The Social Media Side of Pick. Click. Give.

As we close in on the start of the new year, many nonprofits in Alaska are anticipating the 2010 Permanent Fund Dividend for good reason. This will be the second year that Alaskans will be able to check off one or several nonprofit organizations to support with a portion of their PFD when they apply online. Even $25 can make an incredible impact on the lives o Alaskans, especially if everyone picks, clicks and gives. Just see what Red Cross of Alaska, CASA, Wish Upon the North Star and Alzheimer's Resource of Alaska have been able to do with your contributions this past year.

This is also the second year that the Pick. Click. Give. awareness campaign is using social media to draw attention to the Permanent Fund Charitable Contributions Program.

In addition to the Pick. Click. Give. blog, there is also a presence for the campaign on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and CauseCast which is a cause-related video sharing site.

There are several things that Alaska nonprofits - and any nonprofits - can learn from using social media for awareness campaigns.

There are several takeaways for nonprofits from a social media standpoint:

1. You Can Be Targeted. Social media can be effective as not only a global or national communications tool but can also be calibrated to be hyper-local and even hyper-rural. For smaller nonprofits whose scope doesn't reach beyond a state or a region or a town, social media can still prove useful and can be that finely targeted.

2. You Need to Pick the Right Tools. Not every social media tool is right for every nonprofit or every campaign. And you don't always start out picking the right ones, but as long as you monitor, measure and assess results from each, you can eventually zero in on the right ones. Even Pick. Click. Give. started out using a number of additional social media tools that eventually proved less useful in reaching Alaskans so we pared down this year to focus more energy on fewer, more effective tools. Holding onto MySpace was possible because it takes less resources to maintain than Facebook or Twitter. Holding onto Twitter even though the numbers may be smaller is a strategic move to be ready for the 3rd year of this program when more Alaskans will be used to Twitter communications. Twitter is still an excellent traffic-driver even before true interaction and engagement sets in.

3. You Must Coordinate Efforts. Social media tools can be linked together and coordinated in such a fashion that they can be utilized with a very small staff. Last year, one person ran the bulk of social media efforts in a few hours a week. This year, we are lucky to have one additional person devoted to social media a few hours a week and have better internal coordination with our project partners such as Rasmuson Foundation and the Nerland Agency (the ad agency that developed the programs brand and the PSAs). Social media cannot exist in a vacuum. All stakeholders in a campaign or project must be willing to keep social media top of mind and to keep the social media team in the loop in any marketing or communications discussion. And the social media team needs to know how to make the right noises at the right times to be noticed and not forgotten.

As Jordan Marshall of Rasmuson Foundation so eloquently put it, "The beauty of Pick. Click. Give. may be that it reminds people that they can make a big difference in peoples’ lives, so when they get the ask from the nonprofits they’re more inclined to act."

And that, too, is the beauty of using social media to remind people that the causes we are working to support truly matter to real people. People reaching out to and connecting with people. You can make a difference.

Pick. Click. Give.

How is your nonprofit using social media to reach out and connect?