Social networks and fundraising

I spent the end of last week in Washington DC for a St. John's alumni event. While I was in DC (where I worked for almost 4 years at American University) I set up a visit with a colleague from Catholic University who work in Annual Giving. Catholic is a companion School to St. John's and we had been following them on facebook for some time. As a result I asked him to coordinate a meeting with the alumni office folks who run their facebook page.

This is step one of the social networking - using the folks that you have relationships with to increase the knowledge base that you possess.  Using that resource was invaluable in this case as it gave me the background to approach the internal constraints that I have on getting this done and present them with a plan and an approach that has already been tested and that I am able to show potential results from.

That approach is as follows:
Use Twitter as the base for all posts.  By setting up the RSS feeds between twitter and facebook you are able to pull the status updates from twitter into facebook.  Using http://hootsuite.com/ as the upload client, you can schedule the tweets and thus schedule your facebook status updates.  The RSS feeds create a cascade effect with a delay between the tweet and the status update.  This can be done using a facebook ap that uses the #fb tag to carry those items through into status updates.

Post questions on a daily basis - generate traffic through a consistent contest and Q&A basis - think morning drive radio show.  Same question category every day, keep it light and fun with real time announcement of prizes.  Plan this out - have a weekly meeting to establish how you are going to do this and then use that scheduling process to ensure that you follow through.

Use a blog page as a way to establish an externally viewable listing of your communication history.  Post each of your email digests and general messages to the blog - simple, free and easy as a way to ensure that the monthly newsletter and electronic communications that you send to your alumni who have provided you with an email can also be viewed by those who simply visit your page or are fans on a social network without you needing to post them again and again and again to accomplish that.  Again, leverage the technology - use RSS feeds and the blog tools to make that happen automatically whenever the messages are sent.

Create a home page that cleanly integrates these pieces and youtube channels or other networks that you are using.  The vast majority of your content can be generated and refreshed through the posts, updates and emails that you are already sending - rather than adding to the content needs, the social networking sites can be used to increase value and engagement while expanding your reach, at the same time limiting the work needed to do so.