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Mar 28, 2011

Get Social with Your Nonprofit Website

Posted by: SethG

How is the Red Cross adding social elements to their “Why the Heck Should I Give to the Red Cross” campaign? What organizations are making their websites more social to help build supporters or to raise funds? We are regularly making time to keep up on what other organizations are doing to increase their network following, inspire engagement, foster community, and raise funds through technology that promotes interactive and social activity.

There are many reasons nonprofits want to get social. The technology and creativity that is available to facilitate social activity is growing and exhibited respectively at an awesome rate. Our latest lab project, Get Social: A Blog of Nonprofit Social Websites is a resource designed to share examples of non-profit websites that get social.

Last week, I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Debra Askanase of Firstgiving.com and Community Organizer 2.0 at the 2011 Nonprofit Technology Conference. Our session entitled “The Social Website: Integrating Social Media Into Website Design and Function“ looked at a collection of nonprofit websites that integrated social strategies to connect with site visitors to meet various goals. We shared a framework that included the following goals and categories of technology integration.

Goals

• Build supporters
• Create engagement opportunities
• Develop a sense of community
• Raise funds
• Call to action

Categories of Integration

• Show – Recent Tweets, Likes, comments
• Share – Like & Tweet Button, E-Card, Fwd to Friend
• Interact – FB Live Stream, Hashtag (Tweet Chat), Comments
• Co-Create – Shared Content: Mapping, Mosaic, Wiki, Links, Games
• Authenticate FB Login, Twitter OAuth
• “Open Source” – API

The goals seek to address “Why” you might want make your website social while the categories of integration address “What” you might do to meet your goals. A focus of our session was on building fluency. We wanted to get our group talking about example sites and scenarios that we provided through the discussion of social strategies using the goals and categories above as a conversational framework.

As a resource for the session participants and the nonprofit community as a whole, we created the Get Social: A Blog of Nonprofit Social Websites site. The social components of this site are features to allow others to contribute examples, comment on them, and share them with others.

Below is a link to the Get Social website as well as links to additional resources. As always we welcome any questions or feedback you might have about our latest lab project or social websites in general.

Additional Resources and Reading

• Get Social: A Blog of Nonprofit Social Websites
• Debra’s excellent recap of our session
• Our session slides on Slideshare

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