As we announce the finalists for this year’s Chicago Cause program, we thought it a good time to look at what social media did for one of our first nonprofit clients, Episcopal Charities and Community Services.

Social Media for Nonprofits:  Finding Real Conversations

At first glance, Episcopal Charities and Community Services (ECCS) doesn’t seem like the perfect fit for social media.

The organization acts as a sort of micro United Way, raising money and distributing funds to 14 ministry partners in the Chicago area.

But director Otto Reinisch saw potential for social media when many still saw it as a realm for teenagers and attention-seeking celebrities.

In the fall of 2009 Reinisch wanted to organize a panel of experts to discuss elder care, an issue that the ECCS community was struggling to address. With health care costs skyrocketing as Baby Boomers reached retirement age, more and more families were faced with taking care of their aging parents, but few were prepared.

That’s when Mana Ionescu, founder of Lightspan Digital and ECCS’s social media consultant, suggested he take the conversation to the web.

“That is when I realized the full power of social media,” Reinisch says, a palpable energy in his voice. In about a week Ionescu arranged a Twitter chat.

“Traditionally,” Reinisch says, “it would take weeks and months to pull together a panel of experts. We engaged two dozen experts from around the world in a little more than a week.”

That was enough to impress Reinisch, but what blew him away more was the quality of the discussion. Experts were chiming in about issue in real time, responding to each other’s comments rather than just thinking about what they wanted to say next.

“To see that dynamic quality of conversation happening in real time was amazing,” he says. “There was a real vitality to it.”

Reinisch says those who write off social media as meaningless banter are tapping into the wrong conversations. There is a mature, dynamic thread in it that serves as a powerful resource for those who search for it, he says.

“It surprised me how real the sense of community on Twitter is,” Reinisch says. “It’s people addressing very real, tough topics in a serious way. And it produces tangible, real results.”

Social Media With Passion

When ECCS began working with Lightspan in October of 2009 Reinisch was drawn to Ionescu’s passion for purpose.

“It’s one of her values, and it’s one of our top values in our mission to transform lives,” he says. “I think she really embraced that. We felt like she would do it for free if she could, she invests so much of herself.”

At the time ECCS had no Twitter followers. Today they claim more than 1,600.

Reinisch says it’s important to recognize your organization’s limitations when diving into social media for nonprofits.

“You really need the right help to tap into the full potential,” he says. “You can do it alone, I guess. I might also be able to set a broken bone by myself, but it would be really painful and the results probably wouldn’t be very impressive.”

He said his board was skeptical about social media when they embarked on the project. “The general consensus was that it wasn’t going to go anywhere,” he says. He invited board members to sit in on training conversations with Lightspan and four years later the program is considered indispensable.

“If we told our board today that we are going to shut down our Twitter page, they wouldn’t let us,” he says.