Whether you want to fine-tune your writing skills, show appreciation, or build relationships with prospective funders, there are many ways you can use social media to strengthen your grant writing and foundation relations. Here are 10 ways to boost your grant writing program with your social media participation
Reporting Impact
Part of our responsibility to our donors after receiving a gift is to report back to them about what the donations they’ve entrusted to us have accomplished. We know they want to hear from us about the impact of their donations.
If we’re good at donor stewardship, we do this in multiple ways and in an ongoing fashion.
Informally, the updates are regular.
But every once in a while, we do formal updates through Annual or Impact Reports as well. As many of us plan this time of year to write and design our Annual or Impact Report, what should it convey?
Given that it is so valuable to have email addresses, to have people on your eNews lists (because email open and conversion rates are so much higher than social media reach and conversion rates), one of your social media goals should definitely be to convert your social media fans, likes, and followers to email subscribers.
So how do you do that? Here are 6 Ways to find the email addresses and receive the permission of followers to be added to your email lists:
Ever visited a nonprofit’s blog page to find…well, nothing? The Blank Blog is all too common on nonprofit websites.
A lot of nonprofit organizations resist beginning a blog or, if they have a blog, they let it languish because they can’t imagine how to keep it full of content. They don’t know what they could possibly say that would be interesting to their readers OR they are so overworked and understaffed they can’t figure out how to complete one more task (e.g. writing blog posts).
The good news is that the people who love a nonprofit organization—donors, volunteers, board members, clients—would be interested in reading several things about the nonprofit, things that a nonprofit staff leader—especially one that has served a long time—might take for granted and see as routine and a nonprofit staff leader doesn’t have to do it all himself.
As I was leaving the building, a few workshop attendees approached me in the parking lot. One said, “A few of us wanted to talk to you because we were puzzled. You said it was really important to blog but we had just attended a fundraising workshop, before your workshop, on major gifts and the workshop presenter had said “Blogging is a complete waste of time. It won’t raise major gifts for you and you need to be getting major gifts.”
Wow. Great to know what the confusion was about. We were able to have a terrific discussion. My only regret was that we couldn’t all have the discussion with the other presenter with us. We could have had a really interesting exchange because I understand why he said what he said and in a way he is right. You certainly don’t ask for or receive a major gift because of anything you’ve written in a blog or posted on your website.
HOWEVER, I think he has missed the point.
In the nonprofit sector, we nonprofit professionals apply for positions in the nonprofit sector. We have experience with nonprofit jobs. Because we’re nonprofit professionals with nonprofit experience, applying for nonprofit jobs, we assume that the people who are reviewing our resumes understand what our titles and positions mean and entail. They don’t. Even if we list our accomplishments, they don’t get it. Too often, board members are hiring or sitting on the search committees that hire us. Those board members are almost always business people who don’t understand what’s involved in our jobs.