Gamiing Nature Centre5822 Social Media Final

Dana ClarkJim Berry

Gamiing Nature Centre an Idea Sparked by a Challenge

We used Sparked.com to find a social media challenge

Gamiing Nature Centre

What is it?

The Gamiing Nature Centre is a large body of land about 2 hours NE of Toronto. It was once used as farmland, but considered too rocky. A family purchased the land about 20 years ago. Over the years they restored it to it’s natural habitat by planting trees and allowing nature to do the rest. Eleven years ago it evolved into the Gamiing Nature Centre.

Mission statement

The Gamiing Nature Centre promotes the understanding and use of practices that balance human needs with the needs of wildlife. They do this by

Practicing a philosophy of land and water stewardship

Preserving a diversity of indigenous plant and animal species

Serving as an educational and practical resource for the community

Gamiing Centre Use of Social Media Before

Blog

Twitter

Facebook

Google +

Pinterest

Our Initial Recommended Strategy

Target your target audience then decide the kind of relationship you wish to build (knowledge, friendship, K-12 education, college environmental lab, etc)

Get content from college student volunteers

Use tools to know who’s viewing your activity

Use tools like Klout to know your presence

Make a connection with your audience with content

Highlight Activities prior to the event

Branding consistent themes

Attract kids, teachers, college faculty

Recommended tools

Tool Purpose Used by Gamiing

Blog Education, depth, advertising

Yes!

Twitter Guide to other tools, headlines

Yes!

Facebook Casual, social, causes

Yes!

LinkedIn Professional connections, fund raising, discussions

Yes!

Pinterest Brand awareness, personality and connection

Yes!

Google + Social, Community Yes!

Klout Understand online presences

No!

Then we learned…

Gamiig really needed help with content and SM organization. They are not alone

According to the Nonprofit Social Network Benchmark Report 2011

89% of nonprofits report having a presence on Facebook in 2011 and only 30% use LinkedIn

57% of nonprofits report measured soft benefits of using social media including awareness, education, non-financial supporter participation

Then we learned…

86% of Canadian social networkers are on Facebook

10-15% of funds raised come in online

Successful fundraising on the internet has increase from 38% in 2009 to 46% in 2011. This includes funds from $1 to $10k annually

What worked/what didn’t

Worked Well Did Not Work

As a team viewing web sites and Twitter posts to understand the Gamiing

As a team formulating our recommendation based on online research and interaction only

Gamiing has active accounts with “the right” social media tools

Gamiing’s content and ability to clearly convey a content driven posts

Gamiing’s ability to get volunteers through grants and online solicitation

Allowing Social Media volunteers to remain autonomous

Gamiing’s social media techniques were present (frequent posts and responsive to feedback)

Maintaining an unclear strategy for the Nature Centre

Lessons learned

The Gamiing Nature Centre needs to clearly define their strategy before they can have a successful, coordinated social media approach. Social media cannot be effective if you do not know the message you are trying to communicate, you will simply spread confusion faster. In many ways this is what The Gamiing Nature Centre is doing. They are using good social media techniques, but their message is confusing and they are not driving people to action.

Our Final Recommended Strategy

Define a clear strategy for the Gamiing Centre

Decide how the world should interact with Gamiig Contributory Collaborative Co-Creative Hosted

Source: http://www.participatorymuseum.org/

Gamiing Nature Centre use of social media after

To be determined as Gamiing works with volunteers from Illinois to India to rebuild their webpage. Volunteers include webmaster, college students, social media strategist and even high school students.

Gamiing Nature Centre use of social media after

We were elated to learn Gamiing Nature Centre had given us an Award of Excellence for our feedback and evaluation of their blog.

References

http://www.sparked.com/ask/Our-blog---where-do-we-go-from-here

http://nonprofitsocialnetworksurvey.com/downloadreport.php

http://www.artez.com/blogs/digitalfundraisingfromatoz/social-media-makes-doing-good-easier

http://www.participatorymuseum.org/

http://beth.typepad.com/