This Q-and-A is the second part of an edited transcript of my conversation with Danielle Brigida, digital marketing manager at the National Wildlife Federation. If you like this interview, be sure to check out part one, in which we discussed

Some people would argue that all nonprofit communications need to include some sort of call to action — however you want to define that. Do you think that’s true? If so, what form does that take for you?

It depends on what your goal is. I do think that investing and just engaging in people is worth it. But I also think there’s an expectation that when you’re a nonprofit, you’re either fundraising or you’re asking for action — and that makes people feel good too. … I try and recognize that when I update our Facebook and it goes to people’s Facebook feeds, they’re probably up there looking up their friends from high school or something and they don’t always want the heaviest of material that we’re working on. … I think it depends on what you’re going for. The way I approach it is, “Hey, get to know us; get to know what we’re working on” — and then just make sure the pages they’re looking for are accessible.

Environmentalism can be a controversial issue. People may not like what you’re doing because they feel it goes too far or because it doesn’t go far enough. What have you learned about dealing with disagreement in a very public way through social channels?

One of the frustrating and lovable things about the environmental field is that you’ve got these people who are incredibly passionate and incredibly focused and they think it’s either all or nothing. … And that fact is we need those people to push us to the next level, but at the same time we tend to take a very moderate stance on a lot of things. That’s because we know that in order to get a lot done with policy, you have to be realistic and meet people where they are. Whenever someone writes a comments and [says] ‘I hate that you’ve done this,’ I tend to jump in there and be very positive and say, “We need your support and we need you to keep pushing us, but this is where we have to be today.” … They can be shocked by that. I think if their intentions are good and they’re not just saying you’re a terrible organization, if they’re just really concerned and passionate, you have to applaud them for their passion and keep them motivated.

I’ve grown to appreciate people and their different opinions and as long as they’re being respectful, I wouldn’t delete it or anything. … I think comment moderation, in general, is a good thing because it makes people feel safe when they post a very thoughtful comment. But when people are just differing in their opinions and discussing things, that’s what social media can allow you to do. It allows you to see the other side.

What’s your take on Jumo and other networks like it?

I still haven’t made up my mind entirely. I like to keep an open mind. When I joined Twitter in 2007, I really didn’t understand it. I was using it and I was posting stuff, but if you’d asked me, “Will Twitter ever be a big thing?” I’d probably [say] “Eh. I don’t know.”

So I’m still open-minded about Jumo. But I will say that it’s go a lot of competitors. We’ve got Care2 already. We’ve got Change.org. We’ve got Crowdrise. There are all these sites out there and they’re all trying to do very similar things. [Based on] what Jumo has right now, it’s not going to pique my interest too much. I’ll be keeping an eye on it, of course. But they haven’t actually let me be an admin yet, so I’m frustrated.

Whenever you segment off a nonprofit as its own thing or put a bunch of nonprofits together in a community, I’m always a little skeptical. Because you don’t have the loyalty that you would in [another] setting or in a larger social network where [users] find you, like Facebook or other places. … I don’t know if integration completely is always the best thing. But I do think that Jumo hasn’t differentiated itself enough to make it a valuable component to the nonprofit community. I think whenever you’re in a space and creating a new thing, you have to be meaningful and unique, and I’m not sure Jumo really is.

The National Wildlife Federation has been playing with location-based networks over the past year. What made you say, “this is a space we need to be in?” What are you trying to accomplish there and what have you found?

One of our main priorities for the organization is to help connect people with nature. Any way you can make that easier and make that trackable is fascinating to me. So the location-based networks were interesting to me because the second I signed up for a personal account, I thought, “Oh wow. It would be amazing if we could know how many people went to a park?” And granted, it wouldn’t the total number, but it could be a cool thing to connect people with nature. … We focused on Wildlife Watch, which is one of our programs. It’s a citizen science program and it allows you to say what you’re seen and track it.

The cool thing about Foursquare and other places is that for now, what we are is we’re just a friendly reminder: “Check out these places and check out the wildlife here.” And in very popular places that gives you little facts about wildlife that you get on your phone if you follow us.

What I’d like to be able to do is see how we can use technology and connect people with nature. This is just an experiment, but it’s proving to be pretty interesting. Especially now that you can upload photos and things like that. Any time you can use technology to make interacting with nature something that is fun and entertaining, I think that’s good.

Image credit: BirdImages, via iStockPhoto

Related Posts:

• Measuring and monitoring for nonprofit social media success — a Q-and-A with NWF’s Danielle Brigida
• Social media for the complex sale: Where should you start?
• Andy’s Answers: How Cargill used social to drive product sampling

This Q-and-A is an edited transcript of my conversation with Danielle Brigida, digital marketing manager at the National Wildlife Federation. If you enjoy this interview, check back Monday for the second part of the conversation, in which she discusses her stance on location-based networks, handling controversial comments, nonprofit-centric social networks and much more.

Let’s start off by talking about goals. What are your goals as social media director for NWF and how do those align with the organization’s goals? How do the two come together?

The way the National Wildlife Federation works internally, is that we focus on revenue, reach and engagement. Obviously, we focus on our main goal, and that’s to get Americans to protect wildlife for our children’s future. … I try and accomplish all those things with social media and I find that taking a business perspective does help, but really it’s almost relationship management for me.  …  Online there’s a very easy way to do [these things], because our average member, currently, is about a 65-year-old woman. And they’re actually joining all these social sites now, but originally they weren’t as present on them and so we were reaching new audiences. Now we’re meeting our current audience and reaching new ones still.

How are you measuring your success and what tools are you using?

I’ve created [my] position — made it up a little bit — and so I’m still working to systemize how we do things. Originally … I was working alongside the communications team, even though I was in a different department. And I was tracking a lot of our blog mentions and things like that using the social bookmarking site Delicious and tagging them with internal key terms. And that was useful until it became too much manual labor and we were getting mentioned more and more, and things just got out of control.

Now we’re using a combination of tools, both free and paid for. Some of them are reliable and some of them need to be checked up on. We’re actually in the business of looking at other paid tools. Right now, we are playing with Smallact’s Thrive, which is really great for Twitter and Facebook tracking. … I use a ton of free monitoring tools — everything from RSS feeds, SocialMention, IceRocket, BlogPulse and things like that  And I actually pull them into a listening dashboard and that’s been really useful to just to find where we are, comments and making note of what’s getting a lot of coverage.

Every quarter, we put out a report. It takes a little while to compile. It’s kind of a neat mix of qualitative and quantitative information. It includes our growth with our main presences, so like a 6% growth on Facebook from this to this, but it also includes things like: what stories are getting shared the most on Facebook and what are some top tips people using social media can us and what’s the next big thing. That report goes over our learnings and our growth both qualitatively and quantitatively.

And then, on top of that, I kind of measure social media measurement in general and benchmarking in three ways. You can measure the obvious — you can measure how many followers you have and things like that, but I find that’s really the least important. What I find really important is how people are interacting with the content you share and the way you interact with them. That I measure in a couple of different ways. PostRank is actually something I really have come to rely on for how well our posts are doing. We use AddThis on our site — even though as a social media user I kind of hate all those “share this” buttons, I also know that measuring or taking a look at the stats from that can be fascinating. Because you think, “oh no one’s actually printing this out,”  but a lot of people are. Or, “no one uses this social media site,” and a lot of people are.

What we’ll do with that information is decide where to act. For many months, our users were primarily just sharing our content through Facebook and that was pretty much it. Even though we have a pretty strong Twitter presence, that wasn’t where people were going. And so we added the Facebook “Like” button and that was purely driven by the fact that “wow, everyone who comes to our site shares through Facebook,” and that’s kind of important and we need to make it more accessible.

There’s a piece of conventional wisdom in the business world that social media means businesses need to become publishers — that you need original content to drive engagement. Do you think that’s true for nonprofits?

I think in some ways we’ve always been that. Our magazines have been, in a lot of ways, how we grew to the size we are. We have children’s magazines that are really great, we have unique content that we create. We have our membership magazine, which has always been pretty wonderful. And so I think, for us, it’s been that way. That’s how we are, because we are an educator, we are creating content. That’s just the way that is.

I don’t think everyone necessarily has to be that. Collaboration is really key right now. Maybe not necessarily in the social media world, but I love when on social media I can promote a smaller Facebook group or when we can work together and deliver value to more people. It’s definitely interesting. I know a lot of people are turning into publishers. Our growing pain is not so much being a publisher, but being an online publisher. Not all the “Ranger Rick” issues are online and that kind of thing is where I think we’re headed.

What are the hallmarks of good nonprofit content?
For us, it’s hard because we’re such a big-tent organization. The hallmarks, for us, would be our members love to hear about wildlife. Which sound surprising to everyone else, because they’re like “Yeah, of course.” But we cover a ton of issues — global warming/climate change, that kind of thing — and then the policies we work on are really wonky when you get into it, so sometimes it just refreshing to be able to look at what our people are sharing and what they’re responding to. When we send out an e-mail, what do they post from that e-mail onto Facebook? We’ve been a such a big-tent organization for so long, that realizing that “oh wow, these people are going to tell us what they want and we can actually listen and act on it.” That’s kind of a fresh way of allocating resources, almost.

Is what you’re gleaning from your members and from other people online driving what your organization does from a policy perspective?

No. Not yet. I would say this is years away. We’re influenced by the same things we’ve always been. Obviously, the research we rely on and our involved members, yes, to some extent do influence. We’re still at a learning curve where I read this stuff and I can pass it on and it does slowly influence us. When the oil spill hit and we were kind of on-call, we had a ton of volunteers doing stuff for us and we’d never trusted another — someone who’d created a video, let’s say — we never gave them the branding rights, and this time we just needed help so much that we kind of did.

I think social media, in a lot of ways, is making us more trusting and realizing, especially as a nonprofit when you have limited resources and funds, that you need to really bridge the gap between the people who are doing the work and the people who want to help. That’s where I’ve seen a lot of the benefits. But it’s not like right now we’ve flipped it around completely, but we’re at least more cognizant. We have such a diverse pool of members; it’s really fascinating because we’re so middle of the road. And so we’ve got extreme animal-rights people and we’ve got all these great people from different walks of life, but they’re very motivated to protect wildlife and that’s what’s neat about them.

The National Wildlife Federation has a main Twitter account, but you’ve also got dozens of employees who are on Twitter in various roles. How do ensure everyone behaves themselves online? How do you get them all to work together?

We do a couple of things. One, when I first started doing social media, I realized that I am not scalable. And I don’t really believe in having a social media department, per se — and that kind of goes against a lot of people. So I started training staff who either run a program or have expertise or really like the use of tools like Twitter and Facebook and things like that. I started training them initially and engaging them. And some of them run programs that speak to very specific audiences, like we have our Green Hour program and Be Out There, that speaks to parents, and then we have Campus Ecology, that speaks to students and faculty. So we have all these diverse audiences and wrapping them all up into NWF …  you don’t lose something, but you don’t get that personal connection that I think social media is really great about — it’s a value that social media can provide if you let it. So we trained a number of staff and when you sign up for Twitter and things like that, I immediately know. I don’t even know how to explain it, but the way I listen and the way I monitor, if there’s a staff member that even tweets a link, I recognize and I add them to the staff list and I give them a call. I check up on them and see how they’re liking it. I act as an internal consultant in that way.

I also encourage them to sign up for Yammer. And that’s the way we wrap the communication around. They’re speaking externally, communication externally, but Yammer is like their feet on the ground. If they have an issues, they can ask, “What’s our policy on this?” or if they’re trying to communicate and they get a hard question.  But it’s also a place where we can say, “Hey guys, we’re really trying to push people to this link. Can you retweet it in your own words?” It’s also to circle back and remember that we’re doing all this social media for NWF.

Image credit: BirdImages, via iStockPhoto

Related Posts:

• Connecting people with nature through technology — a Q-and-A with NWF’s Danielle Brigida
• Andy’s Answers: How Itron developed a companywide listening program
• Should you evaluate your blog the way you evaluate your employees?

So you’d expect them to approach social media from radically different angles. But as Olivier Blanchard explained at Wednesday’s Buzz 2010 event, which SmartBrief helped organize, the two kinds of organizations certainly have their differences, yet the ways they approach social media have more in common with each other than you might think.

Both kinds of organizations can use social-media tools to improve their human resources and public relations operations, he noted in his presentation:

• Social-media tools can lead to better hires and can help organizations make sure their workers represent the brand well online.
• Social media is a vital reputation-management tool, especially during a crisis.
• Social media helps organizations explain to the public why their product, service or mission is important.

One difference between the two kinds of organizations is whether they view the people they’re trying to reach as customers or  members, he added:

• Businesses want to establish a brand that customers trust. Nonprofits still need members to have trust in the organization, but they also want to build member involvement in whatever cause the organization has as its nonmonetary goal.
• Customer service takes on an extra dimension, as well. While nonprofits want the same kinds of support and feedback that business customers expect, they also need to feel a deeper connection, with more kinds of engagement.

The biggest difference between businesses and nonprofits is ultimately their goals. Both kinds of organizations need to worry about money — but for most businesses, profits are an end point, whereas the money a nonprofit brings in has to support some other goal. But Blanchard argues that these different goals shouldn’t change the way an organization thinks about return on investment.

Businesses must make sure their social-media efforts raise or save more money than they spend. Nonprofits need to do this, too, he notes, even though money is secondary to those organizations’ primary goal. Nonprofits need to resist the temptation to try to assign arbitrary monetary figures to actions, such as getting a member to write to their congressional representative.

Instead, nonprofits need to calculate the ROI of their social-media presence and use the money they’re bringing in or saving to accomplish those goals. Blanchard recommends nonprofits get around this by starting with their ultimate goal and planning backwards.  Start by thinking of your nonfinancial objective, then ask how much money you’ll need to support that objective, and then design your social-media efforts in support of those financial goals. Identify exactly how your social-media presence will lead you to those goals, he said, and then set clear metrics for success at every step along the way.

Image credit: raalves, via iStockphoto

If you missed the Buzz2010 series of events on social media for associations, recordings have been made of all three events.  Both the June 16 session on open leadership and July 20 session on social media risk are available right now.  The  August 18 session on social-media ROI will be available on Sept. 1.  Click here for more details.

Related Posts:

• A look at social media costs and returns with Erik Qualman
• This week’s most clicked
• Making sense of social-media ROI with Olivier Blanchard

The problem is, these businesses can benefit most from the type of insight that market research provides. Where should you allocate your budget? What products or services are most important to your customers? Until recently, small businesses had to roll the dice and hope their decisions yielded results.

Suzette Gardner, director of Internet communications and publications at the National Sleep Foundation, found herself in the “small budget, big needs” predicament many nonprofits struggle with. At the OMS DC Summit, Suzette provided attendees with an inside look at her team’s efforts — explaining how her organization took advantage of the scope and low cost of social media to better understand and prioritize the needs and demands of her customers.

After setting concrete goals focused on increasing sales of the foundation’s literature and getting a better read on which subjects mattered most to their customers, Suzette and a team of four set out to use social media to get the answers they desperately needed. Here are five tips she provided:

1. Establish your company in as many social networks as possible. For many, this is a no-brainer. But if market research is your first time exploring the wide world of social media, it’s important to get your feet wet in as many puddles as possible. Gardner and her staff expected eons.com (the “Online Community for Boomers”) to be the most active, given their typical demographic. But in time, other networks and platforms proved to generate more data, so their small group was able to focus and become more efficient.
2. Create groups. Initiate and build groups around your issues. Once you have built the focused communities necessary, solicit feedback on issues important to you.
3. Start conversations. It’s OK to ask the very questions that you’re looking for answers to. Often times, businesses dance around what matters — but customers and constituents want to help drive your products and services. Ask and you shall receive.
4. Pose relevant questions. Once you have identified the most appropriate spaces, your questions should be in the proper context. If you feel like your question is off-topic and will not be well-received, chances are you’re in the wrong community.
5. Join groups and conversations that are already in progress. Suzette saw most of her success in these endeavors. Although she created new groups, joining the larger, established groups and gathering input proved to be the most useful. Also, Suzette noted that some of the “older” group platforms (Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, Windows Live Groups) were the most active and fruitful spaces.

The information the National Sleep Foundation Foundation gathered was immediately acted on. After about three months of creating, engaging and gathering, the organization found that users were interested in more information about restless leg syndrome. Consequently, the team built www.whatisrls.org. Even though they gathered 100% of their insights from social spaces, the group members found that their customers preferred print brochures over digital, so resources were allocated back to the some of the outdated yet important brochures.

Some companies have research and development departments. Some bring in consultants. While a good strategy and proper execution still takes man-hours and dedication, research and development via social media is a useful and cost-efficient alternative for those of us looking to make better decisions.

Image credit: binabina, via iStockphoto

Related Posts:

• Is “stickiness” a thing of the past?
• From #SXSW: 4 ways to find your fans
• A few good reasons to check out a social network’s advanced search function

I’ll give you an example. I want you to tweet the link to this article. But that doesn’t mean I want you to open up another browser tab, type the URL for Twitter, sign in, copy the headline, etc. Nobody’s going to go through all 10 tedious little steps just because I asked. But that’s cool, I understand. That’s why there’s a button at the bottom of this article labeled “Share.” Move your cursor down there, click on the Twitter button and the sharing software will do the grunt work for you. You’re much more likely to help me out when I only ask you for what I really need.

The Red Cross learned that lesson in a big way this week. It netted more than $8 million from a text messaging donation campaign to aid recovery work in Haiti. Part of that total stems from the scope of the tragedy and the fact that the White House encouraged donations. But the Red Cross also made it incredibly easy to donate $10 via your cell phone, just by texting Haiti to 90999.

Pete Cashmore calls it the antidote to “slacktivism.” It just sounds like common sense to me. The Red Cross didn’t ask people to go to their computers, log on to the Red Cross Web site, fill out a donor card and enter all their credit card info before donating. They just asked people to say yes to a donation. They made it easy. They asked for exactly what they needed.

What are you doing to make it easier for your fans to get involved? Can you think of another organization that does a really good job of asking for exactly what they need?

Image credit, BlackJack3D via iStock

Related Posts:

• Social is dead — long live social: How to be ready for the next phase of engagement
• Build it and they won’t come: Why your new Facebook tabs fail
• This week’s most clicked

Any conversation on social media and marketing invariably turns to the big question: Which social media platform is right for you? Depending on your industry and your message, the answer may be most of them, but the answer is never just one. As with every other aspect of your marketing mix, the key to good social media strategy is integration.

The possibilities of integration on the Internet are endless, but here are four tips for a good start:

Be everywhere
Everyone has an argument for their favorite social media platform. As with traditional advertising, you need to ensure your presence is everywhere your audience is, as long as the medium fits the message.

Know the rules of each community before you participate
Each social media platform has its own written and unwritten rules. Be sure to understand those rules before you start participating. For example, Twitter as a community frowns upon shouting out your message without engaging in conversation and promoting others. Facebook has different rules for fan pages as opposed to personal pages. Join the communities as an observer before diving into the fray.

Maximize behind-the-scenes integration
Once you’re versed in the media, tie it all together and make it work for you. Facebook can automatically post your Twitter posts (and vice versa) with a quick setup change. Both have feeds you can automatically post to your Web site. When it’s possible, I prefer to tailor the message to fit the medium with separate posts. On the go, however, that’s not always possible, so I’ve set up the organization’s Twitter account on my phone. If we have news, one quick Tweet from my phone makes it to Twitter, Facebook and the front page of our Web site in minutes.

Cross-promote
It’s possible your message is being read by someone on their favorite platform, and they’ll never see your other social media sites. It’s also possible they stumbled across it,  and if they don’t see your other platforms, you may never see them again. How can you ensure they know you’re where they are?

• Have a central page on your Web site listing all your available social media platforms. Make it an organization policy to have the social media platforms (or a link to that central page) in all e-mail signature files.

• Mention other platforms. Tweet occasionally that you are on Facebook. Post a Facebook link to Twitter.

• Make sure your core customers or members know where they can find you. Send a blast e-mail or put it in your newsletter, but make sure they know where you are.

The real power of social media lies in using all of it as a whole. Learn how to integrate the media and you’ll have finally mastered the ability to be everywhere at once.

Image credit, geopaul, via iStock

Related Posts:

• Measuring and monitoring for nonprofit social media success — a Q-and-A with NWF’s Danielle Brigida
• Should you evaluate your blog the way you evaluate your employees?
• 7 questions every social media strategy must be able to answer

Tell us a little about your background. How did you end up running online and social media strategy for the Lupus Foundation of America?

I’ve been in lots of different working environments.  I spent several years in corporate communications for Westinghouse.  I spent a handful of years bringing authors into Barnes & Noble stores in the Washington, D.C., area. I’ve spent the past nine years in the nonprofit world — first at the American Diabetes Association and now the Lupus Foundation of America.  The LFA job encompassed everything I had done at ADA, but also included social media, which was new to me.

Tell us a little about the differences you’ve noticed in working with Facebook Causes and Facebook Groups.

When I first checked out Facebook, I discovered there were lupus groups already there, some using outdated versions of the LFA logo, and some linking to an earlier incarnation of the Lupus.org Web site.  So I introduced myself to the admins for these groups and offered my help.  Everyone was receptive, but I also realized that while having these offshoot groups was nice, there needed to be an “official” LFA group in Facebook.  I created one, and I began to use it as an information repository. I provide links to key content on our Web sites,  such our Walk for Lupus Now events across the country, the online version of Lupus Now magazine and our message boards.

In January 2009, I discovered that someone had already created an official LFA cause in Facebook.  It had been sitting dormant, so I contacted Causes and took over the account.  I really see LFA’s Facebook cause as an action center.  If there are things that I want our Cause members to act on, such as contacting their members of Congress for our advocacy day on Capitol Hill or recruiting interviewees for our magazine or sharing lupus-related news, then I use our Cause to push out the message.  As a result of our constant engagement with our members, we’ve increased our Cause membership 584% in 6 months.  And we’ve increased our online donations in Facebook by 790% in the same time frame.

What type of growth have you seen in other channels?

We’ve been very fortunate to see growth across all the social media in which LFA is engaged.  LFA created a Twitter account in February 2009 as another tool for us to use for our 2009 Advocacy Day on Capitol Hill.  In five months, we’ve grown to more than 325 followers.  LFA’s message boards, which launched in February 2008, now boast more than 4,200 users from around the world.  That remains a very vibrant and positive online community.

One thing I’ve noticed is that our constituents like to receive information from us via many vehicles.  I see them on our message boards, on Facebook, on Twitter, and our blog. I know they also receive our biweekly e-newsletter.  A lot of people living with lupus aren’t as mobile as they’d like to be. They feel isolated because of the disease itself, or because of the side effects of the medications they’re taking.  All these social media outlets provide the LFA a way to connect to and engage all people living with lupus — all from the comfort of their homes.   It’s an amazing thing.

Have you seen a connection to donations in those spaces?

In Facebook, without question.  LFA hasn’t really dipped its toes into donation efforts in other mediums, like Twitter.  But that’s certainly on our horizon.

Now, to the readers. Do you have any more questions for Wick on how he’s leveraging social media for LFA?

Related Posts:

• Facebook’s Amy Thibodeau on why content strategy matters
• How much time should you spend on social media?
• 5 ways social music tools can build brands and boost business