Breakout Report 6: Community Foundations and Social Media – Knight Foundation

Breakout Report 6: Community Foundations and Social Media

Community Foundations and Social Media

Facilitator: Jeff Reifman, Founder, NewsCloud

Scribe: Beth Probst, Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation

NewsCloud, founded by session facilitator Jeff Reifman, is a Knight-funded Facebook application that helps engage readers in the news. On NewCloud, the comments tend to be very civil because people are using their real identities to post comments. One can see who is making the comments. All in all, it is a virtual community but it connects real people and real communities.

Goals for the session:

Reach:

  • Cultivate new audiences and introduce them to our community foundation
  • Reach young people
  • Connect to rural communities that we can’t visit on a day-to-day basis.

Engagement:

  • Advance causes that are meaningful to our community foundation
  • Engage in real conversations versus just information dissemination

Content:

  • Share stories with target audiences
  • Learn about ways to share news through social media
  • Advance our grant making impact by sharing stories
  • Demonstrate our community leadership to our target audiences

Why:

  • What is the value in social media?
  • What is it?
  • How do you use it?

How do you make social media work in your organization/what are some success stories?

Facebook works because we are going where people are congregating. One success within this is how foundations talk about themselves but share stories about charitable giving in general.

Focus on scholarship students has been successful. This page has a clear vision and mission—helps young people find money.

Blogs: Take them one step further than staff. Engage board members. Don’t edit them, but rather let them speak from their heart. This is a safer environment for people to share their real stories.

Challenges within social media:

Can you use social media to engage new audiences? If you were talking to the person 1:1, how would you engage them? Use this strategy.

Ownership is an issue. Can you encourage grantees to work together to have a more collective impact?

Start small. Organizational account is a good starting place. Experiment with largest initiative. Social media is a constant learning process.

How do you differentiate between your umbrella organization and important causes within your organization?

How do you coordinate internally? Bring the knowledge in as quickly as possible. Need buy-in from entire organization. Social media is just a publishing channel. It is not magic.

Ultimately you are trying to drive traffic back to the grantee or the organization you are trying to help. Otherwise, you might be taking away from those groups.

Lack of control. If someone posts something negative, what happens? This is just part of communications. Flexibility is important. See and respond.

If someone says something negative, you actually have an opportunity to respond.

One needs a clear call to action or social media won’t benefit your organization. What are your goals in terms of serving your audience?

Social media is more than just statements. Ask questions. Engage your audience.

It isn’t just about fundraising. It is about having conversations with people—building a real relationship and empowering them to take action.

The future is not just about publishing information but also engaging in conversation. Real success will be found in those who can have real conversations with real people.

This involves breaking down difficult barriers.  Communication is becoming more peer to peer versus top down.

In starting out, ask the question, are we shooting for flawless execution or picture perfect execution?

For those afraid of legal consequences of social media, a resource:

Citizen Media Law Project:

http://www.citmedialaw.org/

Collaborating around technology investments make sense. If you find yourself working with a developer who is not using open source code, ask them why?

http://www.Groundwire.org

Questions to ask when hiring developers or development firms

Nonprofit documents

The value Community Foundations bring to the table:

We filter some of the information.

We bring credibility to the discussion.

Ask yourself: would I care about this if someone else was posting it?

Parting thoughts:

  • Who is your audience?
  • What are you trying to communicate?
  • What do you need to say?
  • How are you going to deliver this message?

Additional Resources – NewsCloud samples and resources

Tool to manage multiple social media accounts.