Nonprofit Social Network Survey Results 2010

NTEN, Common Knowledge and The Port just released their second annual Nonprofit Social Network Survey Results capturing data from almost 1,200 nonprofit organizations for 2010. Here's a quick summary of our key take-aways:

On Usage

• Facebook is still used by more nonprofits than any other commercial social network with 86% of nonprofits indicating that they have a presence on this network. This finding is a 16% increase from 2009, when 74% of respondents had a Facebook presence.
• Twitter grew as a commercial social networking outlet of choice for nonprofits with a year-over-year increase of 38%, moving from 43% in 2009 to 60% in 2010, as measured by nonprofits who affirmed that their organization had a presence on this rapidly growing micro-messaging platform. Twitter saw its average community size (i.e. number of followers) grow an astounding 627% from 286 in 2009 to 1,792 followers this year.
• YouTube usage remained steady over the last year as it already captures the market for video. YouTube moved up only very slightly from 46.5% in 2009 to 48.1% in 2010.
• For nonprofits who were not engaging in social media, the primary reasons were financial (no budget=32%) and lack of in-house expertise (47%). Only 12% said that they didn’t see any value in a social media presence, a number that decreased from 13% in 2009.

On Staff Time

• 67% of participating nonprofits committed ¼ to ½ of a full-time staff person to social media. 15.8% (19.0% in 2009)committed three-quarters to one full-time resources, and 5.4% (6.1% in 2009)allocated two or more full-time resources.

On ROI and Metrics

• Number of members and site visitors are the two chief metrics used to evaluate success.
• Half of respondents (51.3%) are only measuring soft benefits, such as increased awareness, improved supporter education, greater advocacy, better volunteer/member recruitment, event participation and improved supporter affinity.
• Four in ten respondents (42.2%) are not measuring ROI at all.
• Only 6.5% of respondents are evaluating social networking effectiveness by measuring revenue or by linking effectiveness to behaviors that will increase revenue over the long term.

Read or download the full report here.