Everyone—including Richir Outreach—loves to talk about how important social media is to nonprofits and political organizations. You can build your base of supporters, spread the word about your mission or issue, even launch fundraising campaigns. That is all well and good, but if you do not know what you are doing, social media can be a huge time-waster. We've been working on our own Twitter best practices for organizations, here's a peek at what we've got:

Consider your target audience; is your key demographic likely to be active on Twitter?

If your answer is "No," that does not mean you should rule out Twitter immediately, aside from communicating with your supporters and raising money, Twitter is a powerful tool for the everyday activities of an organization. You can connect with other nonprofit or political professionals, get advice on just about everything, and learn how to make your organization the best it can be. By using your time and resources wisely, you can get everything you need out of Twitter without wasting any time.

If you have never used bit.ly before, it is a great resource to know, especially if you use Facebook or Twitter. Rather than sharing long links that might break, you can create short links that automatically redirect to the page you are sharing. That keeps your tweets and Facebook posts short and to the point.

With Moms Rising, we took it a step further.

First, we purchased moms.ly as our short URL. A short URL does not have to end in .ly, but can have any ending you like. When searching for a URL to purchase, we looked for ones that were 5 letters or less and in keeping with Moms Rising's focus. For instance, if your organization is focused on animal rights, you might choose a short URL such as paws.us, or anim.al. Be sure that you understand all of the requirements to register a domain, especially one with an ending registered in another country, such as .ly or .al; some countries require that you have a domestic presence before you can purchase their domains.

Progress Out of Poverty wanted to have a new email template with which to email their supporters. They use a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) called Convio to process donations, organize donation databases, and maintain their supporter information. CRMs are extremely useful for nonprofits and businesses alike, as they keep everything nicely organized in one place.

To design an email template in Convio, we used an example email that Progress liked to build an HTML document with embedded images, links, and content. We then broke it up into pieces: the header and footer, which became the "Stationery" in Convio; and the text and inline images, which became the email content. The stationery is not likely to change very much from email to email, but the content of each email certainly will, so we want to make sure that the text and images in the content are easy for the Progress staff to edit.