Twitter can be something bigger

The morning after Hurricane Sandy, one of the first things I did was lay in bed and check all my social media pages to see how my friends on the East Coast weathered the storm. My college roommate who now lives in Brooklyn said she spent the night with her dog, reading on the couch. A friend from high school living in DC lost power, but was other wise untouched. Another friend from college living in Manhattan was fine, although her car, which had been in a parking garage that flooded, was now no where to be found.

This made me realize that as much as I grow tired of seeing pictures of friends' dinners, or reading vague status posts, social media is a powerful force in our society. It have given each of us the capability to broadcast our every thought, emotion, and belief to the entire world, and for better or worse, it is not going away. But instead of just learning to deal with this new form of communication, we in the nonprofit community need to learn to work with it.

Something that I hear quite often in board meetings and staff meetings is squabbles or laments over the budget. It's not big enough. We in the nonprofit community have gotten great at living lean, but with ever increasing problems in the world, we have an ever increasing need for more money and the reduction of over head. As a professional fundraiser, I have seen first hand that it takes money, sometimes a lot of money, to make money. There is the cost of materials, printing, postage, processing, content development, the list goes on and on. So I have to wonder why more nonprofits are not using social media as a fundraising tool? For the most part, social media is free. Yes, there is the cost of graphics and content development, but that one time cost give you the opportunity to reach hundreds, sometimes thousands of people at the same time.

One of the keys to a successful fundraising ask is portraying the urgency in your campaign. With social media, you can give your stakeholders and followers a second by second update (although, please don't) of your mission. In addition to using this for policy campaigns, this could be used to give minute by minute updates to fundraising goals. This offers us the opportunity to get out followers and stakeholders even more involved. Next time you are running a fundraising campaign, try picking a few donors to write a post for your Facebook page about why they give, and why they feel your mission is important. And don't just use your major donors! The story of a donor giving $25 or $50 a year can be just as compelling as the story of a person giving $1,000 a year. Sometimes our donors tell our stories better than we do. We might know all the facts of the campaign, but often our donors can see the forest when all we see is the trees.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good cat video as much as the next person, but we are change agents. Let us start to harness social media and use its force for the power of good.