NASAA+PIO+Questions


 * Getting Started**


 * What is the best way to get going with SM?
 * What are the best practices in using SM?

See: Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly Maturity of Practice Model for Networked Nonprofits

If you are in the "crawl" stage, the best way to get started is to look for pilots or small campaigns where you can integrate social as a channel to reach a specific target audience for a specific objective. Don't try to do too many channels or activities and focus on learning and integrating social media into the work flow. Use the POST framework or another integrated social media framework to structure your thinking.. Many organizations get started with Facebook or Twitter because they are the most common social channels. If you're trying to reach nonprofit arts organizations, Facebook might be a great place to start. Do a scan and locate all the nonprofit arts organizations in your state that have a presence. Get your presence set up. Here's a good check list.


 * Strategy and Measurement **
 * How do you plan your campaigns and analyze your data to determine success?
 * How can I bring my agency's social media presence to the next level? How can we integrate multiple forms of social media engagement with a very limited staff?
 * What are common goals and strategies for measuring social media?
 * What does success look like for an SAA in the social media sphere? I'm supporting and advocating for a sector, not selling tickets or tracking 'conversions' per se. We could do so much more in these channels, but am not sure what niche/direction/focus is the right one for us.
 * I want to know how to track successes on social media; how to more effectively integrate social media with other communication strategies.
 * What are some good goal setting and metrics tracking tools?

In my book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, you will find the 7 Steps of Measurement framework for thinking through what success means and how social media plays a part. Here's an overview of some common goals and strategies for measuring social media for variety of nonprofits. The question, "What does success look like for a SAA?" -- that depends on your mission and goals. Social media should help support those goals. Success is not just counting the number of fans or followers. You need to have a strategy session with your team and ask that question. Here's an example from the ACLU-NJ. Then once you agree on the result and definition of success, you need to identify the one metric that matters.


 * Institutional Support/Policy**
 * We could use template social media policy, staff social media conduct policy and board social media conduct policy examples.

Here's my curated collection of examples, tips, and tools for creating a social media policy. If you want to leverage staff as champions for your social media policy, you need to have dos/don'ts for staff in your policy. Some useful tools to check out that can help you: The social media policy tool will help with our first draft. The social media policy workbook is useful to guide your staff to develop customized policies. Bolder advocacy also has useful resources for nonprofits and don't forget your agency's legal counsel can be an excellent resource.


 * Management**
 * What is the best social media management app/platform?
 * How can we get the content experts in our agency to contribute to our blog and post to social media?

There are a number of social media management apps/platforms that are low cost including HootSuite, Buffer, and SproutSocial. The best feature is the ability to schedule your posts and most have some metrics integration. Here's a way to think about your work flow so you are efficient.


 * Engagement **
 * What does true "engagement" look like and how can it be achieved? I think engagement needs a hire purpose. How do you connect engagement activities with a result and measure along the way. Here's some of my best thinking on these topics. "Engagement with A Higher Purpose" and Tactics for Engagement


 * Content**
 * Making decisions about what our content should be, who should be directing and sending out the messages, and how to determine what "fills air" versus what is valuable to our constituents.


 * Channels**
 * How important is it to be using Pinterest? If your audience is on Pinterest, it is very important! Here's a quick summary of user demographics and interest areas on Pinteret (and compared to other social channels). You might want to do some research of your audience to see if they use Pinterest, if so, come up with a simple pilot to test out a hypothesis. Here's a collection of best practices articles
 * We're on Facebook and Twitter. What's the next social media channel we should consider using? That depends on your audience and objectives!
 * What's the best free or low-cost way to monitor mentions of our agency in social media? 10 Low Cost Monitoring Tools for Social Media
 * How do we get Facebook to quit messing with whose feed they show? If I had an answer to that question, I'd be rich. For now, here's an informative article about the newsfeed algorithm and how it works. What I'd do is start tracking and monitoring your content on Facebook and understand what resonates with your audience. Next, you might want to consider Facebook advertising and promoted posts.
 * From research I've seen, it appears Facebook continues to far and away out-pace other social media in terms of number of users. Should that be the focus of marketing efforts, or should we continue to push messages through Twitter? It goes back to your goals and the audience you want to reach. Facebook is great for reaching many audiences, especially nonprofits arts organizations and arts supporters. Twitter is a good for targeting influencers, journalists, and policy makers.
 * We are currently trying to define the specific purposes for each of our platforms we are using (FB, Twitter, Instragram, etc) We have a good grasp on our audiences, but we definitely want to make sure we are not repeating information across platforms. I think we are getting close though. Don't worry about repeating your content, think about optimizing it for the channel. Here's an example.