Finding and Building Your Cause-Driven Community

Step One in Cause Marketing and Social Entrepreneurship

So you have a cause you want to bring awareness to. Perhaps you even have a solution, either as a work dedicated to the public good, or a social entrepreneurial venture. Either way, to promote adoption, you need to spark or tap into a social movement. In other words, you need to find or create a community of concerned people.

You have content to share, now you need an audience.

[SOURCE] © Kristian Mollenborg, according to Creative Commons License, use with attribution.

Recent movements such as flash mobs and the Occupy movement have shown the amazing power of social media to help people find and organize communities and movements. Facebook is an awesome way to organize your close contacts and be referred along their networks of friends. Twitter, however, excels beyond any other social media channel in terms of letting you connect with totally new people with shared interests.

 

Building Your Cause-Driven Community via Twitter

Cause-driven people often have lots to say! We can tell tons of stories and generate moving content. Many of us are not so good at the public relations work needed to develop an audience to hear our stories.

Creating an audience via Twitter is very doable even when you aren’t already famous. It also takes a lot of work. I find content-oriented people, including myself, want to focus on developing the best content, not doing the tedious manual tasks of fostering and generating a social media audience. However, we still want that audience. Tweeting to thousands of people is way more fun, interesting, and powerful than tweeting to a couple of hundred.

 

Tweeting with a large flock is much more fun and impactful.

[SOURCE] © Pete Klosterman, used according to Creative Commons License, use with attribution.

 

Engaging a Cause-Driven Community Without Having to Build It

So what do you do when you have so many other things besides trying to build a social media audience? You could hire social media marketers or consultants – that’s how bigger companies solve this problem. But what if your budget is tight? That’s the case for most independent bloggers, small non-profits, and social entrepreneurial startups.

This was the dilemma faced by the team at vTricity as they were preparing to bring awareness to their social entrepreneurial solutions. They wanted to build their social media community of concerned-citizens, but had even more important things to do such as finishing code and working with early testers. So, they took a design-thinking view of what it took to build an audience on Twitter and as a result created Zamba.me SoapBox.

So what benefits might you see if you try out SoapBox to help you build your cause-driven community? As the first customer of SoapBox, here is my experience. In 3 months, SoapBox has found me over 2000 followers, more than doubling my total followers to over 4000. It’s also transformed my audience. Whereas before my followers were primarily technologists interested in IT, most of my new followers are cause-driven people interested in making the world a better place.

Everyone deserves to be heard if they have something to say. I encourage you to try out Zamba.me SoapBox yourself. You can meet your first 25 new connections for free, and you don’t even have to enter a credit card. Be sure to greet your new followers. You’ll see they are real people interested in causes, and they chose to follow you. All they needed was an introduction to you.