How non profits can benefit from social media
- Facilitating volunteer organization, cross border collaboration, ease in organizing events
- Increasing donor confidence through transparency and vibrant volunteer activities visible to donors
- Training staff without the expense of classrooms and tutors
- Saving time in training
Reference: http://www.e-taalim.com/events/how-social-media-can-be-used-learning.html
What it means to own your online community
zeedna allows you to create an interactive, branded online community. your community members can create accounts on your site, invite friends, connect to other community members, communicate and collaborate on the site to further your charity’s cause and support your campaigns.
Benefits from owning your online community
- Ownership of media libraries vs. Facebook where they own assets on the site
- Stakeholders communicate and collaborate directly.. (volunteers create groups, get organized through events, blog on their volunteer experiences, share photos, videos)
- Owning advertising space that becomes increasingly valuable as the community grows
- Selling products / services and promotional goods.. with a vibrant community this accelerates sales growth because your community members can recommend your products to each other.
- Fundraising made easier.. (add widgets to raise funds to your community site,community members spread the word on your behalf, photos and videos can be added to strengthen the charity appeal, blogs on the fundraising activities by community members,recommendations from volunteers increase the chance of their social network signing on)
- Charge members (optional)
Use facebook & Twitter as channels.. own your community & data
Facebook and Twitter act primarily as marketing channels and not as publishing tools, where the ownership of your data, your photos, events, profile information of members and anything else you publish using their platform is theirs.
zeedna on the other hand gives you the ability to own and manage your own community and data, facilitating interaction with your community under your brand. Unlike user data posted on Facebook and Twitter, zeedna allows you through using analytics, to analyze this information on the backend, understand community behavior and create more targeted messages for them. In addition to owning the content, you own and sell advertising space on your community page.
Build your community on zeedna and combine it with the strength of the existing networks on Facebook and Twitter to maximize your reach.
Case study
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF)
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), a US-based non profit organization which addresses medical and humanitarian crisis facing Palestinian youth and other suffering children in the Middle East, among other charities, focused the volunteer efforts of its many chapters under a zeedna launched branded community.
Since September 2010, and through using zeedna’s rich social community features and modules, members under each chapter are able to take an active role in sharing and documenting their interactions with PCRF patients and doctor missions by uploading photos, videos and writing blogs. They can receive chapter updates, join groups within a chapter or independent ones, as well as invite members of their community to events they list and manage.
zeedna also provides tiered community management rights to moderate content and manage members. Chapter managers have administrative rights over their chapters and groups within. They can send messages to all members of the chapter, create events and invite members along with people from the external community to attend and confirm. Group managers oversee their groups; sending invites, editing information, scheduling events and writing blogs.
Campaign banners on this community page, were recently added to raise enough support for medical patients needing quick treatment and urgent community responses.
The social publishing module present also allows members and site administrators to post their community page blog comments onto their personal accounts for the former and the organization’s official page for the latter on Facebook and twitter.
In this regard, zeedna’s charity branded community is a platform for communication and collaboration of a large volunteer base and a dedicated networking hub helping members build deeper relationships.
