Who’s listening to who? Online Dashboards

Share Online Engagement – Build a Social Media Dashboard

This is very similar to the one I built for the American Cancer Society. However this one takes a lot less work and does more!

Guest post by Haila Yates, Communications and Outreach Manager, Greenlights for Nonprofit Success

A social media dashboard is an easy way to share a variety of online engagement in a single view. A communications or marketing professional may have a daily routine of checking a variety of pages and accounts to stay on top of the social media conversations relevant to their organization, but it’s just as important that the rest of an org’s staff, board and other constituents stay engaged.

At Greenlights we have a social media dashboard that pulls together a view of our online activities, including tweets by Greenlights and about Greenlights, flickr photos, Google alerts to capture media and blog mentions, Facebook and YouTube content, plus feeds from a variety of blogs our staff reads. Staff and interns at Greenlights are encouraged to set the Greenlights dashboard as their homepage (or one of their homepage tabs) so that they’re always informed about our online presence and can choose to engage in ways they’re comfortable with.

We recently created a social media dashboard for our upcoming event, the Texas Nonprofit Summit. The TXNS dashboard displays tweets about the event, including a twitter search for the event hashtag – #TXNS, a feed created from a twitter list of event speakers, Google alerts to capture articles and blog posts about the event, blog feeds from speakers, a flickr module that gathers photos with our event tags, and a module that simply links back to our main Texas Nonprofit Summit webpage. We’re sharing this dashboard with our entire Greenlights community (not just event participants) via twitter, email and we’re including a QR code to the dashboard in the event program.

Both of our dashboards were created using Netvibes. A free service that’s ideal for setting up personal, private dashboards, but also allows one public dashboard per account.

Greenlights for Nonprofit Success is a 501(c)(3) based in Austin, Tx that strengthens other nonprofits for extraordinary impact and performance by providing a variety of services and resources that are either free or affordable, including management consulting services, professional development workshops and conferences, in-depth research, a membership program and more.