Tag Archive - social media

Beth Kanter: Social media takes leadership, spreadsheets

April 27, 2011 in Blog, Cause Organizations, Strategic Planning with 1 Comment

Effective nonprofit social media outreach takes leadership and spreadsheets, says Beth Kanter.

A head and shoulders portrait of Beth Kanter.

Beth Kanter

Beth writes Beth’s Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media, one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She spoke April 27 on the GuideStar webinar “A Conversation with Beth Kanter: Nonprofits and Social Media.”

Creating a social media culture at your nonprofit begins with leadership, Beth said. “You absolutely need leadership buy-in.”

Somebody in leadership then needs to “get out that spreadsheet.” In other words, have an editorial calendar. I’m adding to Beth’s words here: Communicate intentionally! Communicate with purpose. You increase your chances of doing that when you plan. (Nonprofit marketing consultant Clover Frederick has some thoughts here on what comes first, the marketing plan or the strategic plan.)

Planning takes SMART objectives. Beth repeatedly mentioned these; they’re Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Framed.

Notice that measurement is built right in to SMART objectives—but be careful, because as Beth said, “There’s a lot of confusion between counting and measurement.” You should have a spreadsheet or some other tool recording measurements of your social media results. Beth suggests three outcome measures … Continue Reading…

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How to empower your event marketing committee for passionate promotion

February 7, 2011 in Cause Organizations with 0 Comments

Tre Brashear

Empowering your event marketing committee to “actually do things without too many checks and balances” is the way to get powerful promotional work out of passionate people. Making this happen for your nonprofit organization takes two steps: (1) Vet your  committee members and (2) Trust your committee chairperson.

This from Tre Brashear (Twitter, LinkedIn), a founding organizer of Nebraska’s successful MAHA Music Festival, which has brought acts like Spoon, The Faint, Superchunk, and Old 97′s to downtown Omaha. The festival is a nonprofit organization because the founders wanted it to be a community event, Tre said, “not just a group of people who do it to pocket something.” Tre hopes the one-day festival, happening August 13 in this, its third year, will get big enough to generate money MAHA can turn around and donate to other nonprofit organizations.

But back to the point: To get that big, you need passionate promotion. To get that, you need an empowered marketing committee—one free to make the day-to-day, week-to-week tactical decisions after the board sets the big-picture strategy like website, branding, and logos.

To empower the marketing committee, you need to do the following two things. (These are all according to Tre, who spoke with me as a followup to his well-received January 28, 2011 presentation  at Cause Camp, an annual educational conference for nonprofits put on by the fine folks at the Lincoln Chapter of the American Marketing Association, which I was proud to sponsor.) Continue Reading…

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Learn how to engage your community at Cause Camp in Lincoln January 28

January 19, 2011 in Cause Organizations, Events with 0 Comments

Learn how to engage your nonprofit’s community of supporters two ways January 28 at Cause Camp in Lincoln, Nebraska. A successful event promoter will show you how he used marketing, public relations, and social media strategies to increase turnout, while a public interest law firm’s research and policy coordinator will show how her organization uses its webpage, Facebook and e-mail to build support and motivate people to action.

A line-drawing caricature of Tre Brashear.

Tre Brashear. Seriously, this is the highest-resolution picture I could find.

Cause Camp’s morning Session I speakers are Tre Brashear (Twitter, LinkedIn) , co-founder of the MAHA Music Festival and an Omaha corporate and commercial law attorney, and Kate Bolz (LinkedIn, profile article), Research & Policy Coordinator at the Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest.

Brashear’s presentation is Event Marketing: A Case Study:

In its second year, the 2010 MAHA Music Festival needed a big turnout in order to keep it going. Thanks to Tre Brashear, that’s just what happened. Tre will walk through the marketing, public relations and social media strategy that made his nonprofit event such a success. Try these lessons for your organization’s big events.

Kate Bolz

Bolz’s presentation is Using Online Tools for Building Change:

This presentation will provide an overview of tools, strategies and resources for nonprofit organizations to utilize in building support and motivating people to action. It will include successful examples from Nebraska Appleseed’s work using its webpage, Facebook and e-mail.

Fulwider Partners Consulting, LLC is a silver-level sponsor of Cause Camp, put on by the fine folks at the Lincoln Chapter of the American Marketing Association. I’ll have a booth at the event, which runs 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Embassy Suites in beautiful downtown Lincoln, Nebraska. You can register here.

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