This is the third and final part of a series, written in response to a
reader's question about how to get her lively community of Facebook fans
more engaged on the nonprofit’s own blog.
As we discussed in Part
One, there are compelling reasons to make your nonprofit’s blog or
website your online “hub” or “home base,” rather than putting all your
eggs in a third-party social network. But it’s not as simple as “build
it and they will come” so, in Part
Two, we took a closer look at the motivations of your Facebook
fans:
What are people are seeking when they go online, and what
attracts them to Facebook in particular?
The more you can learn about your own Facebook fans, the better
equipped you’ll be to compete for their attention by speaking to their
specific needs and wants. It all comes back to these two questions:
- How does Facebook reward your Fans?
- How can your nonprofit do it better?
Facebook offers its users an opportunity to share their photographs,
videos, and other media and favorites; to tell others what they’re
doing and thinking; to share links to things they find interesting; to
comment on what others have posted; to express their opinions; to stay
in touch… and that’s before they tap into the dizzying array of apps
available in the Facebook applications
directory.
The successful Page administrator will monitor what “works” and what
doesn’t, and customize accordingly to meet their fans’ preferences, so
there can be a lot to learn through observation of other nonprofits’
Facebook Pages as well as your own online community.
The bottom line on Facebook’s appeal is user-generated content.
The fans not only create the community around a Page, they define in
large part how they want to experience it. And there are two sides to
web content from the user perspective: they can consume content
or create it. That is, there is web content that users read,
watch, hear, or otherwise consume more or less passively; and there is
web content that enables and encourages the active participation of
users in creating their own community culture on the site.
So here’s the first half of the equation:
How can you make your nonprofit’s web content
appeal to the widest possible range of fans?
Mix it up!
Your nonprofit's web content might take any number of forms, including:
- Blog posts
- Website pages
- RSS news feeds
- Newsletters
- Email blasts
- Spreadsheets
- FAQs
- Reports and ebooks
- Charts and graphs
- Maps
- Photographs
- Cartoons and illustrations
- Videos
- Audio/Podcasts
- Webinars
- Slideshows and presentations
- etc.
Variety of content delivery methods, as we know from many
studies of internet usage, can increase the level of user engagement with
your site. Novelty is part of it, but not the whole story. Different
people “learn” in different ways — some people are more visual, some are
more oriented to language — and there are accessibility
factors to take into account as well, especially if your nonprofit
serves people with differing abilities.
There are plenty of free or low-cost tools to try out, and we’ve
talked about lots of them already: from Animoto
to Mofuse,
and from custom
campaign maps to eye-catching charts,
and including cross-platform tools like Twitterfountain
that brings Twitter and Flickr together in a nifty widget. We’ve also
looked at tools to help your readers to dig into your content more
deeply, such as site
search widgets or custom
newspages, as well as various RSS tools for delivering that content
to your fans in the ways they’ll find most convenient.
Useful new free
or low-cost tools are coming out all the time, so keep your eyes open
for something fresh to try!
The second half?
Let your fans create their own content.
Run down the list of content delivery methods you’re already using —
or are considering for your website or blog — to see how you can
enable readers and fans to participate more actively.
Let’s take your blog posts and website pages, for example. How
might your fans take a more active role there?
Share it
Social
bookmarking buttons like AddThis, ShareThis, and similar services
give you a snippet of code to paste into your blog or web page, so
visitors can easily bookmark your post or page and recommend it to
their friends. (This can be a terrific traffic-builder for you site,
too.)
Rate it
Who doesn’t like to give an opinion? A simple ratings widget like
the excellent five-star widget from Outbrain
or one of PollDaddy’s
rating widgets (they offer both five-star and thumbs-up/down styles) may
be a good addition to your blog, particularly if your nonprofit serves
teens and young adults.
Discuss it
Comments are the undisputed Big King Daddy of user-generated
content, so you’ll want to make sure that you’ve enabled comments on
your nonprofit’s blog unless there’s a compelling reason not to do so.
(Part Two suggested a few good resources to help you get more comments
on your blog and use them to build a sense of online community.) And it’s easy enough to enable the comment
function of most blogging platforms.
But what if you’ve got a static
website — web pages without a built-in comments function? Consider adding a guestbook, chat room, or forum to let your site
visitors share their ideas and opinions (see 5
Quick Free Ways to Set Up Your Own Chat Room and the “Discussion
Forums/Online Communities” section of 100
Online Tools for Nonprofits for some options there).
Alternatively, you might look at a “social commenting” system like Disqus or IntenseDebate
which can be installed on both blogging platforms and static HTML
websites.
Suggest it
One of the most effective ways to engage someone in conversation — on
blogs or in the real world — is to let them pick the topic that
interests them most. Could you use one of the many free tools for
creating your own polls
and surveys to check in with your fans about what types of content
and topics they prefer?
Or ask your fans to help you crowdsource a list of web resources. SlinkSet, for
example, lets you set up your own Digg-like social link-submission and
voting site — with a handy feature that is not often mentioned: the
ability to create a widget to show the top-voted links in your sidebar.
Write it
Guest posts?
Well, you get the idea…
Next, do the same with photographs, videos, whatever other kind of
content your organization publishes online — look for ways that your
fans can take a more active role in creating that content. YouTube Direct, for example, is one tool we’ve talked about already
that lets you create
a (moderated) video channel to share your community’s videos on
your site.
And remember the big conference of association professionals in
Toronto last summer? The ASAE annual meeting website
ran a Twitterstream of #asae09 tweets throughout the event so people
who weren’t able to travel could be “virtual attendees” and follow
along. Couldn’t you do something similar for your own events, through
the magic of RSS?
Ask your members what other platforms they may be using to publish
their own content (Slideshare? Flickr?
VoiceThread?)
and, if appropriate and feasible, consider showcasing that
member-created content on your organization’s website… The possibilities are virtually unlimited!
One Final Note:
Nonprofits do have a fine line to walk with user-generated content,
true. While individuals, entrepreneurs and small business folks can be
a bit more adventurous with their website content, nonprofit
communicators must answer to an executive board, donors, constituents,
other stakeholders — and, oftten, the general public — all of whom are
likely to have very strong opinions about what is appropriate content
for a nonprofit site.
Those stakeholders may be understandably nervous about allowing
user-generated content on the site, but measures such as forum
registration and comment moderation, guided by a thoughtful social media
policy, can go a long way to keeping the content family-friendly and
relatively spam-free.
What is your nonprofit doing to help your blog or website compete
in an age of social networking sites? As always, please share your
experience in the comments.
p.s. If you missed the first two parts of this series, you can catch up here and here.