The TUX Team was out in full force at the Congress of Neighborhoods on Saturday, ready to share insights and resources for using technology to engage your stakeholders and extend your outreach. At the “Amplify Your Klout: Digital Tools for Empowering Your Community” workshop in Session 2, Stephen Box led a lively discussion about digital tools that can help you make sense of the many outreach options in today’s technology-saturated world, engaging with workshop attendees both face-to-face and via Twitter, with participants encouraged to tweet their questions to #TUXbootcamp live during the session. Box outlined the importance of measuring your influence, the benefits of engaging your community through digital tools, and some of the best options for doing so.
We all know that Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms are fantastic ways to connect with your community and spread the word about local events and neighborhood issues. But how do you know what your reach is? After all, measurements and metrics are key if you want to know how many people are reading your emails, “liking” your Facebook page, retweeting your tweets.. and ultimately, how many people are listening.
Do you know your Klout score? Klout is a tool that aggregates your online presence and calculates a score based on the amount of influence and reach you have in the digital world. Everyone on the internet has a Klout score from 0-100, and the closer you are to 100, the louder and more influential your voice is. By checking your Klout score (you don’t even have to sign up to do so), you can see where you stand in relation to other people and organizations and decide on a strategy for increasing it.
Now that you know how you’re doing, how do you extend your reach and improve your Klout score? Checking the metrics for each online platform takes time, and you can end up spending all day just figuring it out, leaving you with no time to actually create and post content. This is where a tool such as NationBuilder comes in: NationBuilder is an online platform that serves as a one-stop shop for your online presence. With it, you can create and manage your website, view and manage your Facebook, Twitter, and other social media accounts, and post content all without leaving the NationBuilder site. NationBuilder also provides voter registration information, meaning that even if you just want to stick to tried-and-true methods of engagement such as door-to-door canvassing, mailers, or phone calls, you can use NationBuilder to gather address and phone information for stakeholders in your area. It will also provide you with a phone number that you can use to forward phone calls to another phone number, answer phone calls with a recorded message and allow callers to leave you voicemail, and respond to text keywords that you’ve pre-defined to allow people to take action with your nation (such as subscribing to your newsletter).
EmpowerLA can help you get set up with a NationBuilder site, and NationBuilder representatives will come to you to show you how easy it can be to consolidate your online tools and increase your Klout.
Nothing beats a face-to-face interaction, but digital tools can help you engage your stakeholders, make them aware of goings-on in your community, and bring them out to events so you can meet and engage them in person. Through a combination of outreach tools, you can make your neighborhood council’s voice heard by more stakeholders and increase the impact of your work.
