How Non-Profits Can Leverage Social Media

When I started this blog post, I didn’t know what I was getting into. The concept of social media includes an ever-increasing hodgepodge of methods for keeping in touch with people you know, getting in touch with people you don’t know, and renewing old acquaintances. Social media allows individuals to “broadcast” thoughts and ideas to an audience that may be very small (like this blog), or very large (like the Huffington Post). Social media can interact with mass media to aggregate opinions (as happens on American Idol) or raise money (as happened during the Hope for Haiti concert, which reportedly raised $66 million, largely by donations received via cell phones).

Social media runs the gamut from blogs, to social networking sites like Facebook, to “microblogging” applications like Twitter, to collaboration tools like wikis, and multimedia sites like YouTube for video, Last.fm for music and Flickr for photos. How on earth is a typical non-profit, already working 48 hours a day just to keep the doors open, supposed to make sense of this landscape and actually use it to produce something valuable for the organization?

I asked Jane Kuechle to give us some answers.