Three months of social media growth for nonprofit Back on My Feet

Tracking our Twitter followers from January 2010 to April. Back on My Feet launched a campaign on the Web in January.

Last month marked three months since I started at nonprofit Back on My Feet and launched a concerted effort to share more member stories and help develop a better, broader online relationship with our volunteers, members and supporters.

The first step in that process was to reawaken our social media accounts — the best platforms to create Web communities and ones buttressed by an organizational blog that I hope to more formally announce soon. Because our organization is all about accountability, we wanted to see how we’ve done.

I thought some lessons or benchmarks might be able to be garnered for others interested in social media use by nonprofits or other organizations, so I’ll share our progress below.

It’s important to note that no one was explicitly in my role before I joined, though someone was responsible for social media use. Still, there wasn’t a lot of experience or perhaps even interest in their uses, so, though all of these accounts had started, there is something of a starting from the beginning feeling.

As I mentioned in last week’s post announcing my seeking an intern, social media is really only one of four big roles I’m filling, so I can’t give it as much attention as I’d like, but it’s certainly a priority.

Take what lessons from these figures that you can.

Twitter — Though our organization is developing chapters rapidly, for now, I’ll be maintaining a single Twitter account.

  • On Jan. 18, our Twitter account had 335 followers, 99 tweets and was listed 30 times.
  • Today, our Twitter account has 770 followers (and we’re following fewer than 150 accounts), 564 tweets and is listed 54 times.

Facebook — I’m using a Back on My Feet organizational Facebook account to then push content to chapter-specific Facebook pages (though we’ll have to transition older groups to pages) and am having a single staff member in each chapter offer more daily updates to those chapter pages.

  • On Jan. 18, our Facebook account had 727 friends and was only sporadically active
  • Today, our Facebook account has 1,087 friends and updates between three and seven times a day with member updates, running quotes and news and links to our blog.
  • On Jan. 18, our Philly chapter Facebook group had 711 fans; our Baltimore chapter group had 311 fans and our DC chapter group had 75 fans.
  • Today, our Philly chapter group has 953 members; our Baltimore chapter group has 397 fans and our DC chapter group has 418 fans. All update between one and three times a day.
  • On Jan. 18, we didn’t have Facebook pages for our May 24-launching Boston chapter, our fall-launching Chicago chapter or our signature event, the Stroehmann Back on My Feet 20in24.
  • Today, the Boston page has 157 fans, the Chicago page has 32 fans and the 20in24 page has 161 fans.

Photos and Video — Youtube is proving nothing more than a repository for our events and member videos. Before I arrived, we had purchased a premium Picasa account, so at the moment all chapters are feeding into a single account for hosting purposes. I may need to transition these to chapter-specific accounts, though I haven’t the foggiest how to best do that.

  • On Jan. 18, our Youtube account had 10 videos and 12 subscribers
  • Today, our Youtube account has 32 videos and 18 subscribers
  • On Jan. 18, our Picasa account was home to 91 photo albums from two chapters
  • Today, our Picasa account is home to 130 photo albums four chapters (including Boston happy hour snaps)

What do you think?

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