Making a Difference with Social Media

Online tools that connect people to real world actions in creative and accessible ways have the potential to rapidly accelerate social change.

Social Actions is a nonprofit initiative committed to making it easier for people to find and share opportunities to make a difference. A search engine on SocialActions.com helps users find ways to take action for the causes they care about from 50+ online action sources including Kiva, DonorsChoose.org, Change.org, DemocracyinAction, GlobalGiving, Idealist.org, SixDegrees, VolunteerMatch,Care2 and others. Social Actions creates incentives such as the Change the Web Challenge to encourage the distribution of their open API (Application Programming Interface) to websites, blogs, social networks and mobile devices and include everything from volunteer opportunities to micro-credit loans.

The overall goal of the SocialActions site is to make the web more action-oriented and to make it easier for people to make a difference.

Check it out.
Cheers!

Dave Sharp
Sharp Consulting Group, LLC

Nonprofits on Twitter...

Not a day goes by when someone in the Nonprofit world or Public Sector doesn't ask me about Twitter. Here's a great post by Lon S. Cohen (Director of Communications at the ALS Association of Greater New York) listing "26 Charities and Nonprofits on Twitter".

Lon's list includes great examples of organizations that have embraced Twitter for building awareness, making new friends, engaging communities and raising funds.

And, it's clear that more and more local, national and global groups are experimenting with Twitter everyday.

It's very easy to get started. Twitter provides a free easy-to-setup interface; the potential to reach a huge engaged audience; and, the ability to engage with people in stimulating conversations. It's a natural platform for any organization seeking recognition for their mission or building a following.

Please share your thoughts.

Cheers!
Dave Sharp
Sharp Consulting Group

Rethinking the Concept of E-mail Marketing...

This might be the time for nonprofits and for-profits to completely rethink the concept of e-mail marketing?

Think about email as a marketing medium for a moment. On average an e-mail program inspires one out of every seven hundred recipients to make a donation or purchase something.

That’s right, the average email marketing letter achieves a 0.15% “purchase” response. In fact, only one in five individuals bother to even open an email pitch.

Maybe we should start redefining a successful e-mail marketing program on its ability to get a supporter or customer to visit a website, to "engage". Maybe the goal of e-mail marketing should be to train customers to regularly visit our website.

If the purpose of e-mail marketing is to train a supporter to interact with us, we would create different e-mails, wouldn't we?

E-mail marketers might market the organization Blog, encouraging the loyal supporters to interact with the organization by sharing a story or photos, taking a poll or posting a video .

E-mail marketers might educate a supporter or customer about how to use the products and services the organization offers. Offering cooking tips for the olive oil marketer as an example. The goal isn't to sell olive oil ... the goal is to tell somebody how to be creative with the olive oil they purchase.

E-mail marketers might share stories and photos about the loyal employees who serve loyal customers and donors.

E-mail marketers might share stories about loyal supporters and customers, helping loyal supporters feel special.

The goal of e-mail marketing could be about making people feel special. This could generate word of mouth, generating donations or sales with minimal incremental cost. This could also generate reasons for supporters and customers to visit your website.

Since only one in seven hundred customers are buying what we have to sell today. What do we have to lose?

More on this later.
Cheers!
Dave