It’s better to let your supporters connect with you on their terms, not yours. Sure, you have acquisition goals, but those should never be more important than the trust you’re fostering with your constituents.
You really want them to join your email list, but they’d rather connect with you as a fan on Facebook. They get too many emails anyhow.
You may want them to do a lot of other things as well. But you can’t make people do what they don’t want to do. The ease of unliking, unfollowing, unsubscribing is almost a natural-born right.
Provide Opportunities
Your job, plain and simple, is to give them as many opportunities as possible to connect with you – on their terms.
- Include these opportunities on every page in your website (except maybe landing pages).
- Include these opportunities in the sidebar of every email.
- Include these opportunities in each social media site.
- Include these opportunities in all of your printed material.
Trust Your Supporters
When I sense an organization is overly focused on controlling how their fans connect with them online, I often ask if they trust their supporters. What always follows is valuable discussion about what “control” means in the context of social media.
Being a Networked Nonprofit means developing a culture where you trust your supporters to make good decisions for themselves and your organization.