This is precisely why conducting a blogger outreach campaign can be the most difficult type of social media campaign.

CTK Techknowledge, a nonprofit software company, contacted me to develop and execute a strategy to promote their Heart & Soul Grant to potential applicants.

Part of the strategy included reaching out to bloggers in the nonprofit space in hopes that they’d write a blog post about the grant.

Results

Our goal for this part of the campaign was 30 blog posts. We ended up with 142 blog posts that sent over 5,000 visits to the Heart & Soul Grant application page. 1,552 organizations submitted applications.

How we did it

There we three factors that contributed to the overwhelming success of this campaign:

1. Inspire participation with incentive – Bloggers get approached all the time to blog about a product or cause. The last thing we wanted to do was to be another beggar. We knew that in order to overcome this challenge, we had to offer an incentive that would be way more compelling than an iTunes card or Amazon gift certificate (yawn). Knowing that nonprofit bloggers are change-makers who prefer direct participation in changing the world, we created the “Bloggers Choice” award. Here’s how it worked:
   *One of the participating bloggers would be randomly chosen to hand-pick one of the applicants.
   *The chosen applicant would get $1,000.
   This incentive gave participating bloggers a chance to look like a complete rock-star to their readers and peers! They would also receive a few mentions on the CTK website, Facebook Page and Twitter feed.
2. Turn heads with trending – We told participating bloggers to publish their blog post on March 1st at 2:00PM (EST). This specific constraint was critical in creating a trending effect among the nonprofit blogging community. There were only 39 bloggers that we were able to personally enlist, so we had to trend their posts in order to get more bloggers to participate. An additional 103 bloggers participated throughout March. If allowed the initial 39 bloggers to publish anytime in March, we wouldn’t have turned the other 103 heads.
3. Unify with an awesome team – The stars of the this whole effort were Juan Garcia and Justin Minsker (of CTK), JD Lasica (of SocialBrite.Org) and Deborah Finn (Strategic Techology Consultant). What they contributed was a lot of hard work, sincere belief in the Heart & Soul grant, and great people skills.

Blogger outreach strategy is just one offering at Inbound Zombie

Photo by 28 Dreams

Back in May, Oceana hired Inbound Zombie to develop an email acquision strategy and increase their Facebook fanbase. They had close to 10,000 fans but felt that they weren’t utilizing Facebook Page to its fullest potential.

Going With The Flow

Soon after we started working together, BP effed up the Gulf Coast with an oil spill. This meants responding to discussions their constituants were having, rather than having conversations about how cute Sea Turtles are.

Strategy

Having email acquisition as a primary goal, the Oceana Facebook team developed a strategy to engage with connections of their Facebook Page with the following expectations in mind:

• Increased engagement would lead to increased acquisition.
• Creating lively discussions on their wall would allow connections to share Oceana with their friends.
• An increase in Page activity would also impact fan growth.

A long-term vision of building a vibrant community was an important component of this strategy.

Tactics

We didn’t want to push an email acquisition strategy with current Facebook Page connections and risk alienating them for good. So we proceeded with consistency and sensitivity.

During the sixty day campaign period, a number of tactics were employed with this strategy in mind:

• Embedded Facebook sharing into the petition process. The Stop The Drill Facebook Tab was customized so that the user was prompted to share the petition with their friends right after they signed the petition.
• Conducted a live chat on June 3rd – during President Obama’s appearance on Larry King. The Facebook’s wall and Twitter were the primary places supporters commented on Obama’s appearance. The discussion for this event received 72 posts.
• Actively updated fans on the latest Oceana blog posts and news regarding the oil spill.
• Posted thought-provoking questions for fans to respond to. For example, “How has the BP oil spill personally effected you?”
• Tagged and praised related organizations. This created greater exposure for Oceana – particularly on Pages that have many more fans. One June 30th, the National Wildlife Federation was tagged on the Page. That update received one of the highest feedback scores. 90 new fans also joined the Page on that day.
• Pulled select tweets from Jackie Savitz and posted them on the Facebook Page wall.
• Set up a private group for fans interested in taking a lead role in promoting the petition.
• Praised and acknowledged fans.

Results

• 5,002 Emails Acquired From Facebook
• 4,277 New Facebook Page Connections (from 9,824 – 14,101) during this period – a 56% increase. This was due in part by the increased engagement on the Page as shown in this chart:
• Traffic from Facebook to Oceana’s website increased 764%

Assets

One of the biggest assets an organization has is the supporters. Oceana now needs to strategize on how to continue to develop the relationships they fostered during this campaign.

How could we have improved our results with Oceana?

Problems

There were several challenges they had with their current use of Facebook:

• Too Many Places - The Brain Aneurysm Foundation had a Group Page, a Cause Page, and even a Profile. But they didn’t have a Facebook Page. This caused confusion with Facebook users and unnecessary work with BAF staff members.
• Creating A Strong Launch – Because their presence up to that point was unfocused and weak, they wanted to do the opposite with their Page. We weren’t sure exactly how many people would initially become a fan of the Page, but we set a goal of 500 fans in the first 30 days – a goal we thought was attainable.
• Confused By Facebook – Turned out, they needed some training on how to properly manage a Facebook Page.

Solutions

• Set The Table – The first thing Inbound Zombie did was to create a custom Static FBML tab and main image. Pages with custom welcome tabs have a higher fan conversion rate than Pages that don’t.
• Send Out Dinner Invitations – The Brain Aneurysm Foundation leveraged two major assets to promote the Page – NING and their email list. But we didn’t just say “Big news! We’re on Facebook” (yawn). We crafted a simple message that was sincere and compelling.
• Serve Nutritious Food – Once people started joining the Page, we made a point of engaging fans in positive ways that created a lively and welcoming atmosphere. This meant posting valuable stories and thoughtful questions on the Page.
• Train The Chef - A critical factor in a sustainable Facebook Page is proper training. We accomplished this with live training, a set of video tutorials on using Facebook, and a series of model updates on the Page.

Lessons Learned

• First Impressions Are Powerful – Explaining the purpose of the Page to their supporters – with bullet points – set the tone for how the community now behaves. They share with each other, ask good questions and keep coming back.
• How To Create Great Content In Three Minutes – Like most nonprofits, their “social media staff” consists of one person who is also the office administrator, IT manager and receptionist. Asking them to create content from scratch was just asking for failure. Instead, they reposted their best stuff from the NING community (forum posts with the highest number of replies), asked meaningful questions to engage fans, and shared resources from their information library.

Results

For a brand new Page on Facebook, we achieved pretty impressive results:

• Over 730 fans in first 30 days
  
• Consistent Five-Star Post Quality
  
• A Happy Page Admin