Social Media & Advancement Survey 2011: Changes, But Not Big Ones

Michael Stoner is president of mStoner. He co-presented the key findings of the 2011 social media survey at the CASE Social Media and Community conference in April 2011.

While advancement offices at many institutions are engaged in using some social media platforms (especially Facebook, which 96 percent of institutions utilize), institutions are still struggling with how to manage social media. And there weren't significant shifts in usage, management or other trends since our first survey was conducted in April and May, 2010.

These are key findings from the 2011 survey of social media in advancement, which mStoner conducted in February and March in partnership with Slover Linett Strategies and CASE. The first survey was released in July 2010.

I'll report briefly on some of the findings in this post. You can download the topline findings and a presentation about them that Cheryl Slover-Linett and I did at CASE's Social Media and Community Conference last week. We're working on a white paper further analyzing the data, which we'll release at the CASE Summit in July.

What Institutions Do

Institutions utilize an array of the most popular social media platforms: 75 percent use Twitter, 66 percent use LinkedIn or YouTube, 40 percent have blogs, use Flickr, or offer a social community developed by an outside vendor. Only 4 percent don't use social media at all.

Top goals for social media remain alumni engagement (at 84 percent of institutions responding) and strengthening brand image (75 percent); also engaging prospective students (68 percent of respondents), admitted students (63 percent), increasing awareness and rankings (61 percent). But only 38 percent of development offices use it for fundraising.

Staffing for social media varies across institutions. At the institutional level, 25 percent of institutions have at least one person working full-time on social media. It's far more common for staff to have social media responsibilities incorporated into their jobs, along with other responsibilities: at the department level, roughly .5 FTE focuses on social media.

There were some changes since 2010:

• The use of Twitter has increased.
• While institutions struggle with social media, they believe that it has value and that it's here to stay.
• More institutions have the IT and content management resources they need to augment their social media activities.
• More institutions have policies on legal and privacy issues and negative postings.

Success with Social Media

Again this year, we asked institutions to report how successful they are with social media and 62 percent reported that they are moderately successful with their social media initiatives, measuring success by the number of touches (friends, fans, comments, likes, etc.) they receive. Facebook is viewed as the most successful social media platform (by a large majority, 87 percent of institutions). They're still challenged by staffing, lack of full support and buy-in from senior staff and lack of readily available expertise and funding.

Institutions that are successful report a number of characteristics: they have specific goals for their social media; they are less spontaneous and plan more; they have institutional buy-in and support for their social media activities; they control social media content and staff with their own department; they use multiple social media platforms and target multiple audiences; and they are more likely to have policies. They are also more likely to evaluate their success in multiple ways.

Looking ahead to 2011, we'll see institutions creating social media plans (51 percent), expanding their activities to new audiences (46 percent), adding new social media tools to current programs (44 percent), and developing formal policies (37 percent).

The ROI Question

Return on Investment for social media. It’s the question asked at every conference I’ve attended over the past year, and I have yet to hear someone pipe up with a concrete example of an ROI approach that clearly and unambiguously proves a financial return on social media. And yet there’s a sense that demonstrable proof of ROI is a precondition for investment in staffing and relevant expertise, the lack of which were cited as stumbling blocks by a majority of the institutions responding to the recent CASE social media survey.

Nobody questions the importance of cost, measurement, and data-driven decision making, especially in this economic climate. The “New Normal” is a place with few luxuries. But a look at some broader trends shaping the advancement environment suggests to me that ROI is too narrow a focus to be the sole factor determining whether and how much to invest in social media. The important numbers are the ones that tell us where our constituencies are and what they’re doing.

Let me highlight four of these trends:

• The growth of social media platforms. Facebook has passed 500 million users. Twitter has more than 100 million. LinkedIn has more than 75 million, and foursquare has passed 2 million. Growth rates on these platforms range from fast to extremely fast and show no signs of abating, even in the face of negative publicity such as the privacy debate that surrounded Facebook in May.
• Increasing rates of usage. According to a recent Nielsen study, time spent on social networking sites by American adults grew by almost 50% from June 2009 to June 2010. 23% of time online is now spent using social media, an average of six hours each month. On some platforms, use is even heavier. As of May, users spent 8.3 billion hours on Facebook each month, an average of almost an hour a day.
• International reach. 70% of Facebook users live outside of the U.S. and Facebook is available in more than 70 languages. LinkedIn has users in more than 200 countries. During the World Cup, Twitter was the medium of a month-long global conversation that culminated in an astonishing 2,000 Tweets per second from more than 80 countries during the final 15 minutes of the championship game. Engagement with alumni living abroad, no matter what your home country, is a perennial advancement challenge. Emergence of a tool that makes this easier is important.
• The mobile web is growing, and it’s social. Morgan Stanley projects that by 2015, more people will access the internet from mobile devices than from desktop computers. Recent research by Ruder Finn indicates that Americans are spending almost three hours a day on their mobile phones and users of mobile devices are more likely to spend time on social networking sites than users of desktop computers. As Sarah Perez suggests, we may need to consider the possibility that mobile phones are a better platform for social networking than the PC.

These trends converge. What we’re seeing is rapid, global, increasingly intense adoption and use of social networking platforms that seem likely to be used even more heavily on the next major emerging medium, the mobile web. These numbers make a compelling case that if we focus too much on short-term dollars-and-cents ROI, we may not ask a more interesting and important question: what will happen to our engagement and fundraising efforts if we don’t position ourselves proactively in response to these trends? The current tone of the conversation evokes mid-1990’s deliberations about whether or not organizations ought to jump on the bandwagon of the latest fad, the Internet. 15 years later, those debates seem naïve. As Andy Shaindlin wrote on Alumni Futures, “ (O)nline networks are part of the fabric now, they're what people do. They are as critical to many businesses as telephone service is. Online community is not an experiment or a half-measure to make up for the fact that people won't read your direct mail pieces.”

This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t invest time, thought, and effort in measuring and assessing our efforts in social media. We should share our successes and techniques with each other. But we should do so from the vantage point of making our efforts more efficient and effective. This perspective includes, but is in no way limited to, making an impact on our bottom line. The trends identified above make it clear that the world is evolving rapidly. To ignore the numbers that tell us where society is going in favor of a narrow focus on short-term, financial ROI would be a serious risk for organizations dependent on creating and cultivating relationships.

Our constituents are already in new spaces and places. If we want to stay connected to them, we need to be where they are. It’s a cost of doing this business.