How to 'Use' your Community - Getting the most out of the community supporting your organization - with Vinnie Lauria (http://vinnie.net/) & Kristine Molnar (Kristine is a Community Evangelist at PBwiki http://pbwiki.com/content/team).

Kristine introduced the session with Vinnie, sharing with the audience her experiences of her own workings with an organization and aims that the session will show the free and available tools out there that can help your non-profit.

Who are your Users?

Kristine talked about how to move on from 'thank you' letters from your donors. How can you create community, volunteers and project participants and engage them and keep them involved and keeping them coming back? In a perfect world, how can your users help?

Program Development

Vinnie shared with how to develop relationships and communications. They shared examples of how to use and develop and integrate and relate with your users in different ways to benefit your non-profit.

Case Studies

Kristine showed an example of a recent 'thank you' letter/email, and pointed out on how a dry simple thank you letter/email without making the end user feeling involved doesn't do much for an organisation. She highlighted donors don't want to receive email but 'me-mail', make it personal, build the relationship with users, supporters and donors. Make the end person that you are communicating with feel good and special.

Reward with Recognition

Personal communications (remember to say thank you personally), leaderboards, share and celebrate involvement in a variety of ways to help build your relationships.

Easy ways to enhance what you're already doing

Vinnie and Kristine shared lots of useful ideas and tips for making a difference with creating stronger relationships with your users. They provided a range of simple easy ways using a variety of media with tips to make them more effective, that can help you to connect further with your users.

• Newsletters
• Email outreach
• Blogging / Wiki's
• Connect participants with donors
• Video's
• Forums
• Surveys
• Widgets
• Groups

Questions from the audience included how to get involvement from others with wiki's, how can OpenSocial interact, and how to use different media in different situations.

"Let you users know how you are helping them, and also how they are helping you."

Further Resources:

http://useruser.wordpress.com/ - How to 'Use' your Users, but not abuse your Users.