Why You Can’t Find Social Media Fundraising Expertise
The ‘Great Deception’ and Millennial Myth Debunked: They Aren’t Good At Social Media Either
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The word “expert” has been horribly diluted, with people completing 4-week online programs now declaring themselves experts. You need a true expert. And there are far fewer of those than you think with regard to social media.
I don’t care if Facebook has over a billion users. A very tiny percentage of them are true experts at using it to grow a business, or to support a fundraising campaign.
Second, and more importantly in this instance, there’s the impression today that everyone is “good” at social media. Especially the younger generations. I call this the Great Deception about social media and millennials. I am repeatedly told this every time I protest about technology being too complex and ineffective at living up to its promises. “The kids are all great at it,” I’m told.
No they’re not.
I was a high school teacher for many years. I saw how “good” kids are at technology when I tried to teach them Excel. Or saw them using a simple word processor or a graphing calculator. They have the same learning curve as the rest of us.
If you want to profit and grow as a result of your social media strategy, you need much more than a college student who knows how to use Facebook and Instagram.
Influence, Not Use
I think the confusion here lies in the difference between knowing how to use something verses knowing how to influence with the same ‘something,’ in this case social media.
Here’s an outcome every nonprofit wants to see from their social media pages: More people engaging with their pages, and because of that interaction visiting their sites and taking action. But to reach that goal requires far more skill than just knowing how to create pages and post stuff.
Here’s another way to think of social media and younger people:
Suppose there’s a device that does 50 different things, but 45 of them are very complicated. Most people – almost all of them in fact – are super experts at the 5 simple things, and a portion of them know a few of the 45 more complicated ones.
But hardly anyone is a master of even a majority of those 45 complicated tasks. And the one guy who can do every single one of them becomes an info-marketer and sells his expertise to everyone below him, and becomes a millionaire.
In our society, almost everyone knows the basics of social media. But I have come to know, through repeated frustrating experiences, that hardly anyone knows how to utilize the full potential of it. And I include myself in the masses. I hardly ever use social media, and I’m terrible at it.
I’ve never gotten past the ‘iconization’ of tech-life where I have to memorize what all these silly little symbols mean, and that there are no directions anywhere, no support, no emails, no phone numbers. Not even a simple diagram or flowchart that shows me how the various pieces of the system fit together. Not even a welcome or starter kit. Most technology platforms, not just social media, just throw you in the fire and toss a bunch of kindling at you (the kindling being “help pages”, poorly searchable forums, and hard-to-read documents with screen caps from older versions that never really answer your real question), and they force you to spend hours flailing around in all that, all by yourself. While your flesh is burning to a crisp.
But that’s me.
But unlike me, many people love social media. And yet, they still don’t know how to leverage it to do anything useful.
So if you’re doing serious fundraising and want social media to be a part of it – don’t do what almost every nonprofit does:
Do not bring on a college student volunteer to do your social media fundraising.
Reasons Not to Use College Students, Interns, or Volunteers for Social Media Fundraising
It’s easy to find someone willing to volunteer to do your social media. But the reason they volunteer so quickly is because they have a professional understanding of almost nothing on the list of social media expert qualifications you saw earlier in this book. They know how to use it, but that’s all.
Once they realize this is a job and not a pastime, they discover and are quite surprised by how little they know about something they thought they knew everything about. Soon after, they get overwhelmed and suddenly “don’t have time,” even though they had time when they volunteered and nothing in their life has really changed. Not long after that, you’re doing the posts yourself again. Sound familiar?
Social media marketing takes consistent effort and attention. You need someone who goes on your page daily. Daily means every day, and without having to be reminded. They go on and respond to comments and questions. They post. They pose open-ended questions. They inform. They do polls. They find graphics. They bring value and ideas to your campaign, rather than waiting around to be told what to do.
You also need someone who responds to your requests daily. If you create a new blog post, or have an infographic you want people to view and share, or launch a new fundraising idea, you need someone who can run with that on social media.
They will need some information from you to do this, like the pages on your site their posts will link to. But they need to be reachable so you can get them to post ads and comments and pictures on a consistent basis.
Social media audiences aren’t static. They’re constantly moving. Posting once a week, you’re likely to hit only a handful of the people following your page.
Your social media fundraising expert needs to be keenly aware of your goals, messaging, and strategies. They need to know how their part fits into the overall plan.
Just to be clear: This doesn’t have to be a full-time job. But it does have to be a consistent job. Your social media person can’t just come in once a week and get all the work done (unless they schedule posts in advance – another example of something they should know is possible and be able to do).
But even doing that, they still need to go on and respond to comments. And not respond the way most people talk on social media:
bad grammer, rong speling. starting sentences with lowercase letters and using no punctuation and using run on sentences and ‘textese’ “words” like gr8 and lol.
You need a professional. Someone who can WRITE. Someone who self-edits. And perhaps most important of all, someone who understands customer service.
For the complete list of social media fundraising and marketing qualifications referred to above, and for much more about event fundraising, solving organizational challenges, using websites and graphic design effectively, harnessing volunteers, and so much more, read the fastest and most engaging fundraising book ever written.
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