The Free Chicago Seminars of Experiential Social Media for Nonprofits

Introducing the Free Chicago Seminars Experiential Social Media Nonprofits

Free Chicago Seminars Experiential Social Media ?NonprofitsThe Free Chicago Seminars of Experiential Social Media for Nonprofits and social impact firms aims to help nonprofits and social impact firms to unlock the power of experiential to transform their commitments from their donors, volunteers and other supporters. The series will be offered by CSRA in Chicago starting Summer 2018. Experiential is “the nonprofit way” to do social media because its main goal is serving people, not marketing to them. And it usually produces much better business outcomes than social media and marketing.

I designed this three-part public seminar series for nonprofits and social impact companies, and I’m making it available for free to qualified groups. I’ve pioneered the development of experiential social media since 2006, and I want to share a new way to build trust and commitment from donors, volunteers, partners, clients and other stakeholders to nonprofits and social impact firms.

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How to Boost Employee Support for Nonprofit Fundraising

Free Chicago Seminars Experiential Social Media ?Nonprofits

Employee Support for Nonprofit FundraisingHow to Boost Employee Support for Nonprofit Fundraising reveals that, although employees can be tremendous supporters of nonprofit fundraisers, managers have to navigate some subtle waters to engage employees.

The key to “engagement” is making it voluntary and meaningful to employees as people. I say this because many organizations expect support, but expectation diminishes the voluntary requirement. When management harbors the attitude that employees owe them to promote the fundraiser, this will backfire. Here’s my response to a situation in the Nonprofit Technology Network forums.

A web/social media specialist for family services nonprofit sought advice for increasing employee participation in their annual fundraiser. Most of the responses explained how to use email signatures (someone even suggested appending promotional text to employees’ email signatures globally!). Someone else suggested gift certificates. I took a different tack.

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Nonprofits and Experiential Social Media: A Special Affinity

Nonprofits and Experiential Social Media: NGO Social Impact CauseNonprofits and experiential social media shares how nonprofits can improve their social media results and why I think experiential social media has an affinity for cause-focused organizations. This post was triggered by my insights from my recent research on nonprofits and cause-focused organizations. Although I’d served nonprofits throughout my consulting career, my focus was on commercial firms. While organizing Chicago Social Empowerment [Cohort One], I researched many nonprofits to distill the cohort’s categories, so I learned more about nonprofit operations and business models.

First, I’ll share some broad insights about nonprofit operations and business models, specifically focusing on their stakeholders, and broad guidance for improving their results with social media. Then I’ll share insights about experiential social media and why I hypothesize that it has a special affinity for nonprofits.

For brevity, I’ll also use “nonprofit” to refer to social enterprises and other cause-focused organizations.

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CSRA Milestones: Ten Years of Experiential Social Media

CSRA Milestones: The First Ten YearsCSRA milestones reflects on my first ten years of experiential social media, seen through the eyes of clients I’ve served. I’ll share what I learned about what outcomes we got in each engagement as well as how it happened that I developed and pioneered experiential, which if a repeatable process for developing trust and profit at scale.

If you’d like to watch this post instead, just click the thumbnail button.

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Relationship Trumps Mission in Nonprofit Social Media & on the Street

Nonprofits’ and NGOs’ use of street marketing and social media reveals how mission too often overshadows relationship building—and alienates more people than it attracts.

In How Nonprofits & NGOs Can Press Their Home Court Advantage in Social Business, I explained how nonprofits had a significant “moral advantage” over commercial enterprises because they were cause-focused, which is inherently more attractive to most people than business focus. However, as I’ll explain here, too many NFPs apply their moral advantage in the wrong way, so it creates more negative than positive impressions. I’ll use the tangible example of street marketing to make the point before applying it to social business/social media.

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How Nonprofits & NGOs Can Press Their Home Court Advantage in Social Business

I have written often about various facets of social business disruption, which usually causes organizations angst because they have to learn to change how they do things. On a happier note, nonprofits and NGOs, long accustomed to being (relatively) disadvantaged do-gooders grateful for commercial bodies’ largesse, actually have more of an advantage in social business than commercial firms (“brands”).

In this context, government usually lies between nonprofits and brands because it’s not commercially focused (advantage), but it rarely considers individuals in meaningful ways (disadvantage). Here I’ll lay out the rationale for these claims before giving some practical pointers for unlocking social business potential by understanding the social good of your business. Brands and governments, you can learn from this, too.

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Giving as Cultural Glue and Smart Business: Blake Mycoskie, Founder TOMS Shoes

Giving as Smart Business: Blake Mycoskie, Founder TOMS ShoesGiving as Smart Business: Blake Mycoskie, Founder TOMS Shoes is a fantastic story and a smart business idea. Blake Mycoskie is a gifted storyteller in his own right, and, in this South by Southwest 2011 keynote, he entertained the audience with the story of TOMS Shoes while imparting a simple but profound principle of 21st century business: discovering the meaning and potential of giving. Here are the highlights of TOMS story, which will help you appreciate the context of the blockbuster business idea.

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PopTech Maps Course of Social Change

These three examples showed how digitally produced social information could change entrenched human problems like war, excessive punishment and imprisonment and mass death by natural disaster. As such, they serve as examples of widespread change that will occur thanks to social networks and work processes. […]