Subject: Social media - can everyone do it?

That is an interesting topic.

I work in a small/medium organisation that I am sure would benefit from social media, I’m convincing people here that Social media is the way forward but I'm must confess that I'm a bit scared to start up and loose control of the system. It would be nice to hear from people that have started and how they did it.

My main concern is time. How to manage the site and how to find time to post regularly and reply to any comments being a part-time “lunatic” wanting to star such a project!

Any ideas are very very VERY welcomed!

All the best

IM TRYING TO FUND RAISE FOR A CH ILD OF THREE WEEKS OF AGE WHO REQUIRES CORNEAL SURGERY IN THE NEXT FOUR/FIVE WEEKS AND NEED TO RAISE A LOT OF FUNDS.AS HIS CONDITION IS VERY RARE AND WITHOUT A TRANSPLANT IN THIS SHORT TIME HIS CHANCE OF SIGHT IS AT BEST JUST SHADOWS,CAN ANYBODY HELP/ADVISE.THANKS

A couple of suggestions - may not helpful with the limited information given (and am not sure why this is cannot be done on the NHS)

You might like to get in touch with charities that support parents and children with visual disabilities - if you are not sure where to find them try Guidestar

http://guidestar.org.uk/

Or look at the fundraising pages on this site.

Social media can help with fundraising using facebook, blogs, twitter to engage friends and keep informed

I work in a medium-sized organisation and we've started using social media (blogs, Facebook, twitter and other forums - like this one). It's mostly been me (as Communications Officer) but I have involved other members of staff. So 3 of us post to the blog (pros: more likely to have content; cons: less coherent/personal voice) and post to Facebook. I think it's really helped us reach new audiences as well as communicate with people we were already in touch with in a more flexible, responsive way.

To get other people in your organisation involved, you might need to hold their hands a little so they have the confidence to get involved. You could try something like Yammer (http://www.yammer.com) internally. It feels less risky for people as it's not public, but it could get people used to the idea of posting short updates about what they're doing, or communicating in forums etc.

One way of testing the waters is to get involved as a charity professional. So, set up a twitter  profile for yourself and start to follow other people in your industry. Join some charity forums (like this one, or The Charity Place http://thecharityplace.ning.com/). Join up to facebook and start joining some groups that might be relevant to your work/charity. This way you can explore what some of the possibilities might be for your charity before you dive in. 

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Anyone else had experience in encouraging their org to use social media?

thanks leahmouse. So it sounds like its been a success for you and your organisation:

"I think it's really helped us reach new audiences as well as communicate with people we were already in touch with in a more flexible, responsive way."

Can I ask a couple of further questions:

• how much time do you think you spend on this in an average week? 
• have you dropped other things to do this?
• do you still have to justfy this activity to your colleagues or do they get it?
• is the demographic of your audience one that is used to using social media?

There is a lot of  talk  about the pros and cons of using social media in the charity sector and of course there are HUGE positive benefits -especially in reaching Generation Y and spreading the brand of your organisation.  However, while some of the outcomes can't be tracked, it is important to evaluate and really audit the time spent on building your brand and awareness of your work on line and making sure that you have a consistent message. Think about the "opportunity costs" of spending this time online - is your traditional communication with core supporters (many of whom don't use new social media) declining.  Is your press and media strategy balanced ?

One of the realities is that sites and even applications change in popularity - for example My SPACE is not so popular these days and Twitter seems to be gaining ground on Facebook (although they are different).  Make sure that you design content which can be "cut and pasted" for various sites and services, and cross link and use RSS from your news area on your site to these new sites.

One way to develop your online brand is to recruit a student volunteer over the summer months to focus on this area. With small investment, supervision and encouragement they can focus on your online presence and populate varioud groups promoting your organisations work.  This can compliment what communication staff in the office are doing offline.  This assignment would be very attractive to a young person - may of whom love "living" online and as long as the messages are agreed  and they work closely with you they can help develop this area.  However - one word of advice - "begin with the end in mind !"  - ie make sure you can sustain the online presence - there is nothing more frustrating if a group you have set up dies online because you aren't cultivating and promoting subjects and providing inspiring content etc.

For small organisations setting up a website can now be really quick and cheap - for example I helped a local community group set up www.stopthestrip.org using a template website service from www.easily.co.uk which gave domain name, e-mail forwarding and hosting for less than £100.

Stephen

Thanks for that Steve. The KnowHow Team recently started our own twiitter journey and are staggered with the reponse we are getting. Have a look at http://twitter.com/knowhownonprof

Trick is to follow rather than lead, but you are right, you have to be prepared to allocate resources to sustain this activity. Your idea of recruiting students is fab, thanks for the tip!

A former Coleague of mine at Uni is setting up a charity and I offerred to help with marketing. We plan to start with online marketing using various social media. With his permission, I hope to be able to give an update on how we are doing with our social media marketing for the charity.  I have learned a lot from this website and still a lot more to learn.

With a bit more nudging from me, JR might come to contribute some more information about the charity and hopefuly we can get a lot of help from all of you here in pushing the charity forward. Till then, can't say much.

By the way, I am following Nowhownonprofit on Twitter land. 

Useful stuff here in this article about measuring Return on Investment on social media. Its not just all about how many followers or members you have.