(source: Mr. Kris)

Organizations are flocking to social media hubs to attempt to engage with their audience, and every organization has a different motive. Some are corporations attempting to rebrand themselves (@GMblogs, @Chrysler, @ComcastCares)  while others attempt to continue the conversation away from the brick-and-mortar standard of yesteryear.

One thing that we have to understand and a question that often gets pondered is how can my organization, specifically my non-profit, benefits from Twitter, Facebook and other forms of social media? Let’s make one thing clear: Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of media are the end result of a communication strategy, not the initial strategy itself. Before you join these platforms remember that these are tools to deepen your relationship with your established community and a means to engage with potential donors.

The non-profit sector is changing at rapid pace. Speaking about strategy itself, some non-profits are transforming the way they work with their current and potential donors, and deepening relationships with their constituents. Here are some tools to connect with your donor community and potential donors:

• Join good2gether, with connections to high-traffic websites, national newspapers, and other publications, good2gether helps you promote events, announce campaigns, and distribute any other information to your audience.

• Create a Cause on Facebook. This page will make it easier to recruit passionate individuals who are already looking for your organization. There is also a Birthday application within Facebook Causes, encouraging individuals to raise money in exchange for their birthday. This is a brilliant way to get people engaged to give back to your organization.

• If you have the resources, create your own tools to facilitate donor collaboration and recruitment (e.g. create your own social media platform). Gift of Life.org, one of our clients, has done this remarkably. They have enabled donors, potential donors, friends, and families to recruit, create donor circle, and collaborate with each other for the greater cause of finding bone marrow donors for individuals with leukemia and cancer. Check out Gift of Life.org/Give to participate in something special.

These tools are an overview of what non-profits should be tapped into and how they can impact potential donors and their communities. Let’s hope that more non-profits adopt the message of engagement and community, improving with such tools as social media and future technology.

(source: Matt Hamm)

Blue Fountain Media is working with the Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation, and it has been a rewarding experience to know that we are helping them for an overall greater cause. Gift of Life is one of largest bone marrow registries in the United States. They focus on the Jewish community—finding a matching bone marrow donor is difficult, but since tissue type is genetic, a patient is most likely to find a matching donor of the same ethnic background.

The Madoff debacle affected the Gift of Life in more ways than one, and that’s where we come in. Blue Fountain Media has been doing Social Media Marketing for their bone marrow and donor campaigns.

When we started these campaigns, Gift of Life had some questions:

So how can social media help us?

Social media or just media is the communication between companies or individual, be it a non-profit, blue-chip or fortune 500 firm and its consumer and/or potential consumers. Social media is a great tool to get in touch with the tech-savvy generation Y (which some say is larger than the baby boomer generation). It helps increase visibility.

It is about listening to the conversation. What people are saying about you, your brand, and your industry. There are industry leaders online that can become evangelist of your message.

What are some social media tools to connect with consumers?

For Gift of Life we use Twitter, Facebook campaigns, and blogger outreach, just to name a few. There isn’t a one-size fits all solution to social media, and for every client the strategy will be different.

I have all these accounts. What now?

Engagement, engagement, engagement. We at Blue Fountain Media focus on engagement and transparency with every avenue of communication that Gift of Life has with its potential donors. Gift of Life tailors its campaign strategy with communication on a variety of demographic factors.

How often do I have to Tweet, Facebook, or comment on a blog?

Imagine your family only spoke to you once every couple of years. How would you feel?

There is no exact number of Tweets, Facebook messages, and blog posts. We encourage you to communicate as often as you can with your consumers or donors. Build a level of trust and openness.

Gift of Life is a non-profit of many firsts. In the coming weeks they will also be among the first to utilize social media as a strategy to connect with donors. We are proud to be working with them, and look forward to the future.

Some businesses are seasonal. But few can compare to the tax business. So how does an online tax preparation service use a multi-month marketing campaign to get results over just a few days?

Simple:

• * A long-term SEO strategy to lay the groundwork.
• * A rigorous, analytical paid-search strategy.
• * Lots of community involvement, accelerating during tax time.

Before SEO:

After SEO:

Our SEO Strategy for PriorTax.com involved two distinct kinds of activity: building a site that search engines could understand, and bringing in relevant links. The results speak for themselves:

From October 12-18*, PriorTax.com’s search traffic’s sources:

2% SEO

32% PPC

(*October 15th is the filing deadline for those with an extension.)

From April 12-18, their traffic soared 380% from the previous tax season:

34% SEO

28% PPC

Pay-Per-Click advertising is a great way to bring in visitors fast, but you get what you pay for. All too often, pay-per click (PPC) advertising targets the wrong users, or attracts good potential clients who aren’t ready to make a purchase. By carefully analyzing the traffic from different keywords, as well as the actions users took based on what they searched, they were able to optimize their PPC strategy to bring in visitors who were ready to make a purchase.

Active community involvement was the final ingredient. Through blogging, twittering, and forum participation, Blue Fountain Media helped PriorTax.com reach out to users who were looking for exactly the services they offered. By responding to hundreds of online queries about filing late taxes, getting ahold of old forms, and generally dealing with tax-time nastiness, we were able to drive thousands of users to PriorTax.com.

Compare the numbers from two “tax seasons” (as a company that specializes in late filings, PriorTax finds mid October — when people who filed for an extension need to finalize things — are nearly as busy as April).

Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation: Finding an Online Audience for a Good Cause

Not all of our clients measure results in dollars and cents. For Gift of Life, there’s just one important measure: the number of lives saved through bone marrow transplants and cord blood donations. Blue Fountain Media originally worked with Gift of Life to redesign their website, but we’ve also started working with them to reach out to people who might be interested in their site.

For Gift of Life, our outreach program is designed around three major purposes: we’re helping to raise awareness of how easy it is to join a marrow registry, we’re broadening their donor base, and we’re giving people the chance to raise awareness through social media, whether or not they themselves donate.

So far, the results have been compelling. By commenting on blog posts, responding to tweets, and emailing online journalists, Gift of Life has attracted lots of online attention. Among the highlights: hundreds of hits from My Special Ks and their Facebook group, as well as more hits from niche bloggers, twitterers, and more. And to top it all off, we got linked by Boston.com, home of the Boston Globe:

Our work with Gift of Life is still in the early stages, though. Over the next few months, we’ll be rolling out new social media features for their website, getting more involved in blogger outreach, and continuing to keep in touch with the thousands of volunteers and donors who make Gift of Life the extraordinary success it is.