Creating Social Buzz
Creating social buzz inspires support for your charity.
One of the best ways to inspire support for your charity is to create a widespread social frenzy about your charity. In marketing, that frenzy is called buzz. You create it by giving people a reason to want to talk about your charity. A well-designed plan of execution can make that happen.
It’s important to remember not everyone is going to be as excited about your charity as you are. In fact, being realistic, you should assume that most people won’t be, no matter how hard you work to prove that your charity is doing good things. That might be disheartening to you, or you could use it to your advantage.
While developing your marketing plan, think of the most economical ways you can raise awareness for your charity. Incorporate those as a top priority in your marketing plan. Raising money is always secondary to awareness and will often times fall hand-in-hand with raising awareness. The more awareness your charity has, the more money you’ll probably have. Therefore, raising awareness is the single most important thing you can do and you should never stop doing it. As a person who is very passionate about your charity, you already have all the right tools to make that happen.
SKIP occasionally struggled with understanding a small financial loss isn’t always a loss when it comes to marketing. For instance, if we were to pay $50 to participate at an event and only $40 was raised in small donations at that event, it’s easy to think the event was a a waste of time and money. On the other hand, if during the event we introduced 100 people to SKIP and they each took a brochure, we at least made a few friends that day. That’s not a loss. That’s called building relationships, which create buzz, which ultimately drive donations.
There are many different ways you can create buzz. Probably the most successful for SKIP has been the instructions for completing the US Customs Form. That article has been the most popular page on the SKIP website ever since it was published. When we changed the URL format a few weeks ago, the ShareThis stats were reset to 0 and already it’s back to being more than 200 shares and has over 80 comments. I also get a lot of email because of that article asking for help with specific addresses. The social buzz that article has created is astonishing and it didn’t cost anything but a few hours of my time. In fact, that article is the reason these articles are being written. People like having knowledgeable resources and we feel we have a lot to offer.
Maybe writing how-to articles isn’t your thing. That’s okay. There are other ways to build relationships and create buzz. For example, giveaways can be expensive, but don’t underestimate their power.
About a year ago I was working on a project dedicated to promoting the charities that support our troops. Traffic to the website and on Facebook was stagnant and despite several attempts to really get things moving it wasn’t until I decided to pull money from my own pocket to encourage people to visit that things took off. What I decided to do was quite simple. Already very successful on Twitter I wanted to boost the project’s Facebook page. I would donate $1 for each new Facebook like to a charity of the people’s choice, setting a limit of $100. I took charity nominations on Facebook for 24 hours from people who already liked the page. Then, told all of the Twitter followers about the plan and monitored Facebook for 6 hours, keeping track of new likes. The end result was amazing. I was able to quadruple the number of Facebook likes in 6 hours and the winning charity was picked at random from those nominated. Building those relationships also helped push website traffic upward.
To do something similar for your charity, instead of donating to a random charity you could select a winner from the new likes on Facebook and give them a t-shirt or another mid-priced item from your fundraising inventory. Or you could push for a specific number of new likes by giving away multiple items to the first X-number of people who like your page.
Six Tips For Utilizing Social Media
- Set aside four 15-minute blocks throughout the day for each social networking platform you’re on.
- Share news related to your charity’s mission, not just about your charity.
- Ask questions that will help your charity learn and grow.
- Accurately answer questions as quickly as possible.
- Form relationships with the people who like, follow or otherwise befriend your charity.
- Be transparent. It’s what you try to hide that will turn people away.
Notice, those six tips didn’t mention advertising. That’s because advertising is a major downfall for a lot of charities and businesses alike. Social media should not be used solely as an advertising medium for you. While yes, you can use it occasionally to promote fundraising activity, you should never only use it for that purpose. The truest purpose of social media is to form relationships. Relationships will help you grow; all-the-time advertising will not.
Creating social buzz takes time, patience and a fair amount of work. It’s not easy to find the niche that best suits you and your charity. It’s not always easy to maintain relationships once they’re formed. But if you take the time to do it right, your charity will continue growing. Most importantly though, it can be a lot of fun if you give it a chance.