Is your organization taking advantage of ever-growing social media? “Do I have to?! It takes so much time?!” Actually, it doesn’t, and the payoff is a potential boost in awareness, membership, and fundraising.
According to Statista, “the power of social networking is such that the number of worldwide users is expected to reach some 3.02 billion monthly active social media users by 2021, around a third of Earth’s entire population… The region with the highest penetration rate of social networks is North America, where around 70 percent of the population has at least one social account.” This is an enormous number and, while not all these users will be in your association’s market, your potential reach is vast.
SproutSocial, is a leader in Social Media usability according to G2 Crowd. They say, “whether to eliminate poverty or protect an endangered species, you understand what your overall charge is”. Similarly, your social goals should be clear. Here are some examples of possible goals that can inform your social efforts:
- Community engagement and education
- Brand building and reputation management
- Program recruitment
- Fundraising
Showing the cool things your organization does on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other platforms, helps people interested in your focus area find you. Sure, they might do a Google search, but if someone looking, say, at Twitter, and sees an awesome post (with a picture!) of a great event—even if they weren’t looking for it—that’s a great motivator to join in and contribute.
One of my colleagues talks about how she wasn’t looking to volunteer, but saw a Twitter post from a new non-profit resale shop benefitting dogs and volunteered that week.
So how do you take advantage of this potential fuel? First, make sure you have accounts on social networks. (Try not to focus just on Facebook; using several platforms increases your reach because people use different networks.) Then make it simple to post content by both your admins and your members. ClubExpress makes it easy.Then share upcoming events, photos of recent events, calls for volunteers, news and features about your organization, or whatever you think would interest members and potential members. Encourage members of the board to like and share content.
When your existing members and new members share their experiences, they both provide value to your other members and encourage new ones. It only takes a few seconds to post and suddenly you’re visible and interesting!
Many of the platforms let you know who looked at your posts, who liked them, and who shared them. If the post links back to your website and you are using Google Analytics, there is valuable data you can gather and use to learn which type of posts drive the most traffic, and which social media platforms work best for you. This way, you can focus on those platforms that add the most value and not waste time on ones that don’t drive traffic to your website.
Even a few posts a week increases your visibility, helps generate traffic to your website, and helps improve search engine optimization (SEO)—or how much you show up in searches. ClubExpress has the most powerful integration with Social Media of any Association Management System.
Understand that social media provides opportunities for connection that other channels may not. Chara Odhner, Senior Copywriter and part of the social team at charity: water, echoes the importance of using social for community engagement. “As an organization that’s had a $0 ad and marketing budget since day one, we invested in social early on,” Odhner said. “And we love social for what it does best: strengthening our community of supporters.”
My next blog post will be on document storage and retrieval. How do you store your By-Laws, your meeting minutes, newsletters, waivers of liability and other important documents? Are they within your AMS or do you use another, separate service for this?