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Tuesday Feb 05, 2008
Using Facebook to communicate with volunteers
I went to the last meet up of the Charity Web Forum on Monday and took part in a discussion about using social networking tools to communicate with volunteers.
I think a lot of the discussion of social networking is often in a marketing context where the focus is on how social networking online can be harnessed to increase the reach of a project, campaign or organisation. However, I think one the most valuable ways in which a website like Facebook can help is by building community amongst already established groups or networks by setting up closed or secret groups.
From our standpoint the big attraction of Facebook was that most of our volunteers and project members were already there. A hurdle many online communities fall at when trying to reflect already existing networks is that not everyone migrates to the new place, splitting your community between those there and those not.
In a practical group communication management sense, I think Facebook has made a huge difference. In particular, this has been felt most in what I call more vertical forms of communication, e.g. where you need to get a newsletter out to a group, an invite to an event and track responses, etc. However, I think the jury is really still out on the more horizontal kind of communication, i.e. where everyone gets to talk and 'see' everyone. A lot of horizontal communications, such as group members contacting each other independently, is below the radar. This isn't a bad thing- but it can make it harder to gauge your community's activity.
Obviously the potential is huge for building community once you've got everyone together online in the same place on a website they may well be visiting regularly. However, whether your community is communicating to each other as much as it could is certainly debatable in most cases. For example, discussion boards and link sharing are consistently underused across groups on Facebook. Why so when the potential is so great?
- A big part of this is the lack of functionality (searching or tagging your info in your Facebook group is terrible or non-existant).
- Another part of this is that there's no get out clause- you can't back up your group or export your data easily.
- Finally, it's crucial to be continuing to include the non-Facebookers in your group- which can become more complex, the more you find yourself wedded to the Facebook platform.
For Facebook development of groups has hardly been a priority- but arguably it's one of their greatest success stories. Here's to hoping Facebook start getting a bit more socially aware :-) Posted by Patrick Daniels ( 12:54 PM ) Link to this post Comments[1]
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Where money has been raised using Facebook, it's been the big profile charities raising relatively modest amounts, or cultivating relationships with new donors by creating Groups and then trying to broaden the relationship outside of Facebook.
Looking at the stats on the Causes application sheds some more light on this - the Non-Profit Tech blog is worth a read.
I'm guessing this is because Facebook is predominantly all about affiliations, rather than financial transactions.
Posted by Sam Thomas on February 05, 2008 at 05:32 PM GMT+00:00 #