Often referred to as a microblogging service, Twitter is a social networking site that allows its users to send and receive messages or “tweets”, as they are called. It’s a free tool that can transform the approach of nonprofits to fundraising. As a beginner, you might find it difficult to answer some bizarre questions or offer some important insights on the Twitter home page. However, once you get the hang of it, you’ll know that reaching out to a global audience and achieving the desired results is not a problem.
People all over the world use Twitter to ask questions, follow people, share news stories, promote links to other websites, coordinate events, etc. Using Twitter can really help nonprofits build a strong and wide net of audience and raise funds.
From a fundraising standpoint, Twitter is a wonderful way to engage potential donors as well as present donors. As a fundraiser, you would know that preserving relationships is one of the most difficult tasks; however, Twitter allows you to do that successfully without disturbing your work schedule. There are several things that you can do with Twitter such as reaching out to people who might be interested in your cause, understanding what people think about your organization and its activities, know about fundraising techniques from other fundraisers. You can even divert traffic to your nonprofit website using Twitter.
One common issue that many people encounter is the difficulty in writing comments in just 140 characters. However, when you consider it from a different perspective, you’ll find that it is, in fact, beneficial. If you can make your tweets easily understandable in just 140 characters, your fundraising writing will improve significantly. Don’t think that you’re being compelled to scrap your ideas, just think that being succinct is giving you an added advantage of being understandable.
However, if you still want to express your thoughts using more words, you can use blogging services and broadcast your blog posts through your Twitter account. This way, your blog posts will reach both people who subscribed to your RSS feed and those who follow you on Twitter. Moreover, this will allow people to comment or retweet on your blog posts and thus help widen the base of your target audience.