Nonprofit Fundraising Technology Tips – Facebook page ranking tool

If you are using social media to actively promote your nonprofit fundraising organisation then you should definitely read on. While using social media to connect with your audience and ideally expand it, the art of measuring success is at best a moving target with no edges. Ultimately social media is about crowdsourcing, especially when you consider that the number one reason a person donated to a nonprofit in 2010 for the first time was for the simple reason that ‘someone asked them if they would’. Therefore determining whether your use of social media is succeeding isn’t as cut and dry as saying I have 300 followers on Twitter or 500 fans on my facebook page. It’s about building relationships by engaging those followers, are they seeing the information you are sharing and most pertinent of all – are they reacting to it or sharing it?

In a previous post I wrote about Klout which allows you to monitor your social media influence, a powerful tool that provides some data which certainly will assist you in tracking your progress and looking at the results of others. Twitter lends itself well to data tracking and there are numerous other tools that provide similar results. Facebook on the other hand isn’t quite as user friendly yet. Until recently you would build a page, share thoughts or other stories and always look to engage with those who became fans. I’ve maintained a few facebook pages associated with blogs for a time and have seen steady growth but of far more use is the inhouse page analytics and weekly reports which allow you to monitor the engagement by measuring visits, comments, shares and views of your updates. Until now I hadn’t found a tool which allowed you to see a composite score that evaluated your Facebook page results.

Now comes ‘EdgeRankChecker’ which isn’t perfect but it’s a good start. It performs a series of metrics much like Klout that allow you to see how well your page is performing in terms of interaction which in the case of a nonprofits Facebook page is exactly what you are aiming for. What I like is that the tool doesn’t weigh heavily in favour of a page with 1,500 ‘fans’ versus only 150, the data collated and overall score is based upon how engaged those followers are with your page. Did they follow your organisaition on Facebook back in February and have never visited since or do they keep you in their newsfeed and see each update and comment and share? While the tool doesn’t allow you to see those exact elements (the on page Facebook Insights will help you there) it does create an overall score for each page you manage based on the composite data. With that baseline you can monitor your progress once a week and see what impact new posts, videos, questionares or links then generate. The tool also provides more background as to how the data is gathered plus tips to improve your ‘edge rank’.

Non-profit fundraising and awareness measuring tool Facebook’s Edgerank

The tool also allows you to check your score for a date range that you specify, which is really valuable if you want to see how the Facebook updates you added over the last few days have impacted your score. They also have a quick guide that explains what your score means, I was happy to register a ’19’ which is apparently above average. The way you use Facebook to engage with your audience or donor base is very much trial and error. I find asking questions, providing exclusive content and videos each to be very popular. Remember though that social media is a two way street – the most important advice is replying to people for comments, suggestions or ideas. Replying to all comments is the cornerstone of social media success, I read a quote this week that essentially said ‘always remember each of these icons, photos or buttons is a person and you must engage with them as a person. Simple and obvious advice perhaps but well worth remembering.

Overall I’d give EdgeRank a B- I hope to see it expand upon the information it provides or stimulate new competitors product but for the time being it is useful. The service is entirely free and you can register directly with your Facebook profile. Give EdgerankChecker a test drive and let me know what you think.

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