Social Media for Non-profits

I recently helped with the launch and engagement initiatives for ‘Playing for Keeps’, a key legacy of the Ontario Summer Games 2012. It was a great learning experience and I ended up forging several positive working relationships.

As with any non-profit trying to minimize it’s cost of operations, social media metrics end up on the back burner. Here’s a quick review of the hows of social media for nonprofits followed by #p4keeps interactions.

An overwhelming 60% of nonprofits do not measure social media metrics and therefore to not know the social capital they might be creative or loosing out on. It is imperative to track the ROE of a campaign and attempt to measure its reach and engagement.

Measuring Return on Engagement (ROE) is actually two measures:
SMART goal Return on Engagement, and the ROE of Community Commitment

Using these two metrics, an organization can get a pretty good sense of whether or not its online activities and strategies are working, and whether or not it is building a community of committed stakeholders.

SMART Goal ROE

SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Time-bound. If you begin your online engagement by defining SMART goals, you can measure the outcomes. This metric looks at the following:

Are you reaching SMART goals using social media?
How effective is your strategy at meeting SMART goals?
How effective are your tactics?

Conventional ROI measurement demands the following :

Goal Setting

Do you want to know how a specific campaign is running? Which conversation topics or content pieces are shared the most? Set a baseline to which you can compare your new social media data, and track your success accordingly.

Network Size

By measuring the your network size, you are simply tracking the number of followers and fans your nonprofit has gained over a set period of time.

Content Engagement

You can also follow your content engagement. Track the impressions, views and clickthroughs to see how many people are seeing your content and wanting to learn more.

Content Sharing

Track any retweets, social media bookmarks, or inbound links you receive on your content. These metrics show how willing people are to share your content, spreading your message across multiple channels and reaching new audiences you might not have reached otherwise.

Tracking social media metrics is essential to evaluating your nonprofit’s marketing successes and ability to meet goals. As you begin to analyze your information, remember to keep your goals in mind. You may have a lot of new data, but more doesn’t necessarily mean better. Take these numbers and identify pertinent trends in awareness, attitude and action changes among your supporters, and establish next steps from there.