Recently Beth Kanter has run contests and the winner of the contests won books on social media. One of the book giveaways was announced in a blog post titled “Can Small Nonprofits Reap Success With Social Media? (Giving away a copy of Twitter for Dummies)” In this post Beth talks about an e-mail she got from Cindy Williams, who is the founder of a nonprofit, Teaching Hands. Cindy has become very influential on Twitter. After posting Cindy’s success story Beth challenged other nonprofits to think about giving social media a try.

At the end of this blog post Beth encourages her readers to leave comments sharing how they are using social media to support their small nonprofits work. Not all of the comments encouraged people to dive into social media.

Even though the contest is over look through the comments that other people posted. I think you can get some very good ideas of cheap and innovative ways to incorporate social media into your communications plan.

If you are already comfortable with your social media strategy you can still learn how to run an effective contest online. More than 25 people posted comments on Beth’s blog. As a result, readers of Beth’s blog got to see what other people like them are doing and if it is working. It’s a great way to get people talking and to learn more about what your members are interested in and what they are doing.

Beth is going to continue to give away books as prizes. Please take advantage of this opportunity to win a few social media book and share your story with the rest of her readers. If you decide to enter the contest or if you have any successful or unsuccessful experiences with social media we would love to hear about it. Please leave a comment or start a discussion topic to share your experience with the rest of the GMT community.