Charities: making the most of Twitter
Posted on: 7 August 2009 at 0648 - Comment
Even doggies are on Twitter
A long, long time ago (back in the 1990s) charities needed to grow big to get attention and deliver greater impact, but the enormous accelerating potential of self-organising social networks has disrupted this forever. If you are a small charity with a compelling story to tell, then this is your moment.
Once signed up to Twitter, your first step is to connect as an individual. Give your profile a (named) human voice (or voices), and make your ‘tweets’ engaging, informational, tangible, and above all, social. Embrace Twitter as your listening engine. Make it your job to know what people are saying about you. Be ready to respond quickly, transparently, shower praise on your advocates, and win over any detractors with your enthusiasm.
Whether you choose to integrate Twitter with your existing programme to maintain and develop relationships with supporters (The Mara Conservancy in Kenya is a great example), or create a dedicated Twitter campaign like Tweetsgiving (which raised over $10k in just 48 hours to fund a new classroom for a school in Tanzania), you can inspire people with an achievable (and often urgent) goal, and clarity of purpose (like building an orphanage, re-housing a temporarily homeless family, funding a Cambodian orphan through college, or re-homing a dog). Remember that Twitter has a short attention span, so break any longer term goals down into smaller actions.
Having an authentic presence on Twitter can also put you in the minds of groups of people who wish to raise money for a cause. Supported by an enormous voluntary effort from a dedicated core group, thousands of people self-organised over a few weeks in January and February 2009 to bring Twestival to over 200 cities across the globe and raise $250k for charity:water, a small charity devoted to bringing clean and safe drinking water to developing nations. It did not ask for this groundswell of goodwill, but did benefit by being open to the culture of generosity on which Twitter is built.
So go with the flow and see for yourselves how Twitter can help build a community of support around the cause – one person, one connection at a time.
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Written by Steve Bridger (@stevebridger) for Twestival Local London
[Image by tashmahal, used under Creative Commons licence.]
