Four Years in the Social Media Game

From our very beginnings as a non-profit desiring to connect the young people in our community to serving others, the Emergent Leadership Institute has leaned heavily on social media. For a young non-profit with limited financial resources, social media provided our organization with immediate ties to our target market (14-22 year old students) at little or no coast to our bottom line. Embracing social media wasn't as much of a strategic plan or desire to connect to youth culture, as it felt like desperately grasping into thin air for something to hang our brand on.

Becoming an "expert in social media" isn't something you stumble into. Rather it takes dedication to making mistakes and learning that success can rarely ever be defined by your numbers. Our first efforts in social media yielded a MySpace group of 4000 in less than two months, but we quickly found using the MySpace tools made it very difficult to connect this throng of users to our mission. Then the Fall 2006 happened and Facebook became a key part of internet presence. We've done just about everything a brand can do to leverage the social networking power of Facebook. We created a group, a fan page, events, placed ads and even an developed an app that allowed (at the time) the only volunteer opportunity search tool on Facebook. Over the past two years 400 members of our Facebook group have volunteered their time to help capture recyclables at the Lawn at White River State Park and Verizon Music Center during summer concerts. We've dabbled with Linkedin, Smaller Indiana and other social networking sites to share our story with adult stakeholders in our community. Most recently focusing time on Twitter, where we re-tweet our non-profit friends and support local businesses. In March of this year our online volunteer center, helpindyonline.com, received a major facelift from the great folks at Rare Bird, Inc. During our development process we worked hard with the folks at Rare Bird to ensure that social media would be a major part of the sites revision. Helpindyonline.com became the first online volunteer center, local or national, to offer social networking referrals and the ability for partner organizations to add Youtube videos on their profiles. Social media has become more than a sale pitch for us, it is the major way we deliver our programming and connect young people to making a difference in our community.

From the very start of our engaging social media we have been very strong advocates for its use in the non-profit sector. Even when the media was demonizing sites like MySpace and Facebook, we were out promoting its positive use in building key development areas in young people’s lives. Our staff has led social media training sessions at the Governors Conference on Volunteering, the Special Olympics State Conference and at the Central Indiana Association of Volunteer Administrators meetings. We've participated on panels about social media at the Blog Indiana Conference, Leadership Ventures and Marion County Commission On Youth events. We've also been asked by local non-profit organizations like the Starfish Initiative and YMCA of Greater Indianapolis to lead training sessions on social media with their staff and volunteers. We believe in the value of social media in the non-profit sector and will continue to support its use and growth.

As an organization and brand we are very proud of how we have used social media over the past four years. It's why we are asking those in Indiana to support our efforts to win Mashable.com's 2009 Open Web Award for "Best Non-Profit Use of Social." These kinds of awards typically boil down to a popularity contest, where an organization with hundreds of those of email addresses wins. We don't have anything against "lemonade stands", "earth clubs" and "royal trusts", we just love small- local- grassroots movements. We believe when an entire community comes around such a movement, it can win!

Nominate "@helpindyonline" for "Best Non-Profit Use of Social Media" at http://bit.ly/nominateHIO

Keep on helping Indy!

Roger Williams
President, Emergent Leadership Institute