Fundraising Principles and Practice, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER TWELVESOCIAL MEDIA

Steven Shattuck and Adrian Sargeant

Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Describe the major social networks and how they operate.
2. Develop an effective social media strategy for your nonprofit.
3. Utilize each social network in a way that benefits your nonprofit.
4. Understand how to integrate social media platforms with other fundraising activity.
5. Evaluate the effectiveness of your social media efforts using a range of metrics.

Introduction

In the last chapter, we outlined the digital communications mix as a framework that could be used by a nonprofit to plan its digital communications’ activities. For many nonprofits, social media has become such a critical and integral part of their overall communications strategy that we elaborate on it in this dedicated chapter.

While the origins of the term “social media” remain disputed (Tina Sharkey, a former executive at iVillage and AOL claims to have coined the term), what we can say with certainty is that online social networking has its roots firmly in online bulletin and message boards. In the 1980s, CompuServe became the first service that offered the public online interactivity in the form of file sharing, messaging, and discussion forums. In the 1990s, AOL (America Online) emerged, providing a gateway service that opened up access to millions of homes for the first time. AOL ...