Foursquare for Non-Profits

About a month ago, I talked about how small businesses could make Foursquare work for them. Now I want to give a little focus to non-profit organizations who might be wondering how to use this tool in their social media arsenal.

The biggest thing that non-profits thrive on to stretch their marketing dollars is awareness. Money in many local non-profits is typically tight. The more people that they can inform per dollar, the better chance they have of surviving. Foursquare is a pretty good fit for this task because it provides a way for a non-profit to passively stretch their dollar.

The first thing a non-profit should do is either claim ownership of or add their listing.  As I said in my previous post on this, you must have a personal account to do this and it is extremely quick and easy to set up.  After claiming your listing, you should make sure that all of the information (including the pin on the map) is correct.

While you can apply many of the same ideas from the post about small businesses, where Foursquare excels for non-profits is its ability to be used to increase loyalty.  When you have loyal patrons, they tend to spread the word faster and with more enthusiasm.  This bodes very well for non-profit organizations.

Possible incentives that encourage loyalty can include the usual reward or recognition of Mayors from Foursquare, but I think offering incentives at different milestones such as 5th, 10th, or 25th check-in would be a better option, especially for foot-traffic driven non-profit organizations such as museums or zoos.  This would not only encourage repeat visits, but those repeat visitors are probably going to be much more likely to bring friends along and the cycle will repeat.

Location-based social media such as Foursquare definitely seems to be taking hold.  Each day, Foursquare begins to look more and more like the next Twitter (at least from my perspective).  Just like small businesses, non-profit organizations should definitely plan on leveraging this new social media tool in their marketing plans.