Free Social Media Template

Free Social Media Template










My Gift to You: Social Media Template – Strategy and Planning

Tis the season of giving, and we have gifts for you in this installment of our LINKY Party!

The grants profession is often complex, and my grant professional friends and I offer you a special present for the season: five useful tools that will help you develop more compelling and competitive grant proposals. As Heather put it,

“If this gift seems like a boring pair of socks to you, remain patient, my Dear Reader: we designed these tools to help you with some of the most challenging aspects of grant writing.”

2014 Grant Professional Gifts

From Diane:    Grant Ready Tools

From Heather: Decision-Making Matrix

From Jana:     Time to Write Grants Tool

From Mark:     A Grant Alignment System

       From me, Jo:    Social Media Plan and Strategy Workbook

Social Media Template

My gift to you is a social media template to help you navigate through the complexities of building your social media strategy. I won’t tell you that I will give you all of the social media strategy answers. What I do have to give to you are best practices and guides to help you test what will work for your organization, your mission and your community so you can make your social media strategy work in a way that is most meaningful to you and to your constituents.

The ways that organizations and grant projects are using social media are diverse. One thing is certain, social media  is no longer an option, it is an integral reality in the way we communicate and connect.

You don’t need to be a technology guru to use social media in a smart meaningful manner.  In fact, many nonprofit organizations and local government agencies opt to have one or two key communications people manage all of their social media communication. However, that is quite impractical, according to Allyson Kapin and Amy Sample Ward, co-authors of Social Change Anytime, Everywhere: How to Implement Online Multichannel Strategies to Spark Advocacy, Raise Money, and Engage Your Community.  Social media is part of our way of connecting and communicating. Giving all of your social media communication and interactions to one person is like sending all of your calls or all of your emails to one person.

Sure, before faxes or email became mainstream, one person or a few people had the task of receiving, filtering and sending communications through these new communication tools. We are beyond the introductory phase and are quickly moving into the mainstream phase with social media. Our organizations benefit when we invest in developing a strategy to make these tools work for us as a whole organization. That is where a social media strategy that includes input from all departments and all levels can truly make a difference in your return on investment with social media.

As you develop a social media strategy it is important to identify what you want to accomplish with social media. This is the area where we often get stuck and leadership does not understand the return on investment with ‘The Twitter’ or Youtube, Linkedin, Facebook, or any of the other tools we have to build our communities, activate our ambassadors, engage our funders or build our brands.

To help you identify your social media strategy I am giving you this Social Media Strategy Template and a bonus Social Media Logic Model. This tool can be used for your whole organization and it can be used by department or project.

As you build your strategy, it is helpful to keep in mind that grant projects and grant professionals using social media fall into three camps:

  1. Project Based: Social media as part of their grant project activities as a tool for education, outreach, intervention and or community/citizen/client engagement.
  2. Funder Alignment and Relationships: Social media as part of their grant seeking and funder/donor relationships.
  3. Professional Development: Social media as part of building skills and best practices in grant seeking, grant development and grants management.


MORE GIFTS!

For more resources, you can find see presentation Power of Social Media for the Grant Professional from the 2014 Grant Professionals Association National Conference by Diane and I here and find the recording of Harnessing Social Media for the Grant Professional on Charity How To here.  I have more about your Social Media Logic Model here and another  presentation on 10 Steps of Social Media for the Grant Professional here. As always, another gift I have for you is a 30 minute introductory session with me. Don’t worry  it is not a selly-selly session – it is an opportunity for me to answer your questions and to get to know each other.

Please pass along the 2014 Grant Professionals Gifts to anyone who could find value from this post and the other posts in Link Party.

I am wishing all of you a warm and joyful season of giving!

 

Jo

 










This Post Has 5 Comments

  1. Great content, Jo! Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

  2. Jo-

    Thank you for the social media template. This will help my proposals when we look at disseminating the impact of a project. It can also help with attracting funding sources too! A multiple bonus!

  3. Such a wonderful gift as part of the #linkyparty! We’re lucky to have your CSMS background to support our GPC focused work.

Leave A Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.