Understanding Social Media for Non-profits – How to Measure Results
This presentation was given to The Annual Arizona Coalition to End Homelessness conference on October. A quick poll at the start of the presentation revealed the following needs and interests of the audience regarding social media:
- How to separate personal from business activities with employees
- How to measure results and return on investment (ROI)
- How to maximize efficiency with your marketing efforts (tools to make social media easier)
- How to develop a social media marketing plan
It became clear that understanding social media for non-profit organizations and how to measure and monetize the results was the top interest with the group along with developing a social media marketing strategy with ways to determine ROI.
Non-profit organizations have an advantage over other businesses when it comes to social media marketing because of their altruistic mission that translates into local or national interests to the social media community. In this case, helping to end homelessness in Arizona is the common mission and by simply sharing photos, videos and testimonials from the lives those that the AZCEH has helped pulls at our heart-strings. As a result, we often feel compelled to help this mission in the form of an online donations or to get involved to make a difference. Social media is an ideal marketing vehicle to get the word out.
All of the organizations present at the AZCEH conference are local in their marekting reach (maybe hyper-local). Helping the homeless can be a matter of being visible within a few miles. You may find this hard to believe but the homeless have mobile devices. Therefore, helping the homeless can be a matter of being a top search in local and mobile marketing. Our Geo-SoMo marketing solution helps businesses be the most relevant local result and has helped non-profits like APECH (Arizona Partnership to End Childhood Hunger) receive a grant from Wal-Mart Charities because their local mission alligned with the Wal-Mart grant.
The take-aways from this presentaion include:
- How to launch a local social media marketing strategy for non-profits
- Determining the best social networking tools to use to grow your non-profit business and dominate in local search results
- How to create your own syndicated marketing channels to grow online donations and recruit volunteers
- Ways to generate measure ROI with social media marketing
Our special guest presenters were Kevin Gralen of ShopTab who launched his Facebook ecommerce app for non-profits to take donations and online sales on Facebook fan pages and Mike Shore of HOM, Inc. (Housing Operations and Management) who helped AZCEH add the ShopTab app on their Facebook fan page.
