What did David Curry do when the Tacoma Rescue Mission wanted more volunteers to help serve food this holiday season?
He did what a growing number of web-savvy philanthropists are doing.
He blogged and tweeted.
“Almost all of our volunteers – about 9,000 a year and 1,000 in November and December – almost all of them come through the Web,” said Curry, the Rescue Mission’s chief executive officer.
Curry and organizers of other local charities, from Toys for Tots to the Emergency Food Network and Catholic Community Services, say new social networking tools are revolutionizing their organizations.
The donor bases of many charities are heavy with the generation of Americans who lived through World War II.
That demographic is aging, and charities are scrambling to enlist younger donors and volunteers. Ramping up their social networking strategies, they say, has proved the most effective way to do that.
In the drive to attract younger donors, once-staid charities are texting, tweeting, blogging and amassing thousands of “friends” on Facebook.
Some are even looking at creating avatars and creating online games.
“You have to use social media or you look like an old, worn-out nonprofit that’s not going anywhere,” said Jann Sonntag, who does public relations for the rescue mission.
The mission, which provides shelter to more than 450 people in Pierce County every night and served more than 29,000 meals last year, is among the most Web-savvy of local non-profits.
“We’ve had organizations around the country calling and saying, “I just follow you and do what you do,” Sonntag said.
That’s not because of her, Sonntag quickly points out. She regards herself as a computer novice and says she needed to be dragged into the social networking realm.
But Curry, her boss, is a leader in the field. Last year in San Diego, Curry addressed a national gathering of rescue mission CEOs, coaching them on the use of social media.
“My belief is that non-profits have to communicate with their supporters and the community in any available spectrum,” Curry said.
“For years, we relied on newsletters and direct mail,” he said. “Now new technology is opening up new spectrums. A lot of the younger generation exclusively follow us on social media.”
The mission’s website got 13,000 hits last month, Curry said.
Curry blogs and routinely shoots off five or six tweets a day, constantly reminding the 1,900 people who follow him of the overwhelming need in the community.
Often his tweets are general and designed to attract people to the mission’s website, where they can fill out volunteer forms or donate money.
For example, last week he tweeted this message several times “Just $1.85 to feed a homeless person Christmas dinner in Pierce County. rescue-mission.org/donate.”
Other times his tweets are direct calls to action, addressing specific needs that pop up.
His tweet on Dec. 9: “We could use hams/turkeys for Christmas dinner at the Rescue Mission. We’re expecting 1,500 folks for dinner.”
“The turkeys just flew in,” Sonntag said.
Kelly McDonald, director of marketing and donor relations at the Tacoma YWCA, tells a similar story.
Six years ago, when she took her job, McDonald said, the YWCA was doing no marketing other than sending out letters.
The letters went to everybody on the mailing list, she said, a scattergun approach that was expensive to design and produce and had a low percentage of returns. Many mailings went directly into the trash.
Now, with a few keystrokes (and no expense), McDonald can post requests and announcements on the Y’s Facebook page, targeting them to just those potential donors whose demographics make them most likely to participate.
Sometimes, she said, spur-of-the-moment requests in the blogosphere work almost like magic.
“This year we have adopted 68 families,” McDonald said, “Using our amazing donor base, I can put a call out on Facebook for specific, needed items, and they just show up in our lobby.”
Recently, McDonald said, the Y’s domestic violence shelter ran short of certain sizes of diapers.
“We put a call out on Facebook for sizes 2 and 4,” she said. “I personally saw 15 to 20 boxes come in from all over the area. It was just amazing.”
Curry stresses that the new social media tools are not magic and that even with the good that they do, the overwhelming needs in the community are not being met.
Many nonprofits – especially small ones – are struggling in the current economy. Unemployment remains high, state social service agency budgets have been slashed, and foundations are cutting back on grants.
Meanwhile, demand is rising.
“Online donation is a growing segment, but it’s still in its infancy,” Curry said. “It’s not going to replace direct mail right now, but it is a way people are increasingly giving.”
“Social media are never going to take the place of looking somebody in the eye and giving them a hug and saying thank you,” Curry said. “And we don’t want to replace that.
“What we want is to make it easy to have those entry-level encounters that make those interactions possible.”
Rob Carson: 253-597-8693
rob.carson@thenewstribune.com
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