You’ve Twittered, Facebooked and blogged about your organization’s story but aren’t receiving the response you desire.

Tim Frick, author of “Return on Engagement” and social media trainer at the Workshop’s upcoming fall session, says many nonprofits have two misconceptions about social media and why they don’t produce the desired audience engagement.

“There’s the misconception that it’s free,” says Frick. “It doesn’t cost any money to get a Twitter account, Facebook account, or a LinkedIn account, but it does take time to create and build the content for those things and present that content in a way that is actually going to engage people.”

Frick says most people tend to dive right into social media tools without thinking how they will use them and how they will engage their audience. According to Frick, many nonprofit communicators take their “old one-way marketing approach,” apply it to their social media strategy and are confused when there’s no response from their audience.

“A lot of times that’s because they’re not trying to engage their users. They’re sending out one-way marketing messages that are all about them and not about what the users might actually want to read,” says Frick.

In September, Frick will cover these common misconceptions and more at the Community Media Workshop training Using Social Media To Build Awareness. This three-hour training is designed to show nonprofits how to optimize social media best practices. Participants explore how to create content strategies, which aligns their digital communications with their website; how to create social media profiles and how to engage their audiences.  Using tactics outlined in his book, Frick shows communicators how to shift their offline communications to an online presence and how to adjust their strategy to work with the organization’s available resources.

Frick says many communicators during his training have their ah-ha moment when they see multiple ways to share their message across digital platforms and track that message’s impact.

No matter what size your organization is, increase your impact with this training and start having the conversations that engage your audience. To register for “Using Social Media to Build Awareness” call 312-369-6400 or click here.

To read more about Tim Frick’s work with nonprofits and digital strategies, click here. Tim Frick is the CEO of Mightybytes, is a full-service creative firm that executes design-drive communication solutions for their clientele. Frick is also the author of Design Techniques for Digital Marketing. Follow him on Twitter at @Mightybytes, on Facebook at Mightybytes and learn more on his website at www.mightbytes.com.

We just posted our fall workshop line up, and the trainings have a lot to offer anyone looking to sharpen existing skills (check out Branding for Nonprofits) or learn new tricks (we have a basic and an advanced social media training this fall). Community Media Workshop is dedicated to helping nonprofits tell their stories, so we’ve tried to keep these affordable and accessible for you when budgets are tight.

I’m excited about the first training in the series–Social Media to Build Awareness. It’s an advanced social media training for people who know the basics but are ready to use these tools like Twitter and Facebook more strategically to drive traffic and engage audiences. I think this is important for anyone trying to use social media in an effective, efficient way.

I also recommend checking out the Workshop’s  one-day Media Boot Camp. We purposefully scheduled this training for Saturday, October 16, because we know weekdays can be hard sometimes for busy executive directors, board members and volunteers. That said, anyone is welcome to sign up for Media Boot Camp with Thom Clark, the Workshop’s president. (FYI-He just did this training at our Making Media Connections 2010 conference, and people loved it.)

We’re also offering a few free brown bag lunches, including one on July 22 on how to build successful campaigns. Just bring your lunch and enjoy.

Take a look and sign up! We’d love to see you this fall.

There’s something about McHenry County which keeps drawing me back to conduct training. Maybe its the sprawling landscape or the mom and pop shops that still keep their doors open, but most definitely its the people.

At my last training at the Shaw Center for Corporate Training, I was once again delighted to work with about 30 nonprofit staff working from Seniors Centers to Emergency Preparedness to issues of homelessness and affordable housing. Read the rest of this entry »

Diane Rarick, College of Lake County Takes Social Media to Next Level from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

Diane Rarick doesn’t much care about GeekyGuy43 — who followed her when she tweeted about Star Wars, then dropped her a month later. She’s more excited about the recent doubling of Facebook followers to the account she manages for the College of Lake County–many of them part of a key demographic her, 18- to 24-year-olds.

Nerds may not be a target audience for Diane, but they are key to Adam Thurman, who led the workshop she and other nonprofit communicators took earlier today. Court Theater, a branch of the University of Chicago, considers one of their core online audiences to be (and he means this obviously in the best sense possible) nerds.

These ideas about audience are what Taking Social Media to the Next Level — the title of Adam’s session — was all about. In addition to turning in stellar results via online engagement at Court, he has his own firm (and blog) Mission Paradox. The key theme of the session:  how to use social media as a tool to lead to:

• more transactions, not just clicks and
• more engagement, not just friends on Facebook

Read the rest of this entry »

"Week Ten: Paczki Day," by Chicago Geek, from flickr

Emily Culbertson is just starting her Social Media Need to Know for Managers workshop this morning–her icebreaker: what are you looking for out of this workshop and what did you have breakfast? Listening to the intros, I had two reflections. Read the rest of this entry »

Wondering where I’ve been (I’d like to think so!) — the answer is, since January, mostly learning how to use my new phone I’m an android now, i guess. You know–the mad whirl of a nonprofit trainer leaves so little time for blogging, dahlings. I have been saving some good stuff up, so watch this space!

Just a quick note now to frame some thoughts on prevention in the LGBT community–today Chicago Dept of Health sponsored “Getting the E-Word Out.” (presentation below except for Gustavo and Simone’s darn it–hey guys send me your slides!). Also fair warning, they are slightly mangled as everyone had their own backgrounds and i just dumped all into one slide deck.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bianca Berkhia, discusses La Casa Norte’s campaign to get 50o Facebook fans by the end of 2009 and how her organization uses social media for its fundraising and communicaitons today from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

Ever since Beth Kanter posted in November about whether small nonprofits can succeed with social media (a post that garnered a lot of comments), I’ve been wondering about stories and proof that, indeed, integrating these new modes of communication into our work is part of our future at nonprofits with budgets under $1 million — especially organizations that have been around a while, and those that provide traditional sorts of services. Found a couple stories these past two weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Mattie Jordan-Woods, executive director of Northside Association for Community Development in Kalamazoo, asked a question during the meet the press panel at Tell Your Stories-Lansing today.

A pitch usually starts when we decide on our own or as an organization that we want media coverage. But there’s a problem with that from the get-go, according to our panel of Lansing, Mich.-area journalists today.

The problem is, journalists do not really care what we want. “Our problem and our responsibility is to serve our audiences,” as Rick Pluta of Michigan Public Radio Network said at the panel, part of Tell Your Stories mini-conference co-organized by Michigan Nonprofit Association and us with support from C.S. Mott Foundation yesterday. ”Everything that we get approached with is going to be assessed with, ‘how well do I serve my audience?’”

So the right first question to ask yourself, before you pitch a reporter, is not what you want, nor what the journalist you will pitch wants, either. The right first question, is, what will delight, or anyway satisfy, the person who will read, see, or hear the eventual story?

In a funny sort of way, social media should make this that much easier for us as we all become more like journalists by thinking through what our own audiences want to read, see, or hear from us. Anyway, just one thought: next time you pitch a story, imagine you were the reporter—how would you frame the story to get an audience to check it out? If you can answer that question for a reporter when you pitch her—you are way ahead of the game.

Can’t resist including two more tips from today’s panel:

• Jam Sardar from local station Newscenter 6 shared an Asian-American Journalists Association resource on how to get in the media.
• Another thought—not to over-generalize from the group who came out today, but based on what they said about how they Facebook – to monitor others’ traffic for possible story ideas, ask friends for specific source ideas, and other useful stuff.

What’s been your experience with pitching reporters? What questions do they ask and how do you know when you’ve been successful (before a story appears)?

Ingrid Gonçalves, communications director at Center for Labor and Community Research from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

When Ingrid Gonçalves said during a round of introductions that she had five Web sites to create or update, I knew I had to try out the flip camera to get her story. It turns out to be a great story, not so much for how unusual it is, but for how typical it is, I think you’ll agree! (Apologies, this time the wrist is really shaky–I’m still learning!)

Ingrid was one of about 20 folks at this morning’s search engine optimization workshop this morning, led by
Tim Frick from Mightybytes. Tim delivered a workshop highlighting how to get found online, drawing on info from his forthcoming book tentatively titled Return on Engagement from Focal Press.

Below the fold here you will find, in the somewhat unlikely event that anyone finds it useful, my more or less complete notes on Tim’s presentation, which I found useful in charting some benchmarks for SEO. In a nutshell, here’s the Tim Frick program (of course it makes more sense when you see him lay it out, but still, it’s a good one):

1. Content, content, content–Have a content strategy and implement
2. Install an analytics package so you know what your Web visitors are doing when, etc.
3. Use alerts to see who is talking about you
4. Track user behavior and adjust your approach as appropriate
5. Rinse, lather, repeat (in other words, go back to step one, fine tune your site–”it’s never done” Tim says)

What do you think– is this an accurate description of what you do right now? Or what you aspire to be doing? Let me know in the comments or by email! Meantime enjoy Ingrid’s story and if you want more, click to see some notes in the rest of this (phew) looong post (hopefully, doing justice to Tim’s presentation): Read the rest of this entry »

Twike Ride in Champaign from Community Media Workshop on Vimeo.

Students, staff and a faculty member or two turned out last night for a leadership and communications training sponsored by the University YMCA just off the campus of University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana.

It was a great training, but for me the biggest surprise of the evening was when one of the participants, Matt Childress, gave me a lift back to my hotel in his personal Twike–a German-made electric, three-wheeled motorcycle that also moves by pedal power. He drives to and from his job doing IT in the university chancellor’s office most every day of the year.

Matt had told me earlier in the evening that he came out to the communications workshop “How To Really Get Heard” because he recently formed an Illinois EV (electric, or exotically-fueled, vehicle) club, and he wants to “learn how to get the word out, gain membership in the EV Club, and hopefully stop having to do all the work myself….well, maybe.” The club exists primarily as a Facebook group right now.

So what struck me–other than just how incredibly freaking cool it was to ride at about 45 mph through downtown Champaign in a space-age pod vehicle that totally turned heads — the University Y building is right next to a sorority house, and as we were getting in voices from the sorority were calling to Matt “hey, can I get a ride?” Along our route, such as when we stopped at red lights, people said “hey, what is that thing?” I think the reason I decided to blog about Matt’s twike, though, was because of how he uses it to evangelize for electric vehicles and getting us out of our gasoline cars generally.

While he was letting me drive it around an empty parking lot (sorry, no video of that!), Matt explained that when he was himself a student some years ago at the university, one professor had a mauve, psychedelically painted VW bus — which was so high profile in the small college town, everyone knew all about it. So part of Matt’s calculation in purchasing the twike, used, from a friend, was the potential for raising awareness around the campus that it represented.

My head is now full of intriguing miscellaneous facts, such as:

• The state of Illinois has no license plate for an electric motorcycle currently–electric cars, yes, but not 3-wheeled electric motorcycles (I’m sure my facebook friend Gov. Quinn can get right on this–maybe he should join the EV club group)
• A twike runs on C batteries–a lot of them–and you plug it in to keep it going–instead of gas a meter in the tiny onboard computer tells you how much volts you have, at rest or when it’s turned on–if you fall to about 250V (i think, or thereabouts), plan to power up or push pretty darn soon
• Getting in or out is a lot like getting in or out of a canoe–lower yourself to the seat butt first (the body is made of light plastic)
• It’s sort of like owning a foreign sports car used to be in the 1970s–hard to find a place to get parts and service! While there are lots of different kinds of EVs (electric vehicles) out there, the twike costs $35,000 new and you have to import it yourself from Europe. But it does last a long time. Maybe it helps if you own it in a college town–Matt has had some help with repairs (since the nearest repair shop is in England) from the guy who fixes the electron microscopes on campus.

But to get back to Matt as evangelist. At every stoplight, or anytime folks like the sorority house residents or others call out “What is that thing?” Matt explains.BTW, this whole explaining to passersby all the time thing is starting to get a little old for his 8-year-old daughter, Matt says (but I think she’ll love telling the story when she gets older–if she does not die of mortification when she’s 13 first).

Of course, the passersby don’t always understand what he’s talking about right off. My favorite response last night: “I don’t understand anything you said, but that looks really cool!” Raising awareness… it’s a process. But you don’t have to enjoy the ride in an EV for long to be convinced how cool it is… couple that with the communication efforts, and it’s a force to be reckoned with.