Event 360 Blog

If you use Facebook, your profile will soon be upgraded to the new timeline layout, which features a large cover image at the top. This presents a relatively simple event marketing opportunity: providing your event participants with a library of custom profile covers that promote your event.

You may have come across some of the media buzz last week over F8, Facebook’s annual developer conference. In need of a boost in consumer confidence, Facebook overhauled many of its most important features including the user profile, applications, news feed and added a new media experience for music, video and news aficionados.

Gordon Plutsky covered the various changes in the Event 360 blog yesterday, so we wanted to spend some time discussing how these changes might impact your organization and engagement strategies on this crucial channel. 

You know that it’s important for your nonprofit to be active across social media platforms, yet with a shortage or resources, it can be hard to find enough time in the day to do everything that you want. Learning how to prioritize your work and organize your content will help you budget your time so you can fit everything you need to do into your workday. Here are some social media tips to help you manage your time more effectively.

Media strategy guru Antony Young wrote, “Social media is not a strategy. Social media is a venue for marketers ... a set of technologies or tactics that enable us to elevate and amplify brands and their marketing communications.”Social media has reinvented the way event fundraising works, but it shouldn’t be your marketing strategy.

Instead of focusing all of your attention on creating a “social media strategy,” you should first and foremost concentrate on your message. Establish a compelling, direct call to action that encourages people to support your work participate in your nonprofit’s event. Then ask how you can make that overall message more social.

Nearly half of nonprofits do not measure social media metrics – they simply don’t know how to collect the information or they don’t know what to make of all the numbers. However, as social media plays a larger role in nonprofit marketing strategies, it’s important to track the ROI of your efforts and attempt to measure your reach and engagement. Here are a few quick tips to help you decide what to measure and how to analyze these social media metrics.

The Humane Society runs one of the largest and most successful nonprofit social media campaigns currently on the web.With more than 873,000 Facebook fans and more than 67,000 Twitter followers, the organization works to build relationships with social media users. With that many followers, an organization has to develop a social media management plan. To develop a loyal group of supporters online that can retain and continue to engage, it’s essential to adopt a social media management platform.

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: There is no such thing as a social media strategy and ROI. There is only fundraising and marketing strategy, and fundraising and marketing ROI. Yes, social media channels have value on their own, but the true value comes when social media are used to complement other fundraising and marketing channels.

There are 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S. that are all competing for donations. Yet many of these organizations fail to differentiate themselves from the crowd and still use tried and true (or should I say “tired and blue”) direct mail to appeal for donations. It’s common knowledge that many of these pieces are not opened.

You got the memo from your executive director requesting that everyone from your organization join LinkedIn. So you created a profile, started accepting connection requests. But now what? Do you use your profile to its full potential? LinkedIn can help you network with other nonprofit professionals and reach potential constituents that are interested in getting involved with your organization. Follow these tips for using this powerful networking tool and and you’ll be on your way to effectively promoting your organization.