Your Online Strategy, Part 1
53 Congregations. 170 people. 18 states and Washington DC. You guys are amazing!
I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity we had this weekend to come together and meet for the first time as a large group like this, focusing on engaging Jews in their (our) 20s and 30s. I’m so happy to have met and talked with so many of you, to have learned about your area and your congregation, and to have told you a bit about what we’re doing at NextDor.
If you want a reminder of what happened, or if you’re interested but weren’t able to join us in person, here’s the twitter feed from the Conversation http://ow.ly/30yIp Thank you to everyone who was tweeting from the room, and everyone engaged in the Conversation remotely!
When people asked me what it meant that I was tweeting the Conversation, and I explained, a lot of you looked at me, sighed, and said “I’m going to have to do this aren’t I” - looking kind of like the dentist had just told you that you needed a root canal. I gave a quick answer standing there, but I wanted to give a fuller answer here. There are three key components of a non-profit social media strategy, and mostly you only hear people talking about the third - what tool to use (“you just have to be on xyz...”).
I’m going to take us a couple steps back - there are (at least) three key questions for any non-profit to consider before you get to the which tool question:
#1: Who is my audience?
#2: What do I want to communicate?
#3: What do I want readers to do?
You can get into lots of levels of detail with any of these questions, I’m going to keep it short and simple here and just give a couple examples.
#1: Who is my audience? Are you targeting folks primarily in your geographic area? If yes, is there a blog or other online service dedicated specifically to your region (as narrowly defined as possible)? Are you targeting folks by age? What people are on differs in different regions of the country, so find out what’s popular where you are; but general considerations - if you’re targeting folks 40+ I’m going to recommend e-mail; if you’re targeting anybody 20-39 you should definitely include Facebook as part of your strategy but this is a really broad audience - keep in mind that a 22 year old is going to look at the web very differently than a 36 year old.
#2 What do I want to communicate? Is it an upcoming event? Meetup.com plus Facebook are necessities. Is it a professional networking group - you’ve got to include LinkedIn (notice their tagline - it tells you a lot - “relationships matter”) - if it’s a non-profit focused event, you should be sharing it on Idealist. Is it just straight up information updates? twitter might be your best choice - one of it’s co-founders recently said that it’s not a social network, it’s an information sharing tool - and he’s right - people scan feeds the way newsrooms use to scan ticker tapes.
#3 What do I want readers to do? You might want readers to stay up to date with your new information - in which case any of a variety of services including email blast (Constant Contact, MailChimp etc.), Facebook groups, twitter etc. should be in your tool belt. Do you want them to be a little more active, a little more engaged? Try something a bit more interactive - ask them some questions and give a route to easy responses. Try a poll or have a contest to find a new name for a new project (or mascot or...). Show up to an event in the real world? See #2.
After you’ve gone through these questions and any others that are helpful for your particular audience or locality, then start seriously looking at what tools are out there, what each one does (remember that most online tools are pretty specialized in what they do, even if they’re just a bit tweaked in performance from others), and what’s going to serve your needs today the best.
A lot of you voiced a concern about time - keep in mind that the biggest portion of your time should go into strategy - once you figure out your audience, what you want to communicate, what you want readers to do, and finally what tools you want to use, the final step of actually posting something online to one or two sites shouldn’t take up more than 10 minutes of your day.
Please post below if you have any questions, and my next blog post will focus on that fourth question - what tools do what specifically, so you can pick the one or two that you really want for any given posting. Thanks for your time! Sadie
I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunity we had this weekend to come together and meet for the first time as a large group like this, focusing on engaging Jews in their (our) 20s and 30s. I’m so happy to have met and talked with so many of you, to have learned about your area and your congregation, and to have told you a bit about what we’re doing at NextDor.
If you want a reminder of what happened, or if you’re interested but weren’t able to join us in person, here’s the twitter feed from the Conversation http://ow.ly/30yIp Thank you to everyone who was tweeting from the room, and everyone engaged in the Conversation remotely!
When people asked me what it meant that I was tweeting the Conversation, and I explained, a lot of you looked at me, sighed, and said “I’m going to have to do this aren’t I” - looking kind of like the dentist had just told you that you needed a root canal. I gave a quick answer standing there, but I wanted to give a fuller answer here. There are three key components of a non-profit social media strategy, and mostly you only hear people talking about the third - what tool to use (“you just have to be on xyz...”).
I’m going to take us a couple steps back - there are (at least) three key questions for any non-profit to consider before you get to the which tool question:
#1: Who is my audience?
#2: What do I want to communicate?
#3: What do I want readers to do?
You can get into lots of levels of detail with any of these questions, I’m going to keep it short and simple here and just give a couple examples.
#1: Who is my audience? Are you targeting folks primarily in your geographic area? If yes, is there a blog or other online service dedicated specifically to your region (as narrowly defined as possible)? Are you targeting folks by age? What people are on differs in different regions of the country, so find out what’s popular where you are; but general considerations - if you’re targeting folks 40+ I’m going to recommend e-mail; if you’re targeting anybody 20-39 you should definitely include Facebook as part of your strategy but this is a really broad audience - keep in mind that a 22 year old is going to look at the web very differently than a 36 year old.
#2 What do I want to communicate? Is it an upcoming event? Meetup.com plus Facebook are necessities. Is it a professional networking group - you’ve got to include LinkedIn (notice their tagline - it tells you a lot - “relationships matter”) - if it’s a non-profit focused event, you should be sharing it on Idealist. Is it just straight up information updates? twitter might be your best choice - one of it’s co-founders recently said that it’s not a social network, it’s an information sharing tool - and he’s right - people scan feeds the way newsrooms use to scan ticker tapes.
#3 What do I want readers to do? You might want readers to stay up to date with your new information - in which case any of a variety of services including email blast (Constant Contact, MailChimp etc.), Facebook groups, twitter etc. should be in your tool belt. Do you want them to be a little more active, a little more engaged? Try something a bit more interactive - ask them some questions and give a route to easy responses. Try a poll or have a contest to find a new name for a new project (or mascot or...). Show up to an event in the real world? See #2.
After you’ve gone through these questions and any others that are helpful for your particular audience or locality, then start seriously looking at what tools are out there, what each one does (remember that most online tools are pretty specialized in what they do, even if they’re just a bit tweaked in performance from others), and what’s going to serve your needs today the best.
A lot of you voiced a concern about time - keep in mind that the biggest portion of your time should go into strategy - once you figure out your audience, what you want to communicate, what you want readers to do, and finally what tools you want to use, the final step of actually posting something online to one or two sites shouldn’t take up more than 10 minutes of your day.
Please post below if you have any questions, and my next blog post will focus on that fourth question - what tools do what specifically, so you can pick the one or two that you really want for any given posting. Thanks for your time! Sadie
Views: 3
Comment
© 2012 Created by Aaron Spiegel.
You need to be a member of Next Dor Online to add comments!
Join Next Dor Online