By Scot Kersgaard, JVA Consulting

Everyone does social media to some extent these days. Certainly almost every single nonprofit has a website and a Facebook account.

The question of whether you should have these things has been settled. No one would argue today that websites and Facebook are superfluous. Still, many nonprofits seem to take the attitude that if they build them, people will come. So they build the website and open a Facebook account and then sit back and wait for the people to come.

It doesn’t work very well.

Almost nothing in life works that way.

There are few things in the world of public relations and marketing where a nonprofit or government agency can get more bang for their buck than in social media, but to get the impact you want, you need to have clear objectives and design and implement strategies for achieving those objectives.

JVA offers a three-hour Social Media 201 training on August 19. You may recall that it was just a year ago that JVA won the Denver Business Journal’s Social Madness contest for the best use of social media by a mid-sized business, a category in which JVA–with just more than 20 employees–was dwarfed by the resources of the competition and yet managed a victory.

Simply put, JVA won by creating a good plan for engaging people through social media and implementing it skillfully.

In this class, JVA’s social media team will help you get from doing the basics to creating and executing a plan that gets the results you want and need—whether that involves fundraising, recruiting volunteers, bringing more clients through the door, or staging more successful events.

Register here.