Your supporters are your best spokespeople
- Thu, October 26 2006
- Filed under: Social networking and web 2.0
Today I’m continuing yesterday’s theme: giving your supporters the means to promote you. It’s even better than finding celebrity spokespeople. After all, the number one reason people give money or take action is because someone asked them—especially someone they know. So how do you give your core supporters ways to be evangelists for your cause?
1. Send them a nifty email and ask them to forward it to five friends. Make it an email that just asks for a simple action, like signing a petition or joining a community so you can get the email addresses of those five friends and cultivate them as donors.
2. If they have a blog, ask them to link to you or fundraise for you on their blog. Give them cool tools to do it. At Network for Good, we’re creating cool tools to give bloggers to call attention to your cause next month. In the meantime, check out Word of Blog.
3. Send your supporters cool pictures or put them on Flickr and ask people to share the good work you are doing. Pictures are so compelling.
4. Ask your supporters to hold events for you, like dinner party fundraisers or races and make it easy for them to recruit people with tools like First Giving.
5. Ask them to tell their stories to you (so you can spread them). I love this new campaign encouraging women to vote by sharing stories of their “first times” voting in an attention-seizing way. The personal stories your supporters have about why they support you are often far more interesting and compelling then any appeal you could create.