Fundraisin Is Fun Putting the "fun" in fundraising

I’m a fundraiser…and you have 4 minutes, 59 seconds to engage!

My buddy, Hillel Fuld, is someone I consider to be uber-connected. He’s on every device, every platform & if you mention his name, he’ll respond faster than you can say his name.

This morning, here’s what he posted on Facebook:

Basically, there was a bug and he couldn’t see any of his posts. For a guy who is uber-engaged with everyone, this is…well, simply put: not good. (FYI: the bug was fixed shortly and Hillel was back to engaging with everyone and his brother.)

Which got me thinking: there are those nonprofits who are very connected and engaged with their community and those that are not so engaged. But here’s one of the first rules of engagement: be there to engage!

You cannot be posting and when people comment on your post- you’re nowhere to be found! People could be talking about your organization and you could be using this as a chance to engage, encourage participation and more- and there’s radio silence.

On Twitter especially, where I’ve seen this rule many times:
most engagement happens in the first 5 minutes that a tweet is posted.

In other words: If you’re gonna tweet, you need to be available for the next 4 minutes and 59 seconds!!!

This is critical for those organizations that use services like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck to schedule their posts: do NOT schedule posts for times of the day when you will be unavailable. (And yes, things happen. I get that. But if, from the beginning, you won’t be around, don’t schedule for those times!)

I have no problem scheduling tweets if you’re on social media all the time. In fact, it makes life easier to “lock and load” content you want to push out in advance.

But if you’re just pushing and not engaging, what’s the point?!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012 at 10:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.