As with all popular communications channels, sometimes social media gets a bad rep. While it's true that social media is not a silver bullet for major list growth or mega fundraising yet, it is helping to strengthen social justice movements. Here are the top five ways building a community on social networking sites benefits nonprofits advocating for social change.
1. Helps to better brand organizations with supporters and potential supporters.
2. Creates more open and transparent conversations about thought-provoking issues. Pre-internet, people were limited to these passionate conversations with friends in person or by phone. Then in the 90’s people had some of these conversations via online forums and listservs. Now many of these discussions are also taking place in large communities filled with millions of people – and often times with people who have never met in person before.
3. Builds stronger connections with members of the media and legislators who are active on social networks.
4. Connects people who are passionate about similar issues to each other. A couple of great examples are Twestival which brought together thousands of twitter members all over the world and raised over $250K for Charity:Water and TweetsGiving which raised over $11K last year in 48 hours to fund the building of a classroom in Tanzania.
5.The development of apps and tools like Act.ly, an online petition tool that leverages Twitter and TweetProgress – a comprehensive list of 4000+ progressives on Twitter.
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