Executive SummaryBetween February 20 and April 15, 2009, 980 nonprofit professionals responded to a survey about their organization’s use of online social networks. The survey is sponsored by NTEN, Common Knowledge and ThePort. Three groups of questions were posed to survey participants:
1) About their use of commercial social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and others.
2) About the construction and use of social networks on their own web sites, called house social networks in this report.
3) Demographic information about their organization. Survey respondents represented small, medium and large nonprofits and all segments including Human Services, Public & Societal Benefit, Health & Healthcare, Environment & Animals, Arts & Culture, Education (K-12 & Higher Ed), International, Religious & Spiritual, Media, Labor Union, Associations, and Mutual Benefit. See Appendix A for a detailed definition of these segments and survey respondent participation rates by
organization size and segment.
From the survey, we learned that commercial social networks, especially Facebook, are popular, but average community sizes remain small, and presence is relatively short. Responding nonprofits are allocating small but real resources, staff and budget to their social networks. Survey respondents prefer traditional marketing channels to promote their social networks but are experimenting with new social media channels. For now, there is very little real revenue generated on these communities via fundraising and advertising. A minority of nonprofit survey respondents, about one third, have built and manage their own house social networks, using software from a wide variety of social network software vendors, with no clear leader among these vendors. The members of house social networks are as yet, with just a few exceptions, still relatively small as well.
Following are more highlights from the survey:
· Among commercial social networks, Facebook is the most popular with 74.1% of nonprofit survey respondents maintaining a presence on this commercial site. Community sizes are still small, however, with an average size of just 5,391members. Tenure on Facebook is relatively short, with most nonprofit survey respondents (94.4%) present for 2 years or less. For Twitter, 93.9% of organizations report using this channel for one year or less.
· Staffing and budgets for nonprofit social network projects—on commercial social networks—are real but small, with four-fifths of nonprofit survey respondents committing at least one-quarter of a full-time staff person to these efforts. More than half of nonprofit survey respondents intend to increase social network project staffing over the next 12 months. External resourcing for social network projects is lower, with 4 out of 10 organizations allocating any budget, and 8.3% reserving $10,000 or more over the last 12 months for outside help.
· Nonprofit survey respondents prefer more traditional marketing tactics to promote their commercial and house social networks—prioritizing website, email list and events to get the word out about their online communities. Lower in popularity but still prevalent were the use of Twitter and other social networks.
· The communications and marketing departments are most likely to own the social network efforts, with fundraising and executive management the next most common shepherds of nonprofit’s social network projects.
· Very few nonprofit survey respondents are generating real revenue on commercial or house social networks via fundraising. On Facebook, about 39.9% of respondents have raised money via fundraising, but 29.1% have raised $500 or less over the past 12 months. On house social networks, 25.2% of nonprofit survey respondents are fundraising, and 1/3 of these fundraisers accumulated $10,000 or more over the last year.
· Among nonprofit survey respondents 30.6% have built one or more house social networks, but here again the community size is relatively small, with 86.6% of house social network-owning nonprofit survey respondents hosting communities of 10,000 members or less.
