Twitter has emerged as a social media channel for people to connect that simply can’t be ignored. As a recent Socitm report put it while doing a study on the use of social media for local government services “Failure to engage with the [social media] trend is tantamount to ignoring the telephone at the end of the 19th Century.” The same applies to nonprofits and whether or not one likes the micro blogging format of communication, it’s hard to ignore the growing importance of Twitter in the nonprofits space.
The nonprofits community on Twitter is an extremely active one buzzing with activity and constantly updating people on what they are doing to engage them and get them more involved. It’s quickly growing as one of the more important platforms for nonprofits to connect with others and gather support for their work. As emails, letters and other longer message forms are losing attention as a result of issues like spam and overflow of unsolicited messages, Twitter is quickly becoming a communication tool of choice for many who prefer replying to direct messages and receiving updates through this format which is mobile and currently popular. In fact most find people more approachable on Twitter. People who otherwise would prefer not to entertain other phone calls and emails are more likely to respond to a tweet than reply to an email and that is something we can’t afford to ignore.
For the smaller nonprofit organizations Twitter can be access to the big time. A level playing field where they can engage and build a community that supports their cause on the same level as some of the global nonprofits. Just one look at the front runners for the nonprofit Shorty Awards that we covered in a previous post and you’ll see that smaller lesser known nonprofits have bigger fan followings and more votes than giants like Red Cross, Livestrong Foundation, Unicef and others. A tweet may be a handful of characters and words but it can create a lot of awareness.
Awareness leads to building communities around your organization. Building communities can translate to building support. Building support translates to more donors. Twitter among other social networks and social media sites will be a key destination for fundraising. The site which hosts thousands of nonprofits among other organizations and people has been instrumental in collecting aid for Haiti and other relief for other global disasters. It’s been central to spreading awareness on so many causes and been a platform for so much work to happen that it’s a channel that can’t be left out. We’ve been busy here at Donor Tools working towards Twitter integration which will be core to the donor management process as we see it. With all the buzz and activity from nonprofits on Twitter in the last year or so it just goes to show less can be more and few words can make massive difference.
