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This blog is all about do-it-yourself nonprofit communications and marketing. I love helping small and medium-sized nonprofits communicate more effectively with their members, donors, volunteers and other supporters, so that together, we can all make the world a better place. I do that as a blogger, trainer, speaker, coach and consultant.
I believe that even the smallest nonprofit staffs with the most modest budgets can achieve tremendous results through savvy marketing and communications. I hope this blog and my online marketing training and other resources encourage you to do just that, while helping you grow personally as a nonprofit marketer and communications professional.
Please comment on posts and feel free to contact
me with your questions and comments. You can also learn more about hiring me to speak at your conference or workshop and to assist you as a coach or consultant.
Check out my calendar of events for upcoming webinars, live broadcasts of Magic Keys Radio, online office hours, and more.
P.S. Please feel free to connect with me on these social networks: Nonprofit Marketing Guide Page on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook (Personal Profile).
Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog has posted the last edition of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants for the year. Check it out. In addition to usual great advice and interesting commentary, you’ll also find links to some of Jeff’s personal favorites.
This week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants is all about the best of 2007, thanks to hostess Nedra Weinreich at Spare Change. You’ll find several great nonprofit fundraising and communications campaigns, including some with how-tos and metrics to help you figure out how they did it and to make the best ideas your own in 2008.
The Carnival travels next Monday to Donor Power Blog with Jeff Brooks. It will be our last edition in 2007 as this carnival organizer is taking Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve off. After Jeff’s edition on the 17th, we will start anew on January 7, 2008. Look for some new hosts and expect the same good stuff you’ve come to love from your nonprofit carnival.
Do you know the important differences between how people read on paper and how they read on a computer screen? Do you understand how those differences drastically change the way you should write for your website visitors and email newsletter readers?
If you aren’t sure, I’ll show you how to go from confused to confident in under an hour. Register for my next live webinar happening Thursday, December 13, at 2:00 p.m. ET. (That’s 1:00 – 2:00 p.m. CT, Noon – 1:00 p.m. MT, and 11:00 a.m. – Noon PT).
From the comfort of your own desk, you’ll learn the important differences between reading and writing on paper and online, how to make your writing more appealing to online readers, and simple word choice and formatting tricks that can drastically improve your website’s or email’s performance.
You’ll also learn ways to organize your thoughts and ideas to match the way people use the Web and how to convert your existing print publications for use online.
If you want your website visitors and e-newsletter subscribers to actually read what you write, instead of quickly navigating away from your web pages or deleting your email, you have to learn to write in a whole new way. This webinar will show you how.
Registration costs just $49. When you consider how much time you spend on your website and e-newsletter, that’s a tiny investment to make sure your messages get across. During the webinar, you’ll have the chance to ask questions over the phone or via chat, using a toll-free, user-friendly webinar service.
I just learned about this very cool site and I wish I’d known about it sooner, as it could have saved me HOURS of piddling around: ColorBlender.com
If you have ever struggled to decide what colors go together when designing anything for print or the Web (or decorating your office, for that matter), this tool will be a life-saver. Simply click on the first box, change it to one color you know you like, and then see how the program fills in the other five boxes.
Play around with the color sliders until you get the exact palette you want, and then copy down the HTML and RGB values for use in your design programs. You can also save them in formats that will import directly into Photoshop and Illustrator and get approximate PMS values too.
If you are in a big hurry and don’t want to pick even the first color on your own, you can “browse blends” for a bunch of combinations.
I see lots of great uses for this tool:
–Finally figuring out what colors look good with your logo color
–Developing your newsletter design style sheet, with headline colors matching text, boxes, folios, etc.
–Reigning in overzealous marketing volunteers by limiting their color palette to one that works
–Improving your branding by using a consistent color palette
–Creating a complete color palette for your annual report
–Finding the right color mat when framing photographs (simply sample a dominant color in the photo)
–Customizing your PowerPoint template so it looks professional and fresh
Thanks to Teaching Sells for the tip.
Nancy Schwartz at Getting Attention has posted this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, which includes several great suggestions for nonprofit marketing priorities for 2008. If you are still debating your plans for the new year, you’ll find inspiration here.
Next week, the Carnival travels to Spare Change with social marketing guru Nedra Weinreich.
Before you launch all of your spectacular new initiatives for 2008, please, please, please all nonprofit marketing professionals, make sure that the organizations you are involved with as staff, volunteers, and board members have taken care of these three items. I admit, they are personal pet peeves, but they are all very basic marketing elements that a surprisingly large number of small- and medium-sized nonprofits have yet to address.
1) Get a clean copy of your logo. It seems like not a day goes by that I don’t see some raggedy, blurred, or skewed nonprofit logo on TV or in print that looks like it has been sent through a fax machine three times. You CANNOT take your little logo off of your website, or copy it out of a Word document, and use it everywhere else. I even see pixelated logos online, which is especially jarring.
Go find your original artwork files. They are most likely Illustrator or PhotoShop files. Once you find those, label them “original” in the filename so you know not to mess around with them. Then make copies and start saving them in different formats and resolutions appropriate to various uses, putting “web” and “print” in the filenames to help you keep them straight. I know this may be Greek to a lot of you, so here is the quickie lesson on file formats and resolution.
For online use, the resolution should be 72 ppi (pixels per inch). So if you want your logo to appear as 1.5 inches square on your website, the dimensions would be 108 pixels by 108 pixels (that’s 72 x 1.5). The file size (how many KBs or MBs it is) will vary based on how complicated the logo is, how many colors it uses, etc. Save web resolution files as jpgs, gifs, or pngs. Use these on websites, blogs, and in email.
For print use, the resolution should be at least 300 ppi. So your same 1.5 square-inch logo on a piece of paper would now be 450 x 450 pixels (300 x 1.5). Save these as eps or tiff files. You can also use jpg, but just make sure that the resolution and size are set high enough.
For TV, I recommend sending the highest quality logo you have and letting the company you are working with adjust the size and resolution to match their needs.
Can’t find your original artwork files? Get them redrawn. Either ask your graphic designer to do it or find a volunteer or college student who knows Illustrator. You’ll need to know which fonts you used or be willing to have the designer take a guess. Unless your logo is extremely complicated, it will probably take a designer about an hour to redraw an old logo. The $100-$200 you spend on this will pay for itself by making your organization look much more professional.
2) Add online giving to your website. I recently did a quick survey of more than 35 small nonprofits in the rural North Carolina county where I live and I found that only one organization told its website visitors how to give online. This is simply crazy. You don’t have to accept credit cards yourself. You don’t need a fancy shopping cart or a secure socket layer or any of the high-tech business that scares off so many small organizations.
All you need to do is go to NetworkforGood.org and search for your organization (use the legal name you use with the IRS or try your zip code if you have a hard time finding your organization — you are there somewhere). You’ll find your very own donation page. Now, simply link to that page from your own website. Network for Good gives you detailed instructions on how to do this and how to get one of their “Donate Now” buttons for your site. And ta-da, you are accepting online donations!
3) Make sure all staff and board members can nail your elevator pitch. Your staff and board members should be able to very clearly and very briefly describe the value of your work and exactly what it is you do. This is NOT memorizing your mission statement. It’s explaining who you are, what you do, and why you do it in three-four short sentences. Here are my tips on writing your nonprofit elevator speech.
Get these three tasks taken care of this month and start 2008 off right!
If you missed my free webinar today on “Getting Ready to Write Your 2007 Annual Report,” you can now view the 37-minute recording online at no charge. Here is the registration page.
It covers what information you need to be gathering now, what decisions you should make before the end of your fiscal year, and what you can put off for a few months. Today’s participants also asked some great questions, so even if you don’t sit and watch the video (although I do have some fun slides), it’s worth listening to while you putter around in your office with other tasks.
Here are a few comments from today’s participants:
“Great webinar… Clear and relevant.”
“Good, clear, high-level content.”
“I found the seminar very helpful – it confirmed for me that we are on the right track with our approach . . . Thank you so much for your time and insight.”
“Thank you – this was very informative.”
“I found the information and the Q&A session extremely helpful.”
This week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants is up at Giving in a Digital World. Bryan has compiled a great set of posts on how nonprofits can use Facebook, MySpace, OpenSocial, and other social networking tools. Check it out now.
On December 3, the Carnival returns stateside to Getting Attention with Nancy Schwartz. Here’s Nancy’s question for you: What are the top three to-do’s on your nonprofit marketing agenda? Get the details here on how to contribute to Nancy’s edition of the Carnival.
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