5 “Must-Follow” Nonprofits
As part of its annual awards program, Mashable includes a category on “Must-follow Nonprofits” … in this case five nonprofits who are making a difference via social media.
The nominees are (read the Mashable blurbs here):
Do you have a nominee that tops these?
Of course, it’s all well and good to have social net applications and tactics that look cool, but are they worth it?
Here, Jamie Turner at BKV Digital and Direct Response suggests an approach to measuring return on investment for social media efforts.
Effectively, what Jamie is saying is that it’s all relative. If you know that spending $1,000 on, say, direct mail typically yields your organization #Y donors whose lifetime value is $Z, you have at least a benchmark ROI to shoot for. So if you spend the same $1,000 on social media, do the leads you generate convert to donors who stack up favorably against that benchmark?
That’s a hardball direct response metric. And I know many social media enthusiasts will balk at that approach, saying social media is about “building relationships” which then somehow, someday yield monetary benefit down the line. That’s OK … to a point. But if your job is fundraising, at some point there needs to be a day of reckoning!
By comparison, how many direct mail letters would you send me, with no response, before you concluded I (or the list I was on) wasn’t worth the investment (not many, too expensive)? How many email appeals (probably more, much cheaper than mail)? How long would you keep adding non-performers like me to your organization’s “Friend” list (probably forever, if you never get around to calculating and allocating the costs of devising your social net presence, maintaining it, and accurately tracking actual conversions to giving).
With social media, it’s tempting to “re-define” and soften the objectives of your spending!
But in fundraising, there are friends in name, and there are friends in deed!
Tom
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