Transmission Project

Nonprofits are struggling to understand how they can benefit from social media — such as blogs, online communities, social networking sites, RSS, distributed fundraising, and other tools and tactics that allow their message to spread online. On the one side, they have traditionalists telling them that these technologies are fads that should be ignored, and on the other, they have social media evangelists telling them that every nonprofit must start using them immediately. The truth lies somewhere in between, and is considerably more subtle – but there’s few resources to help nonprofits navigate this complexity. Our “Considering Social Media for Your Organization” online seminar is by far our most popular seminar, and we constantly get questions from organizations struggling in this realm.

And in fact, social media can provide nonprofits with substantial benefits when used strategically. Many of the strategies and tactics included in this area are low cost, high engagement methods that allow the organization, their beneficiaries, and their supporters to speak in personal and compelling ways about why the organization is important. They help nonprofits reach out through untraditional networks to find supporters that would be hard to reach in other ways, and can thus expand awareness, fundraising, communication, and true community engagement.

We propose a project to create a Nonprofits’ Guide to Social Media, an online written resource that will help nonprofits understand what tools and tactics are available in this area, how they fit in with their existing strategies and techniques, and how they map to realistic nonprofit goals.

Currently, much of the information in this area is based on hype and punditry. We’ll take the opposite approach — interviewing nonprofit staff and experts to understand what nonprofits are actually doing, what’s working, and the costs and resources involved. This careful, research based look will allow us to engage the community of nonprofits already working with social media, understand what they’ve learned, and bring that knowledge back to organizations nationwide.

Through the course of the project, we’ll also create smaller, one-off articles to provide more focused guidance on particular social media areas.

And as both a research method for the report and a boost to Idealware’s own outreach and engagement efforts, we will also consider Idealware’s own social media strategy. Through the course of the project, we will create a plan and implement appropriate tactics to take advantage of the benefits these tools can offer.

A VISTA member will be instrumental to this project. They will take the lead on creating a compelling and useful web resource, through background research and planning, community outreach, interviews with nonprofit staff and consultants, analysis of the interview data, first hand research into the available online tools, and careful work with our staff researchers and writers. They will greatly increase Idealware’s capacity (currently, we only have 1.5 full time staff people) – without them, we will not have the ability to take on a project that requires such extensive outreach, research, and coordination.