How can you use the web to engage your members, supporters or the public, and move them towards a specific action?

That's a common question from nonprofits who are diving into social media. Whether you're looking for your online visitors to contribute photos, forward your issue alerts, make a donation, or contact policy-makers, social media can be a powerful way of engaging your audience and driving them towards action.

But it's often hard for nonprofits to figure out how they can engage people effectively online. It's hard enough to get visitors to your site or social media presence, let alone drive them effectively towards action. In our session at NetSquared today, we used Social Actions as a case study in engaging online community participation, and shared two strategy tools that can help you make your nonprofit site more engaging. Today, we're releasing those tools to the nonprofit community under a Creative Commons attribution/noncommercial license.

1. User profiles

   "Nonprofits", "seniors" or "businesses" don't visit your web site, log into your online community or post photos; individual people do. Sarah, the communications director of that nonprofit across town, logs into your web site. Kim, a grandmother living in Oregon, posts photos of the pothole in front of her house. Luisa, who owns a small deli, leaves a comment on your blog post. When you're trying to reach or engage an audience, you need to think in terms of the individual users who will be using your site, and look at your online presence from their perspective.

   Our user profile worksheet helps you get to know your target users. Download the worksheet, and complete at least one worksheet for each type of user you want to engage in your site. We find that getting inside the head of a typical user can help you identify the best ways of bringing them to your social media presence, and the content, tools or relationships you can offer to get them engaged.

2. Engagement planning worksheet

   Engagement is a process, not a destination. It's helpful to think of a ladder of engagement that begins with your target audience finding your organization or site, and then moves them to a higher level of interest until they are ready to act.

   Our engagement planning worksheet helps you identify the steps that move your target audience from casual site visit to active participation. Complete a worksheet for each of the users you've profiled in the user profile worksheets. Each "rung" on the ladder should specify 1-3 content features, tools or activities that will appeal to the user you're targeting.

Together, the user profile exercise and engagement planning worksheet help you see your social media presence from your users' perspective. By offering the content, tools or relationships that your audience members care about, you can move them towards the actions and results you need.

Need help? Let us help you find your engagement opportunities.

The Social Signal team can help you identify the social media approach or features that will engage your users and move them up the ladder of engagement. Complete a user profile worksheet and an engagement planning worksheet for up to three different user types, and send them to us for review. We will:

• review your web site or social media presence to assess your online message and focus
• analyze your worksheets to understand your audiences and target actions
• schedule a call or video meeting to review your engagement planning worksheets and discuss the steps you have envisioned for moving your users to action
• deliver a memo summarizing the 3-5 social media promotions, tools or content features that will be most effective at moving your target audiences from interest to action

For NetSquared community members only, our engagement opportunity finder package is $500 when you book online (value: $1,000). Contact us to schedule a call to review your completed worksheets.

A number of folks in the conference hallway have asked about options for tracking conference notes in real time. 

If you are looking for blog posts from NetSquared, you can find links to all the blog posts about the NetSquared conference here. 

And if you want to participate in real-time note sharing via wiki, Erin Denny has set up a pbwiki space here. (The password for the wiki is "net2".) We'll move those notes onto the NetSquared site once the conference wraps.

A number of folks in the conference hallway have asked about options for tracking conference notes in real time. 

If you are looking for blog posts from NetSquared, you can find links to all the blog posts about the NetSquared conference here. 

And if you want to participate in real-time note sharing via wiki, Erin Denny has set up a pbwiki space here. (The password for the wiki is "net2".) We'll move those notes onto the NetSquared site once the conference wraps.

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Rob and Aaron are both heading down to San Jose this week for the NetSquared conference. For the past eight months, we've been working with the CompuMentor/Techsoup team that is behind this event. 

The conference aims at pushing nonprofit engagement with the "social web" (aka "web 2.0") to the next level. The web site (which we helped develop) has built an online community around the same agenda, and will now link the online community to the San Jose conference through a two-day remote conference.

I'm holding down the virtual fort from here in Vancouver, but look forward to hearing updates from Rob & Aaron. And if you're going to be at NetSquared yourself, be sure to say hello.

Rob and Aaron are both heading down to San Jose this week for the NetSquared conference. For the past eight months, we've been working with the CompuMentor/Techsoup team that is behind this event. 

The conference aims at pushing nonprofit engagement with the "social web" (aka "web 2.0") to the next level. The web site (which we helped develop) has built an online community around the same agenda, and will now link the online community to the San Jose conference through a two-day remote conference.

I'm holding down the virtual fort from here in Vancouver, but look forward to hearing updates from Rob & Aaron. And if you're going to be at NetSquared yourself, be sure to say hello.

as posted on Corante's Civic Minded blog

Where can you find inspiration for online advocacy, guidance for online faclitation, and gossip about online politics? On Tuesday May 30th and Wednesday May 31st, NetSquared is hosting a remote conference featuring live chats and Q&A sessions with leaders from across the nonprofit web.

The remote conference is happening at the same time as a two-day confab in San Jose. After eight months of work on the NetSquared project, I'm heartbroken that I won't be there in person (something about not travelling in the ninth month of pregnancy, mutter mutter grumble) -- and absolutely determined that the online event will be so fabulous that when my colleagues return from San Jose, they're going to be jealous that I was the one who got to hang out in the chat room.

And what better way to get over that morning-after-the-Memorial-Day-before feeling than to spend the day chatting with leaders in nonprofit technology -- leaders like:

• Judith Feder on "Health care and web 2.0 patient communities"
• Rolf Kleef of Greenpeace
• Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions on "Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and more tales from Participate.net"
• Beth Kanter on "Tagging in the Nonprofit World"
  
• Robyn Deupree of Bloglines Lisa Stone of BlogHer
  
• Alexandra Samuel of Social Signal on "Building Online Community: Behind the Scenes at NetSquared"
• Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons on "Leveraging Technology for Free Culture and Your Nonprofit's Mission"
  
• Enoch Choi of Palo Alto Medical Foundation on "Tech Tools in Medicine: Personal Health Records, Mobile Devices, Blogging,Podcasting, Health Search & Tagging @ Google Co-op"
• Boris Mann from Bryght on "Open Source and your non-profit"
  
• Scott Heiferman from Meetup.com
  
• Nancy White of Full Circle on "Online Facilitation Open Discussion"
• Edward Vielmetti from the University of Michigan School of Information on "Superpatron: viewing libraries from a patron's point of view"

The remote conference is open to anyone with an Internet connection. And feel free to drop by the conference hallway for even more remote conference-y goodness.

as posted on Corante's Civic Minded blog

Where can you find inspiration for online advocacy, guidance for online faclitation, and gossip about online politics? On Tuesday May 30th and Wednesday May 31st, NetSquared is hosting a remote conference featuring live chats and Q&A sessions with leaders from across the nonprofit web.

The remote conference is happening at the same time as a two-day confab in San Jose. After eight months of work on the NetSquared project, I'm heartbroken that I won't be there in person (something about not travelling in the ninth month of pregnancy, mutter mutter grumble) -- and absolutely determined that the online event will be so fabulous that when my colleagues return from San Jose, they're going to be jealous that I was the one who got to hang out in the chat room.

And what better way to get over that morning-after-the-Memorial-Day-before feeling than to spend the day chatting with leaders in nonprofit technology -- leaders like:

• Judith Feder on "Health care and web 2.0 patient communities"
• Rolf Kleef of Greenpeace
• Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions on "Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and more tales from Participate.net"
• Beth Kanter on "Tagging in the Nonprofit World"
  
• Robyn Deupree of Bloglines Lisa Stone of BlogHer
  
• Alexandra Samuel of Social Signal on "Building Online Community: Behind the Scenes at NetSquared"
• Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons on "Leveraging Technology for Free Culture and Your Nonprofit's Mission"
  
• Enoch Choi of Palo Alto Medical Foundation on "Tech Tools in Medicine: Personal Health Records, Mobile Devices, Blogging,Podcasting, Health Search & Tagging @ Google Co-op"
• Boris Mann from Bryght on "Open Source and your non-profit"
  
• Scott Heiferman from Meetup.com
  
• Nancy White of Full Circle on "Online Facilitation Open Discussion"
• Edward Vielmetti from the University of Michigan School of Information on "Superpatron: viewing libraries from a patron's point of view"

The remote conference is open to anyone with an Internet connection. And feel free to drop by the conference hallway for even more remote conference-y goodness.

As part of the NetSquared remote conference, I'm going to be hosting an online chat conversation on "Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared". Since Social Signal helped to develop the strategy for the NetSquared site, and undertook the Drupal set-up and configuration work on both NetSquared and Net2Learn, we periodically get questions from people who want to know why we set up a certain feature in a particular way, or how we were able to get a page to work a certain way in Drupal. This session is a chance to answer some of those questions in a more structured setting.

As part of the NetSquared remote conference, I'm going to be hosting an online chat conversation on "Building online community: Behind the scenes at NetSquared". Since Social Signal helped to develop the strategy for the NetSquared site, and undertook the Drupal set-up and configuration work on both NetSquared and Net2Learn, we periodically get questions from people who want to know why we set up a certain feature in a particular way, or how we were able to get a page to work a certain way in Drupal. This session is a chance to answer some of those questions in a more structured setting.

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