Editor’s note: This post first appeared on the Tactical Philanthropy blog.
I am one of about 12 individuals sitting around the conference breakout table. We are a diverse mix of organizations, foundations and generations but we’re all asking Scott Harrison of charity:water and Donna Callejon of GlobalGiving the same question: how do we use social media to get our message ‘out there’. Just because we can, should all foundations and charitable organizations be creating social media strategies?
When asked how to measure the cost benefit of investing in a social media strategy, our own Tactical Philanthropy panelist Sean Stannard-Stockton responded to this question by asking “Does your foundation have a unique approach to poverty alleviation?” If you believe you have a unique method to influence change, you increase your impact merely by spreading that idea.
The problem with this, especially for the more traditional charities and foundations here at the Council on Foundations conference, is that when you decide to leverage social media tools (and that’s all they are, tools) to spread your idea, you relinquish full control of that message.
Scott Harrison uses this to his advantage. charity:water uses a powerful media strategy to engage people by telling stories which drive interest in their work and communities. By partnering with major media outlets they’ve managed to ‘get the word out’ but not to always control the direction of the message. But hey, 25million viewers via American Idol is pretty unbeatable. This method only works when you have strong, compelling content to begin with, something many non-profits struggle with.
“It’s easier to be a two year old organization launching into the social media space, they’ve come in on the wave” Donna reminds us. As I look around the table of staff from more established foundations searching for ways to leverage social media tools to connect with the next generation or turn interest into donations or to connect donors to the recipients on the ground I think: enlist the next generation to teach you about your message and how they want to be engaged; find your community’s evangelists and give them something specific to share; and finally tell stories, real stories of true impact. Hopefully then the myth around how to use social media tools becomes trumped with the knowledge of why you want to get your message out there. Or just don’t do it at all.
Tags: philanthropy, social media
Hey Molly! You raise some great points, and it’s interesting to watch how companies are choosing to address the control issue.
Josh Bernoff from Forrester says many of our common (mis)perceptions about control can be linked to “the baggage that comes along with the word ‘media.’ Media is something that media companies control, and media is overwhelmingly one-way. The online social world is about as two-way, multi-way, any-way as it can be. Nobody controls it, not even Facebook, which found it can’t even change its own terms of service.”
Even if a social media approach is guided by solid strategy and directed towards meeting a specific goal, companies should still honestly ask themselves, “are we willing to have open conversations we can’t control? And since we put such a premium on listening, how would we be prepared to use the feedback?”
Of course it can (and should) take an organization several years to re-orient itself around this type of open dialogue, but successful growth and change almost always begins with tough questions.
And if you can define the strength of your brand by how other people describe it, some will say that we never had control to begin with.
Reply to Will ZweigartHi Molly,
Great question.
Social media does sometimes feel like a double edged sword, because of the ’social’ nature of it.
Besides 2 year old organisations who swim with socmed easily, it is vital to raise comfort levels among the larger organisations who touch many lives already.
A starting point for the giants may be to use social media to get the wonderful group of people who work for them, often in far-out hostile locations, connected to their colleagues across the world. This group understands each other and can act as a powerful support group.
All the best!
Cheers,
Anita Lobo
Reply to Anita Lobo