Survey on Commercial Social Networking

Between February 20 and April 15, 2009, 980 nonprofit professionals responded to a survey abouttheir organization’s use of online social networks. The survey is sponsored by NTEN, CommonKnowledge and ThePort. Particpants were posed to survey about their use of commercial social networks such as Facebook, MySpace,LinkedIn, and others.


Survey Results
Commercial Social NetworksPopularity of Commercial Social NetworksBy a large margin, Facebook is the most popular of the commercial social networks with 74.0% of respondentsindicating that their organization has a presence there. YouTube and Twitter are a distantsecond and third with 46.5% and 43.2%, respectively, of nonprofit survey respondents indicating theymaintain a presence in these channels. Linked In was fourth with 32.9% , and MySpace fifth with26.1% of respondents.

Within individual vertical segments, professional associations were more likely to use LinkedInthan Facebook for their commercial social network efforts—51.7% of associations cited LinkedInas their commercial social network platform versus 32.8% of survey respondents across allverticals. Likewise, just 55.2% of associations reported using Facebook versus an average of74.1% across all verticals.

Staff Time and External Resources Dedicated to Commercial Social NetworksFully four-fifths (80.8%) of survey respondents committed at least one-quarter of a full-time staffmember to maintaining—marketing, managing and cultivating—their commercial social networkpresence over the last 12 months. Roughly two thirds (64.5%) of survey respondents dedicated onequarterto one-half of a full-time resource, and 16.3% committed three-quarters or more staff to theircommercial social networks.

Looking ahead, over half (55.0%) of survey respondents indicate they will increase staffing over thenext 12 months, 39.5%) say staffing will stay the same, and just 1 in 20 (5.6%) will decrease staffing.

Four out of ten (40.6%) survey respondents had some budget over the last 12 months for externalresources dedicated to helping with their commercial social network work, but just 8.3% set aside$10,000 or more, with only 1.4% allotting more than $100,000 to external resources to help withcommercial social network efforts.

About one-quarter (24.1%) of survey respondents indicate they will increase funding for external resourcesdedicated to helping with commercial social network efforts in the coming 12 months, whilethe majority (68.0%) say they will keep external resourcing budgets the same. 7.9% of survey respondentswill decrease their social network external resource budgets for the coming year.

From the survey, we learned that commercial social networks, especially Facebook, are popular, but average community sizes remain small, and presence is relatively short. Responding nonprofits are allocating small but real resources, staff and budget to their social networks. Survey respondents prefer traditional marketing channels to promote their social networks but are experimenting with new social media channels. For now, there is very little real revenue generated on these communities via fundraising and advertising. A minority of nonprofit survey respondents, about one third, have built and manage their own house social networks, using software from a wide variety of social network software vendors, with no clear leader among these vendors. The members of house social networks are as yet, with just a few exceptions, still relatively small as well.

Source: http://www.nonprofitsocialnetworksurvey.com/