Nonprofits often perceive foundations as monolithic black boxes into which emails and grant proposals disappear. Unfortunately, that sentiment does little for Knight Foundation’s mission of fostering informed and engaged communities. Experimenting with social media has been critical for combating that impression. It has enabled us to open up our grantmaking staff and processes, share our insights, and build stronger networks.
We’re using social media to foster better conversations with our grantees. Even seemingly small gestures have gone a long way toward building online credibility. For example, Knight fields grantee questions on Twitter and responds with timely information, benefitting fellow grantees with similar questions and reducing staff time spent answering questions. Meanwhile, the program staff that runs the Knight News Challenge has hosted Google+ Hangouts to connect with potential grantees and partners. We’ve also used webinars and live-chats to increase our reach.
Why do we take this approach? The success of our mission depends on the success of our grantees, partners, and networks. Since these key audiences increasingly use social media to communicate, especially in our funding areas of media innovation and technology for engagement, it’s important to meet them where they reside.
Beyond grants management, Knight leverages social media to support the work of our partner organizations. We’ve helped grantees attract broader support and raise their visibility by featuring their work for visitors to our website and our 30,000 Twitter followers to read. This includes a variety of tactics, from posting videos of Knight News Challenge winners on our site, to writing blog posts about grantees such as Citizen Effect, a movement to recruit citizen philanthropists in Philadelphia and Detroit. We’ve also helped grantees recruit for job openings by using our established networks on social media platforms.
Knight increases access to its resources, events, and thought-capital through social media. By live-blogging and live-tweeting this year’s Media Learning Seminar, we nearly tripled the amount of people who were able to participate. Meanwhile, Knight disseminates its research and evaluation project findings through social media so grantees and leaders in the fields where we work can apply lessons learned. For example, a recent evaluation on social impact games that included data visualizations and infographics achieved a good deal of adoption because the content was shareable on social media; we even noticed people pinning the infographic on Pinterest. Social media enables us to be more innovative in our evaluations and experiment with new ways to make insights accessible and relevant to partners in the field.
The commitment to social media across all levels of our organization – from our board and CEO to our staff – has been critical to advancing these efforts. So has stronger collaboration between our communications department and program staff. Our communications team has provided one-on-one trainings in social media tools like Twitter and Storify because, ultimately, program staff that manage grantee relationships constitute the outward looking face of the foundation.
The Center for Effective Philanthropy’s social media report demonstrates that funders can better harness the power of social media with their grantees, and Knight is no exception (Note: Knight Foundation grantees were not included in the report data, but we will soon receive results from our own grantee survey.) Knight wants to learn more from grantees about how we could use social media to advance their work. We also need to analyze our social media efforts more rigorously so we better understand which tactics have been effective, what kinds of content our network values, and how we focus future efforts.
Knight has completed an initial shift from using social media to communicate with grantees to using social media to increase their success. We’re excited to continue iterating our approach to deploying social media to accomplish our goals and those of our partners.
Jon Sotsky is Director of Strategy & Assessment at Knight Foundation. He can be found on Twitter @jonsotsky. Elizabeth R. Miller is Communications Associate at Knight Foundation. She can be found on Twitter @ElzbthMllr.
Join the conversation about the findings featured in Grantees’ Limited Engagement with Foundations’ Social Media on Twitter using the hashtag #cepsocialmedia.
I was surprised to hear how few of my nonprofit colleagues are using social media to engage with their funders! After reading Jon & Elizabeth good articulation of the value they see using social media, I blogged about reasons nonprofit grantees and grantseekers ought to engage with foundations via social media. http://www.socialcapitalinc.org/node/1297
Thanks David, this is a great list of reasons why nonprofits should engage with their funders! Your points about how social media can help organizations keep up with their field, amplify their message and build relationships particularly resonated. Thanks for mentioning our blog post!
Thanks, Elizabeth and Jon, for your thoughtful review of how the Knight Foundation’s use of social media is evolving. We certainly learn a lot from your efforts and I’m grateful that you are helping the philanthropic sector move more quickly (not our strength!) into the use of new communications technologies. I agree with your goal of extending the impact of social media from simply communicating with our grantees to helping them succeed. Ultimately, that’s what the vast majority of our communications work should intend to accomplish.
I also want to emphasize that the facts that CEP’s report revealed — that our grantees aren’t following our social media channels — should not be seen as a failure of our grantees, but rather as an indication that we need to make our social media channels more useful to them. David Crowley’s blog (see the link in his comment above) provides some good reasons why grantees might want to follow their funders on social media. As funders, we should treat that list as guidance for how we can improve: Are we allowing grantees to build relationships with us through social media? Are we amplifying our grantees’ messages through our social media channels?
This is a rich and helpful discussion. I hope others continue to contribute to it so we can all improve our use of these powerful communications tools.
Thanks for your feedback Daniel. One follow-up thought prompted by your comments: I wonder if many on both the foundation and grantee side are viewing social media more as another marketing channel rather than a place to really engage and learn. It’s this latter potential of social media that really excites me, a space where funders and grantees can exchange ideas and work together to tackle important problems.
Thanks for you comment Daniel, you’re spot on. I think what it really comes down to is understanding your grantees and how they want to interact with you on social media. Are we making sure that as foundations we’re sharing the kinds of content they find most useful? Are we doing the best we can to leverage their work? And are we doing it consistently? Since the report showed that the grantees themselves had high adoption rates when it comes to social media, they clearly see the value in it. I hope we as a field continue to push ourselves to use these tools in ways that help build the value of our work.
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