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Making social media tools work for you

By Elisa Birnbaum
February18, 2008

To say that social networking is on the rise is a major understatement. A seemingly wonderful way to engage, connect, or just speak your mind, and a wonderful medium to promote causes and events, these online initiatives seem like inspired choices. Not surprisingly, with the potential to reach an infinite number of visitors and without having to shell out a lot of money, the social media avenue is fast becoming the road well-travelled by nonprofits in Canada. But how well are these tools really working for the nonprofit sector? And can their impact be measured?

Tools of the online trade

“I’m a huge fan of social media,” says Tara Wood of World Wildlife Fund Canada. “As a communicator, I think it’s a tool we can’t ignore.” Although she acknowledges that staying ahead of the curve is a challenge for a nonprofit with limited resources, the inexpensive medium is a great way to get one’s message out, making it a challenge worth pursuing.

The pursuit began for WWF last year with the launch of their Save Our Climate campaign, a large-scale national campaign aimed at engaging Canadians on the issue of global warming. At the main event in downtown Toronto, 3,000 black balloons were used to represent the average carbon dioxide output of a single Canadian each day. Hoping to capitalize on the visually stunning inaugural event, WWF created a blog and added other tools such as YouTube, Del.icio.us - a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing and discovering bookmarks - and flickr, a photo sharing website, to make the campaign an interactive one.

Bloggers were also invited to the Toronto event, providing coverage uniquely different from traditional media. “This is the first time an ENGO had really used social media in a big way to get a message across in that manner,” states Wood. “Our goal was to try and reach as many Canadians as possible and to use a new medium where it would be easy for people to get to our campaign website and understand a bit more about climate change and what they can do to be a part of the solution.”

Bringing people together and fostering a feeling of community engagement led Special Olympics Canada to the social media route, as well. Hoping to raise the profile of Team Canada at the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Shanghai, China this past October, the organization launched an interactive website that included a blog, a well wishes section, daily photos, highlights, and profiles of the athletes, coaches and staff. Information was updated daily for the duration of the Games, keeping Canadians regularly connected. And with 10,000 unique first-time visitors attracted to their interactive site, marketing and communications manager, Vaso Charitsis, has become a believer in the potential for social media to raise awareness.

How do I know thee, let me count the ways

Then there’s the Salvation Army. Their Facebook page boasts more than 800 members, and they were one of the first Canadian charities to be accepted for Causes, an application that allows individual users to leverage their list of friends to support a cause. They also use flickr, YouTube, blogs, Twitter, and the new social networking kid on the web block, Virb, which is similar to MySpace but more design-driven. In fact, as one of the first nonprofits to make its home there, Virb administrators asked the Salvation Army to lead a new campaign called Do Good Plus Look Good, wherein different nonprofits are featured each month.

“Overall, I would say awareness is our number one objective,” says public relations director, Andrew Burditt, of the varied tools the organization has implemented. After all, he points out, no one is going to donate money to an organization they know nothing about. But Burditt also credits social networking with helping raise the organization’s accountability and level of trust.

Is seeing believing?

While organizations continue to jump headfirst into this exciting new realm of connectivity, the obvious questions arise. How do organizations determine social media success? Is it possible to measure the return on investment? In essence, how can nonprofits discern if social media is right for them? For many, the answers come down to what they want to achieve. Perhaps it’s awareness or engagement or bigger donations. Maybe it’s all three. Yet, even if those goals are clear, how can success be measured for impact? It seems most nonprofits look to such indicators as the number of visitors to their blogs or friends on their Facebook pages to arrive at any conclusions.

But critics remain cautious. “Simply reporting visits and views is a terrible thing to do cause it gives you nice, big fat numbers, but they may be meaningless,” says Alex Langshur, president of PublicInsite, a company that helps organizations optimize their online channel. As an analogy, he offers the following: If someone walked into a retail store but immediately turned around and walked right out, is that really a valuable transaction? Has the message really been communicated? “Do you think they are really going to be able to talk meaningfully about what you’re about?” he asks. Besides, adds John Hossack of Vancouver-based VKI Studios - an Internet marketing and website usability firm - what you really need to understand is why that number of visitors is rising or falling in the first place and how you can impact that change. “But if you’re not even having that thought process, don’t waste your time,” he says.

Measuring is understanding

Only an approach that relies on measuring impact, continues Langshur, will ensure efforts online are optimized and worthwhile. “People get caught up in what I like to call the cutting ribbon phenomenon,” he explains. Organizations like to cut ribbons and have photo-ops but they don’t really like to follow up to see whether or not the bridge they built is actually getting used. “But the online channel is absolutely, 100%, measurable.”

By adopting a measurement tool, an organization can go beyond visits and page views. It provides them with the ability to design their site to understand whether or not they are achieving outcomes they desire, regardless of what those outcomes may be. After all, says Langshur, it’s about the strategy. “How do we measure it, how do we understand whether or not we want to continue with this investment, or whether we should move our investment elsewhere?”

That level of understanding will, in turn, help organizations determine which of their online initiatives are most effective at engaging visitors. It is that focus on engagement, one that goes well beyond visits and numbers, that is essential. What are visitors doing online, what are they consuming, how long are they consuming for, and what tools are they using? “All those things really let you understand, at a much more granular and robust level, whether or not you’re actually achieving your goals,” Langshur adds.

Strategize, conceptualize - realize

Of course, for this approach to work, an organization needs to choose a goal that’s measurable and a strategy that will help them reach it. And those elements must be determined before any social media tools are chosen, and long before the campaign even begins. In this way, an organization can monitor the tool indicators to ensure they are moving in the direction they had hoped. If they’re not, corrective measures can be taken to reorient the campaign.

Luckily, there are many measurement tools out there from which to choose. Even installing the free and user-friendly Google Analytics is a good place to start. But, nonprofits should be careful to choose a tool that fits well with their goals and to ensure it is properly implemented by someone who can make sense of it all. In the end, concludes Hossack, “there’s no point in tracking any data if it’s not going to lead to an action.”

Elisa Birnbaum is a freelance journalist, producer and communications consultant living in Toronto. She can be reached at: esbirnbaum@gmail.com.

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