Social Media Basics

There are many features within Facebook and Twitter that can be confusing. The options become even more cumbersome from a company point of view. One of the main starting points with any company page is to “LIKE” them on Facebook and “FOLLOW” them on Twitter. This allows users to keep up to date with a company's events and information. These two platforms, however, act very different.

For example, within Facebook, complicated algorithms dictate which posts will be seen by the public. Not all updates are pushed out to all the fans of a company page. Due to this, a company needs to utilize other tools to reach their audience. This comes from loyal followers as well as engaging content. 

So how can loyal followers help a company page thrive? There are three ways, Like, Comment and Share. When a company pushes out a post there are three options at the bottom of each post that allow for user interaction. By clicking the Like option, you are both notifying the company as well as Facebook that you found the content interesting. This ups the level of visibility of the post to the public by positively influencing the aforementioned algorithm. If you Comment on the post, it has a similar effect as a Like, but it holds more weight with Facebook as well as offers the company more information beyond a simple Like. The final, and most productive way, is to Share. This allows a company’s post to go beyond the people who are fans of the page. This allows everyone of the user’s friends to see the information as well. The goal is for the information to be engaging enough so that the friend will then Like the company’s main page. The more shares a post receives, the wider the influence a post will have.

Twitter also has three options, but they act very different from Facebook. A user can Favorite, Retweet and Reply. The first one, Favorite, is useful to the user and the company. A user can Favorite a tweet, which saves it as such in a separate tab in your profile. This serves as a bookmarking tool. By clicking Favorite, this also sends feedback to the company letting them know they like this type of post.  The other options are even more useful for a company. The goal is to get your tweet Retweeted by followers. Like Facebook’s Share, this allows the information to go beyond the people that only follow the company and extends to the users circle of friends. Reply is very similar in its range of influence, but it also allows for the user to offer more information to the company regarding the tweet.

When it comes to organic marketing, these techniques are vital in getting our information out. The first line of offense is the employees who work for the company as well as your own friends and loyal fans. By utilizing some of the above mentioned techniques, you can extend your reach to a much wider net that will only grow larger.

For more information on social media, check out our upcoming classes - http://goo.gl/0fJbM2.

UNLV Grant Academy Launches this Fall

UNLV Grant Academy courses will be offered at Historic Fifth Street School in Downtown Las Vegas.

Syllabi for the new Grant Academy classes are finally complete and approved, which means we can officially get excited about the program. It’s been awhile since I worked in the nonprofit and grant writing fields, but I have to say that reading the course descriptions had me wishing my grant education had been this well structured. 

For me, my first application basically plagiarized my predecessor’s work; the application was pretty much cut and pasted from a sample my boss handed me. It was not big money, maybe just $500, so he figured it was a good learning opportunity for me. Taking this type of shortcut didn’t work long, though, as I moved on to bigger grants and more sophisticated review committees.  

This is the point at which I begin to salivate at the Grant Academy curriculum and wish someone had better explained to me the value of doing all the difficult pre-work before working through a grant application. Before the Grant Academy students even begin to write proposals, they will take Building a Grant Ready Organization. In this class they will back up and look at the big picture: organizational capacity, program development, partnership building, and policy development -- all should be in place before an organization asks for funding. These behind-the-scenes tasks aren’t glamorous, but, boy, do they make a difference in giving a grant application focus and purpose. 

Most grant writing workshops I attended over the years did a solid job of taking participants through the proposal writing process. The Grant Academy will no doubt do an excellent job of this, especially since a total of eight weeks will be dedicated to discussing narratives, budgets, and RFPs. So while proposal writing is important, I would rather get you excited about the final Grant Academy course: Grants Management.

With so much focus on winning the grant, sometimes it can be alarming for an organization to realize it actually has to come through on proposed projects within the promised timeline. In the everyday business of nonprofit work, tracking expenditures and program outcomes can easily fall by the wayside. When the grant report comes due, there’s a scramble to consolidate the required information. Grants Management will give grant writers and managers tools to successfully implement projects, track outcomes, and build relationships with funding sources; these skills all improve your chances of receiving additional funding.

Registration for Grant Academy courses is now open. Course descriptions and details are posted online. You may take courses individually or save by registering for the full five-course series as a bundle. The first course for fall 2014, Identifying Funding Sources, starts Sept. 2.

Top Three Open-Source Content Management Systems

A content management system (CMS) can make building dynamic websites less painful.  

There are many expensive enterprise options for content management systems, but three open-source (Free!) options are capable of everything the enterprise versions can do: Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. 

All three are built using PHP for a programming language and MYSQL for a database.

Traditionally, Wordpress was an easy to use blogging platform, Drupal was a somewhat difficult enterprise level CMS, and Joomla was somewhere in between, a robust system with a simple interface. As the three projects mature, however, the lines are blurring.

Wordpress

Wordpress, the CMS with the largest market share, is still the easiest to set up and the administrative interface is very intuitive. This is great for building a site and passing it on to a client -- all of the site administration information is well documented. Wordpress was once limited to two content types, blog-like posts and basic pages, but custom post-types are now possible. Wordpress also offers a hosted service at wordpress.com

Notable sites:

• time.com
• techcrunch.com

Joomla

Joomla is estimated to be the second most used open source CMS. While not as easy to use as Worpdress, Joomla has a very intuitive use interface. A large community of developers backs the many extensions that are available. The biggest drawback to Joomla is the work it takes to make sites search engine optimization (SEO) friendly.

Notable sites:

• Linux.com
• Guggenheim.org  

Drupal

Drupal has a steeper learning curve than the others. Originally developed for developers by developers, it can be much harder to learn for less technical users. While the Drupal community has made strides to correct that, it is still more difficult to learn and use than Wordpress. Drupal is enterprise friendly and stable, making it an excellent choice for dynamic data-driven websites.

Drupal shines with more complex websites. It's a great solution for people who want to build feature-rich websites and it's a great solution for large enterprises. – Dries Buytaert, Drupal Creator

Notable sites:

• nbc.com/the-tonight-show/
• Whitehouse.gov
• Virgin.com

Want to learn more about leveraging Content Management Systems on your sites?

Check out the UNLV Continuing Education course,  Introduction to Content Management