1. Social Media Case Study: Success at Syracuse Habitat for Humanity Pat Fiorenza Syracuse Habitat for Humanity AmeriCorps VISTA Syracuse Habitat for Humanity | ReStore March 27, 2011
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11. Contact Information Syracuse Habitat for Humanity 308 Otisco St Syracuse NY 13204 (315) 422 - 2230 [email_address] www.syracuserestore.org @syracusehabitat Syracuse Habitat for Humanity | ReStore March 27, 2011
Notas del editor
Explain AmeriCorps and Relationship to Syracuse Habitat Marketing Budget; associated challenges, already doing a lot of marketing Restricted by funds and already doing what we should be with traditional marketing Need to do a better job of awareness through marketing – but don’t spend anymore money. Need to do more with less Noticed that problem was not always not knowing the ReStore – but not understanding that Syracuse Habitat was local. Social Media was the perfect solution. Can’t really expand our marketing budget, that would diminish our ability to build more homes locally, but what we can do is increase our social media usage and take a critical look at our current marketing practices. What we found is that our content is not reaching our market effectively. Strapped with resources, we were unable to really tell our story of the good work we are doing at Syracuse Habitat. Our newsletter was the only way we communicated with our constituents. We decided we could do better, and social media was the perfect solution.
Since our organization was going to be exposed in many ways, we decided it was important to do an audit of all our marketing practices and our materials. We decided that we would keep going with all our traditional methods As we began exploring the projects I began to see that most, if not all of our marketing materials needed to be cleaned up. Our brochure was in black and white, outdated information and our website had no updates or new posts since 2005. But what is a marketing audit really doing? It is not just reviewing materials and updating – it is forcing you to think critical about your organization, its’ mission and objectives. This is the key: social media helps you continually think about your organization. What content should I be posting? What content do I have? What can I do better? The objectives that we set are not always complex. So we developed new press-kits, updated the ReStore website, created a new brochure, ordered new promotional materials and began making a conscious effort to document all events. Once we started doing this we found that we were overwhelmed with content. It is a great problem to have.
Let’s talk about these, I am on Twitter the most out of any of the social media outlets we use.
Now we have looked at everything Syracuse has done
Now we have looked at everything Syracuse has done
One of the first things you need to do is set some goals. There are plenty of acronyms you can use, this one seemed to work for me as I started to frame some of our goals and think about Syracuse Habitat. SMART Goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Rational, Time – Bound. I’ll share an example of some of our goals on the next slide. The next thing, document everything, organized well and know where to find your content. We have so many photos at Habitat, a real challenge was finding photos I want to use and having everything in the right format. We still have slides and these odd things called tapes. We’re working on getting all this into a format for the web and placing on YouTube, the content is priceless. Since my position at Habitat is ending in July, what I have done to help continue build capacity is built a social media packet in addition to my marketing and outreach plan. The social media packet includes 100’s of “tweets” blog posts ideas, YouTube Video Suggestions. This will be a huge time-saver. I have also written some articles about homeowners that will not be posted when I am at Habitat, but will be used as future blog posts. I would recommend just sitting down and having some brainstorming sessions and think of content and ideas, take 20 minutes a day for a week and just write “tweets.” All I do now is just go to my packet, find something to tweet and copy and paste. Be patient! Just like any form of marketing, it will take some time to develop, build you audience and meet your goals. We talked about this earlier, but make sure your content is linked. If you have a blog, chances are you can install a widget to display your twitter posts, you can embedded your YouTube videos, this also saves time. You can use applications on facebook like “selective tweets” that will automatically update your Facebook page when you update Twitter. Using social media has been one of my favorite experiences at Syracuse Habitat. It’s a great way to engage with your constituents, great way to continually monitor your marketing program and helps you and your employees understand your mission and identity at a much deeper level. When we have quick marketing meetings or are sharing content to post, we are essentially building morale. If I was a manager, a great morale building- exercise would be thinking of tweets with employees. Social media is allowing you to build stronger relationships within you organization and externally by your web placement.