Through our ongoing video series, our founder and CEO Brent Grinna will be exploring the emerging methodology of social donor management (SDM) and how it can streamline your work in advancement to make you (and ultimately your team) more efficient and productive.
Watch the video below to learn about the first pillar of SDM: Build.
Afterwards, learn about the next two pillars of SDM in Ep 3: Understand and Ep 4: Ask!
FULL VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
If you work in advancement services, odds are you don’t collaborate very closely with your social media team…and you might not even know one another. And that makes us sad.
Why? Because there’s so much potential for advancement services to integrate social media into prospect identification, research, and relationship management efforts.
Your social media team is already building an audience of fans and followers on these platforms. And our data shows that Facebook fans and LinkedIn Group members are much more likely to give.
Social platforms can reveal new affinity, capacity, and relationship insights not stored in traditional databases. Social donor management connects the dots between internal and external data, so you can start answering to questions like:
- Which of our rated prospects are engaging with us on Facebook?
- Which of our LinkedIn group members should be nominated for additional research?
- How can social help build our donor pipeline?
Social intelligence can deliver ROI by answering those questions and many more.
If you work in advancement services, you should care as much about the data outside your database as you do about the data inside your database.
So get started by taking the following steps to integrate social media into your advancement services efforts:
- First, make sure your advancement services and social media teams know each other. Does your Facebook manager understand your broader fundraising goals? Do they know how you identify and qualify major donor prospects? If not, share your policies and procedures to make sure everyone’s on the same page.
- Second, take stock of the audience your team has already built on social media. Which of your donors are engaging with you on Facebook? Who are your biggest fans? How many of your constituents are on LinkedIn? You might be surprised to learn just how strong your social foundation already is.
Once you’ve gotten to know your social media team and have a better sense of your audience, schedule a time to get together. Maybe it’s weekly, maybe it’s monthly, but avoid the temptation to let these two critical parts of a fundraising operation work in silos. Because nobody likes silos.
Bust the silo.
Have questions? Insights? Want to learn more about social donor management? Join our next Social Donor Management Tutorial!