Growing Your Nonprofit Organization

Whether you are an active leader or member in a nonprofit, or you have created your own, every one of them must find the chance to grow at some point. The purpose behind nonprofit organizations is to spread awareness or create change within a community through events, research, and donations from supporters who feel the same towards a common cause. What are the steps to take when considering an expansion of a nonprofit, and how does it come about?

Before the mission even starts, it is important to find out exactly what audience you are speaking to. It is easy for nonprofit organizations to get caught up in the dream that they can reach and affect every person that comes into contact with their information. Don’t be that kind of nonprofit, but instead transition your success off of the reality that certain people will listen and certain people won’t. To make it a more impactful cause, it is more efficient to steer your advertisements, campaigns and events towards the demographic of people that will hop on board.

Once this is discovered, the next step is finding resources and information that will help publicize you to those individuals. Depending on your cause, different media channels may be required to gather followers in your demographic. Some useful websites to help you get started are nonprofitfundraising.com and helpfundraising.org, created by nonprofit advocate Chris Tinney. With platforms like these to begin searching, it won’t take long to find the right online or physical community looking to support a cause like yours.

Instagram - The Informal Business Marketing

Decades ago, it would be downright invasive for a marketer to join in on a potential customer’s conversation about their life and how they are choosing to think about it. These intruders would be marched out of the door before they had the time to bring up their product or service. However, with the increasing use of social media networks in marketing strategies, this reality has become more than possible, it has become an every second occurrence within the popular social media platforms such as Instagram.

                

Who knew that shared pictures with a caption would become such a powerful tool for businesses to spread information and advertising about a product? It’s hard to believe, but the effectiveness of Instagram marketing has become so prominent that entire marketing industries have been born from companies that strictly use Instagram to reach out to customers for clients.

                 

Chris Tinney is one of these marketing professionals, using social media platforms such as Instagram to gain exposure for his clients through his company, HoteiMedia. It is as easy as finding the trends that the public move towards, and identifying a target market from the hashtags, captions, and pictures that display their personality as a consumer. From there, it works like a blog posting content, except it comes in the forms of captivating pictures and creative 7-second videos. With a small amount of effort, companies are able to not only informally reach their customers, but make them buyers as well.

The Power of the #Hashtag

The younger generations began using the hashtag to easily convey a summary of their feelings at the end of their social media update. This was an innocent gesture, but this simplification of a person’s thoughts became a powerful tool that bloomed far beyond its original intentions. As digital marketers began to seek out new ways to learn about their target market, hashtags morphed into not only a representation of a social media summary, but a short and effortless way to represent a brand.

                 

The hashtag is a bridge between the users of social media networks internationally and the company’s, organizations, and marketers looking to find new ways to reach them. Think of hashtags as a social media search engine that allows users to get insights into things that are found interesting to other users. Together, Google’s SEO integration and the hashtags from social media networks became a powerhouse for market research.

                 

Because of this adoption by marketers, social media has now turned into a research and exposure hub for companies who wish to informally reach their customers, doing it passively through social expansion rather than direct marketing. ChrisTinney, the owner of social media marketing agency Hotei Media, uses this method of marketing in his company to help automate the process for businesses. An entire industry has formed under the pretense of the hashtag, and as technology continually accelerates the pace of the world’s globalization, so too will its marketing be accelerated.

Chris Tinney - Looking into Networking before Facebook

The Millennial Generation and beyond would never be able to imagine a world without social media networks, those that instantly connect them to the people both around them apart from them, tethering everything together into the comfort of a phone or computer screen. However, what was life like before the big names like Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, and how did people stay connected? This is difficult to conceive for some, as the history of networking in the 20th and 21st century took a sharp transition in a very short period of time.
   
Networking was a difficult journey for individuals before the development of computer technology and the Internet. Physical interaction was paramount to scaling one’s contact list, and in order to keep in touch with these people, constant follow ups and reunions were required to keep people fresh on each other’s minds, in order to sustain a strong network. People steadily picked up on the tools and resources that continuing computer technology provided, but even the Internet was reserved for government entities and academic communities.
   
Once computer technology began to accelerate, many networking platforms were created well before they became popular from Myspace and Facebook. Chris Tinney, a serial entrepreneur and social networking professional, created some of the first social networks to exist, creating the online community, Powerful Intentions, that went on to become the official online community for the most successful Independent movie in its time, The Secret. Though not universally used, these seed-stage networks created by people like Chris Tinney created the momentum that eventually made Facebook what it is today.

Certified Hootsuite Professional

Hootsuite University is the most esteemed social media education available anywhere offering the opportunity to become a Certified Hootsuite Professional. This certification gives you an industry accepted social media certification and allows you to learn at your own pace with an easy to use course outline. Also, you will have a broad curriculum of training in social media with best practices and guidelines. Mastering HootSuite and social media has never been this accessible before.

Social media certification gives you industry-respected credentials. Hootsuite University gives you those credentials, so you emerge and stand out from other social media experts. Now you can work through the courseware on your lunch break, weekends, or between meetings. HootSuite University's on‑demand educational program gives you a chance to learn whenever that is advantageous for you. Quite a few people call themselves social media specialists; however few really are truly experts. Hootsuite University sets you up to utilize the Hootsuite dashboard and social media at a specialist level.

It is imperative to be certified as a social media team leader.  Certification opens up doors and enlightens you on all things social media while gaining credentials to showcase this ability. At any juncture in time if you can stick out like a sore thumb in this industry it is a great accomplishment, but more so if you are certified as a professional. Adding Hootsuite Certification to your resume will expand your credibility as a social media marketer and guru.

Chris Tinney is a unique social media marketer who is proudly designated as a Certified Hootsuite Professional.