Social Media: A Powerful Tool for Your Toolbox

Dania R. Beck

Annual Giving Manager

Greenville Hospital System

University Medical Center

www.slideshare.net/ghsgiving

facebook.com/ghsgiving twitter.com/ghs_giving youtube.com/ghsgiving

What social media is, and what it is not

• Have realistic expectations• What are the benefits to social media?

– Disbursement of information in a timely manner– Establish and grow relationships– Build awareness and affinity– Obtain feedback– Low level fundraising– Low cost

• Not a major revenue source• Not the answer to all your annual giving problems

Getting started: Have a plan• Ask yourself the following questions…

– Why are you using social media?– For awareness?– Advocacy?– Fundraising?– Who is your audience?– Where do they congregate?

• Build a content calendar– Keep it quick, easy, powerful- focus on links, photos,

video opportunities, etc.• Example: We built a month-long Twitter plan using content

from our different giving sites and campaigns before we ever tweeted.

Twitter plan

• Include your coworkers in your social media plan– Employees in your organization should be your

biggest advocates and can be very powerful in grassroots efforts

• Example: We set a goal and challenged our coworkers to ask their friends and family to like us on Facebook. We did the same thing with our Children’s Hospital Development Council.

Staff Facebook challenge

Children’s HospitalDevelopment CouncilFacebook Challenge

• Include a plan to track ROI. ROI can vary depending on your reason for engaging in social media and can include the following…– Number of followers/fans– Number of retweets (RTs)– Number of mentions and likes– Number of comments– Traffic to your sites– Dollars raised

• Make a plan for how you’ll include access to your social media accounts in every possible place:– Websites– E-mails/eNewsletters– Promotional Items, print marketing materials

Breaking it down: Relationships and Resources

Relationships: Build them online and off

• 85% of social media users expect organizations to interact with them on social sites (2008 Cone Biz in Social Media study). Are you just spitting out content or are you having a conversation?

• Followers/friends are more likely to respond when asked questions or asked for likes/RTs. This is a quick and easy way to kickstart relationships.

– Example: when folks answer a question from us on FB (and it’s in our social media plan to ask at least one question a week), we respond back to them, or when folks RT us, we thank them and also include them in our #ff list.

• Again, engage your followers with great content: photos, videos, links, questions, surveys. It makes them more likely to respond.

• Look out for your follower first – pass on useful, interesting info, even if it’s not from your organization.

– Ex: We regularly pass on community info (ie interesting area news articles, updates on as well as healthcare/non-profit articles on both Facebook and Twitter.

• Seek out social media connections outside of the web – does your area have a social media club? A tech group? Join ‘em! No groups? Start one!

– Ex: It’s in our specialist’s yearly goals to attend Social Media Club Greenville and Tech After Five meetings each quarter and to spark new relationships with social media professionals and community leaders. Resources: http://socialmediaclub.org/local-chapters/all/all/all or www.techafterfive.com

• Most important: your followers are more powerful than you. Plus, per a Blackbaud study, event participants who use social media become the strongest/top fundraisers. It’s the Aunt Mabel effect: folks are more likely to give to an organization if they’re tapped by a family member, like Aunt Mabel, instead of the organization itself. – What are you doing to empower your followers and friends to

spread the word about you? – Are you thanking the champions that are already on your

bandwagon? – Are you keeping an eye on how you can partner with the small

group of folks who support and love you best?

Resources

• Measure your social media – keep up the conversation, but make sure you’re aware of the best ways and times to have those conversations.

• Don’t just measure it in terms of finances – social media is still growing in terms of funds raised (don’t treat your followers like an ATM, and don’t use social media as your only fundraising avenue).

– Have you recruited volunteers? – Are they engaged in your organization’s events and have they spread the word to

their friends? – Have you nurtured relationships with followers and cultivated social media

leaders out of that?

• Realize the difference between Facebook and Twitter: if Facebook is a cozy, sit-down restaurant, then Twitter is a drive-thru. Facebook followers are more likely to engage with you.

• Are you making it easy for folks to find you and spread the word about you?– Example: our office maintains about 10 websites for annual giving opportunities, and we

recently made a simple update to all of them: we made sure our FB/Twitter/Youtube icons and links were highly visible, above the fold and posted on all of them. We also added a FB social plugin to our main website, ghsgiving.org, so that folks could like us directly from the site and see our feed.

Facebook web plugin

• Have you checked out the scientific side of what content to send and when to send it? Per HubSpot’s Science of Timing study: – Late in the day & week is the most retweetable (2-5 p.m. is the best

time)

– Don’t be afraid to tweet more throughout the day (you’re not going to flood twitter streams)

– If you’re tweeting links from your site, from your content, don’t tweet more than 1 link an hour. If you’re just tweeting links to gain followers/be a resource and links are from all over the place, tweet as much as you’d like.

– Don’t crowd your content on Facebook. Most successful pages post every other day

– Weekends are best time for your Facebook followers to share your content (and most followers share from midnight to noon)

• Per HubSpot’s Social Media Optimization (SMO) study:– SMO = The distribution of social objects and their ability to rise

to the top of any related search query, where and when it’s performed.

– Make the right content appear at the right time in the right place with the right keywords

– Tags, descriptions, keywords contribute to the “discoverability” of social content – not just in traditional searches (think: YouTube searches)

– Tag content now within public stream - #hashtag • Example: when we spread the word about our cancer fundraisers on Twitter, we

always reference #cancer research, so that someone searching for that hashtag would find us

Google Analytics

• A free tool that will measure web traffic flow and sources– Example: We have Google Analytics installed on all of our 10 giving websites,

and we debrief monthly on the statistics (number of visits and pageviews, average time spent on the site, traffic from social media, etc)

• GHS Google Analytics example – we set our URL goal in Analytics to our donation and/or tickets pages for two events and then tracked the donations page visits and compared them to the total web visits and total $ raised:

• GHS Google Analytics example – we set our URL goal in Analytics to our donation and/or tickets pages for two events and then tracked the donations page visits and compared them to the total web visits and total $ raised:

– 13% or 374 of 2,923 visits of DesignerShowcaseHome.com’s February website traffic came from social media; out of this social media traffic, about 25% of these visits lead to donations page.

• GHS Google Analytics example – we set our URL goal in Analytics to our donation and/or tickets pages for two events and then tracked the donations page visits and compared them to the total web visits and total $ raised:

– 13% or 374 of 2,923 visits of DesignerShowcaseHome.com’s February website traffic came from social media; out of this social media traffic, about 25% of these visits lead to donations page.

– 6% or 179 of 2,969 visits of March’s traffic came from social media; out of this social media traffic, about 11% of these visits lead to donation pages.

• GHS Google Analytics example – we set our URL goal in Analytics to our donation and/or tickets pages for two events and then tracked the donations page visits and compared them to the total web visits and total $ raised:

– 13% or 374 of 2,923 visits of DesignerShowcaseHome.com’s February website traffic came from social media; out of this social media traffic, about 25% of these visits lead to donations page.

– 6% or 179 of 2,969 visits of March’s traffic came from social media; out of this social media traffic, about 11% of these visits lead to donations page.

– Designer Showcase Home combined preview party and ticket sales through the website: $12,560.

• GHS Google Analytics example – we set our URL goal in Analytics to our donation and/or tickets pages for two events and then tracked the donations page visits and compared them to the total web visits and total $ raised:

– 3% or 115 of 3,848 visits of DragonBoatUpstateSc.org’s February website traffic came from social media; out of this social media traffic, about 65% of these visits lead to donations page.

• GHS Google Analytics example – we set our URL goal in Analytics to our donation and/or tickets pages for two events and then tracked the donations page visits and compared them to the total web visits and total $ raised:

– 3% or 115 of 3,848 visits of DragonBoatUpstateSc.org’s February website traffic came from social media; out of this social media traffic, about 65% of these visits lead to donations page.

– 3% or 261 of 8,712 visits of March’s traffic came from social media; out of this social media traffic, about 63% of these visits lead to donations page.

• GHS Google Analytics example – we set our URL goal in Analytics to our donation and/or tickets pages for two events and then tracked the donations page visits and compared them to the total web visits and total $ raised:

– 3% or 115 of 3,848 visits of DragonBoatUpstateSc.org’s February website traffic came from social media; out of this social media traffic, about 65% of these visits lead to donations page.

– 3% or 261 of 8,712 visits of March’s traffic came from social media; out of this social media traffic, about 63% of these visits lead to donations page.

– Dragon Boat donations through the website: $49,914.75 (46.5% of $93,328.75 total as of noon April 4)

• Resources, resources, resources: Stay versed in the latest tools that will help your organization engage your followers and capitalize on their influence.

– Example: Customize your Facebook page – we knew we wanted to use our FB page both as a central location for a lot of our great content, like our event photos and our YouTube feed, and as an opportunity for folks to give online.

Custom Facebook welcome pagebuilt for free using Pagemodo, www.pagemodo.com

Custom Facebook donations pagebuilt for free using Lujure, www.lujure.com

• Use the resources that work best for what you’re trying to accomplish. Once you’ve learned something new, pass it on – it’s free, useful content that you can give to your social media followers that you didn’t have to write! - Always make sure to attribute the info

Example tweet:

• Want to know exactly how impactful social media is on your revenue? Throw a social media-specific, time-sensitive fundraiser. – Example: the #Tweeta20 fundraiser for Thompson Child &

Family Focus in Charlotte (beefed up social media presence, asked folks to pass along #Tweeta20 – giving $20 donation – to followers, combined with live luncheon that incorporated Twitter mavens in town, raised $4,000 through event, doubled FB and Twitter followers, featured in Chronicle of Philanthropy). Ex: our one-week social media Virtual Toy Drive plan (taking our most recognizable campaign and combining it with our new Facebook/Twitter accounts).

Helpful Hints: A quick look at what you should be doing

now

Soak up free resources!!

Free Resources

– Webinars for learning latest social media tools, trends and tracking:

• Hubspot: http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-resources/

• American Marketing Association: http://www.marketingpower.com/_layouts/Reference/Webcast.aspx

• AHP

– Podcasts• Social Good on philanthropy.com

– Tips on better blogging:• Likeable Media’s likeable.com/blog

Free Resources

– eBooks for downloadable learning at your convenience:

• HubSpot’s library: http://www.hubspot.com/internet-marketing-whitepapers/

• OneForty’s Twitter 101: http://oneforty.com/i/ebook/twitter_business_101

– General:• Oneforty: http://oneforty.com/blog/

Free Resources

– Custom Facebook tabs (all of these sites also offer a range of pricing):

• Involver | can add Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Photo Gallery & more to FB page with basic applications: http://involver.com/applications/

• Pagemodo | can create one free tab for page: http://pagemodo.com/

• Lujure | can create one free tab for page: http://lujure.com/

Free Resources

Google Analytics:– Go to www.google.com/analytics and click Sign up Now (you need to

have a Google account to use Analytics)

– Under Getting Started, enter website name (you can add more later), account name (ours is GHS OPP), country,time zone, and individual’s name

– Copy and paste the Analytics code onto your site (if you have internal access to your content management system you can do this yourself, and/or you can ask your web folks for help)

– Once you’ve hit save and finish, remember to set goals under the edit option!

• Example: Our URL goal for each site is the donation/ticket purchase/checkout page, our pages per visit goal is 2 and our time on site goal is 3 minutes.

Tracking Social Mediathrough Google Analytics

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/04/25/how-to-track-social-media-within-google-analytics/

Helpful Hints• Customize your Facebook page:

– Make sure your Facebook page has a customized link (available for pages with 50 or more fans)

– Create a welcome page to greet new potential fans when they click on your FB link and don’t forget to set the welcome page as your default landing page:

• On your FB page, click the Edit Page tab in the right upper side of the page

• Under manage permissions, click the Default Landing tab dropdown menu and select Welcome

– Fill your page with good content that encourages engagement and conversation: photos, videos, articles

• Tracking:– Free: Google Analytics (takes 24 hours to

update) | http://google.com/analytics

– Paid: Clicky (real-time results) | http://getclicky.com/

What’s next for GHS?• In addition to our current social media outlets,

we will soon have a blog.• Blogging is a great way to pull people into your

world. They can get to know you and your organization on a deeper level. Great way to build and enhance relationships.

• Our blog name will be Inside Giving. Once it is launched, you can find us at ghsgiving.org/blog

Content provided by: Jenn Parker, Annual Giving Specialist Dania Beck, Annual Giving ManagerPresentation available online: www.slideshare.net/ghsgiving

Contact info:Jenn Parker- jparker4@ghs.org

Dania Beck- dbeck@ghs.org

Follow us on Twitter: @ghs_giving

Like us on Facebook: facebook.com/ghsgiving