Trustees are influential people, and they can use social media rewardingly to help their charities and raise funds. As a trustee, you must keep up to date with the issues that affect your charity regardless whether you are otherwise busy with your job/business.
With minimum efforts, trustees can achieve this – provided they regularly follow key stakeholders and trade press on Twitter or by using the news feed, Pulse, or dealing with relevant groups on LinkedIn.
As part of their induction, charity houses should advise trustees that their charity works should be detailed in blogs that are reader-friendly.
It is well known that a quick and assured way to promote your charity is by purposefully using social media. Trustees must add their roles to their LinkedIn profiles or to tweet about their charity or post in Facebook. Surely this would also help lend transparency to the functioning of the charity.
Most charity committees meet only every few months, and trustees will all be busy having a portfolio of other commitments in between. Trustees can keep pace with their charities work through a closed LinkedIn group and by following their key staff members and other administrators on Twitter. Trustees need to be engaged, just as staff and volunteers do.
Make it a point to introduce your charity organization to all your social media contacts. The trustees might even introduce their CEO to influential people in their network via LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter.
Assuming the CEO has particular stakeholders in mind, then the CEO can go on LinkedIn and other social platforms to see if their trustees share any connections with them.
Remember we are on the internet age and digital communications are an effective catalyst for change. Social media will help trustees make the most of opportunities for supporting their charities and developing their fundraising skills. Trustees of charities need to truly understand the potential of social media to realize their optimum goals.
It is no exaggeration to say that social media is already causing a revolution in the way charities operate: funders, donors, advocates, staff, volunteers and beneficiaries are all jumping onto the social media bandwagon.
Charities need a fair degree of freedom when using social media in order to benefit from its multiple features. Charities must evolve simple and easy-to-follow guidelines for the use of Trustees.