online+communities

Image by George Dearing via Flickr

This isn’t a post about marketing, social media, or technology. Ok, maybe it’s a bit about social media and a sprinkling of technology, but it’s mostly about people and passion.

Those two things shone bright last month during a food drop at the North Texas Food Bank in Dallas. It was the first time I’d really been behind the scenes to see how things really come together.

I was encouraged by the NTFB’s vigor and dedication to helping feed its surrounding communities, certainly a challenge for an area as large as the North Texas region.

It didn’t take long to realize the NTFB is a well-oiled machine, legitimately concerned with things like “doing more with less” and increasing operational efficiency across the organization. On a related note, there was recent data showing that the first question on many people’s mind before investing in charities concerned “overhead.” Other organizations take note; That perception is apparently engrained in the psyche of your customer so we should all be thinking about how to change that.

After an emotionally-charged press conference, I was stopped by someone on the marketing team who asked if I had any recommendations for how they could use  social media.

My advice? Tell your story as openly and honestly as possible. And enable others to the same. That’s one of the key lessons I’ve learned from another one of Telligent’s clients, The National Breast Cancer Foundation. NBCF’s marketing head Kevin Williams has made that mantra part of everything NBCF does. In Williams words, "make it easy for people to tell your story."

Those two things are the bookends to a larger communication strategy, but it’s becoming clear that communities want radical transparency and want their own voices to be heard as loudly as the cause, brand, or sponsor.

The positives for the organizations when done right are many, but seeing social media diminish as a thinly-veiled discipline and become operationalized is one of the most important byproducts. 

The other thing we chatted about was how to use the web to raise the awareness of current campaigns and increase membership. I was fortunate enough to present on just that at the recent DigitalNow Conference in Orlando. My slides featured NBCF’s social media strategy and were a part of a larger deck that can be found on Slideshare here.

But again, the fundamentals aren’t terribly complex. Do your Facebook thing, establish your Flickr page and staff up who’s planning to respond and jump in the conversations. And as some of us are acutely aware, it  gets a bit more difficult when you have to figure out how to engage with people after they actually start showing up to your social media pit stops.

Lastly, I’d do all the people who really pulled this event off an injustice if I didn’t mention the corporate horsepower behind this Herculean effort.
Telligent, Tyson Foods, Wal-Mart and cause marketers MediaSauce were some of the corporate backers, with MediaSauce managing a lot of the logistics and planning.

If you’re curious about the timeline and events that lead up to the Dallas stop, make sure to visit the Hunger Pledge site.

I can’t say enough about the experience and what I learned. It’s one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done.  I pledge to do more.

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Interview with NTFB CMO Colleen Brinkmann

Interview with Scott Henderson of MediaSauce.

Flickr photo set of North Texas Food Bank Tour.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

Tagged as: cause+marketing, NBCF, North+Texas+Food+Bank, online+communities, Telligent, Tyson+Foods

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