Engagement? But I’m Already Married!

Today, we’re continuing to beat the “engagement” drum.  This week: Three Things to think about BEFORE spending organizational time, talent, and/or treasure on social networking tools.

1. Be clear about what “engagement” means to your organization.  Is it as simple as clickthrough in your emails or number of fans on your organization’s Facebook page? Or is it more involved than that – people commenting on your organizational or staff blog, replying to and retweeting your Twitter status, recruiting people to join your Facebook Cause or something else?  “Engagement” is fuzzy (unless it’s leading to a wedding day…).  Sharpen up those edges.

2.  Honestly assess your goals for engagement.  Sometimes, you can be more clear-eyed about this if you think through scenarios.  If you have 100,000 fans on your Facebook page and 10% of them share information you put there with their networks, but only 1% ever donates (directly or via Causes), will that meet your goals?  Are you pursuing engagement to acquire new donors, increase the average donation or donation frequency among existing donors, raise awareness of an issue or problem, or generate more or higher quality activism actions? Think about this as clearly as you would your goals for launching a new direct mail program or a new grassroots program – at the end of a given period of time, what will have made it worth it?

3. Budget “engagement” activities realistically and according to your goals. While Facebook pages and Twitter accounts are free, maintaining then and undertaking the activities necessary to make them do anything for your organization can be expensive. Budget in the staff time, design time (if you’ll be needing logos, images, or other assets), the time needed to engage your fans in conversation, cultivation, and action, and do that in accordance with your goals.  Consider the things that won’t happen if time, talent, and treasure is directed at managing social networking tasks, and factor that into your budget, too.

As I noted on Monday, engagement for engagement’s sake isn’t a responsible use of organizational resources.  This isn’t to say that engagement isn’t a good idea, just that it should be resolutely directed toward advancing your organization’s mission and marshaling the support (and supporters) needed to do that well.   In our experience, if you start with these Three Things – definition, goal-setting, and budgeting – you’re much more likely to do engagement right.

What have you found?  Did your organization take a different approach?  Let us know in the comments!  And, as always, if you’ve got Three Things you’ve been dying to tell the world, shoot us an email – we’d love to share your ideas in this space!