The Facebook app will now have an explore feed and a news feed. News will be limited largely to actual friends and paid advertisements. The explore feed will the Facebook ghetto, where your Giving Tuesday post will go to languish unless you pay them to promote it.

You may recognize this business model from this (explicit and NSFW) scene from GoodFellas. And you can get some details about the changes here.

But, you say, I already knew Facebook’s organic reach was poor from when they changed it before several times. How much worse can it get?

Well, they pilot tested this program in Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Serbia, Bolivia, Guatemala and Cambodia. There’s a great article called “Biggest drop in Facebook organic reach we have ever seen” that details it; I’ll just give you one picture from the article:

I’m no expert, but it looks like the bars on the left are much happier bars than the bars on the right.

In the Inc article and this one from Campaigns and Elections, there are a lot of good tips for how to deal with this inside Facebook.

What I’d like to talk about is how to survive this outside of Facebook. Let’s say you want to paint a mural that supports your fan theory that Jar Jar Binks is the Big Bad in the entire Star Wars universe.

Truth! It’s time to get woke, sheeple.

You put a lot of time and energy redoing an entire wall of your apartment in His Immortal Darkness’s likeness. Then you market it. Pretty soon, Darth Jar Jar has a following – you can even charge some people to see it.

But it’s on your apartment’s wall. That means it isn’t your painting. Your landlord can paint over it. She can restrict people from seeing it. She can take your revenue from people seeing Sith Binks. She can put ads around the shrine. She can kick you out. And if you change apartments, it’s hers, not yours.

Facebook is your landlord. That’s not to say they are good or bad. It just means that your Facebook followers are as much yours as your apartment or your homage to the Gungan who would be Emperor. Which is to say, barely.

As the Vital Signs report reminded us last week, donors are vital to our nonprofits.  In fact, they are even more vital to us than we are to our donors. So it is incumbent upon us to own that relationship. That means using social media to drive people to our sites and getting them to opt-in to communications that we control.

And owning the relationship also means owning the information about the donor. Social media organizations will try to give you all the tools you want within their walled garden. You want to set up donations through Facebook? Great! We at Facebook will make that very easy, but we’ll keep the information, because we can resell that info. You want people to advertise that they donated to you? Great! We’ll make that easy, because it’s content we can sell and user interactions we can monetize.

When you have people opting in and when you have an active listening program, then – and only then – you are painting on your own walls. Social media will then have its purpose – to have discussions about your issues and content and to provide you with a means to get people into your movement. Now you’ve created your own communication, your own audience, your own following. And the more you interact with and learn about your donors, the deeper your relationship can go.