Candice updating the Doorways Facebook Fan Page.
We knew we had to do it, but we didn’t know where to start. How does a nonprofit go from having no communications staff to winning a social media award in just a year and a half? Insert me, a supportive development team, and an amazing volunteer. I am the Education and Outreach Director at Doorways and as such was given the task of getting us up and running with social networking tools to expand our outreach and create a virtual Doorways community.
I myself grew up using email through high school, joining MySpace in college, later Friendster and then Facebook. I had had some friends who “tweeted” and I knew of a few organizations whose blog I read from time to time. But I didn’t really know how social media could be used to advance an organizations mission or create relationships with donors and volunteers.
Then I met Kelley Coyner. Kelley is a connector and Doorways social media guru. A former board member, she came back to Doorways and into my life for the first time in April of 2009. I remember having meetings with her and leaving with pages and pages of notes and to-dos that would get us caught up and working with the electronic tools of 2010. With her coaching we were able to educate our staff about the importance of social media tools and to hone how we promote our message and how we engage the community.
With Kelley’s support, I started with a Facebook group page which quickly fizzled into a Doorways Fan Page. We signed up for Twitter but weren’t sure what to actually promote. And a blog was in our future but we didn’t know when. We quickly realized the reach we could have as people began to sign-up to hear what we had to say.
We integrated a mixture of our wish list requests, client stories of new hope, community events, volunteer happenings and Doorways updates to our new outlets and promoted engagement from our community. We continue to tailor our posts to what our readers want to know about Doorways and our role in the community.
A year and a half later we are the recipients of the Nonprofit Roundtables of Greater Washington’s “Moving Your Message” Social Media Advocacy Award in June of 2010. We have almost 400 fans on Facebook, over 250 followers on Twitter, and dozens of people reading our Executive Directors weekly blog. In addition the award highlighted the amazing outcomes we had with our online advocacy campaign last spring. We facilitated over 600 letters to the Arlington County Board through our website and electronic communication vehicles to help increase Doorways funding.
Thank you to Kelley and our entire online community for all of the support you have given us in meeting this challenge and propelling us into the digital age!
Caroline Jones
