The types were: Information Sharing, Self Promotion, Opinions/Complaints, Statements and Random Thoughts, Me Now (personal status updates), Question to Followers, Presence Maintenance, and Anecdotes. Actually, technically there were nine types, but two were different kinds of anecdotes, and that just seemed unnecessary.

The main result of the study (and the source of Mashable’s headline) was that 80% of their quite small sample of 350 users were using Twitter mostly as a “Me Now” service, posting personal updates and not much else. I have to assume that this leaves out spammers … but anyway, the question it brings to mind is this: How much of each of these types should a nonprofit Twitter account be posting?

Check Yourself

For those organizations that have a Twitter account already, there’s an obvious place to start, and that is a breakdown of your own feed’s recent tweets. Since we’re relatively new to Twitter (at least on the @charitygeek account), I can pretty easily break down all of our posts to this point. Our first 25 tweets have been made up, as it turns out, of 16 Information Spreading posts, 8 Promotional posts, and 1 Presence tweet (our first, basically saying “hello, we’re here”). That’s 72% Information and 32% Promotion. I would argue that promoting our own posts about our subject are also somewhat informative, but we’ll stick to the categories in the study.

Stay Close to Message

This blog’s whole reason for being is to spread information, to inform, and so I’m pretty happy with 72% of our tweets being informational. The 32% that are promotional are all links to our own posts, which is, at the end of the day, a main reason for having the Twitter feed at all. I would say ours is an example of being on message, perhaps to a fault. If there’s one thing that I’ll take from this study, it is to be a little more flexible with the account. There is definitely a place for the “Questions to Followers” and “Opinion” posts. Take a look at your percentage, and make an effort to stay close to your message, if not consistently on it. Don’t be afraid to veer slightly off if the topic is something that your followers will find interesting, or that will start or maintain a discussion.

Make the Distinction from a Personal Account

Many high-profile nonprofits have an account for both the organization as a whole and the president/chairman personally, and I think this is the way to go. A personal account lets you be more flexible, and use your personality as the tool for your cause that it really should be. That also allows your organization account to be a little stricter. Discussion is a vitally important part of the Twitter experience, and I would never counsel any group to use it purely as a promotional tool, because that is not an effective use of the service. But keep in mind what your followers want to see, and by all means, ask them what they want to see. They are interested, and your Twitter account can be a vital tool in keeping them so.

For charity websites, there are three main classes of calls to action, though you can of course get more specific if you so choose. These three, in order of visitor commitment, are Learn, Help, and Give.

Learn
The simplest call to action, and the one that requires the least commitment from your visitors, is to read more of your site. For some nonprofits, such as public education and awareness campaigns, this is the primary goal, though the others should come into play too. If educating your readers about a certain topic is important to you, then make sure that as many pages as possible have links to a central page with that topic. If you have a sidebar along the left or right of every page of your site, you may want to put links to this central page there, especially if it is time sensitive. For example, the leader of a local AIDS foundation will want to not only write a separate page about the upcoming AIDS walk, but link to it from several prominent places on the site. If your site is a blog, or uses blog software like Wordpress, think about listing Related Posts at the end of each page. Here’s a great list of Related Posts plugins for Wordpress. This won’t provide the control over links that you get from writing them all yourself, but it’s easier, less time-consuming, and does a pretty good job of finding things that the reader will be interested in.

Help
While some readers will want to remain just that, readers, some will be so inspired by your site that they will want to do something to help. This may sound specific to volunteer organizations, but nearly every nonprofit website can and should take advantage of this kind of traffic. Helping doesn’t just mean working at a soup kitchen or donating services. It can be as simple as clicking a link. Providing links to spread the word about your site can be a great way for readers to help you without a lot of commitment from them. Provide a Twitter button to “Tweet about this”, or a Facebook button to “tell your friends”. Look around the web for awards and contests that you can enter, like Name Your Cause, then link to a page that lets your visitors vote for you. It not only makes them feel better, but it involves them more in your organization, and can lead them back, and you might even be able to convert them with the highest level of nonprofit call to action …

Give
We will be talking very soon about the best way to set up online donation for your site, but regardless of how you do it, you must give your visitors a way to give to your organization. Ideally, whether it is on your sidebar or on individual pages, the reader should always be just one click away from donating. There is nothing more frustrating to me than finding a nonprofit website that I love, and finding it difficult to donate to them online. The user that finds your site and is willing to contribute to your cause is precious – make sure you’re allowing them to do so. Now, that does not mean being annoying and having a massive flashing green donate button. In fact, let’s just make it a rule that you should never make anything flashing at all. But make the option available to them, and make sure it’s not easy to miss.

The importance of analytics
My boss at my day job is constantly repeating the mantra of web analytics – “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. I recommend that all nonprofit websites, regardless of size or technical knowledge, install Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s easy to install and use, and it gives you basically all of the information that paid packages do. All you have to do is put a short bit of code at the end of your pages, and suddenly you have information on which pages your visitors are seeing, how long they are staying, and most importantly, whether your calls to action are working. Play around with things like different donation buttons and different kinds of links, until you see improvements in how many visitors are doing what you want them to do. It’s also incredibly fun to look over your stats and see where your traffic is coming from, and what they seem to like the most on your site.

Unclear calls to action are some of the classic rookie mistakes of new nonprofit sites. Remember that your visitors only know about your organization what you tell them, and that includes what you want them to do. For the most part, if they have found your site, they are interested in your cause. Work on converting that interest in the most efficient way, and everyone comes out of the experience more satisfied.

Other helpful posts
Using Google Analytics to Track a Nonprofit Website (FrogLoop)
Google Checkout for Nonprofits – One choice for simple donation buttons
How to Write a Call to Action for Your Brochure (Nonprofit Marketing Guide)