Tuesday 27th October 2009 by James Skinner

Our for-profit clients often challenge us to show them new ways to improve their ROI on online engagement and social media technology. It's not hard to show how improved customer satisfaction and increasing self-service can reflect directly on the bottom line.

We're now being asked more and more by not-for-profit organisations and charities to show them how their online activities can translate into benefits for them as an organisation - some of the less obvious and palpable benefits.

So here are 10 ways in which NfPs can take maximum advantage of their investment in social media.

	A real need	Income gain	Efficiency gain
1.	Facilitates the co-creation of knowledge by enabling conversations to take place
2.	Improves relationships between the organisation and its stakeholders
3.	Strengthens offline activites and offline events strengthen online relationships
4.	Enhances marketing activities by supporting the most powerful technique – word-of-mouth
5.	Generates new revenue opportunities by collaborating with the members to develop new services, campaigns and fundraising
6.	Allows rapid dissemination of information enabling quick and effective mobilisation online and offline
7.	Improves the quality of ‘customer’ service by making it viable to treat members as individuals
8.	Improves transparency, governance and accountability which increases trust in your organisation
9.	Used internally, improves effectiveness and efficiency and enables flexible staffing and volunteering
10.	Helps create a highly responsive association that is more inclusive