OPINIONS: Twitter/Facebook: Time Well-Spent for Child/Youth Advocates?

Twitter/Facebook: Time Well-Spent for Child/Youth Advocates?

by Ray Schultz, Child Advocacy 360

This year’s Nonprofit Technology Conference drew standing-room only crowds to sessions on social media. But one question remained unanswered after hours of talk: Can Twitter and Facebook perform miracles for hardworking child advocates?

That’s dubious, based on the evidence.

Take the area of fundraising. “Very, very little money is raised through social networking sites,” says Mal Warwick, chairman of Mal Warwick Associates, an agency serving nonprofits.

His view is confirmed by research from the software vendor Blackbaud. Of the nonprofit groups with positive return on investment online, 63 percent use e-mail and 46 percent use social media. “Everything we’ve seen shows that e-mail has more proven value than social media,” says Allison Van Diest, senior product marketing manager for Blackbaud.

Nor are the social networks good for interaction with colleagues. Advocates typically use Facebook and Twitter “to communicate with a few of their friends, but not professionally,” Warwick says. And government employees, though part of many nonprofit constituencies, often lack “access to current technology or are limited by policy,” adds Nedra Kline-Weinreich, president of Weinreich Communications, an agency and consultancy.

Next is the issue of resources. Do your overworked staffers have the time to be tweeting people? And even if they do, can they write in the more personal tone required in social media?

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