Insight White Paper: Social Media in the Not-For-Profit Sector

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Social Media – all the rage

One of the much talked about social phenomena of recent times is the startling take up of Social Media and Social Enterprises – Web 2.0 – from Facebook to Twitter, from Blogging to Wikipedia. Facebook might have just passed its fifth birthday, but it, together with other social networking sites, are becoming essential elements of people’s lives. These sites are becoming platforms for local action as well as methods for engagement between people without international boundaries.

How are not-for-profit organisations to respond to Web 2.0? Harnessed correctly, social media can be a springboard to greater success and international expansion. Ignored, or mismanaged, the opportunity can become a threat, with the organisation being bypassed and sidelined. Why should a member renew their subscription if the forum they use is free-of-charge on LinkedIn?

Networks will form and discussions will be held; the question is whether you want to take part in the discussions, try to facilitate them and attempt to host them.

This paper discusses some of these social phenomena and provides high level guidance on engaging with social media and online organisations.

How to harness the power

The first steps are to understand how your members or supporters might want to engage. For professional membership organisations, this is often in the form of Communities of Practice (CoP), whereas for fundraising charities, this would more normally be through methods of engaging donors and supporters.

Communities of Practice

The key differentiator between 'Social Networks' and 'Communities of Practice' is facilitated learning. CoP users want to both learn and contribute, and to see that these are valuable to them personally and to the overall community. This is a very attractive model for membership organisations, many of which are knowledge based; it is a mechanism to exploit the collective intelligence of the organisation’s membership.

The facilities required and general “flavour” will vary to some extent from one organisation to another, but there will be common threads. The typical tools that are useful include:

• Wikis – a Web page or collection of Web pages designed to enable any user to contribute or modify content.
• Blogs – a website or page, usually maintained by an individual, with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video.
• Discussion groups / forums – a bulletin board system in the form of a discussion site. The members submit topics for discussion (threads) and communicate with each other using publicly visible messages (posts).

Other common tools are profile pages and project or group content.

Underlying all of this is the need to become the place to have the conversation. There are a number of ways to encourage contributions and buy in from membership:

• Tools - the appropriate tools to the organisation need to be available. It is important to be open to change rather than prescriptive, so be aware of the conversations/activities that are going on, where they are working, where they are not working and what changes to make to improve the situation.
• Facilitation - having a keen and knowledgeable facilitator who will initiate topics and reinvigorate existing topics is vital, particularly in the early days of a forum.
• Add value - think about how your organisation can add value that is not available to open communities such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Opportunities here include the ability to link to other relevant content, such as news, magazine/journal articles, events and best practice content, with “see also” links.
• Encourage – through automated feedback of peer rating of entries and pages to build kudos, perhaps backed up by awarding Continuous Professional Development (CPD) points where posts are assessed as good.

Other features and content that can attract visits and encourage buy-in include email newsletters linking to website content, ICAL diary feeds for events, RSS feeds notifying new content, podcasts, video and social bookmarking links such as Delicious and StumbleUpon.

Engaging donors and supporters

The key issue with engaging donors and supporters is to provide what they need and to use the website and their engagement with the website as a means to leverage their engagement with you. How can you help them to help you?

• Inform - ensure that your website is a useful source of up-to-date information; providing your supporters with valuable information resources
• Involve - enable individuals to sign up to your website, pass the message on to others and to add comments and contributions
• Motivate - provide feedback and opportunities to take part
• Provide – a platform to expand their fundraising, together with online tools to help and encourage them do this (for example by providing easy ways to collect online sponsorship)
• Encourage the face-to-face – social media is only part of the overall picture; for some organisations social media will be preeminent. For others, face-to-face contact will be much more important (here social media would be tool to help arrange and publicise meetings and events, and to continue the dialogue)

The Challenges

There are a number of challenges that organisations need to take on in delivering this. Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA has summed up the challenges they’ve encountered:

“Change involves simultaneously confronting barriers (such as activist capture, cumbersome governance and stuffy inward looking cultures), building capacity (finding new ways – particularly on-line – of engaging people) and developing new content propositions (what are we asking members to do and how can we make this an attractive and rewarding proposition).”

So some of the challenges you’ll encounter are to your business and some are to the processes you use. For example:

“Command and control” will be reduced – if CoPs take off, the content could grow to be a significant proportion of the website. The fact that this content has not been scrutinised internally should not be seen as a problem. Another example is allowing people to form their own groups dynamically, as they can on LinkedIn.

Moderation will be by exception, relying on other members to identify postings that need to be moderated.

Instead, effort should be focused on facilitating the discussions groups, starting topics, stimulating comment and summarising. This effort will come from experts internal to the organisation, or from active, respected members.

Ensure you extract what the participants and organisation needs from the conversations. This might be an encapsulated summary or conclusion of an important dialogue, or sending information to a local organiser or group organiser.

Don’t underestimate the amount of work that will be involved. Your social media provision is never going to be stationary so, someone in the organisation needs to be constantly monitoring what’s happening in the news and whether new forums or projects or microsites should be initiated. An example is that before and/or after an event, there should be a microsite for the event with the ability to discuss topics raised – each session gets a page with the slides from the talk and then the ability to post comments. Much of this can be supported by templates, but there is still some effort needed.

Investigate how current processes can be improved – better support for groups, such as SIGs, by giving them forums and tools for file sharing and event organisation for example.

Delivery

The IT challenge is to support and deliver responsively, quickly and cheaply:

Platform – it is important to have the right underlying platform – normally a content management system. There are a number of these, many low cost or open source, which provide the tools for social media. The last thing you want to do is have to pay for bespoke development.

Agile development – you do not know what will work best for your community, so take an agile approach to introducing the social media tools – start small, deliver incrementally, react quickly and be involved.

Availability and support – ensure you have the appropriate level of availability and support for your communities, including the ability to cope with any peaks in demand. In many cases, users will be making their contributions in the evenings or weekends, so support will need to be 24/7.

Monitor and report back – on the take-up of the different facilities and the impact of the effort put into moderation.

Strategic – IT should also be monitoring technology and, in particular, new ways to interact, or new ways to use and embed other social media sites.

Above all, ensure that the social media facilities are clear, easy to use and well structured.

Conclusion

Mechanisms for engaging with the wider community continue to evolve at a dizzying pace. Social media is already a critical part of many people’s lives and the not-for-profit sector, with its diverse community of stakeholders and traditions of wider social engagement, is ideally placed to take the maximum advantage from these innovations.

Whilst prescriptive approaches and solutions will not ensure success, a framework of operations needs to be established and regular reviews and reprioritisation of initiatives needs to be carried out at a senior level within an organisation. Organisations will have to accept changes to the control of information flow, allowing flexibility and ownership by individuals outside an organisation.

Stakeholders will expect to see social media as part of an organisation’s communications and those that fail to exploit this will see an increasing disengagement.

Ignore social media at your peril.