Yesterday, I talked about why nonprofits needed to use social media in 2010. And I promised to talk about the strategies nonprofits can use to grow membership and fundraising dollars.

To get started, create a Gmail account and import all the email addresses of your members to it. Keep this one private, and don’t use it. Not because there are any problems, but because you don’t want your members to get confused when they get emails from a Gmail account with your name on it.

• Join Facebook and start a Facebook Fan Page for your organization. Import your members into your Facebook account — this is what the Gmail account is for — and friend the ones who are on there. Encourage them to communicate with you and each other on the Fan Page. Ask your members to recommend the Fan Page to their friends. Participate in conversations with your members and fans.




• Set up a Twitter account, and encourage members to start “following” you. They’ll receive your updates (tweets), and be able to keep up with what you’re doing. Participate in Twitter conversations with your members, and follow people who talk about the same issues. Use things like Twitter search or NearbyTweets.com to find people in your area talking about your organization’s key issues.




• Start a blog and write about the issues that are important to you. Don’t give up your print newsletter, but use your blog to communicate with members in between your monthly or quarterly mailings. Write about other organizations in your field, like a similar nonprofit in another town. For example, if you run a food bank, write about the great things a food bank in another state is doing.




• Use LinkedIn to establish your personal brand. Your personal brand is just as important as your organization’s. By getting to know people outside your organization, you may find different opportunities to be out in your community. This helps you meet people who could be likely donors, find other opportunities where your organization could be a beneficiary of a community event, or even find possible members and volunteers among your new network.




• Automate some of your content feeds. You could do this all by hand, but this will save you several minutes a day. Use the Network Blogs feature on Facebook to feed your posts to the Fan Page. Use Twitterfeed.com to automatically feed your blog posts to your Twitter stream. Don’t turn your feeds into automated bots (robots), but use automation to lighten your load a bit.

There are more ways than these five that you can use social media to your advantage. But these are the five that can get you started. If you have any ideas or suggestions, let us hear from you. Leave us a comment, and if we get enough, we’ll use them in a future post.

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As widespread as social media is, there are still a lot of organizations who are avoiding it, including nonprofits.

Those organizations are missing an important tool in their fundraising toolbox. Most nonprofits have their reasons for not using it, like “our members don’t use it,” “we don’t have the time,” or “it’s too hard.”

Except, they do, you will, and it’s not.

How important is it? Watch the video at the bottom of the screen to see what’s happening with social media these days. And it’s only going to get bigger. Here are five reasons you need to start using social media as part of your fundraising efforts in 2010.

1. Your current members are using social media. According to Facebook, their fastest growing demographic is 35 and over. Erik Qualman, author of Socialnomics, says it’s actually females, age 55 – 65. would wager a large majority of your members, donors, and volunteers fit in either group.

1. Your future members are using social media. How are you going to attract new members by sending a mailing to your existing mailing list? You’re not. You need to go where the people are, and they’re on places like Facebook and other social networking sites. If you want to notify potential new members about what you’re doing, this is one of the best ways to reach them. Watch the video below for an idea of how big this has gotten.

1. It’s cheaper than direct mail. I used to sell direct mail, and I can tell you that while it’s a great, effective way to target your ideal donors, it still costs money. There’s printing, assembly, and postage, and the fancier everything is, the higher the cost. On the other hand, social media has a much bigger, easier, and less expensive reach for a fraction of the cost. You can reach more people more often than you can with direct mail.

1. You can communicate frequently. In fact, it’s encouraged. There are a lot of things going on in your office that your members want to know about, whether it’s the latest legislation that affects your constituency, the grant you were just awarded, and the envelope stuffing party you’re holding. If you’re communicating only through a newsletter, you’re missing a lot of opportunities to talk to your fans.

1. Errors are easily fixed. How many times have you printed the annual fundraising letter and found a mistake? It doesn’t matter with a blog post. If you make a typo or mistake, you can always fix it. Even after it’s published, you can easily go back and fix an error. If it’s an important error, just send out notices to your blog readers through your usual social media channels.

Next time, we’ll talk about how nonprofits can start using social media.

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