Please note: this is a legacy page from my former company, Group of Minds. The info is still useful, though the process has changed a bit. Get in touch if I can answer questions. -Ron

 

Today, all marketing is social. What your brand socially says about you is reflected in all of your online marketing channels, including your website, email marketing, your blog, etc. People are making value judgments and attendance decisions based on these channels. Are they performing well for you?

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Social Media Audit is Groupofminds’ proprietary four-step online arts marketing audit and improvement system that scores arts organizations on their online marketing, identifies problem areas, illustrates solutions based on industry best practice, recommends areas for improvement, and then follows up with them over time to support their expanded capabilities.

Just as every nonprofit has its finances audited annually, periodic assessment of social media and online marketing practices is necessary to ensure that strategies and tactics are up to date in this rapidly changing environment.  Arts organizations both large and small can benefit from this cost-effective review process.  Groupofminds founder Ron Evans explains…

 

Social Media Audit is Unique

 

Social Media Audit is the first online marketing diagnostic system designed specifically for the arts. The Social Media Audit multi-step process is designed to find, fix, and facilitate:

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• Step 1: Initial assessment -- The arts organization's online marketing capacity is analyzed via a proprietary scoring rubric

• Step 2: Education -- Groupofminds meets with each organization to review their scores, and facilitates an educational session to create solutions to their marketing problems

• Step 3: Variable-time assessment -- The organization is told they will be re-scored sometime in the next six months, but the exact date is not revealed

• Step 4: Behavior reinforcement -- Groupofminds meets with the organization a second time to reveal their new scores, identify behavior shortfalls, and reinforce best practices

 

Social Media Audit examines and rates your online activities from many important angles , including variables such as:

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• Analytics and tracking -- Are you able to track visitors and their behavior to your online properties?

• Branding and visual appeal -- Do your online channels sync up well with each other visually?

• Interactions and user engagement -- How are people interacting with your brand through all levels of online channels? What is your online "voice" like? How can you increase user participation online? Are you growing your base at a good rate?

• Software and toolsets -- What tools are you using to accomplish your online goals? Are there tools that will save you time and/or expense?

• Level of profile completion -- While it's impossible to be everywhere at once, what sites should you be creating profiles on, and are they fully filled out? How often should you update them?

• Daily operations -- How is your marketing plan accomplished each day? How do you get to your goals from here, with the staff and time you have available?

• Return On Investment-- Is there a method in place to measure ROI? If so, how is the ROI working for each channel?

 

Social Media Audit Modifies Marketing Behavior & Creates Measurable Results

 

Just about any "marketing specialist" can teach someone tips and tricks. The real questions are "does that knowledge stick? Will it be useful in the future? Will the student permanently change the way they are doing things?" With its combination of precise scoring, instruction targeted to weak knowledge areas, and variable-time repeat assessment, Social Media Audit is a proven tool to modify human behavior through game-like psychology. Social Media Audit performance improvements are trackable, measurable, and reinforced over time. The Social Media Audit system is in continuous development, to allow fast response to changing online trends and new functionalities.

 

Case Study: Philadelphia Cultural Alliance

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Seeking to provide affordable professional development for its member organizations, the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance became one of the early testbeds for Social Media Audit. The Cultural Alliance provided Groupofminds with a cohort of 33 community arts organizations for the first step in the Social Media Audit process. The online marketing capacity of each organization was analyzed, and disseminated to each group as an individual report, showing their strengths and weaknesses over a variety of marketing channels.

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Groupofminds then conducted a half-day tactical workshop, going deep and detailed into online marketing best practices, and including topics such as video production, social media voice, and online advertising. Only groups with sufficient online marketing experience were allowed to attend, helping to guarantee a high-level, fast-flowing educational experience. The participating groups found the meeting incredibly useful. In their own words:

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"This was absolutely perfect. We had our pre-workshop start position clearly mapped out for us so that we would be able to take the information from the session and really cater it to our own needs." -Participant

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 "This is a unique format approach because it has continuity after the workshop. It's great to have a careful analysis that you can then build from as you gain more skills." -Participant

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"I attended a social media workshop a couple of months ago (provided by a different organization), and found it limited in value.  Yours assumed a base level of knowledge, and your very thorough and witty presenter shared lots of great tips.  It's wonderful to attend a session, and feel like I can actually implement some of the ideas right away.  Thank you!" -Participant

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At the end of the workshop, the groups were led into Step 3: Variable Time Assessment. They were told that at some time over the next six months, their online marketing channels would be scored again. They were not told exactly when they would be re-scored, only that it could be done at any time, so they needed to be on their ongoing "best marketing behavior" because "you'll never know when we're watching." A nervous titter went though the room, as the psychological motivator for good behavior was put in place.

A couple of months later, Groupofminds re-scored each organization. The results were amazing.

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81% of the organizations had increased their score on the Social Media Audit diagnostic, with some groups seeing huge gains, doubling their previous score. The graph to the right shows the base and follow-up score for each organization (organization names have been removed for privacy).

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Social Media Audit was recently used to assist grantees at the California Community Foundation. We received some great feedback:

 

“Thank you so much! This is all such fantastic work. I love that there could be really concrete (and sometimes simple) fixes. I also love how the rating system as well as your presentation really challenged the grantees to think about their online marketing in terms of quantifiable measurements – something that I think they are not used to doing, but now with the technology are able to pretty easily. I am pleased to see CCF arts grantees already implementing suggestions and seeing results.” -Leslie Ito, Program Officer, California Community Foundation

 

 Get in touch for a tour of our tools and services. 

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