you are limited to $5 or $10 per gift.
This may not be strategically aligned with your ministry/organization’s objectives to further develop donors who are able to give more or those who would be willing to donate more if approached properly.
The dollar limit may likely cause someone who would be willing to donate a larger amount to settle for donating $5 or $10 since it is the path of least resistance.
If using a donation form, make it as easy to use as possible, including pre-populating it with the visitor’s information when they access the link from email on their mobile device.
Responsive Design & Progressive Enhancement
A trending discussion about mobile design revolves around Responsive Design and Progressive Enhancement.
Responsive Design allows your site to be designed to perfectly fit a specific platform/environment–smart phone, tablet, or desktop–with a single design. Through specific adjustments to the website code and style sheets, the design scales and responds accordingly per the device. Here is additional information about responsible web design and its adaptations for mobile.
Progressive Enhancement, on the other hand, “is a way of designing web pages so that the more features a user agent supports, the more features the web page will have. It is the opposite of the design strategy graceful degradation that builds pages for the most modern browsers first and then converts them to work with less functional browsers.” (About.com) A how-to guide for progressive enhancement is provided by Webdesigner Depot.
Knowing that the design is also part of the user experience is something to consider when crafting your mobile strategy.
Deliverables for Your Mobile Strategy
Keeping the goals, metrics, data, and best practices in mind when developing your mobile strategy will lead to success. You will also want to include in your strategy:
Audience Analysis: clear definitions of your mobile users, trends for different demographics, and usage patterns
Mobile Sitemap: defining the core website navigation and pages for your mobile offering.
Mobile Wireframes: taking into careful consideration that your mobile audience will interact with your mobile website differently than on a desktop, establishing a clear information architecture for mobile will be key to ensuring no gaps exist in the user experience.
Mobile Design: with the information design complete, you can elevate your wireframes to life through your mobile design.
Be sure to work closely with your web team to ensure that your goals and metrics are clearly being met throughout the mobile production process. As technology continues to evolve, you want to be sure that your mobile strategic efforts grow with your brand.
Comment Below:
Have you started thinking through a mobile strategy yet? Why or why not?
This provocative clip gives you some data to chew on if you are wondering about the ROE and ROI of Social Media. Thanks Socialnomics – Social Media Blog.
Okay, I admit it, I have become an iPhone fan-boy. I wasn’t always this way (see You May Not Want An iPhone, and Your Virtual iPhone). I have used Palm OS,Windows CE, and Blackberry phones yet the sheer expandability of the iPhone blows the others away. And, iPhone OS 3.0 is yet to come. I cannot wait.
However, there are still lots of little tips and tricks to be learned no matter how long you have had an iPhone. With this in mind, I borrowed a friends book the other day, The iPhone Book, by Scott Kelby and Terry White. Even though I have had my iPhone for several months now, there are still some nice little tips and tricks I am learning and thought I’d share – so here it goes (all credit goes to Scott and Terry, of course).
Address Book Search
I used to have a Blackberry and before that a Palm phone. One of the thing I liked was the ability to quickly find contacts in your address book. If you’re like me finding one contact amongst 2,400+ can be daunting if you have to scroll through many of them. While the iPhone does have an A-Z sorter and search field, a new trick I learned was using initials. Simply enter into the Search field the first initial of your contact then a space followed by the first couple letters of the contacts last name and – bingo – you have your contact pop up.
For example, if you are trying to pull up the contact information for Joseph Mahma you type “j mah” and Joseph’s contact info will pop to the top. Try it.
Erasing Email
I know this may seem easy at first, all you need to do is tap the Edit button when looking over your list of incoming emails, right? But what if you’re scanning through emails during a break in a meeting and want to erase those one or two spam messages? Just scrub your finger across across the message and a Delete button will appear. Tap Delete and the unwanted email goes away. Nice.
WiFi Finder
My first reaction was to go to the App Store and grab a free application for finding WiFi in my surrounding area. Did, you know the iPhone can do that out of the box using the built in Maps application? Simply type in “wifi, [city name], [state]” and you’re off and running.
Convert Home Movies In iTunes
Did you know you could convert your very own movies for the iPod and iPhone? I didn’t. All you need to do is add your movie to iTunes and then choose “Create iPhone (or iPod) version” from the Advanced Menu. Yes, it is that simple. Isn’t that cool?
Control Music Playback From Other Apps Here’s another trick that I was not aware of. If you’re playing music you can switch to another application and continue to listen to your music. But, what if you wan to control the music? Do you have to go back to the iPod app? No! Simply double click the Home button. This will bring up your iPod controls. Make whatever adjustments you want and then tap the Close button. That’s it. Oh, and if all you want to do is adjust the volume, don’t worry about the iPod controls…you know what to do — use the volume buttons on the side of your iPhone.
iPhone Sleep Machine
Do you have trouble sleeping at night? You can use the Timer feature to help you drift off to sleep while listening to your favorite tunes. First go to the iPod app and choose the album or playlist you want to listen to as you go to sleep. Next, press the Home button, go to the Clock app, and tap Timer. Here you can set the minutes or hours you want your music to play. Finally, tap When Timer Ends and choose Sleep iPod from the top of the list. Tap Set and you are done. The neat thing that Apple built in is that the music will fade as it shuts down. Nighty-night.
Play Movies Through The iPhone On Your TV OK, maybe I’m slow here, but I never thought about the ability to play back movies and TV shows from my iPhone…and in widescreen too! You will need to make sure you have either Apple Component or Composite AV Cables depending on your television connections. Next tap the Settings then tap iPod from the list. At the bottom of the screen is an option for TV Out. You can choose Widescreen (if you have a TV that supports that format) and/or the TV Signal NTSC or PAL (depending on what country you are in). Navigate back to your Home screen and then choose your iPod and select a movie or television show to start playing. By the way, make sure your TV is turned on and tuned to a proper channel for the cable inputs. Enjoy!
Quick Typing Email Addresses Find yourself emailing a lot with your iPhone? Ever get frustrated about entering all those new addresses? Did you know you can speed up the process with a simple little trick? When you are in Mail on your iPhone and typing in an address you can see the period button. Did you know if you tap and hold down on it there will be displayed .com, .net, .org, and .edu? No more having to type that suffix.
Custom Ringtones If you own a copy of GarageBand, creating a custom ringtone for your iPhone is nothing new to you. Create a 30 second diddy and make sure it is set to loop. Next, choose Send Ringtone to iTunes from the Send menu. From iTunes you can sync the ringtone with your iPhone.
There is another little app I recently discovered, from Rogue Amoeba, called MakeiPhoneRingtone. For this free little application, all you need is 40 second .aiff files. Simply drag and drop them onto the app and your custom ringtone is placed within iTunes ready for you to sync. I found that by opening mp3 music files in QuickTime, I could trim them to the section of the song I liked and then Export it as a mp4. I could then drag the file onto MakeiPhoneRingtone and — tadaa! — instant ringtone.
Back To Top This may be a familiar link you have seen on some long Web pages, but did you know this feature is part of the iPhone as well? In many of the applications all you need to do is double tap the top of the screen and it will bring you back to the top. This is very handy for me since I have several thousand contacts in my address book. I can easily pop back to the top and use the Search field if needed.
Spammers Beware
Have you ever been in an email on your iPhone and seen a link in the body of the text? Ever wonder where it goes? No more worries. Just tap on the link and hold your finger there while the Web address pops up for you to see. If you do not want to launch Safari, drag your finger off the link and you will not open your browser.
Formatted For iPhone
Many Web sites are not formatted for mobile display, yet many other Web sites are. Is your favorite site optimized for the iPhone? Type the word “mobile” or “m” in front of an address and see what you get. For instance, http://www.usatoday.com would be mobile.usatoday.com -or- m.usatoday.com. Now, you try it.
ICE Nice
If you have not placed ICE (In Case of Emergency) on your mobile phone, what are you waiting for? We saw a friend today at lunch who did not know what ICE stood for and why it was important to add to your address list. It is always nice ti have quick access to an emergency contact. A nice free app from the iTunes App Store is Close Call. By installing this you can create a custom wallpaper for your iPhone with an emergency contact number.
iPhone Screen Shots
Apple built in the ability to take screen shots of your iPhone screen. Just press and hold the Home button, then press the Sleep/Wake button on top of your phone. The screen flashes and saves a copy of the image to your Camera Roll.
Watcha Got?
These are just a few of the tips and tricks I found useful. How about you? What have you found out to be helpful? Share your tips and tricks here for our readers.
I installed the Kindle app for the iPhone right after it came out (thanks Ryan Block for the heads up). I then found a free book that I downloaded and was able to play with. Listed below are my first impressions. What are yours?
Likes:
Text sizing
Bookmarking
Page turning
Page scrubbing (page location)
Sync with Kindle books
Dislikes:
Cannot annotate
Page will not rotate when I turn iPhone on side
Cannot download books directly from Kindle app (like Stanza)
I took the plunge. I bought a 3G iPhone today. Some might have said, “bad timing” with the expected iPhone Nano announcement, but I needed a phone now. I actually like the bigger phone because I have bigger hands than most.
I’m checking out of the AT&T store and the salesman says, “would you like a case for your iPhone to protect it from drops?” I look at the selection and prices and told him I’d wait. He then went on to say that if the phone got broke somehow I would have to pay an additional $100 (retail price) to replace the phone.
Say WHAT?!
It seems, when you first buy an iPhone, the cost is $100 off the “retail” price after which you are not eligible for the discounted prices for another 21 months.
HUH?!
Maybe I missed some small print somewhere. Where on the Apple site or AT&T site does it say any of this?
I have to be honest, I have not researched this yet. So, I wanted to hear what you have experienced. I have heard that while the iPhone is cheaper to buy ($199) the cost of operating is more and so it all evens out similar to the original pricing.
Now, it’s your turn – talk back. Have you found this to be true or is the phone more competitive with other models and manufacturers?
When the iPhone first came out I was skeptical about it’s longevity…
As fantastic as the BlackBerry is for letting you connect to your office while you’re on the go, you have to have that office to connect to in the first place. I have a home office so I can telecommute to my Virginia-based job from New Jersey, but lately due to family demands I’ve been out of that office more than I’ve been in it. Next month I’m moving to a different part of New Jersey. The app store convinced me that I can lead a crazy web working life and still get done what needs to get done for my employers without keeping my laptop and its associated gear with me all the time.
Thinking about joining me in switching fruits from berry to apple? Here’s a quick look at what’s to love (and not-so-love) about being a new iPhone owner from the point of view of someone very used to the BlackBerry experience.
I’ll be taking a week off to focus on closing out a project (July 28-August 1). More to come from the lessons learned during this engagement. It’s a really cool online course with custom hooks into a client app. The back-end was designed as “plug and play” so content can quickly and easily be swapped out while still being applicable to the course testing and grading scenarios.
I was in my local Apple Store today and noticed the line of people waiting to purchase the new 3G iPhone. It was lunch time and they were waiting in line…
Waiting in line!
Where else have you heard of this? The local AT&T Store ran out — everyone was at Apple. Plus, some people said it was easier to get the phone through Apple than AT&T (hint, hint — take notes AT&T).
Previously On WeirdGuy
You may have read my previous articles about the iPhone. I hoped you listened. If you did, then you are not one that is kicking yourself for having purchased the first generation phone. Although, you might find someone (a Windows user perhaps) that would be willing to buy it from you for $100 and give you a nice down payment on the new iPhone. And hey, this time you have a choice of White or Black :)
So, it comes down to this — I am rethinking the iPhone in this new iteration. Granted, I would probably keep my iPod because it has a heck of a lot more memory and holds every song I own, but this new 8GB iPhone looks pretty sweet for the price…hmmmm….
You may ask, “Are you willing to trade in your current Smart Phone for Apple’s new release?” Yeh, I am willing. I just have a few questions about the email and package pricing. You see, I use Entourage and I want to get my email on the iPhone. Does that mean I have to use Mobile Me? My email is currently through AT&T and I hear you cannot get it without forking out the $100 for Mobile Me.
Help Me
What do you think?
Did you recently purchase a new iPhone? How do you like it? What do you love/hate about it?
What advice would you give me about the new iPhone? Should I get one? Why/why not?
Can I get my Entourage email any other way on an iPhone? Can I sync my Entourage Calendar too?
Alright Apple, spin this however you’d like, but the fact remains people want more memory at a better price. The “cool factor” is starting to wane and many iPhone adopters see their friends with inexpensive phones and iPod’s with lots more memory that still get the job done.
So, Mr. Jobs, get off your high-horse and eat the bitter pill of unmoved iPhone inventory. Yank out the low memory guts and replace it with more. Then you’ll be able to recoup some of your production and marketing costs.
Like I said in the article, Your Virtual iPhone, what I have works great and I am not switching until this product gets where it needs to be — and it will get there. To bad many will spend 2 to 3 times over what it would have cost to wait for the “right one.”
Apple doubled the capacity of the iPhone and the iPod Touch on Tuesday for an additional $100.
Apple thinks that there’s still room for an 8GB iPhone in the mix, said Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of worldwide iPod and iPhone product marketing. The first time around, people signaled pretty clearly that they wanted more than 4GB of storage, but he thinks that there’s still a “sweet spot” at 8GB of storage.
And the iPod Touch can also store more music and videos now, with 32GB of capacity for $499. That device is now available in three versions, with Apple also selling a 16GB model for $399 and an 8GB model for $299.
Amazon’s first iteration of an electronic book reader is the Kindle. Introduced in November, it weighs about 10 ounces, holds more than 200 full-length books and can display newspapers, magazines and blogs. It uses E Ink technology, developed by the company of that name, that produces sharply defined text yet draws power only when a page is changed
The Kindle is expensive — $399 — but it sold out in just six hours after its debut on Nov. 19. Since then, supplies have consistently lagged behind demand, and a waiting list remains in place.
Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, has nothing to fear from the Kindle. No one would regard it as competition for the iPod.
Yet, when Mr. Jobs was asked two weeks ago at the Macworld Expo what he thought of the Kindle, he heaped scorn on the book industry. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”
When we launched our Lifehacker Top 10 series back in March we had no idea what a big hit it would be. That Letterman guy’s really onto something! While we’re milking this whole “best of 2007 list” thing, we compiled the top 20 most-viewed Lifehacker Top 10 lists of 2007.
Waiting for the price of hyped gadgets to come down is the most sensible strategy, according to research.
David Kuo of Fool.co.uk said: “We’ve tracked some of the top gadgets on the market today and on average, �87.20 has been slashed since a product first launched. If you can hold out until the original hype has died down, you can make some significant savings.”
“However, if you do find the latest technology too tempting, there are some gadgets that hold their value longer than others, but there are no guarantees they will do so over the long term,” Kuo said.
Fool.co.uk found that the Nintendo Wii was still the same price – �179 – as it was in December 2006. However, a Samsung Blu-ray Disc player that went on sale in March 2006 for �800 now cost only �476, a saving of �324.
One example of waiting for prices to come down being the best option was seen recently when the Apple iPhone was launched in the US.
I love this. Mobile learning and teaching is great for JIT (just in time) training. A natural by-product of this effort is team work and communities of practice.
The Dallas Morning News published the story Grand Prairie Schools Welcome iPods in Classrooms. It features Whitt Elementary in Grand Prairie, Texas where teachers are using 321 iPods “to teach kids about subjects they might otherwise find boring.” The iPods have only been in use a couple of weeks at the school, but the media players have inspired teachers to have these ideas:
Use GarageBand to produce a song about states of matter. Listen here.
Help teach English Language Learners and foreign languages.
Video students being revolving planets.
Produce a podcast about the American Revolution.
View video about season changes.
Allow students to take the iPods home (as long as they are returned the next day).
Whitt teachers are embracing change and are doing great things for students. The activities and teacher/student creation of media seem to be the most powerful parts of how teachers are changing instruction.
I recently read Heather Mansfield’s book, Social Media for Social Good: A How-To Guide for Nonprofits. As I finished the book several thoughts came to my mind:
Posted by ebrown 
Waiting for the price of hyped gadgets to come down is the most sensible strategy, according to research.
The Dallas Morning News published the story 
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