GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!

A few weeks after I decided to dip my toe into the development pool, I met a guy who wanted to get his non-profit into the social media sphere.

"Everyone keeps telling me I have to get on Twitter," he said.  "What do you think?"

My gut reaction was to cry out, "YES! and I want to be your Twitter Guy!"  But, unfortunately, I felt obligated to reply with an honest, right answer.

"It depends."

Know Thy Goals
Big problems arise when any small or medium organization launches a new initiative by describing how they are going to accomplish tasks, and not what what needs to be accomplished.  Sure, I can get my new friend onto Twitter, but why does he want to start tweeting?  Is it to gain new clients?  Does he want to engage in conversations with existing clients?  Perhaps its because he thinks it can drum up support for the cause.  Or, perhaps (and I actually heard this) he just needs something for his college interns to do.  Without knowing his end goal, no one can decipher if this online initiative would be a saving grace or a colossal waste of time.

Think of it as if you were following a treasure map, but you didn't know what you were looking for, or how many landmarks you had to find before you reached the mystery treasure.  Start at the tree, now go to that bush, now find the third blue mailbox on the next street, now crawl under the porch, now go to a Jiffy Lube in Wichita, Kansas, and so on, and so on.  After a while, you get frustrated and board and you give up, leaving anyone who followed you without a leader.

That could very likely happened when our intrepid director attempted his organizational Twitter account without knowing why he wanted one.  After a month of tweeting and only getting 17 followers, he may find something to better spend his time doing.  Hopefully, it not Instagram.

After we talked for about a half hour, I found out that he really wanted to get more people to his events.  Since Twitter relates more like ease-dropping at a party, we decided to spend his efforts in Facebook.  Most of his donors and clients have accounts already and Facebook has the ability to invite people to events.  In addition, his organization will create a texting list, so his advocates could be personally invited to each event.

Making Goals that Stick
If anyone gives you a magic formula in how to create the perfect goal, kick them in the shins and run away.  There are thousands of methods for goal setting, some more businesslike than others.  My method when I served as a small non-profit director was to turn a problem into a statement.

For example, I hated that the majority of our funding were from grants and special events.  I wanted to increase our capacity to accept monthly donations from our many advocates.  By using this goal as a guide, we decided to tap into Network for Good to process donations, and Facebook, our website, and various email campaigns to promote the online donation portal.  We also trained all our intern staff on how to log people into the system from a mobile browser, just in case someone asks how they can donate on the spur of the moment.

Just remember that there are no right or wrong ways to create your goals.  Just write it down, make sure everyone is on board, and then work backwards until you get a task list.  And if you need any guidance, click on the Contact Me link and give me a call/email/tweet.