Go where your nonprofit’s members, donors and supporters are already
hanging out in social media sites, and set up your “outposts” to engage
them there — that’s pretty much established best practice to make the best use of your
organization’s limited staff resources.
And there are a number of ways you can find out where your
constituents spend their time online, such as:
- ask the question in your e-newsletter or direct mail piece;
- put a poll on your website or blog;
- make an educated guess, based on social media usage statistics;
- "find friends" for each social media platform, one by one;
- try Flowtown.com.
Jay
Baer calls Flowtown “a social anthropologist hidden in your
keyboard”:
I’m often asked by corporate clients where they should engage in
social media. “Should we be on Twitter, or Facebook, or Linkedin, or
YouTube, or some other places?”
Flowtown gives you the answer in seconds. Export your email
subscriber or customer database to Flowtown, and you’ll know in minutes
what percentage of your audience is on Facebook or some other social
outpost.
Flowtown will automatically show Klout scores (you can read more about Klout
here) for those who use the service to track Twitter influence, and it is quite thoroughly integrated with MailChimp email service. Check out the YouTube video introduction for a quick overview:
This is a paid service, but there are no long term contracts — a
basic month-to-month plan starts at $14.95 plus 5 cents per imported
contact, or you can “pay as you go” — and Flowtown offers a free trial so you can
check it out first.
Now, as Jay Baer points out, this isn’t going to be perfect:
As with any data-harvesting service, Flowtown results aren’t
bullet-proof. The more email addresses a person uses across the social
Web, the less ideal the results.
But Flowtown is the first tool we’ve come across that makes a good
sound effort to help your organization connect your contact databases
with the social media activity of your members and supporters. Ethan
Bloch, one of the founders of Flowtown, commented
that event planners are using the tool to come up with some
demographic data for their sponsors, too — interesting!
How might your nonprofit use this kind of social media profiling
to create more targeted outreach or fundraising campaigns?
