Top Tips for Community Building: Social Change Anytime Everywhere
	Posted by Guest Blogger at Feb 13, 2014 01:31 PM CST

This article was written by guest author Amy Sample Ward, CEO of the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN).

This is the third  and final installment of the series highlighting tips from our recent book, Social Change Anytime Everywhere: How to Implement Online Multichannel Strategies to Spark Advocacy, Raise Money, and Engage Your Community. The first post shared three tips for successful multichannel advocacy campaigns and the second turned to fundraising.

For the final post, here are some top tips for building and supporting your community in a multichannel world.

1. Focus on needs of community
It might seem strange, but I promise it’s true: your community is not interested in everything your organization does. Not everything. There are some aspects of reaching your missions -- whether entire campaigns, certain programs, or even fundraising -- where your community, or at least a segment of the community, is happy to let you do it without them. And that’s okay.

It’s critical to identify which topics, programs, or issues your community does care about, and what need they have that brings them to you (what role do you play?) so that you can plan for their engagement at that cross section of interest and need. If you try to build community around your cause but only invite the community to participate in fundraising, for example, or ask for volunteers for an after school program when all of your supporters are teachers, you will set yourself up to fail.

2. Let individuals choose their platform
Social media, and the way we each use it, changes every day. Even if you have 500 fans on your Facebook page, if those fans aren’t interested in engaging with organizations while sharing photos with their friends and family, you can’t expect many likes and shares. Instead of focusing your community engagement on a specific platform, focus on the content and engagement opportunities so that the individual supporters can share your message on the platform of their choice.

Great content is shareable, so instead of working on developing lots of posts for your Facebook page, think about the story or information you want to share and invest in posting it in public channels that can be easily shared like your blog, YouTube, Tumblr, and so on. This does not mean you can’t or shouldn’t maintain other social channels like Facebook and Twitter; instead, you may find it’s easier for your community to follow your content in an aggregated channel and then post it to their pages/profiles/accounts (including on channels you may not use or even know about).

3. Anticipate change
Our supporters and donors are all people. And if there’s one constant about people, it’s that they change: their minds, their interests, their locations. When building community around your work, especially with a multichannel approach, you have to expect change not just in the tools you’re using but also in the very people you’re engaged with each day.

Remember, your supporters want to see your mission reached, just like you. It’s important that your engagement with them, across all channels, ties to the full mission of your work so that as campaigns end, technologies change, and people move and they have more or less time for engaging with you, that the messages and calls to action you share are flexible enough to survive that change. Ask questions of your community, and listen to their answers, so you can continue to iterate in bite-sized ways regularly, helping make your response to change regular and easy.

Do you have any fundraising tips to add? Share them in the comment section!