Tuesday, July 14, 2009

How do nonprofit organizations use Twitter? Part 2

As I mentioned yesterday, in "How do nonprofit organizations use Twitter?", I recently completed a mini-case study to explore how nonprofit organizations use Twitter. Yesterday I mentioned some of things I noticed, and today I wanted post post some of the highlights from the interview, and a link to the Charities Review Council's Twitter Plan.

For this mini-case study, I interviewed Kelly Rowan, one of the staff members in charge of her organizations Twitter account @SmartGivers at the Charities Review Council.

How does your organization use Twitter, what specifically do you tweet about?
Well we tweet about the organizations that have participated in our review process, so we tweet about the results of those reviews, and then also about other events or services that we’re offering and we try to provide links to good resources both our resources that we provide but also resources provided by others that we think will be valuable to the people who are following us and then we just try to engage in conversations that happen to do with informed giving and nonprofit accountability and transparency and helping really to improve and increase philanthropy.

How did you come to the decision about what specifically you wanted to tweet about?

Well we viewed Twitter as another communication tool for us, so we of course have our marketing and communication plan that we have each year that we implement and then the goals that are inherent in that plan are design to help us pursue our mission and then the goals for the Twitter plan are designed to help us meet those marking and communication goals.

How has using Twitter impacted your organization?
Well the very first day that we launched our account, let’s see what was the topic. Helen had tweeted about an article or something and the very next morning we had a call from a reporter at the Wall Street Journal who had seen that tweet and she just never would have, I mean of course there are ways she could have become aware of us, but Twitter was a really direct way for that connection to be made. So, that’s kind of an example, but I think overall we are using it to try to break down barriers in communication and accessing the services that we provide and really helping to mobilize informed donors and accountable nonprofits for the greater good.

Finally, Kelly made a great point near the end of our conversation that I wanted to share "I think a common challenge that we all face is we are trying to figure out how to measure how effective Twitter is in meeting the goals I mentioned earlier. There are some really great conversations happening around that, oftentimes via Twitter."

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