Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies Social Networking Recommendation Summary and Roadmap

1. Federation of Protestant Welfare AgenciesSocial Networking Recommendation Summary and Roadmap

2. Overview The following Recommendation Summary and Roadmap is the result of the IBM Trailblazer grant entitled “Social Networking Workshop.” The workshop was held at the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies offices on Wednesday, October 21, 2009. Workshop participants were an exciting mix of 14 New York City agencies. The participants shared suggestions and offered success stories with each other and not only helped each other but also provided valuable input for future workshops. Notes captured during the session highlighted key findings and trends. This helped us develop an overview Roadmap which would assist the FPWA and their member agencies in achieving their goals. One important trend observed during the workshop was that social networking is best utilized in parallel with other traditional client touch points from the various organizations served. Clients may not be using typical social networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube. If clients have an awareness of these tools and that relevant agency content can be accessed using them, they could use these tools as an additional touch point to the organization. Reaching donors through social networking tools also extends the organization’s reach. FPWA is a unique organization whose members include a wide range of audience types. These audiences have differing goals and objectives for using social networking tools. However there are many commonalities we identified. As such, we have drafted the following Recommendation Summary to be relevant to all organizations. We have divided the Recommendation Summary and Roadmap into sections: • Part 1: Findings –a summary of the workshop notes and discussions • Part 2: Recommendations – based on the workshop findings and our experience with other non-profits, the recommendations are prioritized into short term, medium term and long term initiatives. A Social Media Strategy Framework used for planning social networking projects is also included • Appendix – helpful links related to our discussions and findings We have very much enjoyed our time with the FPWA and believe you and your agencies are well positioned to succeed with social networking initiatives and strategies.

3. Part 1: FINDINGS A workshop summary and session notes.

4. Audience Types The following audience types were identified during the workshop. This does not represent a comprehensive list of all audience types but rather is a starting point for reaching known target groups.

5. Goals and Objectives The following goals and objectives were compiled from the pre-work questionnaire then consolidated for use during the workshop. Most organizations reported that they plan to use social networking tools to build support for their missions as well as to disseminate information about programs and services. Pre-work Questionnaire’s consolidated goals: • Increase visibility and awareness of the organization’s programs and initiatives • Build an online community of supporters, especially financial supporters • User social networking tools to augment the agency’s programs and services The following are 2 – 3 objectives that would satisfy those goals: • Develop a larger following on social networking platforms including agency staff, individual supporters and clients • Develop engaging content and encourage users to participate in the online community • Tailor programs and services to include the use of social networking sites

6. Critical Success Factors The following critical success factors for social networking initiatives were identified in the pre-work questionnaire: • People must pay attention and draw value from an agency’s social networking initiatives • Staff and Board must use the social networking technology to support an agency’s efforts in this area • Agencies must develop useful, interesting and unique content • Agencies should increase their staff capacity to manage these new initiatives • “Friends” and “contacts” need to spread the word about an agency through their personal networks

7. Potential content The following is a consolidated list of suggestions for content types from the pre-work questionnaire: • Schedule of upcoming events • Stories of people touched by our work • News articles and other information relevant to our work • Opportunities for people to get involved in our programs and initiatives

8. Brainstorming During our brainstorming session, we had the opportunity to discuss the challenges organizations are facing. As a team, we discussed how social networking could be used as an organizational tool. Interestingly, we realized that there were many situations where traditional outreach was more effective then using newly emerging social tools. The following is a result of those sessions. Project 1: Outreach

9. Brainstorming Project 2: Donors

10. Brainstorming Project 3: Health Fair in a targeted area

11. Recommendations Builds on the Findings content. Provides Summary Recommendations and a Roadmap to help the FPWA achieve their goals.

12. How do we get started? • Embrace the organizational change – crossing the chasm • Start the discussion internally • Encourage all staff members to learn about the new technologies • Gain buy in from the Executive Director and Board • Some techniques: show them the statistics of social platform usage • Communicate that the target audience is using these platforms • Explain that this is another important client communications channel • Show the results from internal sources or other organizations • Communicate a plan for timeboxing • Share a draft of your overall strategy and request input • Start brown bag lunch conversations or “Facebook Fridays” (source: Beth’s Blog see link below) • Think about how you have introduced technology changes to your organization in the past and identify what has worked • Start small • Identify your first project • Identity the goals, objectives, critical success factors and risks • Develop your Social Networking Strategy Framework *For more ideas and information go to http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/2008/12/how-to-think-like-a-nonprofit-social-marketing-genius-whats-your-brilliant-thought.html

13. Developing a Social Networking Strategy A successful social networking project does not occur by happenstance. It happens by design. Whether they be online communities, social networks, blogs or other types of social applications, the most successful social networking, social computing or collaborative technologies experiences share a set of characteristics that attract, encourage and facilitate user engagement. Translated into a set of practices, these characteristics provide a framework that can help organizations define an actionable strategy to develop lasting and meaningful engagement with their targeted audiences. This framework includes social and collaborative technologies but also encompasses every touch point you have with your donors, volunteers or partner corporations. The following slide is a visual representation of IBM’s view of the four key elements of a successful social networking strategy framework.

14. Create Individual Value Design for Community Engage with Authenticity Feed, Measure and Tune Social Networking Strategy Framework 1. The four elements of the framework are: • Create Individual Value – Create an experience that is valuable to the user prior to any social engagement. • Design for Community – Design the experience in a way that makes it simple and desirable for users to engage in social behavior. • Engage with Authenticity - Adopt and promote a set of behaviors that make users want to engage. • Feed, Measure and Tune - Encourage, measure and continuously evolve the experience to improve it and foster passionate use of it over time. 2. 3. 4.

15. Step 1: Create Individual Value for FPWA’s Audiences Questions to consider: • Who makes up your target audiences? • What are your objectives related to these audiences? • What can you do to create individual value for your audiences that aligns to your objectives for each group? Some suggestions included: Audience types: • People in need, donors, volunteers and press Objectives: • Objectives are specific to the audience, let’s use volunteers since we did not cover that audience type during our workshop brainstorming Suggestions for creating individual value: • Demonstrate how their volunteer efforts help people in need, include success stories or personal stories about how people were assisted • Provide a rich internet experience through blogs, video footage, photos of a volunteer event giving a new volunteer an idea of what to expect • Provide feedback areas for volunteers to relate their experiences enabling a new volunteer to learn from others’ experiences • Tag volunteer photos and videos

16. Step 2: Design for Community Questions to consider: • How can we make the user experience more engaging (and possibly more social)? • How can we encourage sharing and participating? Some suggestions included: • Respect the user’s attention and time. Give them the tools to manage and filter information as they choose • On Facebook or on an organization’s website, seed the content to get the discussion started • Create a specific call to action targeted towards a specific audience, “5 things you don’t want to miss”, or “5 things you should know about our organization”, or “bring a can of food to an upcoming event” • Create badges/achievements – to reflect level of participation • Develop a content plan which includes content for the different platforms. Specify how frequently updates should occur

17. Step 3: Engage with Authenticity Questions to consider: • What resources do we need to be successful? • What are the responsibilities of these resources? • What are the key issues/risks associated with this effort? How do we want to manage them? Some suggestions included: • Assemble a “task force” of staff member(s), Board member(s), intern(s) and volunteers to plan and implement the social networking plan • Identify who will be responsible for keeping the Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, YouTube, website, etc. content updated • Identify risks – is a social networking policy needed before your organization feels comfortable spending time updating social sites? Do you have the contact names for donors or volunteers you are trying to reach?

18. Step 4: Feed, Measure and Tune Questions to consider: • Where do we start? • How do we measure our success? • How will we keep the imitative going? Some suggestions included: • Determine who your target audience is : donors, volunteers, the press, people in need? Or an audience type we may not have identified • Determine the best content and platform to reach each audience type and to meet your objectives • Determine how you measure success. Number of Facebook Fans; relevance of posted content from fans; influencers such as Twitter followers, etc. • Make your plan flexible so that it can accommodate the inevitable changes in the social networking landscape

19. Web metrics to measure success • Visits • Includes all visits, including repeat visitors • Usually measured as count of all sessions during a fixed period of time • Avoids counting robots or spiders as visitors • Unique visitors • Counts only unique visitors during a given time period • Usually measured by counting unique cookie ids during a targeted time period • Type of visitor • Identifies the specific customer segment (donor, volunteer, campaign) • Compares visitor’s purpose for coming to a website to the business intention • Time on site • Measured as session duration; may overestimate actual user time on site • Measured as sum of time spent on all pages; may underestimate actual time • Page views • Not recommended – not a useful metric but one you may hear about • Originally measured as server hits, but now known to greatly overestimate page views • Referrals • Measured as percent of visitors referred by other domains (such as search websites) • Can also be measured as percent of visits driven by searches for specific keywords or phrases • Fans, followers, friends, contributors • How many Facebook Fans have you established? • How many Twitter followers for Linked In connections, etc. • Has your user generated content increased? • What is the blogosphere saying? • Are the top non-profit blogs mentioning anything about your initiatives? • What are the results if you perform relevant Google searches? • Fundraising • Can you tie fundraising or donation milestones to your social initiatives? • Increased outreach or advocacy • Did the website answer visitors’ questions? Following are suggestions for measuring the success of your social networking initiatives. Use these as a starting point and customize to best reflect your goals.

20. Platforms to consider We discussed various uses of different platforms during the workshop. Consider using these platforms for the following uses. Use this list as a guideline, test, tune and make changes and cross promote content on different platforms to increase effectiveness. Organization’s Website • Static content about mission, organization • A reliable source where audience members can quickly find information • Update homepage monthly as a “monthly magazine” where content is more thought out and researched including content such as elections, strategic plan, scorecard, article archive Facebook Fan Page • Use this as your “test bed” for content to get quick feedback from audience members, solicit users’ opinions • Daily news updates • Links • Current, topical stories Facebook Group Page • For specific topic areas that target a particular audience (such as volunteers for a particular event) • Event information Linked In • Job postings • As a tool for “Google Stalking” to locate connections to like-minded people, potential donors, volunteers, etc. Blog • More in depth conversations • Promotes your organization as the “trusted source of information” in combination with website and Facebook Fan Page Twitter • Quick, informative messages • Start the drumbeat

21. Leveraging social networking – short-term initiatives Short-term • If your organization doesn’t already have one, create a Facebook Fan page • Add links to your social media sites on your organization’s home page • Encourage all staff members to use social networking sites such as Facebook to learn the basics and to fold social networking skills in to the fabric of your organization. Staff members are a valuable source of new ideas. In maintaining an open policy on social networking, it’s important for employees to have guidelines on acceptable behavior. Here is a document outlining some basics. More detailed information can be drawn from IBM’s Social Networking Guidelines found at: http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html • Create a checklist of steps to do daily/weekly. The checklist would include items like: • Update Facebook status on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. This maximizes the time people spend on Facebook. Here’s why (the social networking psyche: Monday – what happened over the weekend I should know about? Wednesday – how am I going to make it through the week? Friday – almost the weekend, what’s going on I should know about?). Maximize the attention level of your friends and fans. • Post new content on the website once a week at a minimum. This takes more work but will keep people returning to your site because the content is relevant and updated • Send out Twitter message but develop “Tweeting soft skills”. Sometimes Twitter silence is golden. Ask yourself these questions before you Tweet: • Do I have something important to say? • Am I providing useful information to people following me? • Am I listening to the people following me or am I just listening to myself? • Check search results once a week on Facebook and Google to ensure site is coming up in the top list of results • Tag photos of events so “volunteerism has legs”

22. Leveraging social networking – medium-term initiatives Medium-term • Brainstorm and document your Social Networking Strategy based on the Framework of your different targeted audience types • Add a flexible promotional area on your organization’s homepage highlighting content from your social networking sites • Develop the official “social networking” policy for employees. Base the policy on other corporate examples gathered during the short-term initiatives • Branch out to other social platforms such as YouTube and create and post an informational video. • List the risks for the project or initiative paired with recommendations for mitigating those risks • Launch a blog on a free or lower fee blogging platform to initiate conversations. Develop moderation strategies. Plan for ways to encourage engaging conversation and chat as well as to deal with negative comments and dialog • Establish a “Task Force” for your initiatives. Ideally, this is a combination of interns who come in with new and interesting ideas and staff members who know the ins and outs of the organization

23. Leveraging social networking – long-term initiatives Long-term The focus for the long-term should involve keeping an eye on emerging trends. A second concentration should be shifting solutions from free services such as Facebook, blogging, and Youtube back to your organization’s website. The free services may always have a place in your outreach plan but the maturity model for social networking in organizations involves providing areas for communities to grow on an organization’s website. Success in this area involves a longer-term investment in technology and staff which allows for: • Adding future functionality for volunteer groups such as project registration, event instructions, obtaining receipts for donations, connecting with other volunteers, posting an opportunity, etc. • Building out the community areas • Providing community tools giving users the ability to post videos and photos, to form topical discussion groups, chatting, blogging, and to utilize advanced search capabilities • Refocusing on creating exclusive site content. For example the site may host a monthly moderated discussion led by experts in a particular topic area Ultimately, planning for future long-term initiatives requires keeping your eyes open and talking with your audience as trends emerge and platforms and functionality evolve.

24. S T E P S This is overwhelming. What are the steps again? 5 Step 5 – Learn, Listen and be prepared to prepared for change In this fast evolving world of social strategy, there will be opportunity to try different approaches, fail quickly, retune and try again. The cost to the organization will be time but the benefits can far outweigh the challenges. 4 Consider proceeding with social networking initiatives like this: Step 4 – Assess and Tune After you’ve implemented your first initiative, check it against your goals, objectives and measurements for success. Was it successful? Did you reach your target audience? What did you learn that you did not expect? Fine tune the approach for the next project and try again. 3 Step 3 – Implement Implement your plan understanding the first project is going to be a learning process. Keep track of the steps you make and the time commitment. Present your results and findings to the your colleagues for their assessment. 2 Step 2 – Identify the first initiative and develop the plan Identify the first project, set the goals and objectives; develop a risk mitigation plan; and determine what it will take to make this a successful initiative. Identify who is going to be responsible for updating content and who the support team will be. 1 Step 1 – Embrace the organizational change Encourage buy in by all members of the organization as well as board members. Create a “Task Force” consisting of key team members and key stakeholders. The Task Force should be responsible for the strategy as well as the implementation of your plan. The task force may also include your target audience; talk to them, they will help you determine a successful direction.

25. APPENDIX

26. Last Word: Some useful links