On Thursday, February 10, Facebook announced a new layout for Facebook pages. The goal of this update is to bring the social network in line with the recently redesigned personal profiles and to provide a more consistent user experience.

Many nonprofits are wondering what to do about the new update to Facebook pages, so let’s take a closer look at these changes and what they mean for your nonprofit.

1. Navigation links (tabs) are now on the left-hand navigation, just like on people’s profiles.

Pages now have the same layout as Profiles. The tabs at the top of Pages are now located in the left-hand sidebar, under the main avatar(image). This is a significant change in the user interface and many brands and businesses are not happy with it.

Essentially, the ability of nonprofits to present clear tabbed options at the top of the page, in line with how websites present navigation, has been replaced with a less prominent listing of page sections in the left column, just below the profile pic.

Tips to maximize the visibility of the left-side navigation, especially if you have Facebook custom tabs:

a) Keep the profile pic to under 200 px in height, so that your navigation isn’t pushed below the fold and is as close to the top of the page as possible.

b) Reorder your sections/tabs in the navigation so the most important are first. You can easily do this using the “More—Edit” feature, then click and drag each section to achieve the desired order.

Note: As before with the top navigation tabs, Wall and Info come first!

c) Keep your navigation concise, including only the essential sections of your page. Tabs that are removed via the new navigation Edit function (click “More” to see “Edit” at the bottom of the navigation) can be restored later with their content intact.

d) Consider incorporating text into your profile pic to highlight “tabs” you don’t want visitors to miss (obviously a trade-off with profile pic height!).

2. Improved Page Management: New Admin View and Wall Filters.

a) “Admin View.” This is a new feature and a convenient way for Admins to manage wall content.

Select “Most Recent” to see all (not filtered by Facebook) non-page posts in reverse chronological order. Select “Hidden Posts” to see posts by users you’ve hidden or posts filtered by EdgeRank. Admins can un-hide hidden posts as well as perform familiar functions such as banning a user or reporting spam.

Things to consider: Users now have more control over what appears in their news feed. They can filter their feed to show “Friends and pages you interact with most” or “All of your friends and pages.” The default setting is the former, and given that default settings usually go unchanged, nonprofits may more frequently be filtered from news feeds when users don’t interact with their posts in their news feed when the user may actually still want to keep up with the brand’s news.

2) Wall Filters.Admins now have two ways of viewing wall posts, accessible via the left-column nav:

If “Wall” (the default) is selected, you can view posts either by “Everyone” or just by the page.

Note that the “Everyone” option is not in chronological order but is presented according to how relevant, shared, interacted with and other criteria (Facebook’s algorithm for assessing post quality is called EdgeRank) the posts are. So a more recent post can easily trail behind a more commented-on post, for example.

3. One-Click Access to Admin Tasks.

One big improvement is providing quick access to several admin tasks, rather than having to go through the “Edit page” link. Let’s explore them:

a) Managing page admins is now accessible via clicking “See all” in the Admins area in the right column.


b) Basic Information can now be edited by clicking the “Edit info” link just below the page name at the top.


c) The “Edit page” link is now a button, located in the top right, just below the “Home—Profile—Account” links.

d) Although it is unlikely that your nonprofit want to change its page category, the new Facebook updates now let Admins change their page’s category by clicking the “Edit info” link under the page name, then selecting the category from the pull-down menu in the edit screen. This is also available by clicking the new “Edit page” button, as shown above.


e) The Fan Count section in the left navigation has been simplified, with the fan pics eliminated and replaced by a simple count.

Clicking “people like this” brings up the familiar pop-up dialog where Admins can remove or ban fans or make them Admins.

f) The “Information” box has been removed entirely, and there’s no longer a place where a brief description of the page can be presented when it loads. Visitors will have to click the “Info” link in the new left-column navigation to access more information about the page.

g) The “[number of] friends like this” section has been moved from the left column to the right column, with smaller thumbnail images but a count of how many of the owner’s friends like the page, as well as some other pages that have liked your page.

h) View Insights and Suggest to Friends have both been removed from the left column to the right column, just below the Admins area.

On my next post, I’ll explore:

1. Login as Page or Profile.
You can now toggle between being logged in as a Profile or logged in as a Page. When logged in as a Page, you can comment and like content on other Pages as a Page. A single username and password is all that’s required for both modes.

2.- The new masthead: How to make the most of this new feature.
Like the redesigned personal profiles, Facebook pages now feature the five most recently added images (Facebook calls this the “Photostrip”) which, when clicked, expand to full size in “lightbox” fashion, keeping users on your page instead of taking them to the photos page.

3. Featuring “Liked Pages” on your Nonprofit Facebook page.
A maximum of five pages can be featured and admins have been given the ability to decide which pages to be shown.

4. The future of custom tabs coded with FBML
Facebook is phasing out FBML and migrating to iFrames. After March 11, 2011, Admins will no longer be able to add the Static FBML application to their pages. We will explore how this affect your custom pages!

Related posts:

1. How to Create a Custom Tab For Your Facebook Page
2. Increasing Online Giving: 10 Tips to Optimize Your Donation Landing Pages
3. Creating an Effective Facebook Profile
4. 5 Must-Have FBML Templates for Your Facebook Page
5. Facebook Friend Invite: The Ultimate Guide

by Andrew Follett
Courtesy of Marketing Profs

Is your current nonprofit’s website delivering results? By results I mean, does your website have a robust online donation interface? a prominent call to action? Are you able to collect email addresses from visitors? Is the information on your site easy to find, up-to-date and shareable on social networking sites? Does your website allows you to collect and track data about your visitors? and does it have an appealing look and feel?

If you answered “no” to two or more of the above questions, maybe it is time for your nonprofit to think about redesigning its website. However, before you go out and hire a Web designer and developer to rebuild the most important tool in your marketing, development and PR vault, make sure you have a well-defined plan for success.

Developing a Website Redesign Plan

Before your nonprofit embarks on a website redesign, be sure to dedicate sufficient time and resources to developing a clear, specific plan. A detailed plan will help keep your project on track, avoiding costly changes and strategy realignments after the new site is live.

Start developing a plan by collecting feedback on your website from visitors and experts.

1. Get feedback from your visitors. Website visitors have a unique perspective on your website, and they can offer valuable insights to help you create a user-friendly experience. Unlike you and your team, visitors are more removed from your website, which allows them to quickly uncover usability issues and points of confusion.

2. Get feedback from professionals. It’s also important to solicit feedback from independent professionals who can offer specific recommendations. Although visitors are good at pointing out problems, most visitors feedback is based on personal preferences and fails to offer solutions. Even your internal team, which may consist of seasoned marketing professionals, may be too close to the project to identify the vital issues related to your website performance.

Experts can help direct your redesign by providing time-tested advice based on Web design, usability, and strategy principles. Though art may be subjective, Web design is not. In Web design, there is a right way and a wrong way to approach layout, navigation, copy, white space, and other critical website components.

Trained professionals can ensure that you have the right plan in place before implementing a redesign, as well as help you avoid a “design by committee” situation within your company.

Once you’ve collected enough visitors and expert feedback on your current website, compile and prioritize a list of recommendations to be included in the redesign specification. Not every suggestion will be appropriate, or even possible, but make sure the critical ones are included.

3. Create a detailed specification document. With the prioritized recommendations in hand, start developing a detailed project-specification document. It should include as much detail as possible, including the proposed site structure, wire-frame sketches, page content (using a cohesive keyword strategy), design preferences (style, color and examples), and any other relevant information.

If your requirement list starts to exceed the original scope, begin breaking the spec into multiple phases. A well-defined spec is integral to an efficient, cost-effective and on-time project. And your Web design and development team will love you for it.

4. Determine measurable objectives. Your nonprofit should agree on clear, measurable objectives before launching a new website. A redesign without measurable impact is ultimately a failure.

Goals should be based on current site performance, using average conversion rates as a benchmark (if you don’t have this kind of data, start using Google Analytics today). Defining objectives also forces you to think critically about the redesign from a business perspective, and how you plan to contribute to the bottom line.

Before embarking on redesigning your current nonprofit website, take a close look at your objectives and don’t start anything without a plan in place.

Related posts:

1. 5 Must-Have Google Tools to Rock Your Website
2. Twitter Tips for Sucessful Nonprofit Fundraising
3. Designing Your Website to Draw in Donors
4. Increasing Online Giving: 10 Tips to Optimize Your Donation Landing Pages
5. 10 Tips to Effective Search Engine Optimization for Nonprofits

By Jay Baer and Amber Naslund*
Courtesy of Smart Brief on Social Media

Sometimes, all does not go according to plan in social media. Will your nonprofit ever see a social media crisis — with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube turning a modern-day mob with torches and pitchforks? Probably not. But maybe you will. And if you do, these are the eight steps to recovering from a social media crisis.

1. Acknowledge the crisis. At the onset of a crisis, when the questions far outnumber the answers, about the best you can do is acknowledge that you are aware of the circumstances. This lets concerned customers and social media onlookers know that you are not asleep at the wheel.

2. Fight social media fire with social media water. In your quest to communicate about the crisis, it is imperative that you do it in the same venue where the tempest brewed. If a crisis breaks out on Twitter, respond first on Twitter. If it breaks on Facebook, respond on Facebook. If the problem is YouTube, your salvation lies there, as well.

3. Be sorry. We may be the most forgiving society ever. For the most part, we’ve forgiven Mike Tyson, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, Tylenol and about 63,157 other transgressors. We’ll forgive Pete Rose. Someday we’ll be okay with Lindsay Lohan. Same thing with Marion Jones and Tiger Woods. But if you make a mistake and want the healing process to happen quickly — if you care about how you’re perceived and want to win back your supporters and fans — it all starts with two little words: “I’m sorry.”

4. Create a FAQ. Create a comprehensive Frequently Asked Questions document as quickly as possible that details the most prominent inquiries about the crisis and your responses. Even if you don’t have answers to every question, create the FAQ and update it in real time as more information becomes available. In the real-time era, supporters are reassured by watching your crisis management unfold minute by minute.

5. Build a pressure-relief valve. An FAQ page without a discussion forum smacks of traditional, dictatorial, unilateral communication that runs contrary to the expectations of today’s constituents and reporters. If your FAQ is located on your blog, open that blog post to comments. Other opportunities for discussion venues include your Facebook fan page (possibly the discussions tab), comments on your YouTube channel, or a dedicated discussion forum.

6. Know when to take it offline. In circumstances where criticism turns ugly, sometimes you can’t win by engaging thoughtfully on a public venue like Twitter or Facebook or on a blog. For people who are too upset to handle via public replies, attempt to engage them offline. Publicly invite them to contact you via telephone, or ask them to provide their telephone number so that you can call them. This demonstrates your willingness to engage — not just to the thorn in your side, but to all viewers — and can, in some circumstances, reduce toxicity immediately.

7. Arm your army. Provide your team with information that’s at least as timely and accurate as the information being provided to the public. That sounds self-evident, but, in practice, crisis scenarios often unfold in such a way that the communication professionals are so busy updating the Facebook page and the FAQ that they overlook keeping all employees in the loop.

8. Learn your lessons. Once the crisis has abated, catch your breath and document the situation. Make copies of all posts to Twitter, Facebook, and your blog; all e-mails received; all YouTube video posted; and so forth — anything related to the situation, both from your team and from customers. This will be useful to help you reconstruct and learn from your response and is also a good policy from a legal perspective. Analyze spikes in traffic to your website, blog, Facebook fan page, and other venues. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

* Authors of the book, “The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter & More Social,” available for pre-order and debuting Feb. 1. Download the first chapter free at Facebook.com/nowrevolution.

Related posts:

1. 10 Must-See YouTube Presentations on Social Media
2. Making Social Media Work for Your Nonprofit
3. 100 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits
4. Tips to Collect and Track Social Media Data to Further Your Cause
5. What’s the Buzz All About? Nonprofits and Social Media

BY MICHELLE DELIO
Credit: Mac | Life Magazine

The last few years haven’t been the happiest time for charities. The still-sullen economy forced foundations to cut back on their big donations, so micro donors—individuals who give small sums as the spirit moves them—are becoming an important source of funding. But barring tragedies like earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis, how can a charity connect with the charitable? Overloaded by requests for our attention, many of us no longer respond to mail or telephone solicitations, and we’re all justifiably suspicious of emailed requests for help.

Enter the do-good app. You choose what causes matter to you, and the app acts as the go-between. Sometimes you simply buy the app, and some of the profits go to the cause. Other apps provide a pipeline for direct donations. Some will educate you—the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Guide, for example, helps you make sustainable seafood choices. Many apps are happy to entertain you, and you may also be asked to perform actions that trigger donations from sponsors.

Earthjustice (earthjustice.org), a nonprofit public-interest law firm, recently papered San Francisco subway stations with posters asking people to fire up Foursquare and “check in at this Earthjustice ad.” The posters addressed timely environmental issues, and corporate donors pledged to give specific amounts for each check-in.

Earthjustice posted these ads in rapid transit stations, where iPhone-toting citizens can check in and help while they wait for the train.

Ray Wan, marketing manager at Earthjustice, says that the goal was to reach 5,000 check-ins, and by the end of October they had exceeded 5,300. Their major donor was willing to match up to $50,000 in donations at $10 per check-in, so Earthjustice got the maximum amount in donations.

“Our campaign was a perfect mixture of the right cause with the right medium and the right timing,” says Wan. “We made sure to highlight issues that our audiences could connect with. We picked an app that was growing immensely popular here in the Bay Area and was easy to use. And our ads went up at the height of the BP oil crisis, when the public’s attention was focused on protecting our environment.”

Then there’s entertainment app company Mobile Deluxe (mobiledeluxe.com), which recently entered the charitable space with Bliss HD+, a game. Up to 50 percent of its $1.99 price is donated to Beautiful Day Foundation, which works to educate young women about breast cancer. Players earn points to win up to five pink ribbon codes, and Mobile Deluxe donates $0.20 for every ribbon code.

Bliss HD+ is a $1.99 universal game that lets you earn money for breast cancer education while playing.

“The more you play, the more we give,” says Kellie Hartwell, senior vice president of marketing. She adds that Mobile Deluxe didn’t set out to make the world’s most innovative game, focusing instead on creating a fun and relaxing experience with a real-life reward for players’ time investment. “It’s not a game for a hardcore gamer, but it’s perfect for folks looking to share the experience and turn their game reviews into potential stories about the game and breast cancer experiences,” says Hartwell.

Pleased with the results of its first mobile campaign, Earthjustice is planning its next project now, and Mobile Deluxe has just released Sudoku Deluxe Green Edition. The proceeds are donated to Trees for the Future, a nonprofit founded in 1989 that helps communities around the world plant trees through seed distribution.

But Hartwell hopes that app programmers will get involved in making games for the smaller, super-effective nonprofits as well as the bigger charitable organizations. “You can make a difference not only for the charity’s cause, but for a budding nonprofit as well,” Hartwell says. Just don’t expect that doing the right thing will always be easy. “There will be cynical people out there that question your motivation,” Hartwell continues.

“Respond to them respectfully and then forget about it. You know you’re doing good, your recipients know it, and that’s all that matters in the end.”

Related posts:

1. Google Apps for Nonprofits
2. Mobile Giving: Meet James Eberhard

by Mark McCallick, CPA.CITP
Founder of NonProfit Connect™

This is the 2nd Blog of the series on configuring QuickBooks for use in a Nonprofit organization. In Quickbooks for Nonprofits: Planning and Implementation, I mentioned that the very first step in configuring Quickbooks is to have an implementation meeting and I recommended using a questionnaire to facilitate the meeting and act as a “centerpiece.” The PDF “QuickBooks Implementation Questionnaire” can be used for this purpose.

Some of the main goals of the implementation meeting are to produce a consensus on the definition of:

1. The Chart of Accounts
2. Funding Sources
3. Programs

Building Your Chart of Accounts

One of the outcomes of the implementation meeting should be a listing of the accounts that your organization will need in order to provide the reporting required by all the users of the Financial Statements. By attending this meeting and participating in it, your Accountant(s) will have a very good idea of the types of accounts they/she/he will need to satisfy the needs of most users.

The implementation meeting should provide an agreement on the names of accounts so that all readers will have a mutual understanding of the terms and types of transactions captured in each account.

So what exactly is a “Chart of Accounts”?

It is a detailed listing of minor categories under the major categories of “Assets, Liabilities, Net Assets, Revenue and Expense.” Think of it as the foundation for a building you are about to construct. The stronger the foundation the stronger the building. The same holds true of the Chart of Accounts. Another way to think of it is as a “filter;” a filter through which information from the “outside” world will enter your accounting system. The manner in which that filter is setup will be the basis for the reports. If the filter is too summarized, the reports will be too summarized. If the filter is too detailed, the reports will be too detailed. So you can see that if we are to “Start with the End in Mind,”  we need to let the reports dictate the construction of the Chart of accounts – not the reverse.

The “FASB,” Your Audit report and Your Tax Return

You would think that if you have defined all accounts in the major categories of “Assets, Liabilities, Net Assets, Revenue and Expense” you would be finished building your chart of accounts. This would have been so if you were working in the “For Profit” sector, but unfortunately many nonprofits (that fall into the category of Voluntary Health and Welfare Organizations) have to make one more distinction in the “Expense” section of their chart of accounts. They need to keep track of the “functional” expenses directly related to:

1. Programs
2. Management and Administration and
3. Fundraising

The reason that many nonprofits must do this is because of “Statement of Accounting Standards # 117- Financial Statements of Not-for-Profit Organizations.” The body of women and men who guide the accounting world (in the U.S.) in matters of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) are known as the Financial Accounting Standards Board and they perform this by issuing “Statements of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS).” One of the requirements of SFAS # 117 is that “voluntary health and welfare organizations provide a statement of functional expenses that reports expenses by both functional and natural classifications.”

The statement of functional expenses is unique to nonprofit organizations and this statement has become extremely important to the taxing authorities (IRS & State tax agencies), funders, philanthropists and sophisticated readers of the Financial Statements of Nonprofit Organizations. This is because the statement of functional expenses hopes to show the amount and percentage of each dollar spent in the three functional expense categories of “Program,” “Management & Administration” and “Fundraising.”

Take a look at your Audit report and your 990 (see Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax Form page 10, part IX) and, if SFAS #117 applies to your organization, you will see the statement of functional expenses.

The logic behind this classification is that the more a nonprofit spends on its’ Programs, the more efficient it is in performing its’ mission. This ratio and the statement of functional expenses has become a barometer for a very important group of readers of the financial statements and as such, we need to reflect this in the chart of accounts of a nonprofit organization to which SFAS # 117 applies (and this is a large group of nonprofit organizations).

So how does a nonprofit organization report expenses by both functional and natural classifications? Is this akin to asking your accountant to “jump and not come down?” Maybe not –because your implementation meeting will provide you with the raw material for your natural classifications and I will suggest two methods that you can employ to use QuickBooks to setup the “functional expense categories.”

The first method I suggest is one I have used at many of my nonprofit clients. I offer this methodology as a suggestion and a guide. I believe that all nonprofits are unique and as such my hope is that you can take the best of this suggestion and use it to create your own unique chart of accounts.

Suggested Method #1

In Quickbooks, create the three functional expenses categories of Program, Management & Administration and Fundraising by creating an expense account for each. These accounts will be “major categories” and you will not post transactions directly to these accounts. Next setup “sub-accounts” underneath each major functional expense category as needed. This may seem redundant in that, as an example, you will have the sub-account “Salaries” under each major functional expense category – but the reality is that you do have salaries in each category (an example of this may be the Executive Director’s salary that may be split between the three major categories).

The best part of this methodology is that you can create a report in QuickBooks that not only shows how you spent in the functional and natural categories but you can modify the report to show the percentages of total expenses related to each functional expense category. This is very important information to many readers of the financial statements. See the short video “Tips for Setting Up and Using Quickbooks” explaining this methodology using a sample nonprofit organization . Also, see the attached sample chart of accounts in Excel™ for an example of using this method.

Suggested Method #2

The second methodology is for you to take a serious look at the “Unified Chart of Accounts (UCOA)” which was created by a number of major nonprofit support organizations including the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS), The California Association of Nonprofits (CAN), CompassPoint Nonprofit Services and The California Society of CPAs. These organizations have other very beneficial information for nonprofit organizations on a number of different topics.

A great resource is the “Unified Chart of Accounts Toolkit.” This tool kit gives you the ability to restore a sample Quickbooks database using your version of QuickBooks (most organizations with at least the 2007 version of QuickBooks should be able to restore and open this sample database). The spreadsheets will also give you a “visual” of the logic in the design of the UCOA. The main difference in the UCOA and the method I use most (See suggested method #1 above) is that while my method creates the major functional expenses directly in the chart of accounts, the UCOA employs the QuickBooks utility of “Classes” to create these functional categories.

In order to get the most out of QuickBooks in your nonprofit, you should combine your chart of accounts with the “Customer/Jobs” and “Classes” utilities found in the software. My next 2 blogs will cover how you can combine those utilities with your chart of accounts to create some very useful reports which can be run by “Funding Source” or by “Program” all within the same Quickbooks setup!

My next Blogs in this series will be:

STEP 3 (Blog 3 of 6 in series): QuickBooks “Customer/Job” utility in a Nonprofit Environment

STEP 4 (Blog 4 of 6 in series): QuickBooks “Classes” utility in a Nonprofit Environment

STEP 5 (Blog 5 of 6 in series): Coding transactions with QuickBooks “Customer/Job” and “Classes” utilities

STEP 6 (Blog 6 of 6 in series): Creating Financial reports in QuickBooks for a Nonprofit Organization

About the Author: Mark McCallick, CPA.CITP has a practice dedicated to nonprofit organizations and small business. He has served nonprofit organizations for over 25 years and is a Certified QuickBooks Pro Advisor. He is also the founder of the website www.nonprofit-connect.com whose mission is to provide nonprofit organizations with a forum to collaborate with one another and share access to resources and best practices in the nonprofit industry. You can contact Mark McCallick at markm@mac-cpa.biz or markm@nonprofit-connect.com.

Related posts:

1. Quickbooks for Nonprofits: Planning and Implementation

On my recent post “100 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits,” I showed you how to help web visitors tweet about your content by adding a Twitter button on your web pages. This post will explore tactic #67: claiming your location on Foursquare to ensure accuracy and maximize exposure. I will then take it a step further by exploring how your nonprofit can use this location-based network to advance its mission.

What is Foursquare?

It is a location-based social networking site, game and city guide. Users are awarded points, “mayorships” and badges for visiting places and checking in via their mobile. In many ways, Foursquare is a game changer for social networking.

While Facebook and Twitter ask for real time updates on what users are doing, Foursquare focuses on where users are hanging out and who’s with them. And while Facebook and Twitter were designed to be accessed via web and only later moved to mobile access, Foursquare is exclusively a mobile application. The biggest difference, however, is that up until now social networks have remained virtual. The physical link between people on social media wasn’t there — until now. Foursquare connects users’ virtual and physical worlds.

Businesses have quickly realized the power of using location-based marketing to engage their mobile customers. Through discounts, specials and rewards, businesses are tapping into new clients and attracting repeat ones. For example, users can become a “mayor” of a venue by visiting the place frequently and get special discounts or giveaways. In essence, people are earning both virtual goods (badges, points, mayorships) and actual discounts or goods from the venues.

In addition, businesses benefit from the power of peer-to peer marketing. When users visit a venue and check in, they can share their physical whereabouts with their networks. As of today, this social networking site has 4 million users and is quickly gaining momentum. Its rate of growth is said to be half a million users per month.

How is Foursquare Relevant to Your Nonprofit?

Nonprofits need to manage their online reputations and engage with tech-savvy supporters to promote their mission on social-media channels. With over 290 million mobile phones users in the United States, Foursquare presents the perfect opportunity to do this.

Joe Waters, Director of Cause Marketing at Boston Medical Center and founder of SelfishGiving, gives us five great pointers on how other nonprofits are using this location-based social network to power social good. ¹

Increase brand presence. The geo-location element is a great way to put your nonprofit on the map.

Manage people within an event. If your supporters are young, they’d probably like to connect with you via social networks. Ask your volunteers to check in on Foursquare when your nonprofit holds an event. Not only will you know where they are, but you could call and text them instructions and questions.

Cause marketing. Recruit a corporate partner to make a donation to your cause every time a user checks in to their store or restaurant. Another option is to reward each user who checks in with a badge (like the American Red Cross).

Event promotion. This is a great marketing tool if you are trying to get corporate sponsors. In a win-win situation, sponsors can promote a nonprofit’s event to shoppers when they check-in. For example, “Join Best Buy employees and customers at the AIDS Walk this Sunday!”

As an added benefit, corporate sponsors have a chance to show customers that they embrace social responsibility.

Fundraising. If your nonprofit is in or near a shopping district, you can recruit a group of stores and restaurants to offer a weekend discount to Foursquare users. The lucky shopper saves 10% when they check in and the store makes a donation to your cause.

3 Things You Can Do Right Away to Get Started

1. Register your nonprofit. First, search to see if your organization already has a venue on Foursquare. If it does, great, but chances are that your organization is not going to come up in search results. If that is the case, you can create a venue by going to http://foursquare.com/add_venue

2. Add ‘Tips.’ The tips and shout-out features let you include interesting details about your cause. Tips act as an information portal for supporters. Check out Best Practices for Tips page.

3. Promote your presence on Foursquare across other social media platforms to reach prospective and existing supporters.

Watch the video below for a 2 minutes introduction of this location-based social network:

Related posts:

1. Are Nonprofit Executives Leveraging the Power of Social Media?
2. The Making of a Strong Nonprofit Brand
3. Beyond the Code: 25 Best Nonprofit Websites
4. Making Social Media Work for Your Nonprofit
5. Changes to Facebook Pages: What Your Nonprofit Needs to Know!

In her presentation, Social Media: Paint by Numbers, Holly Ross, Executive Director of NTEN (The Nonprofit Technology Network) reminds us that we need to look at the “big picture” when it comes to social media. Holly points out that when we paint by the numbers, we focus on painting one square at a time. Yet, we don’t fully understand how all the colors work together to create the bigger picture. It’s the same with social media and your cause.

It is easy to get hyper-focused when we are busy trying to manage our Facebook page, post on Twitter, follow up on LinkedIn, send out our weekly newsletters and update our website. We spend a lot of time working with each individual technology but rarely take the time to understand how these technologies can inform and support the rest of our work. What ends up happening is that your social media activities occur largely outside your organization’s broader communications and fundraising strategies.

In order for us to “see” the bigger picture, we need to find a way for social media, communications and fundraising to work together. If we are successful at achieving this, the potential to further our mission through increased commitments of time, talent and money across a diverse spectrum of constituents is greater. Where do you start? You start by regularly collecting, tracking and analyzing social media data about your supporters.

Social media data can tell us a tremendous amount about our supporters– what interests and engages them and what they need from us. You can discover and track information about who is re-tweeting you on Twitter, liking your stuff on Facebook, commenting on your blogs and donating via these channels. All of these are data points you want to capture — together they provide you with a new kind of database on your supporters, which can help you see a broader, more colorful picture.

Tips to collect and track social media data

Create a customized listening dashboard using iGoogle. Pull in RSS feeds of Twitter mentions, blog searches and specific news. Use this as your homepage for monitoring your online brand and supporter activity.

Source: Convio Social Media Guide

Start small. From Facebook posts and tweets, to actions taken and donations sourced, there are seemingly endless metrics that can be tracked in social media. Rather than trying to measure everything, start small. Begin with measuring your top 8 to 10 metrics.

Source: Convio Social Media Guide

Collect social media profile IDs. Just as you’d collect business cards at an event, ask supporters if you can use social media as a contact point. For example, would they rather receive a message via Facebook or direct mail?

Follow or add to your list of friends key people. Advocates, influencers, bloggers and mainstream media relevant to your cause should be followed. You can then use segmentation tools to create a feed (or list) on Twitter or Facebook to monitor their activity for collaboration opportunities.

Create a regular report to show growth and trends over time. Although there are various applications and tools out there that can automatically generate reports of varying levels for social media metrics and activities, I recommend creating a simple and intuitive report with only the metrics that matter to you.

Convio’s guide, Going Social: Tapping into Social Media for Nonprofit Success, provides a great example of a simple metric dashboard.

Time and again we have heard that targeting and personalizing messages do a better job in retaining and engaging supporters. However, this is hard to do if we don’t have a social media database that we can integrate with our existing fundraising and communications databases. What it all boils down to is that our nonprofits need to start tracking social media interactions.

The challenge collecting more data presents, of course, is that we might end up with multiple, independent databases (clients, emails, donors and social media interactions), aka data silos. Our task is to find a way to get them to talk to each other. What are some ways you have found to integrate social media data into your fundraising and communication databases?

Related posts:

1. 10 Must-See YouTube Presentations on Social Media
2. Are Nonprofit Executives Leveraging the Power of Social Media?
3. Putting Out Social Media Fires: What to Do When a Crisis Breaks
4. What’s the Buzz All About? Nonprofits and Social Media
5. Using Social Media to Connect with Wired Wealthy Donors

I recently read the book The Dragonfly Effect by Jennifer Aaker (@aaker) and Andy Smith (@kabbenbock). The book is packed with case studies from nonprofits and how they are leveraging the power of social media to do something good. From Charity: Water and Alex’s Lemonade to Kiva and Tom’s Shoes, the authors tell the stories of how these organizations are using social technologies to engage and inspire people to participate in movements for change.

It’s true that a dizzying number of people have written about the mechanics of using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. But only a few are writing about how to use social media to do something that really matters. The authors of The Dragonfly Effect fall into the latter category. Like you, I wanted to know more about how nonprofits can harness the power of social media to deliver positive change, so I contacted Jennifer Aaker. She graciously agreed to an interview and now I am passing it along to you.

Design Principles of Engagement

RC: Can you expand a bit more on how to make people connect with a nonprofit’s goals? How do nonprofits engage people through social media so that they really connect with the mission of the organizations?

JA: Chapter 3 of the book explores how to create a personal connection, accessing higher emotions, compassion, empathy and happiness. It’s about empowering the audience to care enough to want to do something themselves…and actually do it. Think of it as forging a connection, deep and real.

The engagement strategy has 4 main components: tell a story, empathize, be authentic and match the media. Let’s explore these four principles with the case study from Charity: Water.

Charity: Water: Using Social Media to Engage Supporters

Scott Harrison was at the top of his world. The New York-based nightclub and fashion promoter, who excelled at bringing models and hedge-fund kings together and selling them $500 bottles of vodka, had money, power, and beautiful girlfriends. Yet his lifestyle brought something else: misery. Harrison felt spiritually bankrupt.

So he walked away and [instead] volunteered for a floating hospital offering free medical care in the world‘s poorest nations. Serving as the ship’s photojournalist, Harrison was quickly immersed in a very different world. Thousands would flock to the ship looking for solutions to debilitating problems—enormous tumors, cleft lips and palates, flesh eaten by bacteria from water-borne diseases. Harrison‘s camera lens brought astonishing poverty and pain into focus, and he began documenting people‘s struggles, and their courage.

After eight months, he moved back to New York—but not to his former life. Aware that many of the diseases and medical problems he witnessed stemmed from inadequate access to clean drinking water, he founded Charity: Water, a nonprofit to bring clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

Harrison launched the organization on his 31st birthday by asking friends to donate $31 instead of giving him a gift. It worked: the birthday generated $15,000 and helped build Charity: Water‘s first few wells in Uganda. In the three years that followed, Harrison‘s simple birthday wish snowballed into donations totaling $13 million, which translated into 1,548 water projects assisting more than 800,000 people.

The reasons for Charity: Water‘s success can be explained through four design principles for generating engagement with your brand through social media. First, tell a story. Find simple, compelling stories to convey critical information. Second, empathize with your audience: let it engage with your brand to learn what’s important to them and how it relates to your campaign. Third, emphasize authenticity. True passion is contagious, and the more authentic you appear, the easier it is for others to connect with you and your cause. Finally, match the media with the message. How and where you say something can be as important as what you say.

Harrison’s personal story—evoking themes of redemption, change, and hope—engaged others on an emotional level. By candidly discussing why and how he started Charity: Water in media interviews and YouTube videos, the thoughtful and accessible thirty-something Harrison helped viewers fall in love with him and his cause by showcasing what was possible.

Charity: Water also found a way to evoke empathy through the use of photographs and videos that revealed the urgency of the water situation in the developing world. Instead of relying on statistics, the organization promoted compelling stories to its audience: the 15-year-old boy in Murinja, Rwanda, who no longer walked five times a day with a 20-pound Jerry Can on his head to get necessary water; a mother in Uganda who now had water to grow vegetables, clean her children‘s uniforms, and bathe; the people of Rio Platano, Honduras, who no longer get sick from contaminated water. The approach forced people to think about what it would be like to live without access to clean water.

Charity: Water’s campaign evoked the third principle of engaging with people—authenticity—through its commitment to transparency. Donors not only understood the history that gave rise to the organization but knew exactly where their money went. Reports and updates on the organization’s website connected them directly to the results of their generosity.

Finally, Charity: Water excelled at matching the media to its message. The group had a staff member dedicated to regularly updating various social media platforms and creating distinctive messages for Twitter and Facebook fan pages. It also relied heavily on video. One of Charity: Water’s most effective video projects involved convincing Terry George, the director of the film Hotel Rwanda, to make a sixty-second public service announcement in which movie star Jennifer Connelly took a forty-pound gasoline can to Central Park, filled it with dirty water from the lagoon, and brought it home to serve to her two children. The producers of American Idol agreed to broadcast the spot during the show, ensuring that more than 25 million viewers saw it.

RC: This is the kind of example that nonprofits need to know about. The nebulous concept of “engagement” is now translated in actionable steps that anyone can do. I particularly like how stories can inspire others. Any closing thoughts on this topic?

JA: Empathize. Listen to others. That allows you to feel what they are feeling, and understand what is meaningful to them. Emotions are contagious. Meaningful purpose garners extraordinary support. The right idea—seated in emotion—grows exponentially. Take how Jessica Jackley, while earning her MBA, raised money online to bootstrap entrepreneurs in the developing world. Now Kiva.org has made over $120M in micro-finance loans with the assistance of individuals who have made loans.

And tell stories. Stories are sticky: they bring facts to life and infuse them with passion. Physiologically, our brains are hardwired for stories to organize and orient information. And psychologically, we need patterns to understand. Stories also increase the chance that your audience will remember your message (humans remember only 1%-10% of what they hear). Salient, meaningful messages, however brief, mobilize communities.

RC: Thanks, Jennifer.

Want to win a copy of The Dragonfly Effect?

I am giving away 1 copy of the book. If you want to win this copy, leave a comment or like this post. The winner will be announced a week from today’s post.

Unlike my other posts, I am featuring a book– a book I encourage you to buy. Why? I learned from Jennifer that the net proceeds of this book are going to seed social good businesses and toward building a bone marrow registry in India. Check out the video below featuring Jennifer (great presentation, as usual) and The Dragonfly Effect website.

And check back soon as I will be sharing more insights from Jennifer Aaker, co-author of The Dragonfly Effect.

Below are other great posts exploring how nonprofit and corporations are using social media tools to increase their brand profile, manage their reputation, empower supporters and connect with new constituents.

1- The Dark Side of Social Networking. Fast Company.
Where did JPMorgan Chase & Company go wrong?

2- The Dragonfly Effect: Win A Copy, Leave A Comment, Swab Your Cheek. Beth Kanter.