Nonprofit and Social Media Surveys

Beth’s Blog is an important source if you are interested/involved in social media and non-for-profit organizations.

Here is an important post from her blog on findings of two surveys on the use of social media for non-for-profit organizations.

First survey was performed by Weber Shandwick; a global public relations firm. The survey was applied to 200 nonprofit and foundation executives in order to see how these organizations were using social media and the value they derived from social media. Interestingly, only half of the nonprofit sector were active users of social media. Most executives understand the importance of social media for the sector but also admit that there is yet more to get from social media than they get now.

The other survey, implemented by Philanthropy Action, focuses on midsized nonprofits.  The headline is:  Social Network and Mid-Size Nonprofits:  What’s The Use? The survey looked at results and numbers and concludes that social media is not very effective and that midsize organizations should not waste time or effort.   The survey was implemented between July 2008 and March 2009 – and the results presented here are focused on impact metrics.

I do believe myself that non-for-profit organizations do not use social media as effective as they should be using. The most common reasons I can list as follows:

1- They think they do not have the enough manpower to dedicate time on social media.

2- They do not know exactly what to get from social media: ambiguity in purpose.

3- They are not 100% aware of the power of communicating through social media.

You can read the entire post of Beth Kanter  by clicking on the image below: