Friday, September 14, 2012

Nonprofits: Putting Pinterest to Work for Social Good

Posted by Leah Ludwig
Image from Mashable.com

As many of you know, Furia Rubel Marketing and PR is dedicated to supporting our agency's local community and the nonprofit organizations within it. In fact, our agency is closing out our 10th anniversary year and along with it, our “10 for 10” Community Service Campaign – in which we participated in community service programs and supported, through pro bono PR and marketing services, several local and regional organizations. We are always looking for new and inventive ways to support nonprofits near and far.

Gina Rubel recently shared a nonprofit Pinterest best practices article with me from Mashable.com. The article highlights UNICEF and how the organization set up a fictional Pinterest profile from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl from Sierra Leone. Instead of sharing images of rich desserts and the newest fashion trends, the organization uses this page to share images of things a girl from Sierra Leone may covet such as a handful of rice or a rusty water faucet. Each of the pins then link to a specific UNICEF Web page where the organization hopes to drive Pinterest users to in order to source donations to provide food or clean drinking water to those in need.

I personally think this Pinterest strategy is brilliant. Images tend to effectively drive home messaging to a variety of audiences and to additionally link each image to a correlating donation Web page for UNICEF – you have a captive audience, what more could you ask for? And, in general, these strategies help to bring awareness to Pinterest users about the needs that exist in other countries and what UNICEF as an organization is working to do. Having traveled to Honduras myself for two different mission trips and having seen first-hand the need that exists in developing countries, I applaud UNICEF and its strategy to put things into perspective for other Pinterest users – in a very practical and visual way.

The Mashable article also includes what other global organizations such as Amnesty International USA, the World Wildlife Fund and Operation Smile, to name a few, are doing on Pinterest for social good. More specifically, Amnesty International USA, the world’s largest grassroots human rights organization, shares a human rights reading list. World Wildlife Fund, a conservation organization working to protect the future of nature and reduce threats to the natural world, has a board of cute animal e-cards that individuals can send to friends. Operation Smile, an organization that provides safe and free cleft lip and palate repair surgery to children around the world, shares images of new smiles – before and after photos of children that have been helped by the organization. To see more of the examples shared in the blog, go to 10 Non-Profits Using Pinterest to Better the World.

Please share this post and nonprofit Pinterest best practices resource with community organizations that may benefit from it – and help us to pay it forward.

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