Ask HN: Social Media Management for NPOs?

[GrowWebs]

So my friend and I have this idea. We want to provide social media management services to nonprofits to improve their public relations and meet their goals (fundraising, recruiting volunteers, increasing awareness, etc). Currently, I provide web services to NPOs, but we are thinking of expanding this service to include support for social media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, Craigslist, etc. The individual organization's needs would steer what specific type of services they would want (as in, if they are really in need of volunteers, we'd concentrate on expanding their volunteermatch profile and local, community-specific forums for volunteers).

The problem we see is that a lot of small and medium sized nonprofits don't have the capacity to manage a successful social media program. At best, a lot of nonprofits think its sufficient to set up a facebook or twitter account with minimal maintenance or updates. We would argue that it takes a lot more than that for a nonprofit to successfully engage constituents on the web. Our solution is to provide these types of services to nonprofits.

I can give more details as needed, but basically we're wondering if this would work. Do you see this as a need in the sector? How should we consider tweaking our idea to improve our services or make them more appealing? How much would you pay (or think is a fair price) for this service?

Any help or advice is appreciated.

[nedwin]

I worked on a startup in this space for about 6 months last year which might explain if my answer is a little cynical.

It's great that you've been able to build a business providing web services for NPO's. It can be a very rewarding experience.

From my time spent in the space I've found that few of the small to medium NPO's (which we call not-for-profits or NFP's in Australia)I've found that there is a heavy cost in terms of education to demonstrate the benefits of social media activities. Many times the benefits are medium to long term whereas these organisations need solutions which work a little faster than that in order to justify the expense to their boards.

It may be an obvious thing to say but I would be focusing on presenting solutions with a clear ROI for both yourselves and the non-profit.

After we shut up our startup I've since gone into the for-profit online marketing space. The returns are a lot greater and there are a lot more companies willing to spend money to test new ideas. I hope to come back to the non-profit space one day, but probably not until I've got some clout to make real change (ie networks or capital).