August 21, 2011 | Read Time: 3 minutes
It’s official: We’re all social now. Nine in 10 nonprofits use Facebook, smaller but significant numbers have Twitter accounts and their own blogs, and the amount charities raise through social networks is growing faster than any area of giving.
But now that nonprofits are pinging and poking, friending and following, liking and tweeting, it’s time for them to take the next step.
Nonprofits must stop simply playing around with social media as if it were a pair of shimmering, five-inch Manolo Blahnik high heels and integrate the tools throughout their organizations like a pair of sturdy Timberland walking shoes.
As the media-pundit Clay Shirky wrote in Here Comes Everybody, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.”
Social media as tools have reached the boring stage. It is time to cut off the tags and acknowledge that the warranty for social-media tools is up. What changes is what we do with them.
As Beth Kanter and I wrote in our book, The Networked Nonprofit, organizations immersed in social media look and behave more like social networks than traditional stand-alone organizations. These groups look outside and see a world filled with networks of individuals and organizations ready and able to help them, an abundance of smart people of good will ready to be activated for a cause.
Within these organizations social-media tools aren’t a department, a function, or one staff member’s job. The tools are integrated into every department and every function of the organization.
For social-media plans or departments to live separate and distinct from the rest of an organization is a mistake. Every functional area of the organization—communications, development, programs, even administration and finance—has use for the power of conversation that comes from social media. Staff members dedicated to social media spend as much time coaching their colleagues in other departments as they do using the social-media channels themselves.
One such example is Atlas Service Corps, a small nonprofit that has social media built into its DNA. Social media make it possible to expand the reach of the organization, which brings nonprofit leaders from developing countries to the United States for one-year fellowships.
By using social networks, it is able to recruit fellows from abroad, raise money, share the success stories of participants, identify host organizations for fellows, and stay connected to its alumni with a staff of just nine people. What would take 30 or 40 staff members to accomplish in an analog world, says Scott Beale, Atlas’s founder and CEO, can be done with a small, agile staff that uses the power of employees’ networks to share, learn, and enlarge their efforts.
But even organizations that were created long before blogs were part of the lexicon can transform their operations with social media. The National Wildlife Federation learned how to take advantage of social networks under the leadership of its social-media manager, Danielle Brigida. Now more than 90 of the organization’s staff members have been trained to use Twitter to share their work with the world, in their own voice, using their own identities.
Social change happens through conversations between real people. Not between logos and people but through authentic conversations between supporters of causes. Encouraging these conversations and participating in them has to be a top priority for all nonprofits. And the best ambassadors are the people already hired to carry out the organization’s mission. Of course, this means giving up some control of both the message and the messengers.
When nonprofits embed social media throughout organizations, they will allow the best ambassadors for their causes—staff members and key volunteers—to talk about the work they know best, ask for help and advice, make new friends, and find new supporters across networks. If those networks help all nonprofits stretch their resources, think about how much more good organizations could do for the world.
