A Pyramid of Online Communication Methods
I've been thinking a lot recently about how nonprofits should divide their time spent in online communications. We all in the nonprofit tech space tend to focus on how nonprofits can get rewards by effectively investing more time and energy into specific types of communications - email, social media, or websites, for instance. . But for most nonprofits, especially smaller ones, doing more of one method means doing less of another, meaning that the decision as to what you do, and not just how you do it, is a critical one
I would propose the following "Online Communications Pyramid" (this is from a slide that's in both our Online Communications on a Shoestring and our Considering Social Media seminars). The idea here is that you should have relative comfort at each step before moving to the next.
Until your computers are networked and backed up, for instance, you should concentrate on that before looking at other things. Until you have at least a basic website presence, there's no point in devoting a lot of energy to email or social media techniques.
Perhaps more controversially, I would also say that about email vs. social media. I think that until you're making solid use of email, it makes more sense to focus on developing a strong strategy there than to look at things like social networks or viral techniques. Email has proven itself as a high bang-for-the-buck method - most social media methods are still considerably more of a gamble.
What do you think of the pyramid?
I would propose the following "Online Communications Pyramid" (this is from a slide that's in both our Online Communications on a Shoestring and our Considering Social Media seminars). The idea here is that you should have relative comfort at each step before moving to the next.
Until your computers are networked and backed up, for instance, you should concentrate on that before looking at other things. Until you have at least a basic website presence, there's no point in devoting a lot of energy to email or social media techniques.
Perhaps more controversially, I would also say that about email vs. social media. I think that until you're making solid use of email, it makes more sense to focus on developing a strong strategy there than to look at things like social networks or viral techniques. Email has proven itself as a high bang-for-the-buck method - most social media methods are still considerably more of a gamble.
What do you think of the pyramid?
Subscribe through Feedburner
15 Comments:
I'm not sure if I agree that email should start before social media. Email is about collecting contact information, getting permission to contact people, and then engaging them via the contacts.
If seems like facebook offers the same set of functionality by setting up a Cause. You get permission to contact people and you can engage them through the contacts. But you know a lot more about them then you traditionally would on an email list. You know the other Causes that they care about, you know about their networks, their activity on those networks, etc.
I've been wondering if some newsletter like behavior should be moved over. What do you think?
(FYI: a lot of the way I've been thinking about this was informed by Tom Watson's CauseWired)
It depends on your audience, of course, but I think it's the pretty rare nonprofit for which a sizable percentage of their potential audience is on Facebook (the exception, of course, being advocacy causes that are likely to be particularly attractive to young people and/or tech savvy people). The vast majority of folks have email, so it's a more inclusive way to communicate.
I could certainly imagine asking folks whether they'd prefer to hear from you via Facebook or via email, but a much harder time imagining telling people they'll need to use Facebook in order to hear from you anymore. This would also put a lot of eggs into a proprietary basket, no?
My understanding as well is that nonprofits are seeing a much higher action/donation rate from email lists than from within Facebook. Many of the nonprofits who have big lists in a Cause are having a hard time figuring out what they can usefully engage those folks with, while email is just much more understood... and thus less of a gamble. Or do you think otherwise?
I believe that organizations with limited resources need to focus on a realistic communication strategy - understanding that they can't do it all. Based on their constituency and their goals, what means of communication would have the greatest impact?
IMHO, smaller orgs are seeing larger orgs make investments in social networks and trying to jump on the bandwagon without thinking what the ROI potential and sustainability plan is going to be.
I like your pyramid Laura...but because I see through data tracking lenses, I see it suspiciously absent in this hierarchy. In order to have an effective communication strategy, you need to know who you are communication with and how to target your message to that segment of your consistency. Without good, accessible, portable constituent data, a communication plan is destined for failure.
Great conversation starter...
I agree with you 100%, Sonny, on both points. I think email typically has a larger ROI, unless you have an atypically social-media-geared cause and/or audience, so it makes sense for smaller orgs to focus there first.
I also am getting pretty concerned about the degree to which smaller nonprofits are jumping onto the social networking bandwagon without thinking through what's likely to actually make sense for them.
And right, I agree, integrated data tracking is missing. In my mind, it's sort of a chuck of each... or maybe it's the ladder that helps you scale the pyramid.
I agree with Sonny and Laura here. Social media is fun and all, but this is really no contest. Email is the most powerful and versatile media for non-profits on the Internet.
1. Email is accessible to a much broader range of people. The proportion of people using social media vs. email is much lower for the older audiences who tend to represent the majority of non-profit donor bases. Also, let's not forget that email really *is* a social media. Personally, I get a ton of forwarded email from my parents and their friends. Email is their facebook, and it's worth remembering that they and their generation have a greater capacity, on the whole, to become donors than us younger folks do.
2. Email is trackable. This allows for analysis, testing, and segmentation strategies. Donation ask amounts can be targeted on email, but not on social media.
3. Email addresses are stored internally. Social media connections are made and kept on external sources. Facebook.com owns it, not you, and they can change how interactions happen.
4. Social media is time-intensive and ROI-maximization strategies are not fully developed. Sure, it's impressive to have 20 replies to your latest tweet or 5,000 pageviews for your latest blog post, but... are those people coming back? Are they giving money? How much time/money went into building an audience that large?
Email may not be sexy anymore, but it's the standard for a reason.
This post has been removed by the author.
Terrific comments on this. Thanks, Laura, for starting the conversation.
I'm not disagree with the pyramid, exactly. And, certainly, I think it's a solid outline for thinking about building a strategy. And, obviously, we need email for more than constituent outreach, list building, and engagement activities.
It's the email solid before social media step I'm wondering about. If you think of the functions, there are several that you might be able to do in a social media environment (facebook is just an example) and get at the same or better outcome than you can by email.
I'm just not sure that it is such a given that social media comes first.
I think there's been a similar flip in the way that we think about secure computing tools. With the advent of info on the cloud, it changes the way that we need to think about the baseline needs in an office environment.
I think Laura's pyramid is great guidance for what nonprofits should be investing in today. That means that there are certainly times when a social media strategy will be more effective than an email campaign, and NPOs should be promoting and investing in technologies that engage more fully with their constituents and and broaden mission awareness more generously and effectively -- e.g., social media. But, as Sonny says, unless all of your constituents and prospects are already there, don't bet the farm on Facebook, because it's still a relatively small percentage of the world that you're going to reach there, versus the amount of people that you can engage via email.
Just as email is making headway over snail mail, the future is in social media, so now is the time to be preparing for that. But does that mean building your Facebook and MySpace pages, or is it educating the CEO and other important people in your org about how the social media world works? Most non profit CEOs and marketers are still in full brochureware mindsets, all about presenting the messages. Successfully adopting social media involves embracing the full conversation with your constituents and the world, even if some of that conversation will be negative or unkind.
So, again, the pyramid is a very good snapshot as of today. It will be great to look at it in three to five years to see how it's changed. But, for now, it makes sense to invest in the mediums that have the numbers.
I see email before social media as appropriate for most nonprofits, simply because way more people are on email than social media. Facebook and other platforms, although quite large, are dwarfed by the number of email users. But this generic model is a great frame, onto which nonprofits should build in their own context to achieve the proper focus.
Yesterday's Inc.com blog piece "The Marketing Skills You Can Learn from Obama" are especially relevant to the "email vs social media" debate. I like this in particular: "leveraging the sheer quantity of enthusiasts and supporters on each tool to disperse messages almost instantly across an unbelievably wide, new network of venues and communities that hasn't been seen since the invention of television."
It is about diverse strategies to reach diverse constituencies.
http://blog.inc.com/e-commerce/2008/11/the_marketing_skills_you_can_l.html
All great comments - thanks for sharing!
Just thinking as well that as per Marnie's comments, this pyramid isn't intended to be time based - for instance, Marnie, if you were starting up a nonprofit, this isn't intended to mean that I think you should have a successful email program up and running before you start any social media outreach.
Rather, it's intended to represent priorities for those with limited resources - for most orgs, if they can only do email or do social networks, I would certainly recommend email for the vast majority of orgs. The Obama campaign is a great example - do we know how much staff time was devoted to email outreach vs. all the social media outreach? I have no facts at hand, but I'd bet there was at least as much if not much more time devoted to email.
And it's not hard and fast - we can likely come up with orgs that would benefit from social networks much more than email. But it's intended as a rule of thumb. Rules are made to be broken... but you should generally understand the rules and know what makes them not apply to you before you break them.
I think your rule of thirds applies here - the 1/3 web site, 1/3 outbound communications (email) and 1/3 social. The social media isn't just Facebook or the other outposts like Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever. The sequencing of social media begins w/listening, then homebase (a blog), and then looking at your outposts. The listening step is about using RSS and persistent search to understand where your audience is and what they are saying about your issue. It's a form of research that informs your social media strategy - what outposts you will establish a presence on.
I think where small organizations get into trouble is that social part is viewed as "Let's get on Facebook" as the first step." If they did the listening step first, they would end up with a more strategic approach.
With limited budgets and capacity - organizations can't do it all to the max. But if organizations have carefully thought through the objectives and audiences - and think about the 1/3 rule - they can then look at incremental steps for area and what a baseline should be.
I think each
Outpost! I just learned that word from Chris Brogan, like Monday. I think, Laura, your diagram is such a useful conversation starter because it captures something about the actual practice of online communications -- the world as it is -- as well as pointing people toward a higher level, world as it should be.
Just to take one small point to raise a teaching strategy question: Email newsletters belong toward the bottom of the pyramid in part because they are actually the easiest of these new tools for many nonprofit communicators to grasp, right? It translates the idea of a one to many communications method more or less seamlessly to the Internet. Call it web 1.5.
But if we assume that emails will in the (semi-distant?) future go the way of the dodo, maybe we should encourage folks new to new media to go straight to social networking? Long-term, it may be better strategy but short-term, it's easier to grasp and seems to have a more immediate payoff.
So the question is, should we, a. provide training and resources that encourage folks to take the shortest steps with the quickest payoff, or work harder on the front end to get them to a stage that maybe has more payoff but over a longer run?
Thanks Laura, this is a great basic framework that maps well to the reality of what I have seen play out in the orgs I work with. I agree that there are exceptions where a given audience would warrant shuffling the stack a bit, but by and large the pyramid is great. There is one big block missing in the pyramid though; CRM. Without CRM, organizations have no chance of maximizing the value of the relationships they are working to build with all of their online investments.
Where to place CRM on the pyramid is debatable and differs from organization to organization, but in most cases, I think it goes above or below the “Well thought out email strategy.” In many cases, CRM is the engine that enables the email strategy to happen. I guess it could be mashed into the email block.
Thanks again for the thoughtful post.
Yes, I agree. Constituent/ data tracking is missing, and it's a critical part of email strategy (and social media? It's interesting that CRM is generally not nearly as commonly used with social media strategies - should it be?)
Diagram version 2 coming soon!
Post a Comment
<< Home