Making Your Own News: Why and How a Nonprofit Embraced Twitter

   News / nonprofit / social media / twitter      Posted on November 30, 2011 by Amy

Earlier this week, a nonprofit client shared his epiphany with me. A couple months back his organization (a museum) received phenomenal press from prestigious news organizations like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He was thrilled and happily anticipated additional buzz and feedback.

It didn’t come. Barely a murmur.

That same month, the Kardashian sisters visited his museum. And the roar was deafening.

His epiphany? You need to make your own news, tell your own story and build your own platform just to break through. With that in mind, the museum is embracing social media to elevate the thought leadership position of the organization and expand its reach.

They’ve cultivated a small base on Facebook. Now they’re looking to join Twitter. To get going, there are seven key questions we posed to define and ensure alignment of what we’re doing, why we’re doing it and how we’re going to measure our progress / success: 

• Goals: Why join Twitter? What are our key metrics?
• Theme: What is the overarching theme we want to convey?
• Audience: Who is our key audience? Who do we want to follow? Who do we want to follow us? How to build?
• Topics: What themes are we going to share?  
• Engagement: How are we going to engage?  
• Timing: When/how often are we going to tweet?  
• Tweeters: Who is responsible for the Twitter presence? 

Nonprofit budgets are tight and it’s important to be thoughtful about what organizations take on and why. With social media, you can define your own boundaries, and take on as much or as little as you want at any given time.

There’s no time like the present – and the best way to get started is to just dive in.