Thank you to the 130 people who joined us for our fun & educational webinar on Starting Influencer Engagement with Cheryl Contee of Fission Strategy and Roz Lemieux of Attentive.ly!

Here are a few tweets from our audience during and after the webinar:

In case you missed the webinar, here is a brief recap. You can also view the webinar deck on Facebook!

Nonprofits can massively extend their reach through the social networks of their supporters. Here’s what Attentive.ly found when we evaluated 90 of our nonprofit clients representing nearly 20M supporters.

We’ve known for years that organizations have influencers on their lists and that those folks have a large reach - the top 5% of influencers reach 85% of your entire network reach, more than 240x the people in your CRM. If you engage 1% of the influencers, you’d reach hundreds of thousands, win big and reach far more than you could otherwise. At a 1% response rate or 36 respondents, that means your reach is 338k people.

With some extra effort, and most likely an influencer program, a 10% response rate of your top influencers means you’d reach 3.3M with only 360 people taking action. Talk about a national day of action!

Influencers are game changers because of their reach and the trust their audience has for what they say and who & what they endorse or promote. They almost always have a large Twitter following, lots of Facebook friends, and a blog. The goal here is to expand your network reach by tapping into other people’s networks.

According to the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), an influencer is a person or group of people who change their opinion or behavior as a result of exposure to new information and there are five categories of influencers. While we agree with their definition, to make things simple, we will stick to three main categories which you can build from: VIPs, Professionals, and Citizens.

From a broad marketing perspective, anyone who isn’t a celebrity or professional, is a Citizen Influencer, though with fewer connections. This generally means: current supporters (those in your email lists) who have 500+ social media connections with 40-60 Klout score. We love this group because they are often overlooked, yet constitute a powerful force as a group.

Even if you aren’t the CEO of T-Mobile, those with a certain professional standing will usually carry a level of influence comparable to their position. The litmus test for members of this category is either credibility (doctor approved!) or access to a target community (C-suite, educators, tech, media). They will tend to have a Klout score between 60 and 80. With a Klout score of 68 and over 12,000 connections, Clay Johnson is a great example of someone you’d want to enlist as an influencer if you’re looking to deepen reach in the Big Data/Open Government community. The reason they have reach is because it’s part of their job.

Finally, VIP Influencers. This kind of social media celebrity could massively expand your network reach if his affinity and past interactions match-up. An Instagram account with 2 million followers is merely a modern extension to the age-old idea of “celebrity.” Statements on Twitter can have as much impact as a press release, especially when someone has the power to influence an industry or sector.

They aren’t difficult to spot. There’s a good chance you have dozens or even hundreds in your email lists already, which is where we recommend beginning. Influencers might be tweeting about your efforts already, and you haven’t noticed. Here’s how to spot them and take notice, so that the next time they tweet it doesn’t go unnoticed.

Earthjustice and Fission worked together on the Mountain Heroes campaign to raise awareness about mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. Part of our strategy to reach new audiences involved reaching out to VIPs like Edward Norton, Woody Harrelson, Daryl Hannah, and celebrity blogs Ecorazzi and FitPerez who discussed the celebrities’ involvement. One photo post on social got over 1,300 likes when Woody Harrelson shared his spiritual message about mountaintop removal, breaking Earthjustice social media records. The campaign was designed to help encourage everyday heroes to submit their own photo micro-stories in support of stopping mountaintop mining. Together, through reaching traditional, regional and online VIPs in addition to a comprehensive grassroots digital outreach campaign, we were able to blow past Earthjustice’s goals for submitted photos. Those photo petitions were presented to the White House & EPA and later led to Patriot Coal promising to cease mountaintop removal. Success!

VIPs are a high-touch, long-tail program which can take months to bear fruit. Chances are, you aren’t the only organization or agency fighting for the attention of a celebrity or VIP. And it’s important to note that today, VIPs are not just the folks you see on tv or hear on radio. As we referenced earlier, the internet has opened the opportunity for many more people to become online VIPS, making broad ally outreach more accessible than ever. Do your homework and find out if there are online VIPs with a Klout score of 80-100 who may be willing to support your cause.

Instead of asking them to buy or donate, you can ask influencers to promote your brand or organization to their network (providing they are talking about the keywords / affinities you are tracking) in return for a similar kind of reward you are giving to citizen influencers.

We will be circulating a brand new marketing guide in the next few days. We've put a lot of work into it and can't wait to hear what you think. Keep an eye out for it!

Feel free to leave comments or ask us any questions. You can reach us here: http://fissionstrategy.com/contact or cheryl@fissionstrategy.com / roz@attentive.ly

Thanks again to everyone who tuned in!