Not for profit and not waiting for anyone: The Humane Society's forward thinking tips on social

This is part two of notes from the Facebook ROI event as part of Social Media Week London #SMWUK. 

Carie Lewis of The Humane Society (US) was one powerhouse of a (social) woman! Here I've tried to get down as much as I could of her rapid-fire goodness. The Humane Society are getting very strong results, so I highly recommend taking two minutes to cast an eye over her tips below.
Please forgive the rough notes and over to you Carie...

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The Humane Society

- raised 500K via FB fan based fundraising (2009 - 2011)

- stimulated 100K to take action in the 9 months of 2012

- have a self-funding social team! All the people working on social are payed through revenue gained through social

Structures and working practices that work for The Humane Society:

- have a dedicated social : PR liaison "social communications manager" (from my experience - most of the industry is too silo'ed and missing this opportunity to massively amplify social and PR content and activity - this is a brilliant idea!)

- SM is a small part of everyone's job, but we are the (friendly) gatekeeper. 

- The Humane Society have over 100 presences on FB in addition to our fan page. This is great and we manage it by requesting they all  sign an admin contract so we have shared expectations. The clear agreement helps communications consistency and shared improvements

- response time - FB = 2 hrs and Tw 30mins

- no automated tools. The team craft appropriate messages for each platform

- not afraid to make mistakes. And have a crisis plan.

- every single piece of content is shareable on FB, twitter and via email

- Home page has live feed of social content

- have a daily comms meeting every morning - 9mins - so they each share what each person shares what putting out that day. Integration!

- have a content plan (ensuring good content). Flexible but ensures continuity

- don't measure success by number of fans / followers. This is just the beginning of the relationship

- do people who you engage with do what you want? (tie your activity to your goals)

- how can you get them to do it

- how are you making it valuable to your fans?

- how will you get them to come back

- post once a day >> relavent, interesting and ??

How we use social 'channels':

Twitter - customer service and relationship tool

FB - our action oriented community and deeper, sustained relationship tool

Monitoring - across all channels (and all versions of the Humane Society name)

The Humane Society's social philosophy:

- provide what our audience want

- make it fun with competitions

- show audience ways they can make a difference

- use polls for simple engagement

- listen to all posts

- answer every question.

- Have creative additional engagement opportunities - have regular fun stuff i.e. fun fridays or questions for the audience such as "how did your pet get their name?" Which got 1000 responses

How we convert from Fans to Constituents:

- bring all asks inside FB (don't redirect to site etc i.e. forms, entries.

- give them options 

- use explicit call to actions

- allow comments but have a policy and monitor

- ask people to share immediately after they take action

- don't dismiss custom tabs yet (1% of people go there) i.e. put magazine in the custom tab and handle questions there

- use promoted posts (which will increase £) to increase base. v. targeted 

- close the loop on previous posts - i.e. show the audience impact of their vote

- make it personal - tie it to them. i.e. their top campaign, "I will not leave behind my pet behind" about what happens in personal household emergencies

Measures that The Humane Society Use

- no. of actions taken

- no. of donors

- amount of donations

- no. of new names to file

- customer service wins

- sentiment %

- growth rate

- most popular content

- no. mentions

- notable mentions (i.e. celebs, supporters, orgs, companies) Supporters with influential bases

>> do a weekly reports for the execs. 

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There you have it, a bullet list of useful goodness from a team clearly well ahead of the curve in using social to build their engaged audience.

You can find more of Carie's thoughts and presentations here: http://www.slideshare.net/cariegrls

Thank you Carie!