Originally, our director, Tony Faria, first set up a profile on Facebook with an aim to promoting the Foundation. Looking back now, our first mistake on Facebook as a non profit was attempting to use the original personal profile as our means to spread awareness of our non profit. Due to a lack of experience on Facebook on our part, we took the initial obvious step of placing the Foundation logo as our profile picture and went about attempting to spread our cause. We’d decided to migrate from a large profile on MySpace (over 5,000) due to the amount of spam that was growing and thought, at that time, Facebook would be the perfect logical replacement. In the early days things grew steadily and quite a lot of effort was required to develop a presence. Still working off of a personal profile, and still blissfully unaware of the true impact groups and fan pages would have, we continued going about the business of developing our profile. The biggest frustration at that time was that although we were circulating our logo lots, getting the actual Foundation name in print was more difficult – simply due to the fact that it was the directors name from the profile that was everywhere – unless people knew our director or it was obvious that he was attempting to promote on the Foundations behalf – they would struggle to make the link between the directors name and the organization. Although the directors personal profile still has the biggest friend list of all of our activity on Facebook, its merely down to the fact that it has been going the longest of all of our activity and had the most amount of time spent on it.
A word of warning to any new prospective non profits looking to use Facebook – avoid using your initial personal profile for promotion – keep it for personal use and work on developing your presence in the ways I’ll describe shortly.
Our initial director profile can be found here:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id= ... p;ref=name
Still back in the days of the old Facebook we came across two html profile applications that would allow us to hopefully make our profile stand out a little more from others on Facebook. Using our directors previous experience as a graphic designer we set about giving our profile a “lick of paint” – something that at that time most other users (unless they were experienced enough in html) were unable to do due to Facebooks insistence that all profiles should remain the same in look. After many hours of code writing we were proud to have a Facebook profile looking just the way we wanted – it can still be viewed from our Directors profile by now switching to the boxes tab:
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id= ... =596838775
However, after all of that work to create a branded looking identity it was to our dismay when the New Facebook arrived – due to the fact that it was on a personal page we had no control over the landing tab of any of our friends – anyone who visited the profile would automatically land at our wall tab – unless they specifically went to the boxes tab (something that people rarely do) they would not see all of our hard work at creating a branded looking page.
The next avenue that we persued for growth was the discovery of the “Causes” application. This has been an application that has been well received by our supporters and is also an interactive application on the MySpace platform. That has given us the ability to push it in both environments. On the whole we are delighted with this application and its great to see embedded across our supporters home pages. However, our biggest drawback with the application is that, despite being a registered Thai non-profit, without American 501c status it is impossible to collect any donations using this application as we have no affiliation to any U.S. organization. Should any org be reading this that could act as an umbrella org on our behalf we’d love to hear from them. The cause is also useful for sending mails to all members as there are no restrictions on the number of mails we can send in one go – unlike the personal profile. You can see our Causes application here:
http://apps.facebook.com/causes/49179?m=3f1cca43
Our next Facebook development was the discovery that we could create a group, name it with our desired Foundation name, use it for discussions, forums etc. It wasn’t long before the group was up and running and announcements sent out via our personal profile that the group was now in operation. Again take up was good, almost 1 in 2 of our original friends joined the group. Despite nearly half of our friends joining the group it is rarely used by any of our supporters, probably, partly on our part, a lack of time to keep things updated here. Again though, we do still have the ability to group mail all of our members. You can see our group here:
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref= ... 6454459731
Next major step was Facebook rolling out their all new sparkly “New Facebook”! initially, we along with many others, were just plain confused by the name format and were veering towards turning our backs on Facebook. As chance had it, a spell of extra free time became available and merely out of curiosity we decided to see if we could see what the new fuss was all about. Gradually, the new layout become more addictive and different possibilities for future networking started to become apparent. The most obvious one was that Facebook was now lending more weight to there “Fan” pages – lots of links appearing in live streams on peoples walls. Our next step was to jump onto the Fan Pages band wagon. After a little bit of effort in negotiating the new facebook our new “Fan” page was ready. We promptly set about the task of using the groups ability to batch mail our supporters that this will be our desired way of going forward with Facebook. Take-up was great, a quarter of our supporters became fans in the first week alone! It was getting frustrating that our supporters were fragmented into different locations and the new Fan page combine with the new Facebook layout appears to be the perfect combination for the future for us to conduct all of our networking from one central location. Another added bonus is that we also have the ability as admin to control the new visitors landing page . Now we can direct them directly to our boxes tab and have this page display everything WE, and not Facebook, want it to. Having now come across the FBML application which is available for Fan pages a thought for the future will be again to utilize our html experience and create a bespoke landing page. You can see our new fan page here.
Having created the Fan page we also made the decision that we would try out paid advertising on Facebook in an attempt to direct more traffic to our main Foundation website, and hopefully attract new potential volunteers. The foundation has a meager budget but we decided we’d give it a go for a month and see how it goes. The sponsored advertising on Facebook also has the added benefit of adding social actions, so as well as our advert it also has the option to become a fan of our fan page and also join our group page. We decided it was exposure that we wanted so decided on a pay per impression campaign. Having set a monthly budget that is assuring wont be exceeded the ad went into production. We get approximately 6,000 impressions a day, not a great deal, but still 180,000 a month for a reasonable 30$ or less. Exactly where all of these impressions land we are still unsure but the advert program does allow you to quite specifically target your desired audience within Facebook. By utilizing background web monitoring statistics we can confirm that our Facebook advert has already had its desired effect. The click through from Facebook to our main website has already produced the confirmed placement of a new volunteer. Not possible to provide a direct link so here’s a screenshot:
Our latest venture on Facebook was to see if we could somehow create an application for use on the new platform. We came across the developer application and thought we’d see what it was. As it turned out, and through a few twists of fate, this particular application was needed by ourselves but not in the sense as a developer – what we initially downloaded seemed like a whole pile of gobbledeegook – way over any of our technical abilities. Then fate took its twist, we were offered a gift by a friend using the gift creator application. It was a photo of a Thai island – basically they were just using it for fun to distribute various photos of Thailand for fun. But the beauty of the Gift Creator Application was that when combined with the Developer application it provided a step by step guide on how anybody could create their own Facebook application. We set about thinking how we could utilize this in the same fun way, yet in a more productive and appealing way. Then we had what we thought was a great idea and the Fernthai Guardians Application was born. We could use the photos of the kids that we look after in some of Thailands poorest communities, and using the Gifts application, send them out to our friends and request that they take them under their wing, in a kind of virtual online foster parent/guardian manner. By also deciding that we would donate 1 baht to each child cared for our users would feel that by collecting our children on their profiles, they will be having a direct impact on that childs care whilst still spreading us thoughout the Facebook network. Despite just being launched the new application appears to be spreading quite quickly. It then dawned on us, that we could possibly integrate this into a kind of “Sponsor a Child” program. By the use of some clever html mark up during the upload of children available for Guardians, our users, should they wish, now have the ability to directly sponsor that child themselves. By creating a link in the photo and a hover over message, should a user now click to the childs name to sponsor they are redirected to a new window outside of Facebook, and directly to our main website. We have now created individual sponsorship pages in our website for each of the children available from within the application. The web page also includes our secure on line ChipIn donation widget making online donations possible. You can see our Facebook Application “Fernthai Guardians” here:
http://apps.facebook.com/fernthai-gua-d ... =dashboard
So, in summing up, what have we learnt as a non profit over the years on Facebook? The future now seems bright! We now have the right tools in place to focus our network from a central location with lots of potential for good growth. Only wish is, that we came across the Non-Profits on Facebook group sooner than today! Basically we have stumbled our way to where we are today, but for any other new Non-Profits considering using Facebook to spread their networking this group contains some great advice:
http://www.facebook.com/FacebookPages?v ... nonprofits
We hope this blog of our journey so far may be of use to others considering the journey.
Kind Regards and Good Luck – Tony Faria – Fernthai Volunteer Foundation
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