#Fundraising On #SocialMedia: Connect With Your Friends And Followers!

Engage donors. Key to effective fundraising is to cultivate relationships with donors. With social media, you can strike up conversations with donors where they already are! Through social media, you can share your mission via engaging content — photos, videos, and blog posts — that inspires, informs, and entertains your followers. You can also engage directly with your followers and listen to what they say. For suggestions on how promote your organization through social media, see the Social Media Best Practices Help.

(BTW, Raiser's Edge NXT recently updated with the ability to track where to find a constituent online — on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or elsewhere like Instagram, Tumblr, or a personal site — directly from their record. For more information, check out the Online Presence Help!)

Find prospects. Also key to effective fundraising is the identification of prospective donors and those who may support your mission. Look for likes, shares, #hashtags, and comments that echo your cause, and then engage these like-minded people. You can also look for established groups or lists in social media to identify networks of people who share your interests, With promoted posts and tweets, you can extend your reach to your friends' and followers' networks and those interested in your cause.

Develop yourself. You can also use social media as a way to connect with fellow fundraisers and continue your professional education. When you follow organizations like Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP), Chronicle of Philanthropy, and — ahem — Blackbaud on social media, you have instant access to feeds of insight and expertise to develop your fundraising skills. You can also friend and follow peers to ask questions and share experiences, similar to here on the Community. As those in your network attend fundraising conferences, you can join in vicariously — without the travel costs! — as they tweet their notes and thoughts from sessions and share lessons-learned on social media.

As you start to build your social media presence, don't get overwhelmed or too focused on the technology. Remember that sites like Facebook and Twitter are simply additional channels to interact with donors and prospects, just like email, mailings, and phone calls. And while social media enables you to foster relationships with donors and identify prospective supporters, it also provides the added benefit of developmental training and education with colleagues — all for free! Now, go connect with your friends and followers!