Search Marketing Sage

On Wednesday, I was “arrested” and taken to “jail”. As part of the MDA’s Lockup fundraiser, I was asked to raise “bail”, or funds for MDA support and research. While many of the participants relied on the good old-fashioned telephone calls to their networks to raise funds, I thought I’d give social media a try to see how effectively non-profits might use social media for real-time fundraising. While this research was far from scientific, I think it does reveal some interesting (perhaps predictable) outcomes for using social media with real-time fundraising events.

The Results

Compared with my fellow “jailbirds”, I found that real-time fundraising via social media was just as effective for me as telephone calls were for my colleagues. I was “locked up” for about two hours, and during that time, I exclusively used Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter for my fundraising efforts.

In the end, I raised comparable funds to my fellow fundraisers in the same time period.

Today I’m being arrested. That’s right, arrested — for the Muscular Distrophy Association (MDA). Our local chapter is holding an MDA “Lock-Up” — an event where local business leaders get “locked up” for a period of time to raise “bail” money (aka donations for the MDA).

After MDA asked me to participate, I decided it might be a great chance to experiment on how social media can help non-profits raise donations in real-time.

So today, I’ll be asking for donations to “bail” me out of the MDA jail. Look for updates on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media platforms. Then tomorrow, we’ll see just how successful we were via different mediums and at different times.

And if you’d like to donate to the MDA, remember that every little bit helps. You can reach my donation page online at: https://www.joinmda.org/charlottesville10/jmiller

To start off the morning, top-ranked Changeblogger, Beth Kanter, discussed social causes and how social media can be used to promote them. She provided four suggestions in opening up non-profits, specifically to social media, however the same suggestions could be used for businesses.  First, work in a networked way to connect those you around you to others with similar interests. If you think about connecting, when something acute happens, you’ll be able to take action.  This type of networking assists with movement building.

The art of network weaving, meaning, people who intentionally weave new and richer connections among groups and networks, will induce innovation and the spread of ideas. The next tip was transparency, and although, we can’t be fully transparent all the time, you can work on it and gradually become more open.  Also, creating a social culture within the organization needs open leadership.  Leaders of the movement will hopefully at least be comfortable with their discomfort.  Everyone involved needs to be aware that thing to change in order to create a social culture.  Some common fears like’ if we enable staffers to write something and could get sued’ or ‘employees will spend too much time on Facebook etc.’ or ‘it might hurt our brand’ need to be dismissed.  What needs to be learned is trustbuilding, and enabling your employees to learn what is private and what isn’t and do their jobs.

Next up, Twitterville Author Shel Israel discusses the new book, and also gave some in the future.

Tools change but people remain the same.

One of his first eye-opening instances with Twitter was when he was able to meet up with a friend, who by coincidence was in the same city as him.

It’s true!  Google has given over 4,000 non-profit organizations Google Grants to allow them to spread their message across the web.  Just fill out an application, send it to Google, and the money is yours!  It seems easy, right?  Well for those of us in the Pay Per Click (PPC) management industry it is that easy.  However, for the average non-profit staff member, I imagine that PPC marketing is probably like a foreign language and that’s OK.

Google Grants are terrific and can range from $10,000 per month all the way up to $40,000 per month.  For all that free advertising, Google understandably has a few guidelines.  One of the most obvious requirements is that your non-profit have a dedicate individual to actively manage the Google Grant which may mean: