The Elusive "Social" Silver Bullet for Fundraising
	Posted by Guest Blogger at Jul 11, 2013 07:00 AM CDT

This article was written by guest author Angela Struebing, Agency Directory, CDR Fundraising Group.

I attended NTEN’s NTC earlier this year, and was excited that there were several sessions on social media. I thought: Finally, someone had cracked the code to fundraising through social media and now they were willing to share the secret!

We Heart Social Data: But What Do We Do With It?
I started with “We Heart Social Data: But What Do We Do With It?” The first half of the session discussed segments within the social audience. Blackbaud uses four categories based on a social score: standard consumer (49%), multi-channel consumer (45%), engager (5%) and key influencers (1%). The percentages in parentheses show the make-up of a typical nonprofit organization. According to Blackbaud, knowing the social score of each of your constituents and which category they fit into is important, because once you understand their level of participation in social media, you can develop plans to proactively engage them in your fundraising campaigns, not only through social media, but through other channels as well. It reinforced the importance of having a CRM system that can handle the amount of data surrounding social media and then using that information to influence other channels.

What I got from the second half is that LinkedIn is an underused social network, and there is lots of valuable data, ripe for a fundraiser’s picking. For example, you can look up members’ job titles to get an idea of their giving potential. You can peer into a person’s professional circle. They also found that members with the highest LTV were active on LinkedIn.

ROI and Metrics
The second social media session I attended was entitled “ROI and Metrics. ” It sounded promising in that there was something to actually measure. The presenters ran through a few tools you can use to track your social media activity (Bitly, Button, Fundly, Razoo, mGive, Twtrland), touted the success Obama had on Facebook, and shared a few interesting statistics. Did you know only 20% of your fans actually see your messages? Or that the half-life of your social updates is 3-5 hours? Or that you only have about a half a second to catch someone’s attention in your newsfeed? But again, it didn’t seem like there was widespread success or even best practices coming out of the nonprofit sector for fundraising on social media.

The Real Housewives of Social Media
The last session of the conference was standing room only, “The Real Housewives of Social Media.” If the National Wildlife Federation, AARP, American Red Cross and Humane Society can’t figure it out, then what is everyone else to do? The session was extremely entertaining, but the presentation focused more on cultivating relationships through social media rather actually raising money. The takeaway was that you need a clear communications policy (including what to say, how quickly and in what voice) for using social media in order to take advantage of those relationships in other channels.

My Take on Fundraising and Social Media
From my own experience, I know that fundraising on Facebook is still in its infancy. Organizations are starting to have success with “custom audience” targeting, but that was just introduced a little over six months ago. In order to truly measure its effectiveness, we need to be able to track lift in other channels (email, mail and phone) from people who saw ads on Facebook.

And what about Twitter or Pinterest? No one is talking about raising money from these sites because it’s not working…yet.

The bottom line is that you can’t ignore social marketing just because it’s not directly making you money right now. You have to use social media to cultivate and engage your audience and then use that information to convert them through other channels such as email, direct mail and phone. You need to have a strong data capture infrastructure in place to collect and process the wealth of information available through social media. And, you need to begin coordinating your channels now so that the messages constituents see across mediums are consistent.