The Women’s Fund of Miami-Dade County serves women and girls in the Miami area. The purpose of the organization is supporting and working with women and girls through programs that stress self image, pride, self reliance, a sense of belonging, and purpose in their community that result in their reaching full potential as individuals.
Facing the issues common to many local nonprofit organizations, The Women’s Fund of Miami-Dade County sought to improve its website, connect in a more efficient manner online with donors, and in general develop a more functional online presence built around staff and member participation. This included Social CRM efforts.
Working with local agency The Cunningham Group, the social business strategy included a combination of basic online blocking and tackling, Social CRM, socialmedia-based promotion, and plain old, traditional “feet-on-the-street” marketing, as social media and its various incarnations, like any other form of media, are best applied in addition to the other forms of marketing and communications that remain important to businesses and organizations.
Although many of the “social makeover” goals were related to the use of social media and/or basic business objectives—the use of member’s content and the provision of up-to-date information about the organization and its programs—there was also a deeper effort aimed at engaging visitors with the donor program. For nonprofits, the donor program is the engine of the organization:
Without donors, the mission and very existence of many of these types of business is threatened. Because it leverages traditional CRM and then extends it to the Social Web, Social CRM is an ideal approach to building a robust donor program.
Through Social CRM, not only can the relationships with current or past donors be maintained, but the relationships with potential donors or those influential in the donor identification and activation process can be identified and built. Working with Tasha Cunningham, the Women’s Fund did the following: 1. Created content in easy-to-consume formats.
Recall that consumption is the first building block in social engagement. Podcasts, YouTube-embedded videos, and similar forms of content were used. 2. Leveraged this new content as conversation starters. Participants were invited to rate, review, comment—to curate—and thereby to move themselves up the social engagement ladder.
Final speech
The Women’s Fund’s “Real Women, Real Voices” campaign resulted. 3. Connected this content to the actual, real-world impact of the organizations’ grants and donors programs. Participants are now able to see directly what