April 1, 2012 | Read Time: 1 minute
Melanie Mathos and Chad Norman, social-media experts at the Blackbaud fundraising-software company, have written 101 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits. In an interview, they offered the following suggestions on how social-media tools can help nonprofits:
To reach local people:
Choose a geo-location-based social network like FourSquare or Gowalla. Such sites allow museums, theaters, or other such organizations to offer discounts or other special deals. Groupon and Living Social are among other sites that allow nonprofits to offer discounts on memberships or other ways to attract support.
To groups with missions that can be depicted visually:
Flickr allows groups to share photos. It also runs the Flickr for Good program, which offers at discounted rates many of the same features that are available to professional photographers, such as information about traffic to a nonprofit’s photos.
Other recommended special deals for nonprofits:
Google for Nonprofits, LinkedIn’s nonprofit resource center, Twitter’s Hope140 program, and YouTube’s nonprofit program.
