The Charity Place

Twitter - Are you a 'natural born twitterer'?

Yesterday I shared an article from The Chronicle of Philanthropy featuring advice and examples of Twitter for nonprofits, which featured a quote from Jeff Manning of the The Lance Armstrong Foundation. If you missed that post, here's a link to it.

Following on from that, I thought I would share this interview with Lance Armstrong that I came across this afternoon on TechCrunch - declaring him a 'natural born Twitterer' - as it contains a couple of insights that might be useful.

In the interview, Lance says of Twitter,

'140 characters fits my personality well. I’m not much for small talk ... I see long drawn out emails and I delete them. It also brings a certain transparency to my life that others may have never seen or realized. Lastly, it works great for talking about the thing I care about the most (behind my family) and that’s fighting cancer. Twitter builds grassroots movements quicker than anything I’ve ever seen.'

These are useful principles to bear in mind whether you're tweeting as an individual or on behalf of the brand of the charity or nonprofit you work for. Being as transparent as possible and focusing on what's important to you/ your organisation gives your followers a clear idea about who you are and what you stand for - and something honest and real to engage with.  As Lance puts it:

'It has to be 100% authentic... people are smart. They know when they see something real.'

Lance goes on to say he tries to:

'Keep it positive. There are plenty of times I felt like crushing someone for what they say or did but I avoid it.'

Clearly, many charities and nonprofits deal with challenges and issues that are not, in themselves, necessarily positive, and need to be transparent about the realities of this in order to attract support.

However, what he means here is that it's important to respond positively to criticism or negative attention.  And it's just as important, if you're about to start tweeting on behalf of your charity or nonprofit, to set expectations with your director or board about the likelihood that this will happen, because you're bound to encounter it sooner or later.

If you haven't yet started tweeting at your organisation, I think it's worth thinking this through, and discussing it with colleagues in your communications team.  They will be adept at handling negative media coverage, and dealing with common misconceptions, and able to advise on the kinds of issues that generally arise and what your organisation's position is.  You might consider working together to develop some guidelines or general principles, so that you (or other staff tweeting on behalf of your organisation) can feel confident that your tweets are aligned with brand values and key messages.

Remember though, whilst it's good to plan and anticipate scenarios, you should try to avoid over-thinking your approach to Twitter and be led by the character of the medium - which is, by its very nature, fast and informal.

If you are going to tweet on behalf of your nonprofit's brand, it will be totally unworkable if every message you post has to be signed-off internally beforehand, if you adopt too corporate a tone, or if your tweets don't show any personality.  Even if your profile name and picture is your organisation's brand, you'll still only get real engagement with the Twitter community if you let something of the personality of the individual using the account show through (Dogs Trust do this really well).  In fact, it's unrealistic to think that won't happen anyway, unless you only post generic updates - and, believe me, if you do that you won't be getting the most out of using Twitter for all your efforts.

So, if you can, try to be a natural born twitterer - and do what feels right, rather than getting bogged down with policies and rules.

You might want to follow Lance Armstrong on Twitter for a while, and decide what you think about his style of tweeting.  You might find it interesting to compare his tweets to those from The Lance Armstrong Foundation. Do they have the same voice; how does the content and style differ?

I've been following Lance on Twitter for a while now, and I've never really noticed that he tweets as frequently as the article says.  Mind you, as he says, 'Most tweets I send people don't even notice'. That's a useful insight too.  Although your tweets can be read at any time, people have busy lives and aren't going to hang on your every word, or read every tweet.  Another reason not to be too cautious or precious, and just experiment a bit.  And if you post a tweet and have second thoughts about it later, you can always delete it or - better still - be transparent, and correct yourself or invite some positive debate about it.

Why charities need to use social media

Here's a link to an article I wrote for CharityComms on this subject, to accompany the presentation I made at their event on 22 October.

(For some reason I can't fathom, clicking the link to the article brings up 'Page not found' and you have to refresh or reload the page to bring the article up. If you still have trouble, here's the URL: http://www.charitycomms.org.uk/articles/insider_secrets/why_charities_need_to_use_social_media)

And here are the slides that I used for the presentation:

Social Media for Change - prepared for Charitycomms, 22 Oct 08

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: communications fundraising)

It feels like it might be somewhat lacking without the narrative I gave on the day (one of the side-effects of abandoning boring bullet points in favour of something slightly less tedious is that the Powerpoint doesn't stand up quite so well on its own afterwards).  The article should go some way towards plugging the gap though.

I'd seen several great presentations that focus more on social media as a concept - and talk more hypothetically about how they can be used - and had also spoken to quite a number people who work at charities who had even attended social media presentations and were still a bit bewildered about what they should actually do.

Because of this, I wanted to illustrate, as simply and clearly as possible, using real examples, what some of the platforms do, what some charities are actually using them for, and what they are achieving, with some clear take outs at the end on next steps.

I had some very positive feedback afterwards, and a couple of people even told me they had joined up to Twitter as a result (if you're on Twitter, you can follow them here and here), so I think it worked.

If you're interested, here's a podcast from the event created by those nice people at Sound Delivery (this features interviews with speakers and attendees, as opposed to recordings of the presentations themselves).

As soon as I post this, it should get tweeted automatically via Friendfeed.  How about that for having your presence on several channels covered?  There's a tip in there somewhere.