Facebook and nonprofits perfect partners?
Over the last year, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of non-profit organizations (NPO’s) utilizing Facebook as a fund raising tool. The thing that has surprised me most however was how ineffective these organizations have been at leveraging Facebook, many it’s many development tools. Facebook is about community – Plain and simple. Facebook is about who you know and who knows you. A community consists of family, friends, acquaintances, people from work, school etc. People chat, exchanging photos, thoughts, ideas and gossip. They share groups, causes restaurants, gardens and games with each other. It’s is a lively, active community. Facebook, like other online communities, are perfectly suited for NPOs. Yet, many are not using Facebook like a community, they use it as an extension of their website – no engagement, no community building, just pushing stuff out there and picking up the scraps here and there. STOP IT! Please, start using Facebook for what it is – build a community online. NPOs are wonderful at community building, in many cases its part of their mission. Engage, recruit and serve your online community. Please do not expect your online community just to give you money, they expect more and deserve more. If you would never expect your offline community to do that, why would you expect your online would? Community is about participation. Facebook allows you to participate in community building at so many levels. So use Facebook for the community building tool it is, you will be amazed at the results you will get in return.
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