Tools and Apps to Energize Your Base

Want to build a powerful movement online? You need two key ingredients – people and tools to connect and engage with them. From “texting” to location based apps like FourSquare this panel will give you the nuts and bolts of the latest apps and tools organizations can use to effectively moblize and energize people online.

SLIDES

NOTES

My slides covered the tools and apps for the back stage side of energizing your community.  Having tools in place to help you monitor, measure, and evaluate your work in real time will help you be more successful with your campaign, better engage with the community, and make more lasting change in the long run.  Since my slides are mostly screen shots, I’ve shared a bit of context below.

Google Analytics – http://www.google.com/analytics/
Whether you have a blog, website, or even multiple, you can use Google Analytics to really drill down into the data and understand how people are visiting and using your site.  Some things I recommend watching for:

• Don’t only pay attention to what people are doing on your site, but watch where traffic is coming from! Whether you are running a campaign, trying out a new social media platform or anything else, monitoring which places are sending in the most traffic can help you focus attention to the best places.
• Use different links on different sites to see what really gets people clicking through.
• Watch for long-term trends, not just what is popular that week or month. For example, if your home page and contribute pages are the highest visited pages consistently, and then one month there is another page that makes it to the top above those, you know something interesting is going on.
• Tip: You can also get Google Analytics for your Facebook Page!

Facebook Insights
These analytics are part of having a Facebook Page. While they aren’t the most comprehensive of reports, there is no point in ignoring free metrics! Pay attention to the “change” in weekly numbers and measure it against activities or messages you were pushing that week.

URL Shorteners – http://bit.ly
There are various URL shorteners out there, but Bitly is one of the most commonly used (I use it!). There are stats built into the tool for the number of clicks and so on, but if you are measuring site traffic already it shouldn’t be new that regard.  What is actually of interest is:

• Who is doing the clicking? Check out who is actually clicking on the links you share to identify passionate and interested people who you could engage on a deeper level (invite them to help share your message in other ways and so on).
• Create easy to reuse links. This is great for use in your Twitter messages but also in emails or even text messages.  Plus, remember to make them something that even your followers/supporters will remember and can reuse!
• Don’t just look at how many clicks you get, but pay attention to when people are clicking. Your interested followers may actually be checking twitter during their lunch break, or in the evening, and not when you’re at work at posting!

Nutshell Mail – http://nutshellmail.com/
Do you prefer getting your infomration in email? If you do, check out Nutshell Mail for reports on your various social media presences.

Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts
Google Alerts is one of my absolute favorite tools. It’s free, you can set up as many of them as you like, and you can choose to get roundups or individual alerts as well as subscribe via email or RSS. Here are a few ways you can take advantage of Google Alerts:

• Be sure to set up alerts for your organization name, project or program names, and key staff people (any one that may be quoted or referenced in association with your work).
• Subscribe via RSS in a reader to cut down on emails.
• Prefer email but want to be sure multiple people on staff get updates? Subscribe with an email address like comms@ or another address that forwards to or can be accessed by multiple staff members.

Listening Dashboards
I recommend using a tool like Netvibes because it allows you to have a public and/or private dashboard, and is easy to use and customize. Dashboards or RSS Readers rely heavily on RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. If you are new to RSS, here’s a great video to explain it! You can see an example of a dashboard by visiting my public Nonprofit Tech Dashboard. I’ve also set up a step-by-step guide to creating your own dashboard.

Community Mapping
Community Mapping helps you identify not just the various segments of your audience, but also create a clear picture of which tools/platforms are associated with those groups and which messages are best to target where.  To get started, first brainstorm and identify the various groups or segments of your community.  This may be other organizations/partners, donors, volunteers, fundraisers, event attendees, etc.  Then, for each group, create a chart with 4 columns and identify:

1. Their goal: why do they engage with you
2. Your goal: why do you engage with them
3. Tools: which platforms and tools do they commonly use for online engagement (don’t forget to include your website if they are visitors/donors/engaged there)
4. Action: The action or connection that ties it together

There may be just 1 item, or goal, that is listed or there may be 50! Some groups have many different reasons or pieces of communication that they want to share with you and you to them, and some may be very simple and straightforward.

At the end of the mapping exercise, you can write an overall goal, like connecting offline, or fundraising, or maybe advocating on important issues, and the main platforms where it takes place. You now have a deep understanding and chart of the kinds of engagement for all your community groups, but you always have very high level information you can easily share with your director or other key staff that identifies a group with the core goal for engagement and platform/s where it takes place.

QUESTIONS

After three presentations in such a short amount of time there was going to certainly be questions. We tried to address many on the webinar, but I have no doubt there are more out there. Here are a few questions that were asked during the session and answered via chat:

Was mGive included in the mobile report from M+R?
Yes, there are a couple case studies included in the report of organizations using mGive.

What is the cost of adding text messaging?
Prices vary by platform/provider and what you are trying to do. There are even free options but they include advertising and possible other limitations.  The best place to look for information on prices and options and even case studies is MobileActive.

How do you find time for so many tools?
Most tools allow you the option to cross post to other social media platforms – this can help save time so that you can post a message in one place and have it pushed across the web!

What about risk management issues around geo-social tools?
The best practice with geo-social tools is to practice “checking-out” and not “checking-in” which means to tag yourself at a location as you are leaving, and not necessarily when you show up.

How do you set up an unconference?
Here are two great resources to get you started: unconference and open space technology.

How do you find a developer to build an app?
A great place to start is MobileActive!

How do you know an “influencer?”
In my opinion, an influencer isn’t just someone with a lot of followers but is someone that is passionate and dedicated to making an influence. It can be much more helpful to have someone advocating on your behalf that is willing to ultimately show up at your event or bring others into your work than someone who tweets your message once and is otherwise never connected.

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Have any other questions or tips you want to add? Would love to hear about your favorite highlights from other WWT sessions as well!

Thanks again to Allyson Kapin and the Women Who Tech team, as well as all those at NTEN who made the webinars happen!

Twitter

Mr. Tweet
Want to find new followers and receive useful statistics to improve your Twitter usage? Well, that’s what Mr. Tweet was designed to do!  It’s easy to use: all you have to do is follow the Mr. Tweet twitter account and messages will be sent to you via DM.  Try it out yourself!

Twitter Karma
If you have been using Twitter for a bit of time now, you’ve probably come to the same realization that many others have—that it sure would be nice to be able to see your follows and those that follow you in any way that lets you really understand and visualize the network.  Twitter Karma is a great tool to use if you want to inventory your Twitter community, clean up any nonreciprocal followers, or simply evaluate your lists.  You can sort by users’ follower counts, mutual friends, and so forth.  Give it a try!

Facebook

Groups & Pages
Do you have a group or use a fan page to create a community space for your organization on Facebook?  There have been quite a few changes to Facebook over the last few months (hey, even days!), so it’s a good idea to log in and see if you are using the applications as best as you can be.  Here are a few things to consider:

• are you listing organization or sector-related events within the group or fan page?
• are you keeping the recent news, discussions, and links sections up to date? (an easy way to approach this is by updating information in the group/fan page every time you send out an enewsletter or action alert)
• do you link to your group/fan page from your website?

Causes
Facebook Causes offers a few different ways for individuals to show their affinity for nonprofits, fundraise for them, and spread the word about the work they do.  These are people who may not be on your newsletter or in your Facebook group, they may not follow you on Twitter or even be in your database, but they like what you are doing and want to show it to their friends.  If you work for the Red Cross, as an example, you can search in Causes for “red cross” and find groups that are focused on the Red Cross but also those focused on specific disaster relief efforts and international projects.  Searching for “blood” lets you find groups working on blood donation efforts and local programs – could be great, connected, passionate advocates to connect with!

Listening

Google Alerts
Spring cleaning definitely applies to your Google Alerts!  Have your key public-facing staff members changed?  Do you have any new partners or programs?  What about legislative or policy concerns?  Be sure to update your Google Alerts to include:

• the names of staff members who may be in the news or lead your programs (like your Executive Director, Communications Director, Fundraising/Development Director, any program-related staff, and so forth)
• the names of your organization and programs/projects
• the titles of bills, policies or other political items affecting your organization
• the key words for your sector (like “blood drive” and “disaster relief” if you are the Red Cross)

Delicious / Bookmarks
Check in on your tags and see if there isn’t any cleaning you can do!  If you use Delicious, the social bookmarking tool, you can view all of your tags and how many items have been bookmarked to each of them.  Some of the most common issues that people like to periodically clean up include:

• pluralizations (tag for “blooddrive” and “blooddrives”)
• dashes (tags for “blooddrive” and “blood-drive”)
• numbers (tags for “district10” and “districtten”)
• names (tags for “amy-speaking” and “asw-speaking”)

Communities

Social Actions
Social Actions is an aggregator of 50+ social action-related sources across the web.  Much like searching on Facebook Causes to find groups who are interested in your work, searching on Social Actions can help you find indivudals and passionate communities working on similar issues around the world.  You can use the advanced search to find specific actions (like petitions) or key words.  Happy searching!

Ning
Ning is a platform that allows individuals or organizations to create branded social networks.  As part of your Spring Cleaning, visit Ning.com and search for your organization’s area of interest—you may be surprised to find communities taking shape without you!  If it is an open network, go ahead and join and see if you can contirbute to the conversation and information exchange.

That’s just to get you started; there’s always so much more you can do with all the options and tools out there.  Have you already started your Spring Cleaning?  What tips or tricks do you have that you can share?  We’d love to hear them!

photo by Collin Anderson