Will Marlow

Dear universities,

Many of you want to use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to supplement your arsenal of fundraising tools, and that's great.  The challenge is that social media platforms are different from almost all other types of communication tools.  In order to pull value in from social media platforms, you need to push value out to your intended audience.

Here's how you should do it: first, forget about fundraising.  Instead, focus on the students, prospective students and alums who need your help.  Specifically, use Twitter and Facebook to give them information that will help them succeed in their classes, find internships, connect with fellow alums, find jobs, and stay in touch with one another.  Use these platforms to announce the achievements of people in your community.  Use Flickr and YouTube to post videos of homecoming, sports events, reunions, and undergrads having a great time succeeding on campus.  Use social media platforms to make announcements whenever any of your grads are mentioned positively in newspapers or blogs.  Write posts that show how proud you are of your community.

In short, don't focus on using social media platforms to do fundraising.  Instead, focus on using social media platforms to deliver value.  Then, when you are fundraising, point to your social media presence as one of the many ways that you enhance the lives of the alumni without spending money on glossy direct mail.  This will not hurt your fundraising prospects.

Hint: a major reason to go with this strategy is that prospective students, current students, and recent grads are the quickest cohorts to connect with you on social media platforms, but each cohort is generally slower to connect than the last.  This has nothing to do with how web-savvy the users are.  It's simply because prospective students need the most information from you, because they need to decide if your school is the best fit for them; current students are willing to connect with you, because you can deliver them information that will help them succeed while on campus; and recent grads are similarly interested in connecting, because they need your help to find mentors and jobs.  The slowest cohort of all to connect with you on social media?  That would be the donors themselves, who need the least from you.  The way to get them involved is to show them how much value you're delivering to their fellow alums who need help.

Sincerely,
Will Marlow
Internet Advisor, Social Media Strategist and Fundraising Consultant

Did you like reading this blog post?  Sign up to get my new blog posts delivered by email by clicking here.

Will Marlow is a digital strategist/online marketing consultant.  He's the co-creator of  AlumniFidelity, which is a Web 2.0 fundraising platform for colleges, nonprofits and secondary schools.   He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, and Bowling Green State University and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

*I took the photo above on Saturday, August 21, 2010 at an event to help the recently homeless in Fairfax, Virginia, which was put on by FACETS, a great charity where my wife works.

Loading mentions Retweet

A lot of people think that all the different social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc.) are more complicated than they really are.   Every social media platform, however, has one thing in common: they all make publishing possible.  That is the key to the social media revolution.

Loading mentions Retweet

It used to be that a website was like a brick wall.  You would visit the website for your school, or a charity, or a business, and you saw a bunch of information on the webpage that someone from that organization posted, and that was it.  You couldn’t get any further than the brick wall.  (Early on, some websites posted real email addresses and bios of people who you could interact with from the organization, but that is basically like installing peepholes in the brick wall.)

The smartest people who run websites today are tearing down the brick wall completely, and replacing it with glass rotating doors that you can see through and walk through.  How do you do that?

• If you run a theater website and someone buys tickets for one of your shows, you shouldn’t just give them a dead receipt (i.e., a brick wall) you should give them a page that lets them write a short testimonial about how much they are looking forward to the show, and link them to a page where other fans have done the same thing.
• If you run a nonprofit and someone registers to be a volunteer at your next event, let them also signup to recruit two additional volunteers, and don’t force them to do it without help.  Give them tools to send email, import contacts, connect to their Facebook and Twitter account, and let them trigger their own reminders well in advance of the event.
• If someone makes a donation to your school or nonprofit, give them the opportunity to create a personal fundraising page (like the type that AlumniFidelity enables) that allows them to become a fundraiser, and not just a one-time donor. 
• Rather than showing only official photography on your website, make sure that there is a method for submitting photographs that your fans take at events, or launch parties, or from old events that may have taken place years ago.  You should make it easy for anyone to subscribe (and also to unsubscribe) to receive updates when new photos and videos are posted.  

The point is, the next generation of Internet marketing for all organizations is this: when a fan/customer/donor stops engaging with you, it should be because they are satisfied that they have done everything that they want to do with you.  The worst thing you can do is to put up a brick wall that prevents an energetic fan of yours from doing more to carry your goals forward.

Loading mentions Retweet

I was recently talking to a journalist about the following question: should businesses (or schools or nonprofits) care about the quantity of followers they have, or the quality of their followers on social media platforms like Twitter, Buzz, Facebook, and elsewhere?

But the more important question that executives in all industries are struggling with is this: what is the return on investment of social media?  How much should we invest in social media?  How much will we get out of a social media plan?  This high level of uncertainty is at the core of any new social media marketing campaign, just like it's at the core of any new business, or any new product launch. 

So what do you do? You need to begin systematically eliminating uncertainty from your social media plan.  Rather than focusing on the number of followers you have (10? 200? 4,000?) you need to define exactly what you hope to achieve with social media, and then you need to begin achieving those goals.  In other words, if you have 10 followers on Twitter, but you can point to specific positive outcomes that resulted from your Twitter marketing, like sales that are linked to Twitter discount codes, or ticket sales through that channel, or even softer goals like reduced customer service costs or an increased number of positive customer interactions, then you can begin eliminating the uncertainty that's preventing your success with social media.  (And this will allow you to come up with a responsible budget for scaling your social media marketing.)

So the short answer is: quality is king.  There's nothing sillier than someone on Twitter who has 50,000 followers, zero engagement and nothing to show for it.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  He would love to help you market your business on the Internet, boost the fundraising numbers for your school or nonprofit, or sellout your next big event.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Loading mentions Retweet

"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about." - John von Neumann 

When I am coaching clients on blogging and social media strategies, one of the most important themes is discipline.  At the beginning of your plan, you need to formulate a strategy that you have confidence in.  You need to write down the steps you are going to follow to execute your strategy (if you don’t write it down, it won’t happen).  And you need to build in multiple ways to measure success and progress.  (Measuring your success all along the way is crucial, because by measuring your results in the right way you’ll be able to fine tune your plan to achieve better results.

But what about straying from your plan?  As someone who reads Avinash Kaushik regularly, I won’t ever advocate randomly changing your strategy, because that’s a quick way to get lots of information and no insights.  But radically altering something in your plan, like doubling the number of posts you make, or reducing the number of posts by 50%, can teach you things you would never have learned if you had just “stayed the course.”  For example, I have a client who reduced her posts by 50%, then posted a survey, and this allowed her to speak directly to her most loyal, most consistent subscribers.  By reducing her activity, she was able to learn quite a bit about her most loyal subscribers, and this has allowed us to refine her communications strategy in a way that will deliver more value to this core group, and to create more of them in the process.  The von Neumann quote above, courtesy of Ben Horowitz, should never be too far from the mind of anyone who spends time in the social media space.

Loading mentions Retweet

If you manage a social media plan for an organization, one of your most important assets is your personal network.  (Don't think for a second that professional social media managers have a substitute for this.)  One of the reasons that the social media space scares so many people is that in order for you to succeed in social media, you need to be authentic, and that means you need to be able to write almost as fast as people talk.  Between posting content to Facebook, your blog, a Twitter feed, or any other channels you use, and leaving and responding to comments from Fans, you are inevitably going to have typos and mispillings occasionally, as well as ideas that sound good at first, but on later inspection, need to marinate more before you put them out for public consumption.  This is nothing like the old print world.  

Loading mentions Retweet

Google launched Buzz 13 days ago, and after spending some time getting to know it better, I wanted to write a quick introduction for people who are still wondering (a) how it works, (b) how it's different from other social media platforms and (c) why they might want to use it.

In everyone's favorite list format, here are the answers to those questions:

1. Google Buzz works in the following way: you access your Google Buzz account through Gmail, and the service allows you to post "updates" which have no character limitation.  Your posts can include rich media like pictures and videos.  Gmail has over 200 million users, which means that the scope of Google Buzz is huge, because each Gmail user was given a default Buzz account along with followers from among their email contacts.  As you post updates, the people in your Buzz network can leave comments, register a "like," or send you a message.

2. Unlike Twitter, which has one feed that shows everything you say (whether you're writing your own original post, or commenting about someone else's post), Google Buzz let's you comment on someone else's feed without using your own feed to do it.  This means you can have conversations with thousands of people, while only updating your own feed at your own pace.

3. Unlike Twitter, there are no follow limits on Google Buzz.  This means you can follow thousands of people, and potentially earn lots of follow backs.  Buzz can get away with this for two reasons: (1) 13 days is not long enough for spammers to flood the system with noise, and (2) it is not yet open to third party apps the way Twitter is, so every time someone follows someone else on Buzz, they physically need to follow them.  This places a natural limitation on the amount of following that can be done, which itself is a protection against spam that doesn't exist on Twitter.

4. On the same topic of follower numbers, unlike Twitter (or Posterous), you don't need to display the names of the people who are following you OR the number of people who you are being followed by and are following.

5. If you comment on someone else's Buzz update, you'll start getting updates in your inbox when other people comment on that thread.  This is jarring at first.  It makes it look like you actually have email in your inbox.  However, it appears that Google simply wants to bring these updates to your attention separately from all the other Buzz noise, because if you've commented on it you've highlighted its importance.  This feature will definitely annoy some people, and I wouldn't be surprised if Google introduces filtering options.  Many people consider their inboxes to be sacred and don't want non-email to fill it up.  However, this aspect of Buzz underscores the fact that Buzz is really an "email-based" social media tool, which is where it derives a lot of its uniqueness.  Even if the hype that is surrounding Buzz right now dies away, it may have strong staying power due to its email roots.

6. So how is Google Buzz the same as Twitter and Facebook?  All three platforms occupy the same category: they are all outposts (to borrow Chris Brogan's term).  This means that Buzz is a great place to meet new people, have new conversations, and to develop a new traffic stream to your primary web base, which should be a blog or a website that you use to deliver real value and host your most important work.

7. So why would you want to use Google Buzz?  If you are interested in truly interacting with people, the features on Buzz are creating lots of rich interactions.  I have over 8,000 followers on Twitter, and far fewer followers on Buzz, but I can already see that my Buzz posts are generating as much or more engagement than my Twitter posts.  It is important to avoid fake success metrics like follower counts and fan lists when measuring success in online media.  It's much better to look at the number of comments, clickthrough numbers, re-posts, "favorites," "likes," and links.  These measures are much harder to fake, and right now the features on Buzz (and its early adopter user-base) have made for the most engaged/engaging platform around.

8. The final point I'd make about Buzz is that if you divide the world between Twitter and Facebook, you'd see Twitter as the best tool for "pushing" information to lots of people, and you'd see Facebook as the best tool for "pulling" information in from the people you choose to connect with.  In my opinion, the strength of Google Buzz is much more in its ability to let you "push" information out than pull it in, which makes it more of a threat to Twitter.  But it took more than 13 days to build Google Buzz, and it'll take longer than 13 days to reach a final verdict on where the platform is headed.  I hope this was a useful early analysis for you.

Did you like reading this blog post?  Sign up to get my new blog posts delivered by email by clicking here. 

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Read more about Will Marlow here, or email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Loading mentions Retweet

The Executive Director of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, Steve Loflin (@sloflin) invited me to Boston to make a short presentation about online fundraising at the Annual Meeting of Collegiate Honor Societies.  I'm making the presentation today at 3:00, and I wanted to share some of my notes below.

Intro to online fundraising 

• Fundraising is about two things: (1) relationships and (2) storytelling.  For all 35 of my clients, no one ever gets a donation unless there is a relationship between the donor and the place they are making a gift.  In recent years, there's been a trend that has reshaped fundraising in some incredible ways.  A second type of relationship has started mattering more than ever.  That's the relationship between a donor and her friend.  Using any number of online tools, after someone makes a donation, they can now alert large numbers of friends and in some cases they can even solicit them on behalf of the organization to match their gift.  This phenomenon is changing the way schools, nonprofits, and political organizations are allocating their resources.
• No longer do you want to spend close to 100% of your resources on soliciting new donors and cultivating current donors.  Instead of that, organizations are spending more and more resources on enabling their current donors to tell their friends and family about their own donations.  What’s the ROI on this type of activity?
• Traditional "new donor acquisition" methods tend to net a ".03%" conversion rate of prospect to donor.  We see friend-to-friend techniques netting a conversion rate of about 30%.  That means that by some important measurements friend-to-friend fundraising is 100x more effective at new donor acquisition than traditional fundraising.

The long history of friend-to-friend fundraising

• People have always known that friend-to-friend fundraising is the most effective way to raise money, but until five or six years ago, it was too expensive to do on a large scale.
• Previously, "friend-to-friend" fundraising was limited to large donors who give $25,000 or more.  It was cost-effective to organize those large donors to ask their friends to match the gifts. 
• Additionally, on a smaller scale, many organizations have a history of distributing pre-stamped stationary and pens to encourage current donors to contact their friends.  Problem with this was that if the materials went unused, the organization operates at a loss. 

• Online fundraising pages.  This is a very simple concept where you take all of the friend-to-friend communication and you put it online on a single personal fundraising page.  
• Eliminate production costs and greatly reduce the resources required to communicate with the volunteers = a very compelling return on investment.
• Add in non-fundraising communication platforms like Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter to supplement tools that are geared specifically for fundraising.  This ensures that the focus stays on fundraising even as activity migrates to large social networks.  

Loading mentions Retweet