Chapter 5

E (Explore): Finding Everybody, and Bringing Everybody to You

No one wants to tweet in a bubble. One way to ensure that your Tweets are not only reaching more individuals, but are also encompassing increasingly relevant topics, is to consistently look for new information, new followers, and new influencers on Twitter. Let's explore some of the best ways to do so.

Finding Yourself

Once your organization is on Twitter, it's essential to regularly search for mentions of the organization. By finding out what others are saying about you, you can connect with individuals who already like you. You can even try to change the minds of those who don't. In sum, searching for yourself will help you do three important things:

While living in Kenya during my early months on Twitter, I tweeted about the daily happenings of my non-profit organization. At the time, however, I was using an account not named for Hope Runs. Looking back, I'm sure it was confusing for followers. By the time I decided to eventually streamline things, simple searching showed me that there was indeed another non-profit organization in the world named Hope Runs that was using the @hoperuns handle. I regretted my early branding mistakes, and I lamented the number of potential supporters I had likely lost by not searching and remedying the problem sooner. So I made a change. Despite the exposure my account had gotten in the early days—making the Twitter blog, and landing a shout-out on the homepage of the early Twitter—I eventually changed gears, changed Twitter handles, and pushed forward a newly branded account.

In addition to doing such a simple search for an overlapping name, you want to ensure that you are searching Twitter regularly to hear the latest things people are saying about your organization. In searching for her organization, Danielle Brigida of the National Wildlife Federation was able to help turn a frustrated supporter into a happy one. One day, she came upon a potential supporter complaining about the National Wildlife Federation, specifically saying that she was not able to buy a magazine subscription online due to website problems:

Brigida responded right away, fixing the follower's problem and immediately earning this Tweet from the now happy user:

There's no better way to earn a great opinion of your organization than to listen when others are talking about you and jump in with a response to solve their problems.

Doing daily searches or setting up an automatic search feed is also an excellent practice for the individual in your organization who takes on the more formalized role of customer support. Melanie Mathos of Blackbaud offers a non-profit spin on a successful customer service story using Twitter.

When a customer popped up in the Blackbaud search feed one day, frustrated with one of their products, Mathos proactively reached out to him and provided support. His response? A big thanks—more than once—sent via Twitter, saying that @melmatho was indeed “faster than our account rep!” The lesson was valuable for Blackbaud. Mathos says, “We value being not only responsive as a support organization but also proactive when it comes to addressing customers' issues. We are now taking that a step further and are creating a dedicated support account on Twitter to further enhance the support experience.”

Leila Janah of Samasource says that searching on Twitter helps her organization “keep track of trends in our market space, like the latest in social enterprise, the growth in social capital markets, and news about areas we work in, like Africa. We can search from the Twitter home page for new topics or trends we hear about, or we can bookmark a search in our favorite desktop app. We can also share search terms and hashtags with our community.”

In short, you don't know where you stand on Twitter if you don't look (out) for yourself.

Finding Key Endorsements and New Leads

As you Explore, you should also be looking for new endorsements and leads that might propel your organization to the next level. Twitter allows you to be in contact with anyone—no matter who they are—and the possibilities this presents are limitless. The previous chapter discussed the idea that non-profit organizations should make private lists of journalists, public relations representatives, and other influencers to follow. Over time, organizations can then begin conversations with these individuals to build relationships that will ultimately help their causes.

Global Citizen Year, the non-profit organization that sends high school graduates on year-long apprenticeships in developing countries, is full of active Twitter participants. Their CEO, Abby Falik, became a Twitter fan when she realized its power for connecting causes with influencers. Falik says she was not thoroughly convinced of the power of Twitter for organizations until Twitter sparked an ongoing relationship—and a key endorsement—from New York Times journalist Nick Kristof.

Falik had always known that the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist was interested in issues of global education:

I've always been a huge admirer of Nick Kristof, and the ways he uses his skill and influence to shine a massive spotlight on critical global issues that would otherwise go unseen. Kristof has often written about the need to get more Americans overseas, arguing that if more people in this country had the opportunity to see global poverty firsthand, there would be a shift from an era of American apathy toward one defined by responsible global engagement. At the same time, he has been a vocal advocate for the gap year as a unique opportunity for young people to see the world beyond our borders. Knowing his personal interests were so closely aligned with our mission at Global Citizen Year, I reached out—initially via Twitter!—to enlist him as an ally.

Let's look at the specifics of how Global Citizen Year found a true ally in a Twitter influencer. In the first stages of Global Citizen Year's time on Twitter, @globalcitizenyr began citing quotes and articles Kristof had written in the New York Times in Tweets. At this early point, Global Citizen Year was still new on Twitter and was not yet using Nick Kristof's Twitter handle when they referred to him:

Once Falik found him on Twitter and started following him, @globalcitizenyr began to send him Tweets via @reply to his then-handle, @nytimeskristof:

Over time, @globalcitizenyr began retweeting Kristof's Tweets in which he mentioned issues they had in common. Kristof's own son was pursuing a “gap year” before college, and Kristof regularly wrote about other young adults spending time in the developing world, including the Congo:

Seeing his support of that student in the Congo, and reading his passion for gap years in general in his bestselling book Half the Sky, Global Citizen Year crafted a blog post addressing these connections and tweeted it out (see http://globalcitizenyear.org/2010/01/kristof-voices-support-for-bridge-year-in-half-the-sky/).

At some point Kristof took notice and began retweeting GCYTweets via his new account @nickkristof. Over time, he even began writing Tweets of his own that promoted Global Citizen Year, praising Global Citizen Year and linking to the GCY homepage:

Wil Keenan, then communications and technology manager at Global Citizen Year, said that a thousand people clicked through the Tweet to see what Global Citizen Year was all about. A few months later, Kristof went on to feature Global Citizen Year in a New York Times article he wrote about the importance of Americans spending time in other cultures. GCY then tweeted:

Following the publication of the article, Global Citizen Year went a step further: a GCY fellow in the field wrote her own response to Kristof's New York Times piece. @globalcitizenyr tweeted it, making sure to include Kristof's Twitter handle in the Tweet to get his notice:

And notice it he did. He immediately wrote his own Tweet promoting fellow Gaya Morris's blog post.

Global Citizen Year was careful to highlight each effort Kristof made to promote them on their own end as well—always making sure to retweet the Tweets he sent out about them for the benefit of their followers:

The relationship continued, and Global Citizen Year kept reaching out:

Kristof continued to highlight them:

And they continued to thank him for his promotion:

Nearly a year after the relationship had first come to fruition on Twitter, Global Citizen Year fellow Tess Langan wrote her own New York Times piece about why she had put off attending Colgate College to spend a year in Senegal:

Kristof continued to cheer them on:

When I asked Kristof about Global Citizen Year reaching out via Twitter, he said, “I always hear from young people who want to go abroad but think it's unaffordable or too dangerous, or their parents are aghast at the idea. So when I heard of an organization working to address those concerns, backed by someone with Abby's credentials, I wanted to help spread the word.” He added that this wasn't the first time this has happened to him: “Something similar happened with Givology (@givology), by the way. I think I found out about them elsewhere, but then I became aware of their Twitter presence and followed them. That led to occasionally retweeting them or highlighting their work. And following them certainly put them more on my front burner than they ever would be otherwise.”

Ultimately, this step-by-step example of how Global Citizen Year developed, expanded, and maximized a relationship with a key influencer like Nick Kristof shows just how to best use Twitter to Explore potential powerful connections.

Finding New Supporters

Some of the influencers that organizations search for on Twitter will not be influential for the megaphone they provide, but rather for the direct resources they offer. There are many ways to find individual donors among those already interested in your cause on Twitter, and there is another untapped donor resource as well. Most large brands and small companies are on Twitter and have dedicated individuals working on this part of their new media strategy. Non-profit organizations can take advantage of this fact to find in-kind or monetary donors from big businesses in much the same way they can with private individuals. As the case of @aircanada and the broken wheelchair shows, brands are listening.

Luke Renner of Fireside International, a non-profit media company, has another powerful story of fundraising on Twitter—but the donation his organization received was not in the form of dollars. At Fireside International in Haiti, Luke Renner uses technology to improve the lives of the poor. In 2010, his technology school, The Caribbean Institute of Media Technologies, realized the importance of offering an English language class to their students. Deciding that Rosetta Stone offered the material his students would most benefit from, he looked into purchasing enough licenses for the product to teach it to the hundreds of students at his school. When he realized that it would cost $18,000 to buy enough Rosetta Stone materials to service all his students, he was heartbroken. He certainly didn't have that kind of money.

After determining that Rosetta Stone was on Twitter, he decided to craft a Tweet about his need for the materials. When @rosettastone responded, Renner soon landed a generous in-kind donation of all the materials he needed. He was floored—and could be seen thanking @rosettastone throughout the year:

Twitter is particularly effective when tapping into the local power of individual communities. Even if the cause is far away, a local event or campaign can generate interest. Fostering Opportunities for Refugee Growth and Empowerment (FORGE) is a small non-profit organization bent on transparency. Starting their Twitter account was a natural progression from the already frequent blogging that founder and CEO Kjerstin Erickson was already involved in at SocialEdge.org. When they were in the running for a small grant from the Jenzabar Foundation, Erickson knew just what to do. To get the requisite five hundred comments on her blog post entry, she tweeted about the experience. When they won, she let her followers know!

And when Erickson got buzz surrounding a series of blog posts she wrote about the financial troubles of FORGE in early 2009, Twitter helped. Any time she wrote a new post, her followers could be alerted right away to see the goods. For FORGE, Twitter also brings a local angle to international operations by making the issues as locally relevant as possible. With offices in Oakland, California and projects in Zambia, it takes a lot for FORGE to connect donors with their projects in the field. One approach is to bring locals together for fundraising events in their area. When World Refugee Day came around, FORGE tweeted out that they were looking for Bay Area artists and musicians for a local benefit they were holding.

Similarly, they send out Tweets asking locals to come out for neighborhood mixers.

The goal is connecting, and many find that Twitter helps them do just that, no matter what country the user is in.

The Power of Search and Promoted Tweets for Good

Another aspect of creating relevant Tweets is to understand what information others are searching for on Twitter (and on the Web—remember, your Tweets are searchable) and to show up in those searches.

In April 2010, Twitter launched its first advertising product with six businesses and two non-profit organizations: Partners in Health and Room to Read. The first product was called Promoted Tweets, a way to turn Tweets into paid advertisements based on targeted keywords Twitter users were searching for; Promoted Tweets for Good was the pro bono version. Our launch happened to coincide with the 2010 Skoll World Forum—where the nonprofit founders Paul Farmer and John Wood were in attendance. It was a busy week, and excellent timing for a new move within Twitter's nascent advertising product.

Our beta-testing non-profits, Room to Read and Partners in Health, were pioneers in jumping on board the new platform and testing its usage. As I formalized the Promoted Tweets for Good pro bono program in the months that followed, we began systematically offering pro bono Promoted Tweets for Good to various non-profit organizations. We sought 501(c)(3) charitable organizations with a strong history of Twitter usage who had the bandwidth to take on the promoted Tweets campaign. We worked hard to time and place campaigns around important world events related to their cause. @join1goal ran during the World Cup, @kwawouj ran Red Cross emergency messages in Haitian Creole during the Cholera outbreak in Haiti, and @greaterthanaids ran their campaign on World Aids Day.

The morning of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, I sought an English-language Twitter account that was serving consistent, relevant data that we could spotlight. @hawaiiredcross came recommended from multiple sources, and I quickly saw that their Twitter stream was full of useful advice and links to important resources. Even after being up all night, Cindy Tanaka from the Hawaii chapter of the American Red Cross worked with me to create the initial crisis Tweets campaign. Using keywords like earthquake, tsunami, japan, #tsunami, and #textredcross, the @hawaiiredcross-promoted Tweets sought to deliver relevant English-language information for those who were searching for it (via keyword) on Twitter.

Indeed, bidding on keywords—although always important in any such keyword-based ad platform—is even more critical when you need to coincide with exactly what people are searching for on Twitter. Understandably, campaigns that ran with highly searched items (such as @join1goal during the World Cup or @hawaiiredcross after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan) were able to garner high volumes of individuals exposed to their pro bono Promoted Tweets for Good.

Here's another example: Blog Action Day is a popular annual event each year in which bloggers around the world come together to blog about one cause for one day. In 2010, the issue was clean water, and Mike McCamon of Water.org saw that the Water.org account, @water, garnered 18.9M impressions in that five-day period on Twitter. “In fact, 17 percent of the traffic that included the #bad10 hashtag @water had either authored it or mentioned it. And fourteen of the top twenty-five retweeted Tweets were from @water,” he said. All this taught him once again that people retweet interesting facts, “not self-promoting fluff.”

Aside from such massive events, it is important to use valuable search terms on Twitter. Water.org was a recipient of Promoted Tweets for Good pro bono advertising (not during Blog Action Day), and McCamon explained that to find the best search terms for his campaigns, he used search.twitter.com and collected recent Tweets that mentioned @water, other water charities, and a few hash tags that @water occasionally used. He then followed the hashtags and inventoried all the Tweets from the campaign, remembering to look at user data to best see the reach of the campaign. “I've also done quite a bit of digging back down Twitter followings,” he explained. “When I stopped, I had amassed about 1.5M users' info (number of followers, number of Tweets, etc.) from the collective following of @water and few others that have big followings in the NGO space.” Ultimately, he learned what resonated with people and used that to help his Promoted Tweets for Good campaigns succeed—even without the boost of a popular event.

Although promoted products like Promoted Tweets will change over time, the value in understanding what individuals are looking for on Twitter will remain an important issue.

New Examples of Success

A final step in the Explore aspect of the T.W.E.E.T. model is ensuring that your organization is keeping up to date on the latest trends and changes in advocacy and activism on Twitter. There are a host of excellent blogs on this topic, and www.Hope140.org is the official site that Twitter provides to help organizations and causes to better understand how to use Twitter. You'll find case studies, how-to materials, and cause campaigns we've worked on to get ideas.

See a list of some of the best blogs focused on Twitter at http://twitter4good.com/resources/best-twitter-blogs/

Finding a Twitter mentor is also a great idea. I often recommend that non-profit accounts who want to learn to excel on Twitter look for popular accounts in their space to follow and then work to emulate their actions. This is a fast way to learn the ins and outs of how to best position yourself on Twitter. Modeling your behavior after those who are using it successfully is an easy way to get going quickly in the right direction.

Top Questions on the “Explore” Step