Petfinder has lots of great webinars all year long for animal welfare agencies. Check out their webinar page and register for any or all of them–they are all totally free!

I have seen nonprofits cautiously embrace social media over the last five years, but they still aren’t completely sure how to use it for fundraising. This session will teach you how, and help you get you Executive Director and Board of Directors excited too! We’ll look at successful social media fundraising campaigns, and some not-so-successful ones, and break down how and why they worked or didn’t work. I’ll share my 5 secrets that make my campaigns meet their goals 100% of the time. You’ll go home with a worksheet that asks you all the right questions, so when you’re done, you have a campaign!

When someone pays with a credit card, you know immediately whether the payment will clear—unlike a check, which may bounce a week later and you’re never able to recover those funds.

“Won’t I have to pay fees?”

Yep. It’s true that whenever you accept credit cards, you will have to pay fees. There’s no way to escape it—and every merchant pays fees. In this day and age, it’s truly just as cost of doing business. BUT—you have a lot of control over how MUCH you pay in fees, and you can do that by educating yourself.

Plus, the overwhelming majority of organizations find that once they start accepting this additional form of payment, their overall revenue increases significantly—more than enough to offset the small fees incurred.

The best part is, accepting credit cards is SO much easier than ever before.

Several different services exist and offer similar technology and services, but the fees are different. Here’s a comparison of the top three – PhoneSwipe™, Square™ and Paypal Here™.

“What is the difference – and which should I choose?”

I have used all three extensively, in the animal rescue field. I recommend PhoneSwipe, hands down. Here’s why.

I find Paypal difficult to deal with, and I don’t like it that I have to manually go in and request my money be transferred to my bank account…and then wait a week for that to happen. Their reader is tricky to position the card just right to get it to read. Paypal’s rates are also higher than any others. Accounting is confusing enough to me…having a separate Paypal account and bank account is a hassle.

With Square, the card readers are small and flimsy; the thinner plastic part breaks at the slightest provocation, meaning you have to buy new readers. While it does transfer my money automatically into my account, it still takes about 5 days to do that.

PhoneSwipe has the sturdiest (but still lightweight compact) reader unit by far, and it’s easiest to swipe the card through it. It’s also compatible with Blackberry smartphones and integrates with Quickbooks.  PhoneSwipe has the lowest rate of any of these products, and even though it’s just a couple of percentage points different than Square, that can really add up over time. There’s also no “minimum” you have to do each month to qualify–if you only use it to make one transaction per year, that’s no problem. And you don’t need to be a 501(c)3 to qualify for the low rate.

When you chose PhoneSwipe, you save money on every transaction, putting more of YOUR donations to work for the animals in your care.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. You can reach me by email at Emily@thesocialanimal.com or by phone at (405) 445-4442.

Ready to sign up for PhoneSwipe? The application takes about 3 minutes, is totally secure and you’ll get your welcome kit and reader packet in the mail in about 3 days! Just plug in, download the app, and you can start accepting credit cards immediately.

Okay, what do those words mean?!

FBML is “Facebook Markup Language.” HTML is “Hypertext markup language.” You don’t really need to know how to speak either in order to do this!

Facebook hath sayeth:

“On December 5th, we will remove the Static FBML Page app and any Static FBML tabs you had installed on your Page will disappear.”

Many of you have already switched. But I see a fair amount of FBML still floating around out there. This USED to be the only way to get custom content onto your page…but it hasn’t been supported for a year or so, and now they are doing away with it entirely.

So what does this mean?

Facebook is completely removing the Static FBML Page Tab application. (any time you put custom content on your page, you’re using a Facebook “application.”)

Pages still using this technology for their custom tabs will lose those tabs forever, along with any and all content they house. If you’re a Page Admin still using the Static FBML app on your Page(s), you will lose your tab content if you don’t take action. NOW.

How do you know if you have any Static FBML Tabs on your Page?

At the top of your Facebook Page, click Edit Page and one of the choices such as Update Info. (you have to be a page admin in order to see this) When you get into your page dashboard, click on “Apps” over on the far left menu.

This shows a list of apps that are currently installed on your page (even if you’re not using them) Look through your list of apps for any that look say “FBML” or look like the App in the screenshot below.

If you don’t see any FBML there, you are good to go!

What if you DO see some FBML content?

If it’s something you don’t use anymore, and you don’t care about keeping, then don’t worry about it. Facebook will delete it tomorrow and it will be one less thing to clutter up your page. If you DO want to keep it, though, click on “edit settings” and it will open up your app. You can just copy and paste all your content that is in here. So copy it (it will look like jumbly code, probably) and paste it into a wordpad, notepad or text file. (try to avoid using a Microsoft Word file, because Word puts its own weird code into the text sometimes). SAVE this! Now when Facebook deletes your tab, at least you still have your content.

If you have more than one FBML content tab, that’s fine–just repeat the above instructions for each one if you want to save the content.

NOW what do you do with it?

Well, you can put this exact same content back on your page, but it has to be as an HTML tab, not an FBML tab. This video explains, step by step, how to install an HTML tab on your page and put in your own content.

If this has made you want to jump off a bridge, it is also something that I can do for you for a nominal fee! Please click here to find out more about this service.

Good luck–and post here if you have any questions!

Because these shelters are a government entity, they can accept donations from the public–monetary donations–that can be tax-deductible for the donor. If someone walks in the door with a check or cash, great! No problem.

But when they want to accept donations online via credit card, there the difficulty arises. Sure, they can set up a Paypal account or a Firstgiving page or something like that. But in pretty much every case, the city/county does NOT want to provide bank account information. Since most of the websites and Facebook pages where these donate buttons would be placed are run by volunteers, I can understand the government’s reluctance to tie a bank account to any specific service like this.

But what are these organizations supposed to use? They have donors visiting their websites and Facebook pages who want to give. They want to give online. There has to be SOME way for them to do that!

Ideally, a volunteer could manage the account (we’ll use Paypal as an example, just for the heck of it). They would set up a Paypal account but not hook up a bank account to it. Then, on a monthly/weekly basis, they would extract donated funds to be paid/mailed to the government shelter via check.

Paypal CAN do this, but you can’t accept payments on an account unless you have a bank account associated with your Paypal account. So I need advice!

Are any of you using an online donation service that does not require you to associate a bank account with it? Please post in the comments here and let me know your suggestions!

Thanks so much–from me, and your friends at city, county and parish shelters everywhere!

• You didn’t create the page–some old employee who used to work for you did, and now they’re gone and you can’t get in touch with them
• You made someone else an admin on the page, and then they went nuts and removed all the other admins
• Someone created a place page when they “checked in” on Facebook at your location, so now a weird empty page is floating around out there

If you need to claim a page or place that belongs to you, but you don’t have control over it, watch this video for help on what to do and how to actually email to a person at Facebook.

To report a copyright infringement, trademark violation or intellectual property violation to Facebook, click here.

This video shows you how to use a static iFrame app (it’s okay if you have no idea what that is!) to put custom content on your Facebook page–like a donate button, a list of adoptable pets, a volunteer application or anything you want! It’s slow, step-by-step and walks you through the entire process.

If you have any questions, please post in the comments here and we’ll get it figured out for you!

Still need help? Make an appointment with me for live, one-on-one troubleshooting!

Say you have several different people who want to help manage your Facebook page, but you’re not quite comfortable giving them COMPLETE freedom. Now you can assign different users different types of admin roles, based on what you want to allow them to do on your page! Facebook calls these “User Roles.”

When you go into your page admin area (click on “edit page” at the top of your page’s admin panel), you’ll see that where it used to say “manage admins,” now it says “Admin Roles.” Click on this and you’ll see your existing admins. You can modify their roles, if you wish, and you can add new admins and assign them permissions as well. Here is a chart of the new user roles (thanks to Mashable.com) and what they are allowed to do. If you want people to have complete control over the page, just leave them as “Manager.” This is what all your existing admins will default to.

Schedule Future (and Past!) Posts

You’ve been able to schedule posts in Twitter using external tools for some time now, but not in Facebook. Now, because Facebook is so excited about its Timeline feature, they really want everything to have its own chronological place. This is great for you, because if you have pictures from an event that you didn’t get around to posting, or you want to highlight that adoption from last weekend, you can still do it, and it will post it in the appropriate place in your timeline! (i.e., in the past)

Likewise, if you want to schedule posts to go out in the future, you can do that, too. Say you’re going to take the weekend off and go to Las Vegas (hilarious, I know), but you want to make sure that you’re posting regularly over the weekend about your upcoming Fur Ball. Now you can schedule those posts before you hit the strip, and not have to worry about it all weekend!

You can schedule a post up to 6 months in advance in 15-minute intervals.

All you do is start writing a post (or sharing a photo, video, link, etc.) as you normally do. You’ll see a tiny something new, though, that looks like a little clock:

Click on the little clock to set when you’d like your post to appear. (If you don’t choose a time, it will just post immediately, like it always has).

Choose the future year, month, day, hour and even MINUTE when you’d like your post to appear, and click “Schedule.”

If you choose a date in the past, the post will appear immediately at the appropriate place on your Page’s timeline. All times correspond to the current time zone you’re in.

Please note: Just because you CAN schedule posts in the future, please use this feature wisely. What happens when we are allowed to “automate” our social media is that it becomes a one-way broadcast, and no interaction. If you’re playing in Las Vegas, and your Facebook page is pumping out posts all weekend, that’s great–but what happens if your fans respond, comment, or have questions? Nobody is REALLY there to answer them. And that makes for bad customer service, which results in lower engagement and just general bad social media juju. So really only use these features if you absolutely have to.

If you are having trouble with either of these, just post here and we’ll get you straightened out! Sorry I didn’t have news about the timeline becoming optional…I know that’s what a lot of you would have liked to hear!!

Guest post by Caleb Scott, Director of Communications for North Carolina Voters for Animal Welfare

Yes, that is correct! Information released from PageLever.com indicate that only a small fraction of fans actually see your posts. How can this be, you say? EdgeRank.

EdgeRank is a Facebook algorithm that determines if your fan page posts are actually seen by your fans.

Here is a quick example to prove that EdgeRank is at work on your fan page. Go to your fan page and click the “Insights” tab on the left side of the page (should be the 4th link down from your profile photo). After you open the Insights link scroll down to the “Page Posts” and you will see the most recent posts tracked by Facebook that you have made. Each post will list the “Reach” of each post, this the number of your fans that saw that posts. This “Reach” number will be substantially less than your total number of fans.

So how can you improve the “Reach” of your posts? You have to improve your EdgeRank!

EdgeRank measures your page’s fan “Engagement” on the page.

Engagement is “Likes”, “Comments” and “Shares”. If your number of likes, comments and shares are consistently low, EdgeRank will determine that your fans are not interested in your page posts and your post will no longer appear on your fan’s Facebook wall. A person “Liking” your page is no guarantee that they will see all your posts. If a fan does not interact with your page (via likes, comments and shares) it will eventually disappear from their Facebook wall.

Most social media experts will advise to post to your fan page everyday to keep your fans engaged in your page. Keeping your fans engaged daily and maintaining their desire for your offering must be part of your fan page strategy. But how do you get fans engaged, you ask?

• By asking Fans questions (Comments)!
• By asking Fans to “Like” a photo or video if they “Like” it!
• By asking Fans to “Share” content that you post on your page.

Petco’s Facebook page is an excellent example of expert Admins that understand Facebook EdgeRank. Asking for “likes” on the photos they post is their bread and butter. They typically get 2,000 – 5,000 likes for each photo they post. This number of likes drives up their EdgeRank and maintains the number fans that see their posts.

So animal advocates, how are you improving the EdgeRank on your Facebook Fan page?

Caleb Scott is the Director of Communications for North Carolina Voters for Animal Welfare. Get updates on the progress of animal welfare legislation in NC at ncvaw.org

ncvaw facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/NCVAW

susie’s law facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SusiesLaw