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April 29, 2009

Nonprofit Technology Conference
Charities Need to Track What Is Said About Them Online, Says Nonprofit Official

Monitoring what people are saying online about an organization is critical, Carie Lewis, Internet Marketing Manager at the Humane Society of the United States, in Washington, told participants at a session on social media.

Charities, she said, should be tracking:

• Their organization’s name.
• Any acronyms associated with the group — the Humane Society monitors HSUS.
• The names of prominent employees and spokesmen.
• Any current campaigns or issues associated with the organizations.
• Other organizations that work on the same cause — the “competition.”
• “Detractors” — people who are known to be critical of the organization
• “Influencers” — people who shape he opinions of others.

“Detractors are people who can’t stand us, and there’s really nothing we can do about it,” said Ms. Lewis. “But we still have to pay attention to them. Our influencers are people who we’ve identified that are evangelists about our brand. We want to be able to communicate with those people and point them out.”

To help the Humane Society track all of that information, Ms. Lewis used iGoogle to set up a dashboard that aggregates RSS feeds from a variety of sources — including Google alerts, Filtrbox, Twitter Search, Technorati, Digg, and Forum — that send alerts on the terms the group is monitoring.

She also receives text messages when someone is talking about the organization online.

Said Ms. Lewis: “Brand monitoring is not a 9 to 5 job.”

— Nicole Wallace

Wednesday April 29, 2009 | Permalink

Comments

1. Helpful information for nonprofits! I don’t even know if a lot of nonprofits out there are thinking about branding, but nonetheless good for the nonprofit to know.

   — Kathy    Apr 29, 03:31 PM    #

2. Thanks for the post. This is really useful information. I am increasingly becoming aware of how important social media is for nonprofits. It’s a little overwhelming, but worth the time to figure it out!

   — Georgia @ Social Venture Group    Apr 29, 10:53 PM    #

3. Along with tracking these online mentions an organization has to establish an ongoing program to manage them. You need to promote the positive mentions and respond to the negatives. I’ve written about this on my blog in terms of “reputation enhancement.”

   http://www.alertrank.com/mrgooglealerts/2009/03/22/improve-your-online-reputation-with-google-alerts/

   The basic principle is building a positive profile that will appear when someone does a Google search. By distributing positive mentions as widely as possible, you increase their rank in Google, which in turn raises them to the first pages of results for your organization’s name.

   — Adam Green    Apr 30, 09:01 AM    #

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