Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

If you are interested in quickly learning the fundamentals of good nonprofit brochures, now is your chance — and it’s free! I’m hosting my first webinar, Nonprofit Brochures: A Crash Course, tomorrow, Tuesday, October 23, 2007 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern (10 a.m. Pacific). Nancy Schwartz of GettingAttention.org has graciously agreed to help me sort through and field questions from participants, so this really is a phenomenal opportunity to get some great training on brochures. The main presentation will take only 30 minutes (it is a crash course, after all), but I’ll be available to field questions for the full hour. Get more information and register now.

I’ll be doing my second free webinar, “Online Writing: A Crash Course for Nonprofits” on Friday, November 2 at 2:00 p.m. ET. Get the details and register.

I’ve been getting lots of questions about whether a recording of the webinar and other materials will be available to people who don’t attend tomorrow. I’m still deciding how to handle it. I do know that I will post several of the Q&As online and will let you know when those are available, so stay tuned.

Michele Martin at the Bamboo Project has posted this week’s edition of the Carnival. We participated in Blog Action Day on Monday and so the posts you’ll read all relate somehow to the environment. My personal fave in the group is Michele’s on how environmental groups are using social media. Check it out in the full Carnival.

Next week, we head over to Nedra’s at Spare Change. See you there!

New to the Carnival?

The Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants is a weekly round-up of the best blog posts by consultants and others who serve, work in, and otherwise cherish the nonprofit community. It moves around to a different host each week. Learn more about submitting posts, hosting, and subscribing to the Carnival feed on the Carnival home page.

Feedback on the annual reports e-book I released in August has been great. Here are a few of the comments I’ve received in the last month from people who have purchased “How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report.”

“I found your book to be a tremendous help. Each year I have the challenge of producing an annual report that is comparable to the annual reports of other local non-profits, which are professionally done (slick paper, lots of photos, etc.). Because we choose to channel the majority of our funds to our programs, the annual report is done as inexpensively as possible. “How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report” is helping me make this year’s report look and sound better than it ever has.” ~ Judi Early, Evansville Goodwill Industries, Inc.

“A step by step how-to for an important publication for my organization.” ~ Kathy Power, Cambridge Cares About AIDS

“Everything you need to know to design your annual report.” ~ Mindy Knappenberger, Armstrong County Community Foundation

And here are a few more comments from people who wished to remain anonymous:

“A very succinct look at annual reports for the nonprofit sector. A well-structured resource with excellent writing tips and good suggestions for incorporating “themes” and other ideas.” ~ J.H.

“Very easy-to-understand and well-written.” ~ J.C.

Congrats to Kelly Collins of the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence for winning this month’s drawing for an e-book refund. When you purchase the “How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report” e-book, you’ll receive a link to a short survey about the book. Everyone who responds is entered into a monthly drawing to get the purchase price fully refunded. (My four-year-old picks the record number, so your chances of winning have absolutely nothing to do with your comments on the survey!)
You can get your copy of “How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report” for $29.99 and then enter the drawing for the refund.

One of the easiest ways that nonprofit communicators can go green in their operations is to use recycled paper all the time — in your office equipment and office supplies like folders and when you buy print. Long gone are the excuses about paper quality and, for the most part, price (or at least they should be, if you shop around a bit.)

There’s just one small problem. Lots of nonprofits like to include “Printed on Recycled Paper” on their documents to promote their environmentally sensitive behavior when they, in fact, have no idea what that phrase really means and aren’t actually using 100% recycled paper. Let me explain.

According to the Federal Trade Commission’s Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims, which were published a decade ago, if you claim that your document is “Printed on Recycled Paper,” you are saying that it is printed on paper containing 100% recycled fiber. However lots of the office and printing papers on the market today only contain 30% recycled fiber. If you are using those papers, you should say, “Printed on Paper with 30% Recycled Fiber” or something along those lines.

I personally buy and highly recommend Staples® 100% Recycled Copy Paper, so I can include “Printed on Recycled Paper” in my documents without further details. To be technically correct about this particular paper, I could say, “Printed on 100% Post-Consumer Recycled Paper,” which is even better from an environmental perspective.

When something is called “recycled,” that material can come from two sources: Pre-Consumer, which is manufacturing scraps, and Post-Consumer, which is all the paper that we put in the recycling bin at home and work. Manufacturers commonly recycle their own discards for economic reasons, so that recovered paper isn’t as important for consumers like us to focus on as the post-consumer material. The post-consumer material is the paper that we are trying to keep out landfills and incinerators and want to be made into new products; therefore, we should look for post-consumer content when we buy recycled products.

When you are buying office paper or talking to your printer about paper choices, ask for the total recycled content and the highest amount of post-consumer content that you can, too. If price is a concern, look for paper that is 100% recycled, with 30% post-consumer content. Interested in learning more about environmental paper choices? Check out the Conservatree website.

This post is my contribution to Blog Action Day.

What makes a good nonprofit brochure? How do your brochures stack up against best practices?

If you are working on brochures for your nonprofit or will be in the coming months, sign up for the free one-hour crash-course webinar I’m hosting on Tuesday, October 23 at 1:00 p.m. ET. I’ll explain the most important points about writing and designing a trifold brochure for your nonprofit organization. You might be surprised how many nonprofits are overlooking the fundamentals of good brochures and wasting time and money on brochures that simply don’t work. The hour-long program will include plenty of time for questions.

This is my first adventure into the world of webinars, so I hope you’ll come for the free advice and then let me know what you think about the format and the service provider I’m test driving. I’m hosting a second free webinar on how to write for the Web and email on Friday, November 2 at 2:00 p.m. ET.

Register Here for “Nonprofit Brochures: A Crash Course”

Register Here for “Online Writing: A Crash Course for Nonprofits”

The North Carolina Center for Nonprofits (one of the leading state nonprofit associations) has just published Principles and Practices for Nonprofit Excellence: A Self-Help Tool for Organizational Effectiveness. Several other state associations have similar guides for their members.

You’ll find several communications and marketing best practices included in the NC guide and most others:

– “Fundraising communications should include clear, accurate, and honest information about the organization, its activities, and the intended use of funds.” (from the Fundraising Section)

–”A nonprofit should regularly communicate with donors regarding its activities and should make such information available through multiple outlets.” (from the Fundraising Section)

–”E-mail accounts for staff and staff usage that comply with CAN-SPAM regulations for broadcast emails.” (from Information and Technology section)

–”A nonprofit should share the results of its evaluation with all interested stakeholders.” (from Evaluation of Results section)

–”Information provided to policymakers, the media, and the general public becomes a matter of public record. Therefore, a nonprofit should ensure that the information is timely and accurate and that the social and political context of the information is clear in order to avoid misunderstanding or manipulation of the message.” (from Civic Engagement and Public Policy section)

–”In serving the public trust, a nonprofit should produce an annual report that contains information regarding activities and financial and programmatic performance and results. The annual report should include:
-an explanation of the organization’s mission, activities, and results;
-an explanation of how individuals can access its programs and services;
-overall financial information, including income and expense statement, balance sheet, and functional expense allocation; and
-a list of board members, staff, and donors.” (from Transparency and Accountability section)
–”Nonprofits should have crisis communication plans that can be implemented expeditiously by staff and/or board members.” (from Transparency and Accountability section)

Yesterday I replied to the arguments made by people who want to reprint blog posts or RSS feeds in full, often without proper credit.

Let me be clear: I have no problem with others excerpting or discussing my posts – I wholeheartedly encourage that. That’s part of the natural beauty of the blogosphere. My problem is with people who reprint the entire post and pass it off as their content, without my permission and without proper attribution and links, or who use my content without my permission to improve their own standing with their readers or with the search engines.

So what’s the right way to republish an RSS feed or blog post? I suggest four guidelines:

1) If you want to reprint an entire post on your site with the purpose of populating your domain with good articles or sharing an interesting or useful article with your readers, simply ask permission first and always include a link back to the original post when permission is granted. If you need good content and don’t want to ask permission, go to a free articles directory; don’t poach articles from blogs.

2) If you want to discuss or respond to a post in an original post of your own, feel free to cut and paste snippets here and there, or to summarize the post in your own words, and always include a link back to the original post. This is extremely common and encouraged in the blogosphere. You can find examples of how others have used my posts in this way at Philanthropy Journal’s Give and Take, which I approve of 100%.

3) If you want to excerpt a post without any original writing of your own, feel free to use the first paragraph (or a small amount of teaser text — usually not more than 50-100 words) and then include a link back to the full, original post. Again, this is extremely common and generally encouraged.

4) If you want to use RSS to automatically add content to your site, like many news aggregator sites do, set up your pages to take only headlines or a limited number of characters or words from the top of the article. And yes, always include a link back to the original post! This is what Ogilvy PR does with my feed and the feeds of many others in our sector.

I’m not suggesting we stifle conversation. I am suggesting that if you want an online presence, you do the work of content creation yourself and not rip off your digital neighbors.

Do these guidelines make sense to you? Leave a comment and let me know.

An article from this blog was recently reprinted in an email newsletter and on a website without my permission and without a link back to this blog. The same thing has happened recently to a handful of blogging colleagues. Is that fair use or content theft? When and how is it OK to reprint information from blogs in your own newsletters, blogs, and websites?

The Arguments For and Against Copying Full Posts

Note: I am not talking about excerpting small sections of posts for discussion purposes; I’m talking about reprinting the entire piece as content on a website, etc.

Some will argue that content distributed in the blogosphere is different than material printed in other forms, like printed books or even websites. People who wouldn’t normally copy and reprint articles from those sources will copy and paste off of blogs willy-nilly. They seem to justify this behavior in one of two ways.

Their Argument: It’s the nature of the blogosphere. Blogs are the Wild West and anything goes. The normal rules of engagement don’t apply. Blogging is all about the decentralization and free-wheeling distribution of information and republishing posts is simply part of the culture.

My Response: In addition to being decentralized and free-wheeling, blogging is also highly personal. The journal format demands a first-person writing style. When you copy my content, you are getting more than words – you are also getting some of the personality that comes along with it. When you reprint full blog posts without permission and pass them off as original content for your newsletter or website, without ample credit and links back, it’s a form of identity theft. Instead of using my credit score, you are using my reputation.

Their Argument: If you use RSS, you want people to republish your posts. RSS means Real Simple Syndication. If you use it to distribute content from your blog, as nearly all bloggers do, that means you want people to have a real simple way to publish your content in other venues, just like all those national columnists who write articles that are then published in hundreds of newspapers across the U.S.

My Response: This line of reasoning is absurd. The method I choose to distribute articles to my readers, whether it be print newsletters, private email, RSS, FedEx, or carrier pigeon, does not affect my copyright. I wrote it; I own it. End of story. And let’s not forget, those syndicated columnists are paid for their work, and the more popular their columns are, the more they get paid.

To answer the question I posed at the top, reprinting entire posts without permission and proper attribution and links is content theft and a copyright violation. It’s a way to add quality content to your site without working or paying for it, but it’s also lazy and, I believe, illegal.

So what’s the right way to reuse someone’s blog post?

Coming Tomorrow: The Right Ways to Republish RSS and Reprint Blog Posts (Part 2)