What is your most effective online tool for achieving your particular goals or mission?
In preparation for our session "Digital presence with (little or) no money" (that you can sign up for now), we'd love to know from everyone here:
- In your experience, what is your most effective and useful online or digital tool for achieving your particular goals or mission? And why? (for example: Facebook, regular email, email newsletters, video, Instagram, Skype, your website, etc.)
Let us know here in this Forum or in Twitter @HowlRound. Be sure to put hashtag #IETMAmsterdam in your tweets.
Thanks!
At Cisne Negro we mostly use Facebook to communicate with our audience. We also have a twitter account that is linked to our Facebook, so every time we create a post on Facebook it appears automatically as a tweet. This is not always super efficient but not having a specific person taking care of our communications doesn't give us another choice. Time is always limited and we feel like using social media tools gives us a lot of extra work
To the audience, absolutely Facebook, that is very popular in Italy: we've spent some time trying different strategies on it, and we now have a specific model for the posts, the hashtag we use, the tag of others, etc. It was tricky because it was not obvious, for a network like us, who we're speaking to in the beginning.
For our daily work, we actually tried lot of digital tools, but we've been never truly satisfied: after a couple of years, and a very good designing project workshop, the whole team even came back to personal agenda and flip board!
But the two tools we maintained and still are essential are Dropbox and Google Cal.
I think one particular tool that we recently discovered at IETM and that is definitively worth sharing is the Google programme for non-profits. The programme allows you to use all the Google apps features (including gmail professional accounts) for free. We for instance use the Google calendar at the office to know who's away on certain dates and to keep in mind important deadlines (such as the Amsterdam registration deadline). The procedure to set it up is quite simple (took us about a week to do it) and it's a good way of saving money and having a great (if not the best) email provider.
For managing our internal office work, we too have found that the free Google Apps for Nonprofits (Calendar, Gmail, Google Forms (for surveys), Google Drive/Docs, Youtube, Google Analytics) have been indispensable for our team. The only cost associated with this is ~$10 USD per year for our domain name registration / email address "howlround.com" (registered elsewhere with a web-hosting service).
For us the best is FB, putting videos and different types of files to atract more people interested on it.
Regarding Facebook: for our particular organisation, Facebook is the most popular way for people to arrive at howlround.com webpages at 37% compared to the next most popular way which is our email blasts at 19%. What's interesting is that people are mostly coming from their friends' Facebook postings after their friends have shared a HowlRound link. People aren't necessarily coming to howlround.com content from HowlRound's Facebook Page. So, for our particular kind of content and relationship dynamics with our community, peer-to-peer word-of-mouth (via their personal Facebook) is more important and effective than our conventional "top-down" broadcasting of posts via our organisation's Facebook page.
I'm sharing a screen capture of how people arrive at howlround.com (from Google Analytics—which is available in the free Google Apps for Nonprofits program.). The 43% "Social" traffic is 86% Facebook and 12% Twitter.
I was wondering if anyone can share any tips regarding engaging followers on LinkedIn. IETM is still making its first steps using this tool (we started posting on LinkedIn less than a year ago). The number of followers is increasing, but not as fast as we would like :) Vijay, as far as I know, HowlRound doesn't have a LinkedIn profile. Are there any reasons you chose not to use it?
Hi Elena, we haven't tried LinkedIn for a few of reasons: 1) lack of time and staff capacity, 2) we have the impression that it's not as conducive or open for real-time conversation or sharing content (unlike Twitter for conversation, and unlike Facebook for sharing), 3) we haven't noticed much activity on it for theatre/performance people (at least in the U.S.). For our particular organisation's purposes/mission: we've opted to focus on Twitter for peer-to-peer conversation, for in-person, real-time events, and for "top-down" broadcasts of content. And we focus on Facebook for "top-down" broadcast of content. Most of the "deeper" community conversation, though, happens on our Journal project in the Disqus comments.
We'd be curious to know if LinkedIn has been effective for other organisations, or individuals, and how you are using it, and why.
For Linkedin followers, I would advice to post content and that your team "like" it so people from their network could see it. Usually, we could create thematic groups but I think that you would like this forum to be used rather than the Linkedin groups ? Maybe we could communicate on specific field : recruitment for example and then make a link through twitter / facebook to this linkedin topics.
I definitely use facebook :
- to connect with our local audience. It's funny when I know someone through facebook first and then coming to the residency / the event
- to make traffic to our website / other social media such as Flyckr (for our album photo)
- to connect with the artist who were hosted at the residency
It's still difficult for us to develop the audience that answer to our facebook event.
I was concerned about one problem : when few people in the organization use those social media, especially facebook and twitter, it could be difficult to develop the online audience.
Finally, my colleague and I use instagram to share the "backstage" of the residency.
The residency also use : google agenda (very usefull!), Flickr (album photo), Linkedin
I use : Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Instagram
Does anyone use Trello. It's an online and mobile application which an be used for project planning by several participants.
Thanks for your comment.
Hi Olivia! Thank you for sharing your insights. It's actually a very interesting idea to create a sort of a "Recruitment group" on LinkedIn, where we could share job opportunities relevant for the sector. I was just wondering, if LinkedIn is popular enough in the world of performing arts professionals. As Vijay pointed out, there is not much activity undertaken by theatre people on LinkedIn. Or perhaps we are not very well aware about it. I will try to find some statistics / studies about what tools are most used in the arts world and why.
Olivia, you also mentioned that you use both Flickr and Instagram. We would be very much curious to know your opinion about the different purposes of these two platforms: how consistent it is to use two different image tools, whether they overlap, etc.
Ciao Olivia, I used Trello once for a project where we had multiple partners working from distance. it was particularly useful to know what others were up to and how far we were with certain tasks, not to mention the decrease amount of emails traded. Since we were not sharing the same office we were kinda dragged into it quickly but i'm wondering if teams working in the same space also find this tool useful
Hi there, some interesting tools can be found on a list provided by silk: NGO tech tools. Thanks for pointing to Trello, indeed something I would try out.