NASSCOM Foundation organized a social media workshop for non-profits with Gaurav Mishra, CEO of social business strategy firm 20:20 Social, held at the American Centre in New Delhi. The workshop, themed around "How organizations and individuals can scale passion", covered how social media strategy isn't really about social media tools but about answering the following questions-

1. Who are our evangelists or advocates and why will they talk about us? Or, how to identify passion?
2. How can we organize and energize our evangelists? Or, how to ignite passion? and
3. How can we help our evangelists spread the word? Or, how to scale passion?

Gaurav Mishra, by introducing participants to exciting possibilities of social media and through many successful examples, answered how social media tools can help non-profits in India organize and energize these evangelists and ignite and scale their passion or cause.

Gaurav shared seven simple steps to scale social media opportunities, namely,

1. The biggest risk for non-profits or any other organizations with social media is in not engaging in enough public conversations about your brand or cause. So, engage yourself and trigger your stakeholders to talk about you.
2. The only way to win at social is by inspiring your evangelists to start and spread more positive conversations about you. Focus on energizing your evangelists.
3. Start by asking: Who are our present and potential evangelists? Who do they talk to? Who talks to them? What else do they talk about? What are their triggers to talk? Why do we want them to talk about us? In effect, you are creating a persona for your evangelists, except that instead of using it to design a website, you would use it to design a web of talk worthy touch points.
4. Then, ask: How can we create a compelling social object (that is unique to us) that will inspire our evangelists to talk about us? Usually, your organization, brand or advertising campaigns aren't good social objects, but a lifestyle, interest or causes are.
5. Then, ask: How can we organize our evangelists around our chosen social object using one of the 5Cs of social: consumer generated content, conversations, collaboration, community and collective intelligence?
6. Only then, use social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube to help your evangelists share their passion. Each social network appeals to a different type of users for a different purpose. Each social network has a different soul and, therefore, a different role. So, the content and conversations for each social network should be customized for its users the specific purpose for which they use the social network.
7. The real value lies in asking and answering the questions in steps 3-4-5. A social media strategy without understanding who our evangelists are, will end up looking like spam. Step 7, then, is to remind yourself that you don't want to be in the spam business.

Most of the participants were from non-profits that are part of NASSCOM Foundation's www.Bigtech.in network, which is an interactive platform where non-profits can avail free software and hardware donations. NASSCOM Foundation, through its ConnectIT programme, has also provided an introduction and training on social media tools, as part of advanced IT training workshops, to over 400 NGO professionals and government officers in Maharashtra and now in Rajasthan.

Ms. Rufina Fernandes, CEO, NASSCOM Foundation said, "NASSCOM Foundation has been a fore-runner in encouraging non-profits to make the most of technology. Social media can be used to connect donor companies, employee volunteers, citizens, media, non-profits and Government. We got great interest from our partners at our Global CSR Conclave, at the NASSCOM India Leadership forum in February, where after Beth Kanter, another social media expert, took workshops for our non-profit partners and CSR practitioners of our member companies. This workshop with Gaurav is to further our efforts in helping non-profits have a better approach to social media."

Gaurav stated at the end of the workshop, "Non-profits in India can surely do lots with social media, irrespective of having low-connectivity and having only a few million users online, India still is among the top nations that use social media. Non-profits have the very advantage of having a passion or cause that everyone can relate to and one that can be scaled."