Archive for the ‘Content’ Category

Using Social Media to Leverage Family Stories for Healthcare Reform: MomsRising Shares Lessons Learned

Momsrising Story Site

Note from Beth: We featured Momsrising in our book, The Networked Nonprofit, as an example of a nonprofit that was born as a Networked Nonprofit.   They are experts in using  social media as part of their multi-channel advocacy campaigns.   They are also experts in repurposing content for different channels.  If you’re grappling with a content strategy, take a look at what they do.  You’ll learn lots.  They are also experts in reflecting and learning about what works and what doesn’t with social media and I’m lucky that they have offered to continue sharing their knowledge on my blog!

I thought this would be timely post because just this morning, I got an email alert from Momsrising  that John Boehner, the new Speaker of the House, announced that the House will vote on January 12th to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the health care reform bill.    The appeal used a personal story – and you can get the context of how it is working from this case study from Donna.

Using Social Media to Leverage Family Stories: MomsRising Shares Lessons Learned

By Donna Norton, Senior Director, MomsRising

Last fall, messaging research released by the Herndon Alliance found that the most effective way to sway swing audiences to support health care reform is to use personal stories paired with a fact or two about health reform. The research highlighted that women are both key targets and ideal messengers.

Inspired by this finding, in September, MomsRising asked members to share their experiences through an online story collection tool about how health reform was helping their families. MomsRising collected over 250 member stories from 44 states through this effort.

One of these stories was from Dawn Josephson, a MomsRising member in Florida, who shared that because of health reform, for the first time her health insurance did not exclude her son’s pre-existing eye condition.

Her story was right on the mark. And, MomsRising shared her story and hundreds of others with the White House, other federal and state leaders, as well as the media. Dawn was invited by the White House to fly to Virginia to share her story in person with President Obama. This event garnered tons of media coverage and Dawn’s story was covered by almost every major media outlet in the country including the Washington Post, CNN, the Associate Press, CBS, and more.

MomsRising decided not to stop there and continued to leverage Dawn’s story through social media. Dawn was invited by the MomsRising team to write up her experience about being helped by health care reform and of meeting with the President as a blog post. MomsRising then posted her blog on the MomsRising blog, as well as on the MomsRising weekly column on the Huffington Post, and MomsRising also worked with Dawn to help her set up an account to post the blog on the Daily Kos.

This social media push drove even more traditional media outlets to cover the issue and to showcase Dawn. Dawn’s blog was incredibly personal and compelling and she received hundreds of positive comments.  Placement in the Huffington Post was a strategic way to reach a large audience.    Importantly, what we found most interesting about this social media strategy is that it resulted in significantly more traditional media coverage. For example, NPR saw her post on the MomsRising blog and did a long interview with Dawn about her experience of sharing her health care story with the President that aired across the nation on Election Day.

Lessons Learned:

1) The lines between social media and traditional media are permeable. MomsRising has many journalists reading the blog and following us on Twitter, so blogs can easily become fodder for traditional media stories. (Note: The fact that the MomsRising blog features the work of not only MomsRising, but also hundreds of other diverse organizations and individuals, not only supports the entire movement for family economic security, but also drives journalists and influential bloggers to the MomsRising blog as a vibrant source of innovative ideas.)

2) Asking Dawn to write a blog about the experience of sharing a family story was a great way to make an important issue (health care reform) more personal and authentic which garnered increased traditional and social media.

3) When Dawn posted on the Daily Kos, she didn’t realize that Daily Kos bloggers usually frequently return to their posts and respond to comments made. She didn’t return to read the comments until a couple days later and by then a big discussion had ensued in the comments about whether or not she had been paid to write the story because her profile noted that she is a professional writer by trade. (Note: She had received no compensation.) From this experience, MomsRising learned that very detailed advanced briefing of members is needed about what to expect when they post blogs on highly trafficked websites; and that it’s important to be available to help them immediately respond to comments–particularly negative comments–on their blog.

In sum, MomsRising learned that to maximize media outreach and effectively impact the national dialogue on any given topic, social media strategies and traditional media strategies can’t be developed in isolation. Rather, it’s important to note that the two strategies build on one another: Social media can generate traditional media, and traditional media can instigate a social media buzz. Now, MomsRising utilizes an integrated media strategy, encompassing both traditional and social media. This more holistic approach to media strategy is incredibly powerful and cost effective in our new media environment.

What is your takeaway from this case study?  How can your organization apply the lessons learned from Momsrising?

Donna Norton: Donna Norton is Senior Director at MomsRising. She has had over twenty years of experience in national and international advocacy on issues of women and girls. Most recently, Donna led the “We won’t be pacified!” MomsRising campaign for health reform that meets the needs of children and families. She is the mother of two fantastic boys who maintain their steadfast political and personal opposition to vegetables of all kinds.

What is Your Nonprofit’s Holiday Content Strategy for Facebook?

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Image from Humane Society

Note from Beth: Recently, Networked for Good offered a free e-book about how nonprofits can development a micro-content for their social media presences filled with useful tips and best practices.    Carie Lewis gives an excellent mini case study of how to leverage micro content during the holiday and get results.

What is Your Nonprofit’s Holiday Content Strategy for Facebook? by Carie Lewis

At The Humane Society of the United States, we pride ourselves on on listening.    But it’s not just about what people are saying about us. It’s also about what other organizations and businesses are doing and we gather this intelligence by reading blogs on these topics on a daily basis.  Recently, I noticed a trend on what major retailers were doing on their Facebook pages for the holiday season. This post is how we could translate some of these tactics to nonprofit social media strategies.

Identifying a Trend

The emerging trend was that major retailers were using their Facebook pages to release special deals and give retail discounts for the holiday season. An article by CNET stated that approximately 31% of retailers planned to use their own websites to promote holiday deals, while 39% planned to use Facebook and 21% Twitter. Internet Retailer claims that the rules for Black Friday have changed significantly, and that many retailers are offering sneak peeks in advance on social networks to create buzz. It’s a brilliant strategy; use the fact that people love a deal to grow your base on social networks.

The Old Saying Is Still True. You Must Be Where People Are.

It’s important that nonprofits pay attention to emerging trends outside of our sector and think about how we can use this knowledge. It’s more about how people use social networks than what the sector is doing. A PC World article predicts that “What [retailers] are doing this year will be nothing compared to next year. Social media is evolving at near warp speed. Not because retailers are out in front of this–they are in fact racing to catch up to where their customers already are.” We must be where people are, and respond to the way they use social networks. Remember when Twitter realized people were using “RT”  to repost other’s tweets, then made retweeting a permanent function of their platform?

Now What?

Every year, we do a holiday appeal that tells the story of animals who have survived horrible situations – puppy mills, dogfighting, and other forms of cruelty and neglect, and ask people to donate so we can continue that work. But we also have an online store and corporate partners that we promote during the holiday season, so we package all of this together in December. For two years, we’ve had a custom tab on our Facebook page that houses all this content. But this year, after noticing this trend of exclusivity on Facebook, I got a few new ideas.

The trick that retailers are starting to figure out, particularly with Black Friday this year, was making people “like” their page first in order to get the deal or coupon – not just having a fancy custom tab. It makes sense; you want these people to have a lasting relationship with you on Facebook. If they “like” you, they’ll continue to have a relationship with you long after they’ve used your special coupon code. Sure, they can always unlike you, but that’s the challenge: stay relevant and interesting enough to get people to stick with you. This made us take a step back and completely change the way we post to Facebook – less often, more engaging.

Implementation is the Hardest Part

To get started, I began researching examples of retailers that were using this tactic already on Facebook. Good examples I found were Borders, Marshalls, and Amazon.

I also came across an excellent whitepaper from Buddy Media about ways to engage fans on Facebook. One of the tactics they showcased was a company that showed a page turn image for non fans, and simulated the page turning when they became a fan, revealing exclusive content. The challenge was finding out how to make this happen on Facebook. To do this, you must use the Static FBML app on your Fan page as a custom tab. If you are already utilizing custom tabs on Facebook, then you’re ahead of the curve. They are a great way to put custom content on Facebook, but take some programming, using Facebook’s programming language called FBML.  If you know CSS and/or HTML, you should be able to pick it up quickly.

(Note from Beth: Last week on the Zoetica Salon Zoetica Co-Founder, Kami Huyse, shared a post summarizing the discussion and how-tos for creating just such a landing tab)

Back to ROI

We gained 3,000 new fans the week of Black Friday, (three times our normal growth rate) most likely from our cross promotional efforts. We asked our Twitter followers if they “liked” us on Facebook and included transactional links on our holiday emails. Each had the angle of getting an exclusive deal when they joined us on Facebook.  We’re going to launch accompanying Facebook ads next week as well. The advantage with Facebook ads is that you can target people with certain keywords in their profile (like “dogs”, for us) but that also are not already connected to our page. Once the promotions are over, we’ll also go back and find out how many people redeemed the coupon codes, and how much money we made from the deals.

An integrated campaign approach, along with ensuring that all of our holiday content is shareable, is the key social marketing strategy behind our holiday campaign. We’re continuing to update our Facebook tab as the holiday season progresses, so keep an eye on it!

What is your nonprofit’s holiday content strategy for Facebook?  How has your organization celebrated other holidays on Facebook?  Have a great example?  Leave it in the comments.

Carie Lewis

Carie Lewis

Carie is the Director of Emerging Media at The Humane Society of the United States, leading social media campaigns to further the organization’s fundraising and advocacy goals. When she’s not in front of a computer, Carie enjoys being outside with her rescued pitbull, Bella. Find her on Twitter @cariegrls.

Enabling a Participatory Culture using Creative Commons Licenses

Photo by Pratham Books: Snapshots from Bookaroo 2010 : Children's Literature Festival

Note from Beth: Lately, a question on my mind is whether or not the concept of Networked Nonprofits is a global one as I’ve had the opportunity to share some of the ideas beyond the US borders in Kenya and UK.    I think Pratham Books, an NGO in India,  is a networked nonprofit.  I first discovered the organization about a year ago when I taught some workshops in India.

Subsequently,  I invited Gautam John who works with Pratham Books to write a guest post about their social publishing strategy where he briefly touched upon their  use of Creative Commons licenses.  In this post, shares more about how his organization uses Creative Commons licenses and why he thinks it is important for your organization to consider it too.

Like my friend Gautam John,  I’ve been an advocate and donor to Creative Commons. Why not join the campaign for creativity and innovation by supporting Creative Commons?

Enabling a Participatory Culture using Creative Commons Licenses  by Gautam John

Pratham Books is a non-profit children’s book publisher based in India and our mission, while simple, is also rather audacious – “A Book in Every Child’s Hand”. Being both a non-profit and a small one at that, has its own downsides – of limited time, money and resources. However, being a non-profit also allows for something very powerful – a community call to action around a cause, in this case that of reading. In a sense, our mission has two parts, one is to create more reading matter such that there is more available for children to read and the second really is a corollary – that we need to be inclusive in our reach; to get books to those children and geographies that need it the most and that the books need to be culturally and linguistically relevant as well.

This is where our challenge lies – to massively scale the production of high quality, low-cost children’s books for a massively multi-lingual and multi-cultural market. Looking at this challenge it is fairly obvious that this is not a problem that any one organization can solve. The solution has to be scalable, flexible and catalyse our fundamental mission as well.

At this point, we realised that there were several internal questions to answer and some of them painfully introspective. Questions as to whether the books we create and distribute have to be a Pratham Book, whether it implied that every book must be paid for by either the reader or an intermediary and, from being a publisher, questions as to whether we are gatekeepers of content or content curators, how we could create infinite good with finite time and resources and most importantly, how we can create more value than we capture?

Having answered most of these questions using “openness” (whereby, we asked ourselves whether allowing unrestricted access to use and re-use our content furthered our mission) as a test and finding that it did fit our mission, the second set of questions to answer was more technical – how, as a small non-profit, do we do this and not find ourselves overwhelmed. It was at this point that we had a moment of realization – that reading is an extremely social activity and that there are communities and organizations who were more than ready to help us achieve our goals.

Creative Commons to the rescue

It was at this juncture that we hit upon the Creative Commons licensing model as one that would help us achieve many of our aims of flexibility, scalability and being able to help catalyse our mission of a book in every child’s hands. In particular, three things stood out – a shared value system of sharing and openness, a community that was deeply embedded in these ideals and, from our perspective, it was scalable because it allowed us to license content to multiple organizations and individuals, both known and unknown, with a one time effort of releasing them under a Creative Commons license as opposed to the traditional model which involves time consuming negotiations and discussions with each known organization or individual who wants to use our content.

As an organization, we did spend some time choosing a license and, from our perspective, a choice between openness and sharing which reduced to a choice between the Attribution and Attribution-Share-Alike license. Given that our goal was being as open as possible, it followed that our license choices were essentially around licenses that allowed for the greatest possible use and re-use because our initial hypothesis was, and continues to be, that being open allows us to fulfil our mission better than a traditional copyright model allows.

We now use Creative Commons licenses everywhere! We license entire books under CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses, we license our illustrations similarly and even photographs and other publicity material too. Over the last year we have been building the foundations for a social publishing model – where we curate communities that are passionate about reading and help us create content. Such a model rests on the idea of a participatory culture and an essential ingredient is a permissive licensing strategy – Creative Commons licenses offers us this, a large community with shared values and an ecosystem to tap in to.

Outcomes

While this licensing and publishing model works well in theory, it has been extremely heartening for us to see it come to life – our communities have created multiple derivative works ranging from iPad and iPhone applications, to porting our works to OLPC laptops, to creating entirely new books from existing illustrations, creating community translations of books we couldn’t otherwise do and, my personal favourite, creating versions of our books for the print impaired – from DAISY and Braille books to rich audio books such that our mission truly does encompass every single child.

We have now now released 100 more children’s books (in English, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi and Gujarati) as well as the illustrations from these books under a CC-BY license.

I firmly believe that we would not have been able to achieve what success we have had without the help of Creative Commons licensing. These licenses and the values that they stand for are vital to building and strengthening a digital commons from which we all benefit. I hope you will consider supporting Creative Commons and licensing content that you own or control such that we all benefit from the growth of the commons.

Crossposted at the Creative Commons Weblog.

Bio:

Gautam John is a lawyer with a focus on copyright laws. He has also been an entrepreneur, worked as a small wheel in the cogs of a large company and now works with two non-profits, Akshara Foundation, in the primary education space and Pratham Books, in the children’s publishing space. He is passionate about education, equality and equity and focuses on ‘access’ as a way to achieve these. Gautam was a TEDIndia Fellow in 2009, is part of efforts to set up a Wikimedia India Chapter and a Creative Commons supporter.

In Search of Bachelors and Philanthropy in Rural Alaska and Video Story Capture Tips

The Story

Last week,  my adventure in Alaska started with a meeting with representatives from community foundations around the state of Alaska hosted by the Alaska Community Foundation.   That’s where I met Joe Page from the Jessica Stevens Foundation who told me the amazing story about the Talkeetna Bachelor Society.

The Talkeetna Bachelor Society is a program of the Denali Arts Council, a 501(c)3 non-profit corporation. The Society’s fundraising activities benefit the Talkeetna Bachelor Society’s Fund for Women and Children in Crisis.  The main fundraising event is the Bachelor Auction, where ladies in attendance may purchase, at fair market value, a feisty bachelor to accompany them at the Bachelor Ball.   Anyone can purchase the “male order catalog” and the proceeds go to support the charity.

Quite a different charity auction ….

I couldn’t help but think – what if Joe Page or other community foundation board members had flip cameras, some video and story telling training and shared their stories on the Alaska Community Foundation Facebook page?

I was lucky enough to talk my host into driving me to Talkeetna so I could document this fabulous story.   So  I got into the car with Aliza Sherman who lives in Alaska who I’ve known since 1995 and with Cassandra Stalzer my host to take a drive up the highway to create this five minute documentary,  “The Hunt for a Talkeetna Bachelor

After a few hours on the road, we ended up in the middle of this rural town that was the prototype for Northern Exposure.  We found our way to the local brew pub – Twister Creek and Denali Brewery at the foot of Denali.    Joe Page met us in town and we reviewed the Bachelor male order catalog looking for a good subject to interview.   After walking around town, we discovered that one of the bachelors, Todd Basilone, owner of Mountain High Pizza Pie, was at work.   So,  I did an ambush interview to ask him to share why community giving is important.    I hope you’ll take the five minutes to watch the clip.

Some Tips

I love capturing and sharing authentic stories with video – either with my iPhone (email to YouTube) or the Flip Camera.  No matter the technology,  the process of capturing and sharing a good story quickly is the same.  Here’s some thoughts:

From Nancy Duarte's new book, resonate

Don’t take a vacuum cleaner approach

With video, don’t try to capture everything.   I use a technique I learned from Jay Dedman called “Moment Capture” where you get the most enlightening snippet.    I usually reserve video capture for a special story or moment that absolutely can’t be told with text.  Sometimes this occurs as a video quote from someone who said something that was an Ah Ha moment for me or else it tracking down a story.

If the latter, I have a storyboard in my head and edit as I go.   What I have found extremely useful is Nancy Duarte’s new book, resonate: present visual stories that transform audiences.  While it is intended for storytelling with powerpoint,  I think the frameworks and templates she offers for narrative arcs are very valuable.  It is so helpful to have these templates as you capture the story.

Photo by Aliza Sherman

The Technical Stuff

There are only four things you need to remember while shooting your story.  I learned these back in 2006 from Robert Scoble.

1.  Don’t frame your subject’s eyes in the middle of the frame, use the rule of thirds
2.  Don’t shoot when you have backlight, your subject will be dark
3.  Avoid ambient noise, find a quiet spot to shoot
4.  Shoot close to your subject so the audio doesn’t suck especially when using a camera with built-in mic

My colleague, Nick Booth, from the UK taught me a few tricks about doing on-camera interviews and capturing b-roll.  But to be honest,  I didn’t put those in practice until I had mastered Scoble’s tips with one-take video takes.   That was four years ago when I was shooting video with my inexpensive digital camera and using the free program in Windows, MovieMaker to create videos.   It’s much easier now with smart phones and the flip cameras.

Sharing the Story

Storytelling with social media, of course, is more than you and your subject with a camera.  Social media is a great way to involve the audience in the story as it unfolds.    Mark Horvath is a genius at doing this with his Invisible People TV site.    There are many tools you can use to share the story as it unfolds in video and photo as Aliza Sherman has documented here.

What has been your experience telling stories with social media?  What are your favorite sources, tips, and stories?

What Tools Do You Use for Making Your Nonprofit’s Social Media Use Efficient?

Flickr Photo by Roberto Ferrari - Creative Commons License Some Rights Reserved

Note from Beth: Social media is not a waste a time, but there are ways to waste your time.   On Saturday, I had the honor of presenting at Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp and one of the burning questions was about efficiency.   So, I’m going to explore this theme over the coming weeks.

A  few weeks ago,  I started a thread on my blog’s Facebook Page,  “What are the best tips and tools for saving time managing your nonprofit’s Facebook Page?”   I summarized the tips shared in this earlier post. Managing your organization’s Facebook page, particularly tracking, content, and engagement can be a time suck, particularly as your network grows.     For example,  we know that identifying and engaging with super fans/influencers on our Facebook presence is important.   But keeping a spreadsheet of the names of people who “like” and comment on threads involves a lot of cut and paste.   Is there a tool that can automate this someone asked on my blog’s Facebook page?  (unfortunately, FB Insights doesn’t do this)

Or what about a tool that helps you plan out your content strategy for the week and even schedule posts on days when you can’t?  What if you want to aggregate and look at all the comments and responses to threads before responding?

There is an evolving category of tools (some free, some not) that can help make the tasks associated with content strategy, engagement, and tracking less onerous.   On the free side, Manny Hernandez mentioned NutShell Mail, software that aggregates comments and likes on your fan page and delivers it in one email.   James Young mentioned SpredFast (he works for them now) and he offered to write a post about how he manages him time.    And while this guest post is about one particular tool, remember when looking for a technology tool solution, think carefully about what pain point is it solving and whether it can truly work for your situation.   If you know of other tools (or tips) that make you more efficient managing content, engagement, and tracking on social media, please share them in the comments.

Guest Post by James Young SpredFast

And as a marketer like you, who has added social media to the mix, I struggled with the same issues you face with being efficient with my and showing the results.    Here’s how I use Spredfast to help me with these challenges.

So Many Social Networks, So Little Time

Doing social media right takes time. We engage in multiple social networks, some that you probably also use: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, our own blog, and a few other networks.

Aggregating Conversations

Conversing with people in all of these places, and creating interesting, value-add content for each is a time consuming business.  It gets worse when you consider that you have to duplicate efforts across different social networks.  With Spredfast, I can do two things that make this so much more efficient.  First, I can pull in all of the conversation taking place across all of the networks into one place, read through it, and participate where I want to. Each and every day, I look for all of the people who have mentioned us or retweeted our tweets, and I thank them. I can do it easily right from my listening dashboard.

Planning Content on Weekly Basis

Second, I can plan out the content I want to publish, schedule it out for the next few weeks, create the content (or, one day when we grow, assign it to someone to create), choose the social network or networks I want each piece to go to, and save it.  Spredfast will publish it on the schedule I’ve set. Typically, I will get a week’s worth of content ready to go ahead of time, and then spend the majority of my remaining time just engaging with individuals.

Tracking for Insights and Value

Like all activity within a good company or organization, I have to create some value. To prove I’m doing that, I need data.  Some of the social networks provide a lot of good data, others not so much. Regardless, it used to take a lot of time to go into each network and gather the data I needed, pull it back into my master spreadsheet, and then do some crunching.

Spredfast makes that a lot easier for me, because it gathers two types of data into one dashboard. First, all of the content that I send out (both planned communication as well as off the cuff conversations I engage in) is tracked. For example, for each tweet I send, I can see how many times it was retweeted, by whom, what they said, how many people could have seen the retweet, and if I included a link I can see how many times the link was clicked. For every post to my Facebook Page, I can see when someone comments, who they are, what they said, how many times the post was liked and how many times the link in my post was clicked. The list goes on across a wide variety of social networks and kinds of interaction people can have.

Second, I can see data that relates to my social media account (as opposed to my content), like number of friends, fans and followers. I can also see the volume of the conversation about my brand, like mentions in Twitter, references in blogs, etc.

The big deal is that all of this data is in one dashboard, so I can jump straight to analysis, making my weekly report a whole lot easier to produce. I just create a graph or report in Spredfast, or I export the data and use Excel and PowerPoint.

It is important track conversions and Spredfast can be integrated with my  integrated my Google Analytics account, and I tag all the links I send out in conversations.  Spredfast does some cool stuff like creating unique shortened links for each content piece (including separate links for the same post sent into both Facebook and Twitter, for example), so when I look at my web funnel data, I can actually track a conversion all the way back to the individual tweet or post. Literally, I can tell my boss how many subscriptions came from social media activity, from each social network, from each account and from each individual content piece I published.

Now, I know that not all value is measured in conversions. So, all of those other things that are valuable, like engagement levels and reach, are available too, using the data in my dashboard. We have some internal, soft values we attach to that data, and ultimately arrive at a total value comprised of soft and hard (conversion) values for my activity this week, month, or quarter.

Scaling Engagement

I know many organizations are worried about giving a lot of staff and volunteers access to the organization Twitter or Facebook accounts. This has some serious consequences. First, it usually limits the number of people empowered to engage in social media. Consequently, it decreases the quality of the social media engagement that does happen. How? Let’s face it, we don’t all have an unlimited supply of time, patience and creativity.  Having more people involved raises the quantity of engagement, time to response and content variety.

Spredfast makes this easier too, because the many authors you may have are not logging into your Twitter account directly. They’re logging into Spredfast, creating content and then publishing it to that Twitter account. One trusted person has already come in and connected Spredfast to the Twitter account.  Spredfast also has “draft” function which is particularly useful is you’re working side-by-side a social media intern.

Best practices in social media is listening, engaging, identifying influences, and tracking.    Spredfast can help your nonprofit be efficient with these tasks.  

Questions from Beth:

What tools and techniques are you using to make your social media content, engagement, and tracking more efficient?  Spredfast is one, but are there others?   What has your experience been?   At what point does it make sense to move to a paid tool for content strategy, engagement, and tracking?