Frog Loop

Ever wanted to find out where your donors and activists are hanging out on social networks so you can continue deepening your relationsips with your supporters and foster more two-way conversations? Thanks to Care2's new Social Network Tracker that allows you to match your email lists across major social networks it's now super easy to do.

The Care2 Social Network Tracker tells you which of your donors and activists are on social networks, what social networks they are on and how many friends they have in aggregate. 

You can use this data to identify the "super-connectors" on your list so that you can reach out to these individuals and:

• Find out if they are talking about your issue in their social networking community.
• Engage them in discussions and generate feedback.
• Cross promote your most important actions, volunteer, and donation opportunities. (Be strategic on this one - no one likes to be treated like an ATM machine).
• Give them helpful resources and answer questions they have about your issue or organization.
• Share campaign successes.

Here is the short list of the social media sites that are included:

• Facebook
• MySpace
• Twitter
• Flickr
• LinkedIn
• StumbleUpon
• LiveJournal

 

Match Rate:

The anticipated match rate for Social Network Tracker data append is 70% to 80%.  However, results may vary for your file.

As Frogloop discusses on this blog often, one of the keys in building a strong engagement and outreach proram is to connect with donors and activists across multiple channels. Social media is a key space to deepen those relationships. The Social Network Tracker is one tool that can help you quickly connect with your base.

The CitizenGulf project was just unfolded last week. A national event on August 25 with would-be meet-ups throughout the country designed to create awareness for the Citizen Effect project, seeks to raise funds and awareness for fishing families. The effort also fits the nonprofit's citizen empowering philanthropy philosophy, which is identifying actionable problems and solutions amongst major problems, such as this one -- the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill. How does one go from an oil spill to a national meet-up event? What strategies and tools will be deployed? Here's an inside look on how we scaled from a nonexistent program to a national effort in just three months.

Strategy Begins with Research

We began our effort with a very visible citizen reporting trip featuring Citizen Effect's Dan Morrison and May Yu, Jill Foster, and myself that informed our strategy. Specifically, though it raised awareness via successful CNN iReports, photos, video, podcasts, blog posts, and social network outreach, the effort provided critical insights:

• Defined the problem facing fishing families, an identifiable and actionable issue within the larger oil spill context. Stories were a critical component of social media to make any cause relatable.
• Indentified a local 501c3 (Catholic Charities of New Orleans) that has relationships with the fishing families as well as a possible solution, educating their children.
• Found local partners to work with, namely cause promoter Sloane Berrent and her existing network of national Gulf Coast supporters like Andy Sternberg via Gulf Coast Benefit

Like crime, procrastination doesn’t pay. Literally.

For many organizations nearly half of online fundraising revenue comes in during the month of December. But in actuality it takes months of preparation – building and stewarding an online community, inspiring donors, cultivating them, testing in advance of year-end and analyzing your metrics -- to really make the most of your year-end fundraising opportunities.

The good news is you’ve got several months – four to be exact – to get your fundraising house in order.  That’s why Eric Rardin and I co-wrote this Overachiever’s Guide and presented a Care2 webinar on this very topic last Thursday – so we could share nine steps you can implement now to help you raise more money in December.

For instance:

Your Mother gave you sage advice that holds doubly true with your donors: Always say your hellos and thank-yous.

While welcoming new donors and thanking them seems obvious, in my reviews across non-profit organizations, a majority do not welcome and thank their donors enough. And an un-thanked donor won’t be a donor for long.

• Does your auto responder donation thank you look like a tax receipt? If so, you are missing an opportunity to re-inspire a donor who just gave to you.
• Do you send your donors non-ask updates on your work including success stories they made possible? If not, you are missing a stewardship opportunity that is relatively cheap and easy to do online.
• When you get a large online gift do you ever pick up the phone or send a handwritten note to thank the donor? This is a huge opportunity to bond that high-dollar donor to your cause for the long run.
• When was the last time you made a gift to your organization? I highly recommend you find out first-hand how you are treating your donors in advance of year-end. What would you want to change about the experience? Most likely, your donors want to change that too.

For more tips for getting your thank on, download the Guide or view the webinar.

In the good old Web 1.0 days cause marketing campaigns got a bad rap. Some criticized corporations and said their cause marketing efforts were PR stunts designed to score brownie points with the public. In the Web 2.0 world, cause marketing contests such as Pepsi Refresh and Chase Community Giving have caused a different kind of ruckus. It's called digital litter. Why? Because in cause marketing contests, charities and ordinary citizens are encouraged to reach out to their online networks and ask people to vote for their favorite charities. The charity with the most votes receives cash grants ranging from $10K to $250K+ to help fulfill their mission. Critics say that the obsession with voting is not only cluttering up their email, but their social networking space too.

"The problems with using social channels heavily for things like vote-raising events like this is that it floods one’s channel with that kind of promotion. That’s problem 1. The secondary problem is that if you’re someone with a larger following, you have to manage how many of these competitions you’re going to promote, because one begets another begets misgivings about which charities one supports and which charities one doesn’t," said Chris Brogan, who was irked enough to write about this recently on his personal blog.

Others in the debate feel that it’s an organization's actual work on the ground that should speak louder than their talent for garnering "votes". What about small nonprofits who just don't have the large email lists or staff time and resources to spend all day on social networks asking people to vote for them? How can they take advantage of opportunities like this?

"I think that nonprofits really need to think about the ROI before entering these contests. Organizations need to hit the pause button and ask if they should participate in the contest in the first place," said Beth Kanter who developed an ROI checklist as result of her research through the American Giving Challenge.

What do you think? Are online fundraising contests effective or are they turning into digital litter campaigns?

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One of the biggest questions nonprofits have been asking for the past couple of years, is what benchmarks should they be using for social media? The 2010 Nonprofit Benchmarks Report released by NTEN has some great data that nonprofits can use for guidance.

Nonprofit Social Media Benchmark Data You Need to Know

According to 1200 nonprofits surveyed:

• Facebook is the number one used commercial social network by nonprofits. 86% said that they have a presence on Facebook, a 16% increase from 2009. However, nonprofits experienced a drop in their average community from 5,391 members in 2009 to 2,440 in 2010. 
  

• 60% of Nonprofits are on Twitter as compared to 43% in 2009.

• Twitter’s average community size (i.e. number of followers) grew the fastest and by 627%. In 2009 nonprofits had an average of 286 followers. In 2010 nonprofits average close to 1800 followers.

• LinkedIn (largely used by education institutions and professional associations) and YouTube usage remained steady over the last year. YouTube moved up slightly from 46.5% in 2009 to 48.1% in 2010, and LinkedIn stayed steady at 32.9% in 2009 and 33.1% this year.

• Not surprisingly MySpace suffered a 45% drop in popularity. Use dropped from 26.1% in 2009 to 14.4% in 2010.

If your nonprofit has been contemplating entering online fundraising contests, check out the 2009 American Giving Challenge report released by the Case Foundation. Over the course of 30 days, individuals competed for donors donations and matching awards for their favorite charities. The challenge raised $2.1 million dollars for nonprofits from over 105,000 donations.

“The open design enabled any individual supporting any organization to enter the contest, and truly leveled the playing field between large established institutions and smaller grassroots organizations, said Sokunthea Sa Chhabra, Director of Interactive Communications for the Case Foundation.

Here are a few key statistics and highlights from the report.

• More than 82,000 individual donors made 105,000 donations to nearly 8,000 causes with an average gift of $17.73
• There was a demonstrated shift in the adoption of social media by nonprofit organizations themselves:  in the 2007-2008 Giving Challenge, a significant number of cause champions were volunteers; and in the 2009 Challenge, 40% of champions were staff of the competing nonprofit (only 25% identified as volunteers).
• Personal connections, compelling use of videos and storytelling, and repeatedly thanking donors for gaining support for causes proved to be important elements for success in the challenge.

The report also highlighted common characteristics for winners:

Personal appeals and good storytelling to pre-existing networks of donors and friends through multiple channels were most effective methods for fundraising. Contest participants rated the following as most useful:

Did You Know?

* 300 billion was raised in 2008 (Giving USA);

* $15 billion was raised online in 2008 – a 44% increase over 2007) (Blackbaud);

* $21 million has been raised by Causes since its launch three years ago;

* 30% of online giving happens in December. (2008 donorCentrics Internet Giving Collaborative Benchmarking Analysis);

* The average online gift was $144.72, according to BlackBaud though M&R’s benchmark study noted that the average one time online gift was $81.

 

How Does Your Nonprofit Measure Up?

This was the opening question Jocelyn Harmon (Director of Nonprofit Services for Care2.com) and I posed during our presentation on "The Art and Science of Fundraising Online" for the Association Foundation Group.

If your organization's average online gift is lower than you would like or your organization has not developed a well thought out year-end online fundraising campaign in the past, then you need to make changes to your online fundraising program ASAP. (You should also check out the webinar “The Procrastinators’ Guide to Year-End Fundraising” coming up on July 22nd at 2PM EST).

Seven Online Fundraising Strategies You Can Do Right Now

Create Killer Landing Pages

Tell people what you want them to do quickly. Be clear how their donation will make a difference. One tactic that has been successful for the nonprofit CARE is to provide their donors with two simple pie charts that illustrate how funds raised are allocated below the credit card donation form.

Also give people several options to contribute money – one time giving, monthly giving, etc.

Did you know that a strong organizational tagline does double-duty? According to Nancy Schwartz, a nonprofit consulting, "working to extend your organization’s name and mission, while delivering a focused, memorable and repeatable message to your base is one of your most effective marketing tools." However, a GettingAttention.org survey showed that 72% of nonprofit organizations don’t have a tagline or rate theirs as performing poorly. Yikes!

To turn the tide and encourage nonprofits to develop taglines with an impact, Schwartz launched the 2010 Nonprofit Tagline Awards Program. How does your nonprofit's organization tagline size up to other nonprofits?  Just enter your organizational, fundraising campaign, program and/or special event tagline!

After the voting ends by such notable judges as Katya Andresen, Chief Operating Officer, Network for Good and Kari Saratovsky, Vice President, Social Innovation at the Case Foundation, Schwartz will release an updated Tagline Report highlighting what kinds of taglines are effective and marketable and which ones simply fail.

Past winners include:

• EarthJustice - "Because the earth needs a good lawyer"
• The United Negro College Fund - "A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste"
• Nothing But Net - "Send a net. Save a life."

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Most nonprofits and social justice groups work with the traditional media to build audiences and new support for their vision. This morning’s stories in the Washington Post and The New York Times are what people are talking about at the water-cooler. When you get a story in the press, people believe it and become attracted to the issue.

But how do you get a story in the press? Web 2.0 can be one of your most valuable outlets for accessing the press by proving that the story has legs. You can show audience through your online buzz. Reporters and news producers are on the web all day, every day. One of your supporters could forward a story from your website to a producer they know, or a huge jump in readership for your blog at Huffington Post could gain a reporter’s attention. Another great aspect of creating synergy between traditional and social media relations is you can show the press how to best tell the story you are seeking to get out.

In this social media age, it’s necessary to make your online outreach work interconnect with and echo the external media relations work. Traditional media relations and Web 2.0 communications plans can compliment each other to serve the objectives of creating stories for the media and for audiences to connect with your non-profit vision. For example, we know that the media always loves stories around holidays, like Labor Day or Women’s History Month. You can plan to offer holiday-related stories to the press at the same time that you post them on your social media outlets. The best result would be that your audience sees your message on your blog and also reads it in the local paper.

Make Audio a Vital Medium for Your Non-Profit

Using audio files may be more powerful than you think. The term multimedia brings to mind flashy video presentations. However, going lo-fi with your media can actually suit your needs more directly than video, text or still photography. Jill Foster, a communications consultant in DC, recently spoke to me about the virtues of stand-alone audio..

Karen: So what is different about stand-alone audio content versus other types of content that you can find online?

Jill: It provides another type of idea stream. With audio, the issue is speed because it’s a simpler type of content to produce. Video is such a powerful medium, but one reason why I like using audio is to preserve the audio quality itself – and use a smartphone mic, like for certain conversations where the audio environment is threatened by back noise.  Last week when interviewing a Gulf resident in Grand Isle, LA – I used Flip video to capture the gorgeous sun on the desolate sandy beach being cleaned up by BP. But later when auditing the video clip, the audio was severely blurred by the strong winds. So that would’ve been a time to use audio-only tech (like the Voice Memo mic on the iPhone) as to preserve audio quality.

Audio, also captures my immediate reflections, and I rarely edit. I love audio content and sharing it especially via mobile.  It’s a way to humanize the relationships I’m building along the way. In the end, audio is everything and it creates a conversational archive.

Karen: How do you make your audio files conversational?

Think it's too soon to start preparing for year-end fundraising? Think again!

Earn your overachiever’s gold star and get cracking with nine steps you can use now to raise more money in December.

You might know that 40 percent of all online donations come in during December. But did you also know that year-end fundraising doesn’t just happen in December? It takes months of list building, inspiring donors, cultivating them, testing, and analyzing metrics to make the absolute most of year-end opportunities.

Join Alia McKee Scott of Sea Change Strategies, Milo Sybrant of Amnesty International, and Eric Rardin of Care2 for a great discussion on concrete ways you can maximize your strategy and tactics this year.

Participants will learn the most successful fundraising strategies including:

• How to create compelling fundraising campaigns that motivate web visitors to make a donation on your website.

• Which easy fixes you can make to your donation page, so that donors complete the donation process.

• How to communicate with donors before, during, and after they donate money online to your nonprofit and build long lasting relationships.

Moving from a 1.0 world to a 2.0 world can be very scary for nonprofits. Senior leadership, in particular, isn’t comfortable giving up power and fear that they will lose control of their core messaging. It’s critical that nonprofits face their fears and take control. Why? Because conversations about the issues you work on are consistently happening all over the web. Your nonprofit can either choose to join those conversations and help steer them or face the consequences. Being left out of online conversations not only gives your competitors the advantage of dominating discussions, it can often frame competitors as “the” leader around your issues in the online space. That’s not good!

If your nonprofit wants to start engaging in online conversations, first you need to start by listening to what people are saying about your organization and the issues you work on. You will want to analyze the competition too. Here are some of my favorite online listening and analytics tools.

Lay Of The Land: Who’s Saying What?

1. Addictomatic: This is by far the easiest way to create a listening dashboard for free. Type in a search term and it will generate the latest news, blog posts, videos and even images around the keyword. After it generates results (using a variety of search engines, news sites and social networks) you can personalize the dashboard. Bookmark it and check it daily. 

2. Topsy: Part search engine, part social web connector. When you search for something on Topsy, such as “climate change”, Topsy finds daily conversations that match the search term. The results are the items people link to, when discussing your search term via a social network, news website, blog, etc. Topsy ranks results based on how well they match your search terms, and the “influence” of the people tweeting or writing about your issue. Bonus: It links to the conversationalists twitter profiles so you can follow them and engage with them on Twitter.

One of the big issues nonprofit campaigners face in their day-to-day job is choosing what online channels and tools should they be investing in. Video blogging (aka vlogging) has been around for quite some time, yet many nonprofits don’t utilize it. Should nonprofits carve out more time for video blogging? Sue Anne Reed who regularly participates in #BlogChat over on twitter (and an avid reader of Frogloop) did a great write up on this very topic. 

“Some are using it to replace their blogging efforts completely, and some are mixing it up with video blogs and regular blogs together depending on the content,” said Reed.

Fans of video blogging feel like it adds more personality to their posts and that it allows them to engage with their audience on a deeper level, said Reed.

Wondering how video blogging will impact your websites SEO? There are a few tactics you can use to boost SEO.

• Provide a transcript (also good for accessibility)
• Write a recap of the video on the blog (in addition to posting the video)
• Add comments and annotations
• Use captions (also good for accessibility)
• Post the video to YouTube – it has SEO benefits.

“Video blogging allows real-time connections and puts a face or a level of identity on issues that nonprofits are addressing. It gives all those that can't be there in the moment a way to connect, ” said Shireen Mitchell who advises nonprofits on leveraging technology and social media.

 Looking for good tips on producing video blogs?

People want to be better listeners.  Or at least they want to figure out what the right tools are. Beth Kanter’s final session of the day “Listening Tools” drew a large crowd of curious attendees at the Nonprofit 2.0 Unconference on Friday, June 25th.

Wendy Harman, Social Media Manager at Red Cross, was the first to discuss the listening tools she uses (namely Radian6) -- and the process she follows (more on that in a moment) to keep a beat on what people are saying about Red Cross across social networks and the blogosphere. 

From Wendy’s explanation, Beth distilled four key points:

1. Keywords are king (Google alerts can only be effective if the correct keywords have been set up)
2. See the forest not the trees (skim, spend time reading through only the meatiest comments)
3. Find a workflow that will lend itself to both internal and external engagement (listening can essentially serve the same function as assembling a focus group – share the important information that you learn about your brand’s perception with your colleagues. Respond to the happy, frustrated or misinformed people whom you’ve found online to address their concerns or successes.)
4. Make sure to circulate the information learned (Basically, this final point just reinforces the importance of using the information that you’ve found through listening to inform organizational decisions.)

Through listening to others’ descriptions of how they listen to what’s being said about their organizations online, Beth determined that there are three different methods of listening:

Allison Fine and Beth Kanter led a thoughtful keynote conversation moderated by Shireen Mitchell during the first annual NonProfit 20 Unconference.

Fine and Kanter told attendees that nonprofits need to empower their free agents (volunteers who are passionate about your nonprofit) to help organizations further their mission.  

Nonprofits should embrace free agents to raise money for your organization, said Fine and Kanter and Kanter.  Kanter highlighted Roger Carr as a prime example.  Prior to becoming a board member for the Arthritis Foundation he was an active volunteer (aka free agent) with the organization and spent his free time raising money for the organization. Why did Carr became a free agent for the Arthritis Foundation? Because he had a very personal connection to the issue.  

Kanter and Fine also warned nonprofits to stop obsessing over control. “The one thing in this world that nonprofits can’t do is control free agents but you can build strong relationships along the way, educate them about your issues, and set them free.”

Before you engage free agents though it’s important that you listen to them first. “This allows you to distinguish between who are the real free agents passionate about your cause and who the trolls are, said Kanter.” You need to mentor and nurture the free agents.

Are Nonprofits Adapting to Social Media?

“If 2009 was the year of the "tweet", 2010 is the year of the "check-in", said Joe Waters, Director of Cause and Event Marketing at Boston Medical Center on this weeks Live Discussion over at the Chronicle of Philanthropy. After all, location apps like Foursquare and Gowalla were the breakout technology at SXSWi just a few months ago. Following SXSWi though, Frogloop questioned if apps like Foursquare are a novelty or buzz worthy, particularly for nonprofits.

Estrella Rosenberg, who founded Big Love Little Hearts, which works to provide life-saving surgery to children with congenital heart defects in developing countries, has been using Foursquare for advocacy as well as to raise money and connect with constituents and volunteers.

“I recently did an advocacy, awareness and fundraising campaign called #100X100 using Foursquare that raised $25,000 in 24 hours and prompted more than 800 supporters to call their Congressmen,” said Rosenberg.

While Rosenberg may not have raised buckets of money, generating $25K in 24 hours and getting 800 people to call their Congressperson is not insignificant.

What was some of Rosenberg’s key tactics? “We levied the power of check-ins connected to Twitter and Facebook and got a donor to contribute $1 for every time someone checked-in (or tweeted) with the hashtag #100X100 on a specific day,” said Rosenberg.

 Also “the ability to leave tips with embedded links and the shout-out feature [made] foursquare a great medium for promoting [our] advocacy efforts,” said Rosenberg.

The following post is excerpted from "Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking," a new book from Berrett-Koehler by technologist and nonprofit consultant Deanna Zandt.

When fear of technology makes us hesitate, or holds us back altogether, the conversations about social change continue on without us--without the benefit of our experiences, values, and knowledge.

Those who are reluctant to use social networks to effect change also frequently express fear over lost privacy. The challenges we face in maintaining some semblance of privacy while participating in the larger social movement can certainly seem overwhelming. We're communicating more frequently and more openly with people with whom we may not yet have forged alliances in our own spheres. Talking to strangers--what you've been told you're not supposed to do since you were a child--may also make us feel vulnerable as we share who we are as part of the work of change. Rinku Sen, executive director of the Applied Research Center and coauthor of The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2008), points out that these risks are similar to the risks that people working in social justice movements have always experienced; only the scale and intimacy have changed. "That need to address our fears and protect ourselves is a part of doing politics," Sen argues. "The medium is different, and you can hear from strangers more often, but the fear itself is not different. It's legitimate in both places." While the fear feels different because it's related to new technology and experienced in a way that we're not used to, it's the same fear that proponents of social change have always had to confront.

A couple of years ago I put together the "social network" calculator as a free resource to assess the opportunity cost of recruiting email subscribers and donors online.  It was ahead of its time and may still need some tweaking, but the basic assumptions hold true - if you're paying staff to spend time on social networks and the end goal is list-growth or dollars, then this tool is for you.

How does it work? After you access the calculator here, enter the cost per hour of your staff, and other basic web and email metrics, and you can get a realistic snapshot of how you're doing. I'll preempt the typical response of "well, there are other intangibles and other types of ROI" by saying that if that's your world, that's fine, you're right - there are interesting and good things that happen as a result of social media, and you should do it, but I wouldn't expect a lot of direct response in terms of dollars, and you might want to hold off if you haven't done some of the basics, first.

And if you're going to spend time on social media, and you aren't leveraging your email list to do so, you're doing things the hard way.

ROI (Return on Investment) in its simplest form has has a very specific mathematical definition. ROI = (gain from investment - cost of investment)/(cost of investment). That will give you a percentage that you can compare against other potential investments. You usually want to go with the highest percentage or percentages if you're making a decision as to where you spend budget.

I think social networks have huge potential - but if you're being asked by your boss (or you're a boss asking your employees or volunteers) to do the near impossible, and beat the numbers, then this tool is for you. You can quickly see the actual cost per friend you recruit, the supporter you recruit, or cost per donation and hopefully compare that to other options - web traffic, direct mail, ads, email, events, etc.

This tool was designed to assess OPPORTUNITY COST; namely, if you're spending time doing something with a lower return on investment than another opportunity, you should stop doing it and choose the investment with the higher potential return.

So... let 'er rip.  Bring on the peer review.  I'm sure all you highly opinionated folks have a lot to say about this now that we have been watching the gold rush for four years NOT pan out to be the viral miracle we dreamed of early on for MOST nonprofits.

It's time to bust out the calculator and have a realistic look.

My hope is that people will help me refine this to make it a more user-friendly tool, and hopefully save the nonprofit sector millions of dollars.

http://ow.ly/1XgIb or http://www.socialnetworkcalculator.com if you want to tweet it. (Ha! The irony).

Coming soon - I'm working on an overall online ROI assessment calculator.  Email me (Justin at care2team.com) if you'd like to help beta test it.

*Justin is the Director of Nonprofit Services at Care2.com.

The ecosystem of nonprofits is exploding, yet the problems society faces are larger than nonprofits, said Allison Fine, on the Care2 webinar The Networked Nonprofit. The solution?  Networking. This was one of the key takeaways during the webinar presented by Fine, Beth Kanter, Danielle Brigida of National Wildlife Federation, and Mark Sirkin of Autism Speaks

“Nonprofits are fortresses trying to manage the message. Free agents will free you from your cage,” said Kanter. What’s a free agent? They are volunteers in your network. People who are passionate about your nonprofits issues and who want to make a difference! “Invite them in,” said Kanter.  Brigida agreed. A truly "networked nonprofit" realizes that help is reciprocal and this is something the National Wildlife Federation is embracing in their constituent engagement strategy.

Sirkin said that nonprofits are too focused on ROI – Return on Investment, something many of us in the nonprofit community have been discussing as we continue to develop road maps and define metrics to help measure social media’s impact. “We need to be focusing on ROE - Return on Engagement," said Sirkin

You can listen to the full recording of the webinar here. You can also view the slides on SlideShare below.

More Resources:

• Strategies for being a Better Networked Nonprofit - Frogloop
• Three Apps and Networks Spurring Social Good - Frogloop
• Networked Nonprofits Avoid Scarcity Thinking and Embrace the Black Smoke Monster - Beth Kanter

 

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Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg fired up the death of email debate at the Nielsen’s Consumer 360 Conference Yesterday. She said only 11% of teens email daily and that they are using SMS (or Twitter) and social networks for communications. Interestingly, despite all the protests against Facebook’s privacy policy she also said that people entrust their personal info with social networks. To Sandberg these are signals that email will die.

Sandberg raises some interesting points such as the growth of social networks, however, as Frogloop reported last fall in our article Email is Dead? Long Live Email, we have not found any valid research that substantiates that email is dying out. In fact, between 2000 and 2009, email in the US alone grew 138% according to the World Internet User Statistics. In India it grew by 1250%. In the UK it grew by 203%. In Mexico it grew by 917%. In China it grew by 1500%. Furthermore, in August 2009, 276.9 million people used email in the US and abroad as compared to 229.2 million people in August of 2008 according to the Nielsen Company. This is growth not a decline.

Are a few popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook growing faster than some analysts predicted? Yes, but on social networks like Twitter, the adoption rate is actually low. Only about 10% to 20% of Twitter’s  users are actively tweeting and are the ones driving 80% to 90% of all tweets. Facebook certainly offers more options to nonprofits like Fanpages and Causes but as a whole nonprofits have far more people on their email lists, generate more actions taken via email (and by action I don't mean "liking something" and giving it a thumbs up) and raise a lot more money than on Facebook Causes.

And what happened to MySpace? They have been publically struggling to compete in the social networking space and are currently in the process of a major rebranding campaign. Will they survive?

At the end of the day social networks are a space for us to be social online. The teens Sandberg referenced are doing just that. As they get older and join the working world, they will use email and a variety of other channels and gadgets to communicate. As all savvy nonprofit campaigners and marketers know, it’s not just about using one tool to communicate with people; it’s about having a tool box filled with all the key tools you need to reach your constituents across multiple channels.

More Resources:

• Email is Dead? Long Live Email - Frogloop
• Will Open Source Social Networks Eventually Replace Facebook? - Frogloop
• Email is the Hub around which Facebook, Twitter and other Social Media Revolve - EPolitics



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