Based on your experience, what are the most important “building blocks” of social media fundraising strategy?
“When we began to ramp up our social media efforts, we got a great kick start from Scott Henderson (@Mediasauce) with the Pledge to End Hunger campaign and then from Danny Brown with #12for12k. They were very different approaches to campaigns, but I learned that you really need good relationships to make fundraising work in social media. In both instances, the strength of the networks drove the strength of the fundraising.”
“Based on that, we found the best approach to be focusing on relationships first, build conversations and connect with folks 90% of the time and only ask 10% of the time. Folks tune you out fast if you always have your hand out. So, we provide information about the issue, post news articles to build conversation, and help people understand the scope of the issue. We also help other organizations out as much as possible. There are a lot of great groups making a difference against hunger and doing cool stuff. So we try to help them get their messages out and share ideas and “lessons learned” from our experiences so they don’t have to take the same lumps we did.”
What impact has Twitter and Facebook had on your fundraising?
“We have a wide variety of fundraising platforms to engage our different constituents. They range from individual grassroots fundraising activities to culinary tasting events to engaging the restaurant community. But most of them are either completely offline or have an offline component. We’re finding that social media is allowing us to connect and support these fundraising efforts better than ever.”
“Facebook has been helpful for letting our folks have a “badge” that they’re supporting our mission. This helps get the word out about our organization to new audiences. Our fan page has also become a bit of a bulletin board, where folks can tell us what they’re doing and folks can give them some love for their efforts. We also use the Facebook events quite extensively to help fans find events in their area. But in terms of actually raising dollars, tools such as FB Causes have been nice, but we’re not see much usage by our folks so it hasn’t been a big focus for us.”
“Twitter has been especially important for us in our campaigning. We’ve tried various fundraisers through it, but it’s been more effective for outreach than anything else. Many people we engage with on Twitter have blogs and like talking about our mission. These bloggers have helped us build targeted exposure for our offline events through their blog posts. But to raise funds, we’ve had more success engaging bloggers in using a ChipIn widget on their site to raise funds and have begun to promote that more than Causes.”
How do you stay passionate about Share Our Strength?
“My two personal “hot buttons” are kids and the environment. I’ve been actively involved in both areas for a long time. So helping kids get the food they need is a no-brainer for me. But a big driver for staying energized is that Share Our Strength is very entrepreneurial. There’s a lot of opportunity to experiment and folks are open to creative ideas. So there’s internal support for trying new things, experimenting and finding new ways to get our message out. It is really exciting to have that support and enthusiasm from the top.”
Thanks, Jeff!
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