JustCoz 101

We keep getting questions about  the best way for a Cause to use JustCoz. Our initial answer is that being a pretty simple and open service there’s really no one way to do so. There are quite a few Causes that make a very good use of our system and each one of them has a unique style of doing so. We truly believe that your best conduct is based on getting to know your supporters, what they like and don’t like etc.

Following is a short list of what we see as a good starting point behavior that might help you kick-start your use of our system.

How to start?
The beginning seems very tricky, you added your cause and it’s been authorized and you have a message to send out but now what? You still don’t have any supporters. What we suggest is to simply send your twitter followers (via Twitter, not JustCoz) a message offering them to support you by donating a tweet a day (for free) and add your JustCoz page URL (http://justcoz.org/YourCause).
Make sure you use your own words in this message; part of using JustCoz effectively is avoiding anything that seems automated as it is immediately associated with spam. After you’ve got some supporters you can start broadcasting your daily messages, some of which, can be used to recruit more supporters.

Always add a link
Fact: People are far more likely to act upon your message if there’s something to click. If you can’t think of anything to link to simply link to your JustCoz page, you can always use the extra supporters.

You don’t have to send a message every day
Yes, you’re limited to one message per day but it doesn’t mean that you HAVE to use it. Try to be consistent (don’t disappear for too long) but unless you have something that your supporters would want people to think they care about, don’t say it. The last thing you want is to annoy your supporters or their followers.

Remember that it’s your supporter’s tweet
When you broadcast a message Your supporters’ followers don’t read it as a retweet or as your message but as a tweet from whoever they follow so make sure the wording of your message supports this; so for example, let’s say that you want to promote an event in New York. If you write something like “Join us for our event in New York” think of your supporter saying just that. It may not make any sense. If instead you’ll write something like “Join YourCause at their event in New York” it will be more effective and will keep your supporters and their followers happy.

Keep an eye on your reach
Having a lot of supporters is great but sometimes you may have just a few but each one of them has so many followers that your message reaches far more people than you may think. Your reach is located right below your supporters count on your page.

Help People stop supporting you
Sometimes people just click a button without knowing what it does and then find out there’s a tweet being sent through their account automatically and want it to stop. Other times people just decide that they don’t want to support you anymore. In both cases the way to do so is to go to your cause page while logged in to the supporting Twitter account and simply click the Stop Supporting button.

Keep an eye on Twitter’s status
We make a great effort to keep JustCoz a stable and trustworthy tool. However, sometimes there are Twitter down-times and errors that are not under our control. If something doesn’t seem to be working properly it’s always a good idea to first check http://status.twitter.com/ and make sure everything’s ok on that front. In any case we are always available for any questions you may have on our Twitter account (@justcozapp) or via email (info [at] justcoz [dot] org].

We hope to publish more more posts like this one in the future, if you have any suggestions or specific questions we didn’t answer please feel free to drop us a line.