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Sisters of Providence social media marketing
- 1. Social Media Marketing Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, Ind.
- 24. Just one story…
Editor's Notes
- Social media for us is anything in an online format that encourages conversation among two or more people. We include e-mail marketing in this because of the potential for interaction with our readers and because it has been a useful means of promoting our social media, which makes it integral to this process. Social media also includes sharing functions and commenting on web pages. Social media is broader than social networking. Social media for us is also the cheapest way to share a lot of information with a lot of people and to target market our information.
- Began doing e-mail marketing in 2004. Consider email marketing a part of this process because it has supported all of our social media efforts, really helped launch us into social media and, in addition to our awesome website, was one of our major building blocks for doing social media marketing. From about 1999-2009, were frequently sidetracked by technology and individual resistance with attempts to do blogging, discussion groups and even Facebook (although we did have some small successes). Technology, interest and time just were not friends to us during this period. Dabbled in other social media during 2007 and 2008.
- Got sidetracked by a major site redesign that lasted more than a year (January 2008-May 2009), although our Facebook presence and use continued to grow during this time.
- Throughout all of this time, one of the things we were really good at was reading and listening to what was going on in social media. So, even though we didn’t always have the time, energy or technology to accomplish what we wanted, we always knew what the next steps would be when we could get there. These are some of our influences (will be on the web page we’ve created for you). After site launch, we finally had the time to turn our attention to social media marketing.
- Staff commitment to social media marketing has grown. We have tried as much as possible to empower people on our staff to do what they have the interest and passion to do. Interest and involvement from people outside of communications & marketing department has grown. “buy-in” from General Council grew as the world changed around us! We have used free technology as much as possible, but a growing commitment to web-related technology has allowed us more freedom to make purchases to support our social media efforts when needed. We really dispersed the responsibility for maintenance of social media sites. This has been essential to help us grow in leaps and bounds this past year. Having a stable, functional, easily maintained website has encouraged our use of social media. Between the website and email marketing, we had an excellent foundation to work with. Benefits to us for things that were once difficult - such as the easy of sharing info with our Providence Associates on a FB closed group or the ease of searching and finding our own photos on Flickr - has encouraged us to use social media sites for our daily work.
- Started updating our Facebook fan pages much more frequently and created a closed group for Providence Associates. We added a feed from our blog into Facebook. We started actively encouraging others, particularly sisters, to participate in Facebook. (Did this through email and one-on-one communication.) The number of SPs with FB accounts took off, partly from our efforts and partly from growth in the general public. ***Go to page(s)
- Increased frequency of our main e-mail newsletter from once a month to every other week. Increased all other e-newsletters and added a number of “invitation” and announcement e-mails.
- Created a blog, then another and we are about to add a third. Invited many others to blog for us. We will even blog “as” them with their permission – all they have to do is email us the piece. Our main blog now has daily posts. ***Go to blog(s)
- Created Twitter accounts for our children’s site and a main account. ***Go to account(s)
- Created a Flickr account, which has blown us away in its statistics. Made contacts with photographer in France, and have had several visits to the motherhouse grounds from people who learned about us on Flickr. ***Go to Flickr stream.
- Started paying a lot of attention to Wikipedia when Christina came on board. (Important to use the skills and interests of the people you have on staff.) -About Wikipedia and similar sites: if you find something wrong FIX IT, because for some people this will be the only place they see you. But important to remember the focus is on facts/encyclopedic information, not advertising.
- Continued to add to a Goodreads “author” account to highlight our many SP books. Made sure data for books written by our sisters is accurate.
- Stopped thinking so hard and started adding social media sites to our repertoire as we saw a need: YouTube, Etsy, LinkedIn, Ravelry. ***Go to YouTube
- Didn’t put rules on ourselves to create the same accounts for every ministry’s needs (i.e. children’s site has different accounts from SP site which has different accounts from WVC)
- Create standardized icons to represent us on other sites and to represent the sites where we have accounts on our own site.
- Worked HARD to integrate our social media work with our website and to cross-promote our news and social media work in every way imaginable. Created a social media page which shows everything we are doing at a glance and linked to it from nearly every page on our site. ***Go to social media page.
- We continue to learn about and add new tools within the sites (such as e-mail subscriptions for blogs, adding “ShareThis” on our website or information tabs within Facebook). We don’t stress about this, but every time we find something new that might be useful and easy to install, we try it. ***Go to site and show “ShareThis” function
- Social media is usually free. We pay about $25 a year for a Flickr pro account because of the number of photos we wanted to upload, but you can try it for free. We do pay for our e-mail marketing service, ExactTarget, but if you are starting small, there are several excellent free options (MailChimp). We use Blackbaud to manage our donor database and paid for a matching service through them this year when finds email addresses for the donors we already have and secures permission to use them. It was the first time we have done this and probably will not need to do it again for a few years, but it was worth EVERY penny. We have a PayPal account, which is necessary for payment for the things we sell on Etsy, but it was also necessary for our e-commerce site. If you take our e-mail out of the equation, we spend less than $500 a year on this.
- Our IT Manager has banned Facebook on the employee network. This was a struggle, but we have found acceptable work-arounds.
- The great stories we hear are too many to mention, but here are some cold hard statistics. Facebook : 499 “likes,” with about 120 interactions a month Flickr : 29,000 views in less than six months! Twitter : 40 followers, with at least one young woman interested in vocations who visited a trade show booth as a direct result of our Twitter activity Blog : Main blog, which is updated daily, has more than 660 direct pageviews a month, plus is read on Facebook, Goodreads and LinkedIn. A second blog, which is only updated a few times per month, still has more than 100 pageviews a month. E-mail : Increased our e-mails sent from less than 30K to more than 160K. Increased our database of active e-mails from about 3K to nearly 10K. Website : We can see the direct influence of a Facebook, Twitter, blog or e-mail mention of a page in our website statistics – repeated over and over.
- Our vocations director recently shared with us that she has 20 women in various stages of discernment — more than she has had since she took the position 9 years ago. Most are in their 20s and 30s. She also said that women interested in vocations are “coming out of the woodwork.” She isn’t sure why all of this is happening so suddenly … but we are! She also shared that one woman is in active discernment with us who has never had ANY contact with the SPs (until a coming discernment weekend) except email, yet she has us on her short list (4) of possible congregations. The only explanation S. Jenny has for this is the website and all of the online work we are doing.
- We always have our sights set on doing more. Right now, the topic hot on our mind is the creation of a social media center and to start issuing social media news releases. These are tools that will help the traditional media, as well as bloggers and the general public using social media, to disseminate our information more easily. It would feature not only a traditional news release, but also summaries, keywords (and tags), video, graphics, “badges,” Twitter updates, and more on specific topics. The CDC has one of the best versions we have seen. We also want to work much more on sister involvement. While we have had involvement in several ways – blogs, Wikipedia entries, Facebook – we can do better at this and we think there is growing interest among some sisters to assist with this work we are doing for them. ***Go to CDC sample
- We have created this web page for you with links to all of the information we have mentioned. ***Go to web page