Thirty thoughts on current social media best practice, trends and challenges for not-for-profit organisations, from discussions between some of the UK's foremost charities at the Social by the Sea conference.

1. 30 thoughts from
social not-for-profits
Page 1St30 thoughts from social not-for-profits | October 2011
Max | John, Lead consultant, not-for-profit and public sector | max.stjohn@nixonmcinnes.co.uk | 01273 764023

2. Introduction
Social by the Sea is a one day conference that convenes some of the UK’s
foremost not-for-profits to talk about the current challenges and opportunities
presented by social media.
Digital and social technologies are starting to play a part at nearly every level
of large organisations and this collaborative forum aims to help everyone learn
faster by sharing their problems, ideas and tips on best practice.
For the first event WWF-UK, the RSPCA, Oxfam, Age UK and Marie Curie all
made it down to Brighton for a day of lively discussions and this report aims to
capture 30 ideas, challenges and current trends that came out of those
conversations.
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3. Our survey said…
We surveyed all of our attendees, from digital, fundraising, campaigning, press,
brand and programmes teams, across five of the UK’s foremost charities.
We asked them how important social media is for their organisation, how well it has
been adopted and what impact it’s having on the internal culture.
We found that while over half believed that social media is one of the best ways to
increase their charity’s impact, only 25% thought that social had been fully
embraced by the organisation.
However, 55% of respondents thought that social media was changing the culture
of their charity, showing that the impact is being felt despite its wider adoption
taking time.
Conversations over the day showed that social media is now a part of most
people’s day-to-day work but there are still big issues to address – from who ‘owns’
social media to whether team structures and planning processes need to change…
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4. 30 Thoughts
Advice & Best
Practice
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5. 30 Thoughts
Get the basics right, first. Make
sure that social media is built into all of the
touchpoints (your website, printed collateral,
email) you have with your audience. Don’t just
link, share content – publish Facebook
discussions in your supporter magazine, allow
people to follow you on Twitter without leaving
your website and sign up for your email
newsletters through your Facebook page, for
example.
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6. 30 Thoughts
Don’t leave social until last.
Whether you’re redesigning your website or
putting together the comms plan for a campaign,
don’t wait until the last minute to work out how
social media fits in. Make sure social media is part
of the planning process and considered as a two-
way channel, and you might produce a website or
campaign which generates a community of
advocates. Leave it as an add-on and it will end
up as another channel for push messaging.
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7. 30 Thoughts
Ask them what they want. Don’t
just assume you know what your supporters want
to hear from you through social spaces – ask
them, using tools like Facebook Questions, or
SurveyMonkey, what they’re most interested in
and how often they want updates. Use this not
just to inform the kind of content that you publish
but how your internal editorial process needs to
work, to minimise the extra effort and to make
sure people will get a respsonse.
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8. 30 Thoughts
Be rigorous. If you’re planning a
campaign, it’s essential that social media is
factored into your evaluation, and that you report
on it with the same degree of rigor that you would
apply to your other comms channels. Building
social into your evaluation reports in the right way
demonstrates that it’s a credible part of your
organisation’s work, generates valuable insight
into what works and what doesn’t, and builds
confidence. But, make sure you that you…
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9. 30 Thoughts
Think before you measure.
Social media is digital, so that makes it innately
measurable, but measuring everything is time
consuming and not necessarily useful. Don’t just
report on Likes of a page or ReTweets because
you can – think about your objectives and the
metrics that might demonstrate progress towards
achieving them, and if you can’t think of any,
maybe you shouldn’t be measuring it at all.
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10. 30 Thoughts
Crises don’t wait for sign-off.
Mandatory sign-off periods and multiple approvals
don’t work for social media. Time and again it’s
been shown that sticking to the old rules mean
that a reputational crisis could be in full swing
before the copy for a response has been finalised.
Rethink the processes, ask hard questions about
attitudes to risk, and make sure you can react fast
enough to mitigate against potential negative
situations becoming full-blown reputational crises.
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11. 30 Thoughts
Don’t lose sight of what works.
We shouldn’t get carried away and prioritise
social media over some of the tried and tested
things that deliver. Testing and innovating always
carries a degree of risk, so we need to manage
that risk in a way that doesn’t compromise our
ability to do what people support us for. Underpin
your plans with what you’re confident will work for
your intended audience and build the new stuff on
top of that.
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12. 30 Thoughts
Protect your space. Everyone wants
to talk to your Facebook fans – from Fundraising
and Campaigns to your corporate partners. Think
very carefully about the mix of messages and
their timing, or risk presenting a very confusing
experience and engaging with only a small
number of people, in a shallow way. Think about
how you can integrate your messaging or
whether you need to segment your audiences
into new communities.
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13. 30 Thoughts
Conversation vs education.
Prompting and maintaining conversations is a lot
more time intensive than simply educating
audiences, but if you carry on doing what you’ve
always done, you’ll always get the same results
(while everyone else moves on). Make sure you
strike the right balance between the push
messaging that the organisation might be used
to, and the thing that social media is best used for
– asking, listening and discussing.
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14. 30 Thoughts
Don’t make an app for that.
Innovating for the sake of it is not necessarily
good. The important thing is to find the right
solution to the problem, not simply the most
innovative. Focus on the problem, the people and
think about your strategy, before you start
thinking about the tools or technologies you might
use. This doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be
allowed the time or space to try new things for fun
– serendipity can be powerful.
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15. 30 Thoughts
Appoint a curator. Empower and
encourage anybody to create content for your
social media spaces, but manage this through
shared tools like a Google spreadsheet or an
internal wiki – but give the power to publish to
someone who knows and cares about your
community. Let them decide what goes up, and
when, and how it’s framed with your Facebook
fans or Twitter followers.
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16. 30 Thoughts
Education can be organic.
There’s a lot of learning to be done around social
media, depending on who you are and what you
do within an organisation. Formal training and
social media drop-ins can be really effective but
sometimes just identifying a few enthusiastic
people within your organisation – and
empowering them to help their colleagues ‘get it’
a bit more can be a low-intensity way of
encouraging a change in skills and attitude.
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17. 30 Thoughts
Ideas and
innovation
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18. 30 Thoughts
Innovation is not invention.
Doing things differently doesn’t need to involve
technology. Making social media work for our
organisations or campaigns can be about
changing the way we think about how
communications are planned, or setting up new
forums for conversations around social media.
Celebrate innovation in all its forms, call it out and
encourage others – don’t exclude people by
making it sound like they have to invent robots.
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19. 30 Thoughts
Twitter is your new customer
service channel. Your audience will use
Twitter to ask you questions, regardless of
whether you’d like them to call your 0800 number,
and expect a fast response. Supporter care/
customer service processes and teams need to
know how to use the tools, how to talk to people
and when there’s a question that needs their
attention – the same way they do email or phone.
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20. 30 Thoughts
It’s ok to fail… as long as you learn from
it. To innovate we need to try new things, and if
we can’t do that with confidence we’re never
going to make significant progress. Explicitly say
that it’s ok to fail – make it clear that the lessons
learned from failing are valuable in themselves
but make sure that everyone can learn from it.
Have a monthly confession session or a space on
your internal wiki so people can be proud they got
it wrong because they did something totally new.
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21. 30 Thoughts
Find your social champions.
Give your supporter networks a greater voice and
a bigger impact by finding who the ‘social
champions’ are – the people who are passionate
about you and confidently, proactively use social
media to talk about you. Scour the country, bring
them in, give them your support, create a toolkit
and provide them with guidance. Harness their
enthusiasm but be careful not to squash it.
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22. 30 Thoughts
Start small and iterate. Whether
you’re trying to convince senior management that
you need to invest more time in social media or
get the customer service team answering queries
on Twitter as well as the phone line, it sometimes
feels like you’ve got a lot of work on your plate.
Set your sights on small, achievable goals and
you’ll feel like you’re making progress sooner,
and with a lower risk of failure than if you’re
spending months slogging towards a bigger prize.
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23. 30 Thoughts
TV is social, join in. Lots of people
use Twitter while watching TV (the ‘two screen
experience’) to share their thoughts and opinions
with other viewers. Find popular programmes
relevant to you or your campaigns, that have a
lively debate around them and research the
hashtags. Check out any earlier conversation, so
you know what people are talking about and think
about how you might join in.
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24. 30 Thoughts
Create a council. Social media steering
groups, user groups or councils – whatever you
call them, they’re becoming more common in
larger not-for-profits. They convene what are
usually disparate teams from across the
organisation to share best practice,
collaboratively solve problems and draw up new
working practices or guidelines where needed.
Anyone should be able to attend and over time
they help build out capability and confidence.
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25. 30 Thoughts
Changing behaviour. Behaviour
change is a major part of some campaigns teams’
objectives but can you measure it through social
media? It’s possible to find indicators that
demonstrate changes in attitudes (e.g. uplift in
mentions of specific phrases) or use closed
groups to run post-campaign qualitative research,
but tying long term changes in behaviour
specifically to social media is difficult, so look at
the campaign as a whole.
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26. 30 Thoughts
Research can be quick. Qualitative
research can take a long time and cost a lot of
money but it’s vitally important if you’re going to
do anything effective, especially if it’s a social
campaign that you want people to engage with –
find a small group of people to poll at an event
you’re attending, or ask for feedback from your
Facebook fans. Make sure you’re confident that
you’re framing your message in the right way,
and that it’s going to resonate with your audience.
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27. 30 Thoughts
Questions and
challenges
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28. 30 Thoughts
What’s our accepted wisdom?
Some metrics that are relied upon for getting
investment are less than watertight (think Barb
ratings and TV) but because social media is
digital, there’s a risk we measure and report on
things because we can, not because they
demonstrate its effectiveness. What do you think
social media is really doing for your organisation?
How could you report on it, confidently, in a way
that gets you more buy-in?
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29. 30 Thoughts
Is it the role or the person? If
you actively want people in your organisation to
get out there in social spaces and talk about their
work, you can look for enthusiastic volunteers or
make it part of their job description. Both require
creating guidelines (however light or heavy) and
providing support but adding it into new roles will
also start changing the kind of people you hire
and create a more social-ready organisation. A
mix of the two is probably the optimum choice.
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30. 30 Thoughts
Change is coming. Sooner or later,
job roles and team structures within not-for-profits
are going to have to change. Coping with the
immediacy of social media, changing audience
expectations and making the most of the
opportunities that digital tools present means we
need new ways of doing things and teams with a
different mix of skills – campaigners that do
fundraising or digital teams that are customer
services, PR and brand. Start thinking now…
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31. 30 Thoughts
Should you ‘segment’? Unlike
email, you can’t selectively publish messages to
specific social media audience segments, but you
can create separate spaces for people who want
different things from you. If you’re not ready to
rethink how to integrate your messaging but want
to engage more effectively with different
audiences, consider creating an issue-specific
Facebook page, for example. But plan for it -
know why you’re doing it and how you’ll sustain it.
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32. 30 Thoughts
Who’s on call? Who should be doing out
of hours monitoring of your social spaces and
how? Many charities are employing one of two
models: the external agency that monitors and
reports on conversations with a prioritised digest
of issues; or a rota of nominated staff members
responsible for keeping on top of conversations.
But is this sustainable? Is the ongoing cost
justifiable and do we need to change some staff
members’ core working hours?
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33. 30 Thoughts
What’s the R in ROI? Focusing on £
generated as an immediate attributable return for
social media is often a good way to end up with
frustrated stakeholders and stressed out
fundraisers – think about other things that social
is good at doing, that also demonstrate a return –
signups to an email newsletter or capturing
mobile numbers, for example.
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34. 30 Thoughts
Who’s the spokesperson now?
Social media means that anyone in your
organisation can be part of its external voice, and
some charities are actively encouraging people to
set up Twitter accounts. As a result, not-for-profits
are organically becoming more transparent and
developing a more representative voice. Just
make sure you give people the support and
guidance they need to get on and do it in a way
that manages risk.
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35. 30 Thoughts
Where does social sit? If it is the
sole domain of the digital team, you might retain
quality and consistency but you could create a
severe bottle neck. Let anybody at it and senior
management might be nervously chewing their
finger nails. Look at different models for managing
the organisation’s external voice – can digital act
as the social media support team and help build
capability more widely, with the help of a monthly
drop-in group to help, for instance.
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36. 30 Thoughts
Manage your partners. Corporate
partners might be champing at the bit to pay for
space on your Facebook page, but this can end
up being a pretty big turn off for your audience. If
you can get them to pay per mention of their
brand name, or for another supporter action, this
gives you licence to mention them as often as
you need to, in a way that feels appropriate for
your audience (as long as you’ve told them about
it), with a financial return as a result.
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37. About NixonMcInnes
NixonMcInnes is a social consultancy that helps FTSE 350 companies,
government and major not-for-profits take advantage of and adapt to
emerging trends in technology, markets and the workplace.
For the past three years we have been recognised by Worldblu on the list
of the most democratic workplaces in the world – living and breathing
the principles of transparency, openness, freedom and participation.
The same principles that are the key to success in social media.
We work in partnerships with our clients – which include WWF-UK, the
RSPCA, Stop Climate Chaos, the Department of Health and the Central
Office of Information.
Page 37 | 30 thoughts from social not-for-profits | October 2011

38. About NixonMcInnes
Follow: twitter.com/nixonmcinnes
Read: nixonmcinnes.co.uk/knowledge
Call: 01273 764010
Visit: bit.ly/NMTowers
Page 38 | 30 thoughts from social not-for-profits | October 2011