Twitter for Fundraising and Event Marketing
Earlier this year Carrie did a post about using social networking as a fundraising tool. In the comments, many of you mentioned using Twitter. Just last week this topic was brought to mind for me again because the site TwiTip, which provides users with all kinds of tips for using Twitter to its full potential, had a post about this same topic.
If you’ve never used Twitter before it’s time to take the plunge. This tool can connect you to valuable information in the areas you choose, say fitness and fundraising, and connect you with people who can help spread the word about your fundraising efforts and charity fitness events.
In case you don’t know yet, Twitter is a real-time short messaging service where users follow the sources most interesting to them and people can in return follow you. You correspond with followers using messages of 140 characters or less.
Using some discussion on the post I mentioned above, combined with some of my own suggestions, here are a few things you can do to increase you success at using Twitter as a fundraising and marketing tool.
Use the #hashtag. This is where you end each of your posts with “#” and then words that will help identify your Tweet (what you call an individual message on Twitter). This helps to categorize it with like topics. Twitter also has an improved search function which will help others find your information when searching. Some # examples might be #health, #charity, #fundraising, #(acronym for your organization) or #(cause you are supporting – cancer, violence).
Provide a specific link. This link should go directly to your fundraising page or your organization page. Keep this link consistent and each time you Tweet about the event put in the link. To shorten links you can go to web-sites like is.gd, tinyurl or moourl. This will allow you to shorten a long link saving you some characters for your Tweet.
Follow people near you. While you want to have international exposure to increase fundraising it is also a good idea to focus on marketing yourself and your efforts locally. You can check out Nearby Tweets, put in your location, and it will pull up other Twitter users in your area. This will allow you to connect with people who can come to your event or be more likely to get involved because they view the effort as local.
Be a person. When you use Twitter as a marketing or fundraising tool it can be tempting to become a bit of robot only talking about your cause and asking for donations. This can quickly turn others off. Find a balance between taking care of business and being a person. Help spread news and info, respond to the questions of others or send a congrats for the success of their fundraising effort, and tweet some minor details of day to day life without a link. When you become involved in the Twitter community in this way people will be drawn to your efforts and not view you as just being out there to market yourself and gain their donations.
Are you currently using Twitter for fundraising and marketing? Do you have some advice to add?
You can follow me here. Please leave your Twitter information in the comments and we can all get connected!
Twitter graphic by Randa Clay
I highly recommend using TweetDeck. It provides an easy way to shorten links, it’s easy to see updates since tweets, replies, etc. are in separate columns. Now you can even use it to monitor more than one Twitter account.
In addition to following people near you geographically, follow people with similar interests. In TweetDeck I keep a search open for certain keywords and that has helped me find some interesting folks. It can be a boost to nonprofits who are affiliates of a larger org – for example if you work for a local United Way, follow other United Way Twitter users to see what their chapter is up to. It’s a great networking tool!
Great summary, love Twitter for those reasons, but we were always worried about leaving out the 95% of Americans not on Twitter! We built http://GuerrillaTweets.com for this kind of scenario, it allows you to spread the tweets farther and include anyone that has a cell phone via text message. It’s work in progress, would love to hear your feedback!
Thanks, Chris