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The Making of a Not-for-Profit Facebook Page

Published on March 26, 2010

by Alicia Schmidt, Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC)

Ok, I’ll admit it. For all of my social media prosthelytizing, there is part of me that just wants to shrug my shoulders and channel Jan Brady when it comes to Facebook, “Facebook. Facebook. Facebook.”

Sure, I can see how it has transformed our personal interactions. And I can see the benefits for political and advocacy organizations. But for BAVC?—a training organization that serves as a type of art and social issue media middleman?

BAVC jumped on the Facebook bandwagon a few years ago (long before Pages were really functional), mostly out of an unquenchable curiosity with emerging media and technology. We like to tinker with new things, to see if we can find new applications for our community of media makers. But with limited time and resources, we weren’t sure that Facebook was worth it for us as an organization? And we’re still not sure.

What we do know is that there are 300 MILLION active users on Facebook and they are getting older everyday. Statistics vary, but the fastest growing population on Facebook is men and women 35 years and older (desk jockies who have ready access to a computer or a mobile device). For us, the potential of reaching a diverse and savvy community of media makers, potential audience members, and donors is what motivates us to continue experimenting.

When Facebook relaunched “Pages” earlier this year with increased functionality, it caught my attention. And so the great BAVC Facebook Fan Page experiment began…

BUILDING A COMMUNITY VS BUILDING A LANDING PAGE

From what I have heard, there are two schools of thought about Facebook users, which rather than being oppositional, seem more like multiple truths. Some “experts” think that Facebook users don’t like to leave Facebook. As such, they recommend creating a lively Facebook environment that includes posting living content like your blog posts, videos, newsletters, etc., all within your page tabs. These folks believe that you should participate in Facebook as a community and that you can motivate your audience to action entirely within Facebook.

Other folks think of Facebook a type of “landing” page for your organization website. It is an entry point for folks to get to your website, where they are then motivated to action.

From our experience so far, both are true. I think it really depends on the focus of your organization. We get a fair amount of traffic to our site from Facebook (if you don’t know where your traffic is coming from, sign up for Google Analytics ASAP).

For BAVC, I decided on a hybrid approach: 1) Make it easy for users to link to the BAVC site if they want; but 2) also set up tools to help us keep our Facebook page easily up-to-date with high-quality content.

HOW WE BUILT OUR PAGE

1. Created a personalized “landing” tab.

There are a few different ways to do this, depending on your skill set, but one of the easiest is to use the Static FBML Facebook application (Facebook Markup Language).

The FBML app allows you to create a custom page and add it as a tab to your Fan page using html.

Don’t know html? Try viewing the source code on your website and pulling over elements from your site that makes sense. Or, try using a free html template from a email marketing software company like Campaign Monitor or Vertical Response and customizing it for your needs.

You can also “borrow” code from some of the best use examples and customize it for your organization. Use inline CSS for best results (Premailer is a great little application that creates inline CSS for you if you need it.)

The “Wall” and “Info” tabs on a Facebook page are static, but the other tabs can be moved (drag and dropped) into whatever order works for you. To create a tab from an application, just go to Pages, click on the little pencil icon next to your app, and click Application Settings. It usually gives you an option to add a tab.

Then, go to the “Wall” page of your site, and click the “Options” link just under the big Share button in the status update window. It should open a few more links including “Settings.” Click on “Settings” to set your default landing tab for visitors (ours is our FBML “Welcome” Tab).

2. Created a custom URL.

To create a custom url for your page, just go here: http://www.facebook.com/username/.

3. Linked our YouTube and Twitter accounts.

This is pretty simple to do in YouTube. Just go into your YouTube account and look under “Sharing.” If you have a Google account linked to your YouTube account, you can set up automatic sharing where YouTube will post to your page when you upload a new video. Your twitter account can be linked directly to your page in Facebook (word of caution, though, it will link your admin profile at the same time - use a twitter app instead if you just want to post to your page).

4. Added the Events tab.

Part of standard Facebook, we added the Events tab.

5. Added a YouTube tab.

For those folks, who don’t want to link off to YouTube, we set up the YouTube Video Box app and added the application tab. You can also used the Video tab and upload your own videos.

6. Used the FBML app to put up a copy of our latest e-newsletter.

At BAVC, we create an HTML newsletter every month. As an experiment, we have started putting it up on Facebook with a subscription link. We’ll see if it translates to subscriptions.

7. Used the FBML app to add a donation link to the left column.

To add a donation link on our Fan Page, we created another instance of the FBML box. Using html, we created a link to our online donation page. Then we went back to “Edit my Page” and clickdc on the FBML “Application Settings” for our “Make a Donation - FMBL” application.

In settings, we chose to “Add” a box and then hit okay. Then we went to the “Box” tab on your Wall page, located the FBML box on the Boxes page, clicked on the edit/pencil and selected “Move to Wall Tab.”

For more on this, check out our reference page for our fiscal sponsorees >

8. Linked our blog using Social RSS.

As far as I can tell, there isn’t the syndicated feed option for your Notes tab like in the individual profile pages, so you have to use a Facebook App to bring an RSS feed of your blog onto its own tab. At BAVC, we’re testing Social RSS, which seems to do the trick so far. We’d love to hear about other RSS Apps that work well.

9. Added tabs for standard Facebook Page apps Photos, Discussions and Reviews.

We may set up an app for displaying our feed from Flickr, but for now, we are happy with these secondary tabs.

NOW WHAT

Now the hard part, how to motivate our 400 friends to become our fans… I’m guessing that we will have a contest or raffle or something to try and get folks to switch over. But it might just take time, as the content migrates, we hope our friends will too.

For inspiration in creating your Fan Page, check out the Coca-Cola or Red Bull pages, or Beth Kanter’s (non-profit social media blogger extraordinaire) page, or the Join One page.

We have just started our Facebook Fan Page experiment. We hope to post updates about this experiment as it goes. We’d love to hear from other non-profits or artists who are using Facebook Fan pages… please let us know what works for you.

Oh, and hey, become our Fan on Facebook.

Alicia Schmidt is Web Administrator / Digital Content & Marketing Strategist at Bay Area Video Coalition (BAVC).

BAVC’s mission is to inspire social change by enabling the sharing of diverse stories through art, education and technology. BAVC provides training and access to emerging media technologies for public media producers, independent artists, at-risk youth and other non-profit organizations.

Note from Arts Engine’s Austra Zubkovs:

We at Arts Engine began our tour of Facebook early on, creating a profile as a pseudo-human long before “fan pages” existed. Reaching our 5000 friend allotment that Facebook allows for an individual page, we are finally making our foray into fan pages. Check out Arts Engine’s new Facebook fan page and become our fan or take a peek at our latest activity at our old page (but don’t be offended if we can’t accept your friend request!).

You can also find us on Twitter and YouTube, Flickr, or a variety of other social media outlets.

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