If you’re not engaging in social listening, you are missing a lot of opportunities to grow your nonprofit, community and find new donors. Social Listening can be your new secret weapon

Hi, my name is Bruce Stapleton and welcome to this weeks Movementum Moment.  Over the last 6 weeks I have reviewed the steps in the Nonprofit Marketing Roadmap that will lead you down a path of to building the momentum you need in your marketing.  You can review these past videos by going to the Movementum Youtube channel.  This week I want to highlight how social listening is a powerful way to elevate your engagement with supporters.

You want to know who supports what you do. Don’t you?  Social listening is a way to tap into all the online conversations and find ones that resonate with your cause.  This allows you to connect to the right people, build influencer relationships, monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns, and manage your nonprofits reputation.

You can’t just jump on social media and start looking at your feeds.   It’s much bigger than this.  You want to identify the people that resonate with your cause that are not currently on your social media pages but are active and talking about topics that your supporters and donors are interested in.  To find these potential influencers you must have a clear strategy on what topics and keywords you want to focus on.  This is why it is critical to have a clear mission statement and supporting messages so you can identify the key phrases and common questions that someone would ask to learn more about your nonprofits focus.   The problem statement you defined when creating your brand positioning is a great way to find actionable key words.  Also use the target market personas as defined in your brand strategy to further clarify your ideal supporter and what social media platforms they typically use.

Many non-profits are growing more reliant on social media to identify and engage with new supporters. Social-listening software analyzes massive amounts of public data, non-public social media, open source intelligence, and various other sources to surface relevant conversations – happening right now – that matter to your organization. The software then lets you harness these conversations to support initiatives, build relationships with influencers and supporters (online and off), manage reputational risk, and help you make smarter decisions. Social media listening tool like Awario, Hootsuite or Mention are three that seem to be good and economical choices for a nonprofit on a tight budget.

Social listening is about taking the time to understand what people are saying about your cause, building relationships with influencers, authentically engaging your supporters, and strategically monitoring what goes on in the social space.

For more information and templates you can use to get started go to my website at www.movementum.com and download the how-to-guide on “Building Your Cause Through Social Listening”.  Next week I will review the last step in the roadmap and provide 10 ways to grow followers using digital marketing. So until next week, have a great week.