Engagement leads to trust, which leads to results
by John Haydon

Facebook is about friendships. It’s about reconnecting with old friends and keeping up with close friends.

Facebook is not about buying things or getting the lowest price. There are already websites for that, like Amazon and eBay.

Facebook is relational, it’s not transactional.

In their new book Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, authors Beth Kanter and Katie Payne talk about the “ladder of engagement” as a way to visualize how nonprofits move people in stages from awareness to action.

The diagram at top might be called the “Facebook Ladder of Donor Engagement.” Keep in mind that this diagram is just one way to represent how donors relate to your nonprofit or organization on Facebook.

Interactions increase as trust goes up

You’ll notice two data points:

1. Trust and affinity: As people become aware of your organization and interact with you at different levels of commitment, trust and affinity increase (or decrease if you’re not trustworthy or likable).

2. Audience size: Similar to the sales funnel model popular in the for-profit world, audience sizes become smaller at each stage of the game.

In this diagram, each step represents an action someone can take on Facebook to express their relationship with a cause, but it may look very different for your nonprofit.

John Haydon delivers social web strategy solutions for “the quick, the smart, and the slightly manic.”Curious? Then connect up: Contact John by email, see his profile page, visit the John Haydon blog, or follow him on Twitter and Google Plus.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.