Many thanks to Volunteer Fairfax and Exxon Mobile for inviting me to speak with the participants in this year’s Community Summer Jobs Program. I’m looking forward to meeting everyone and enjoying a great discussion!
Building an online community is a fun and dynamic way to connect with your audience. While community building seems like an easy thing to do, a solid plan will ensure that you (and your internal stakeholders) understand who you are trying to reach and why. When we launched our social media plan for GoodDogz.org, we had many audiences to address – animal rescue volunteers, dog owners, dog adopters, pet professionals, donors – how would we engage them all? With some research and a lot of “listening“, we realized that each group was communicating in a different part of the social media space and we engaged them on their turf.
We set-up a growing animal welfare professional networking community within a LinkedIn group. Yahoo Groups provided a perfect forum for rescue volunteers to tell other organizations about dogs in need. Our NING community provided a full community where dog owners and potential adopters can connect with each other and we can connect with them. Through VolunteerMatch, we’ve successfully recruited a myriad of volunteers. We use tools like Facebook and Twitter to help promote events and initiatives. And while our community is growing, we have been less successful had we not taken the time to understand what we were trying to accomplish.
The formula for creating a plan is pretty simple and is reminiscent reporting for my school newspaper.
Who? Who is your audience? Donors? Board members? Volunteers? Employees?
What? What are they talking about? Are they trying to raise awareness? Are they concerned about a news item or political initiative?
When? Are they engaging during the workday? On the weekends?
Where? Where are they carrying on their conversations? Facebook? Twitter? Blogs?
Why? (Goals) Why do you want to get engage your audience? For donations? To raise awareness about a particular issue? To recruit volunteers?
How? (Tactics) How are you going to be part of the conversation? How will you gauge success?
Once you’ve established answers to the questions above and feel good about your plan, you can start setting up your community and promoting it. As long as you engage your members and nurture the community, it will give back to you ten-fold.
Here are a few additional resources to help you get your head around community building:
- Need a Community Platform for Your Nonprofit? NING is Your Answer.
- Why Non-Profits Are So Good as Social Media
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that I’ve really liked reading your blog posts. In any case
I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you post again soon!