Get your Organization’s Social Media Profile from Rapleaf

Want to know which social networks in which your email subscribers participate and how active they are?

Rapleaf gives you demographic, psychographic and behavioral information such as a social graph and online social media activity about your email subscriber base.

I liked this product when I worked at Media Contacts, and I still like it in my new role working with social change organizations.  Today I participated in a conference call with the Rapleaf team about how non-profits can use their product.  They also discussed a case study about a large non-profit focused on women’s issues and how they used Rapleaf’s reports.

Here is some info you can obtain from Rapleaf’s social media profile –

Rapleaf Report Info

Don’t worry, your membership PII is safe.  They also merge multiple email address into one record, which somewhat helps take care of out-of-date email addresses.

And even better news –

You can upload a partial sample of up to 1,000 emails on their website and get a report for free!  (A full aggregate report costs a couple thousand dollars for 10-20,000 emails.  The full aggregate report is worth it if your organization is considering a significant investment of staff resources in social media and you have a much larger email subscriber base.  Rapleaf also offers a more specific report tying each email to each social network on your list for pennies per record)

Here is some sample data they send in their aggregate report (just the tip of the iceberg) –

Check out a full sample report here.

Your subscribers' social networks on Rapleaf

Some questions you can learn the answers to –

• Do your subscribers use social media? (READ: Should you invest significant resources in social media?)
• Which online social network(s) does your base use? (READ: Where should you be to talk with them and expand your reach through their networks?)
• How many friends do they have? (READ: How influential in social media are your subscribers?)
• How active are they? (READ: Can I engage my supporters to spread my message to their friends and help raise money for my organization?)

Rapleaf Friend Counts

Rapleaf gives you an incredible opportunity to use social media to personalize your marketing efforts, segmenting your base to target only those who would be interested in in particular message.  Imagine the increase in email opens and conversion rates!

Rapleaf Demographics

Case Study

I wrote an earlier post on the how the Obama team sent me an email about volunteering for their “data team” during the election.   I believe they used Rapleaf to segment their subscriber base and learn that I was an analytics professional – I know I never gave them that info.  My position at the time was Manager of the Data and Analytics group and Occupation/Title is part of the demographic info in the report.  (I have a call set up with one of Rapleaf’s founders.  I’ll confirm this point and update this post.)

Case Study from today’s conference call – A large non-profit focused on women’s issues

Background

• They are considering a larger, more strategic social media campaign
• They have created basic fan pages on Facebook with limited success
• They have 25,000 + members

Problem

• They didn’t know if social media was popular with their memebers
• They had sparse demographic data through offline surveys so they didn’t know much about their subscribers
• They needed to persuade internal management of the importance of social media

Questions they Wanted Answers to

• Confirm their membership bias to older women
• Is social media worth it?
• If so, which networks should they use?

Info Gained from the Study

• Demographics of the membership base
• Number and distribution of social media usage
• Activity levels of members

How they used the Info Gained

• Justified a social media campaign to their management team
• Launched targeted ad campaign on Facebook (the main social media tool of their membership)
• Collected benchmark data for campaign ROI
• Initiated a communications strategy for reaching a younger audience (the report showed that their membership skewed younger than they though because younger people did not fill out the offline surveys)

Results

• Increased their Facebook fan base by 10x with an email campaign to members to join them on Facebook
• Targeted ad campaign on Facebook increased donations
• Ad targeting increased media efficiency

If you are interested in other demographic and psychographic research about your website visitors, as well as your online media reach and response, check out my blog post on Quantcast Marketer, another free tool you can use to learn more about your online audience.

Feel free to ask me more about research tools such as Rapleaf and Quantcast and how to use the results to improve your organization’s online communications.