Nonprofit Communications

Jason Dick has posted this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants on the elements of a successful capital campaign. If you are considering a capital campaign or are having trouble getting yours off the ground, be sure to read this collection of posts.

Next week the carnival will be hosted by Endless Plain.

New donors, volunteers and other potential supporters have questions that they want answered before taking the next step with your organization. These five simple but universal questions that people will have about your organization are best answered not with statistics or wonky program statements, but with stories. Your website is the perfect place to answer these questions.

1) What Do Other People Think About This Group?

Answer with Testimonials. When someone is learning about you for the first time, they’ll be curious what other people think about your organization, your staff and your effectiveness. You can talk about how great you are, but that’s not nearly as convincing as testimonials from other people who aren’t on your payroll (or even on your board). Testimonials are short quotes — little mini-stories — that offer insight into why someone is happy to be associated with your organization in one or two sentences. Gilda’s Club Seattle includes testimonials and photos at the top of nearly every page on its site that instantly convey how important the group is to its supporters.

2) Are People Here Like Me?

Answer with Profiles. When someone donates time or money to your organization, they are joining a virtual community of people who believe in the same cause. If someone is not quite sure if your nonprofit is a good fit for them, showing them that they fit in with other supporters can help overcome that barrier. Profiles of clients, donors, volunteers, members, and other supporters are a good way to show the different kinds of people who are involved with your group, making a newcomer feel more comfortable that they are in the right place. Iraq Veterans Against the War lets members write their own profiles as part of the open, online membership directory.

3) Does This Work?

Answer with Success Stories. Do you get the job done? Are you going to make a difference with the money I give you? Success stories show donors (and potential new donors) exactly what it is you do and how you do it. They can be full-length articles or shorter vignettes like those on the National CASA website. The multimedia stories on the home page show the children they serve and their adult court-appointed advocates speaking about the benefits of the CASA program. These stories end with this simple statement: “Children with a CASA volunteer are less likely to reenter Child Protective Services.” Does it work? Yes, it does.

4) What Difference Can a Single Person Make?

Answer with Personalized Giving Options. Big problems are overwhelming. If you swamp people with the enormity of the need, they are likely to tune you out and move on to something that feels more manageable. One way to overcome this problem is to focus on the difference that a single person can make and clearly demonstrate through storytelling that a new donor, as a single individual, can bring about change by supporting your organization. Tying donor actions or gift levels to specific results is a great way to do that.

Kiva and Donors Choose are the shining stars in this category. CARE’s “I Am Powerful” campaign also makes a clear yet less direct connection between individual donors and the people they are helping.

5) Can I Come Along?

Answer with Personal Chronicles. For your supporters to fully engage with your nonprofit, you have to be willing to share what’s really going on. A small but important segment of your donor base won’t be happy with the level of detail they get in your newsletters. They’ll want more and you should give it to them. Blogs are a natural way to provide this kind of ongoing, detailed, behind-the-scenes narrative about your work.

The Humane Society of the United States’ dispatches from the Canadian seal hunt are riveting (although brutally graphic). It’s one thing to ask supporters to put a “Save the Baby Seals!” bumper sticker on their car — it’s another to invite them to tag along virtually with the HSUS’s Rebecca Aldworth as she chronicles the bloody devastation on the ice floes day in and day out. A more heart-warming example can be found on the Interplast blog, where doctors chronicle their efforts around the globe to repair birth defects like cleft lip.

In both cases, these nonprofits are taking their supporters to places they would likely never physically go themselves, showing them in detail both the need for their support and what can be done with their donations and advocacy. By bringing your supporters along day in and day out, you can make them feel like they really are part of your team.

While storytelling is a wonderful tool for nonprofit marketing, it only works with a specific goal in mind. What point are you trying to make? Or in these cases, what question are you trying to answer? Without a goal behind your story, the words may be interesting or amusing, but the point will be lost on your supporters. Know what question you are answering before you start telling your story for maximum impact.

Learn More Here: Nonprofit Storytelling: How to Write Your Nonprofit’s Best Stories

It’s Blog Reader Appreciation Day! Feedburner says that 1,050 people are subscribed to this blog as of today, so *thanks* to each and every one of you.

Your comments on posts and emails to me have not only shaped this blog into what it is today, but have also inspired me to launch Nonprofit Marketing Guide last year, along with the weekly webinar series this year. Your feedback continues to be a great source of inspiration, so let’s keep the conversation going! I’m having a great time creating all of these resources for you, so thanks for using them!

As a thank-you present to you, dear blog reader, I’m offering two recordings of recent teleseminars at no charge.

You can listen to my interviews with Claire Meyerhoff, who spoke on “Getting Reporters to Cover Your Nonprofit” in February, and Nancy Schwartz, who spoke on “Branding for Nonprofits: What Is It and Should You Do It?” last week. Both include lots of questions from nonprofits who participated in the live events and were very well received. I guarantee that you’ll learn a lot from both of them.

Since these are audio-only files, you can listen while doing mindless office work — but nothing that requires too much brain power, or you’ll miss the great points Claire and Nancy make! (By the way, Claire and I are doing another webinar tomorrow, 4/17/08, on press release writing.)

To get the links to the mp3 files, simply complete this quick registration form, confirm your email address, and check your email box for the links.

And the Annual All-Access Pass Goes to . . .

Lisa Machesky at the Birmingham Bloomfield Community Coalition. Congratulations!

Exactly 50 people emailed me in the last 48 hours to enter the drawing, many with very funny notes about why they should get the prize. But alas, creativity gets you nowhere this time — it was a random selection by Ava Rey, my five-year-old office assistant.

What is this coveted All-Access Pass? It’s a ticket to every webinar I host for a full year, currently priced at $330. You can also get a quarterly pass for $97.

Keep reading even if you didn’t win (or didn’t even see the notice about the contest). I see more giveaways in the future . . .

Wednesday, April 16 has been declared Blog Reader Appreciation Day — thanks to Michele Martin for letting me know.

In celebration, I am going to give away one free Annual All-Access Pass to a blog reader. This pass entitles you to attend every webinar I host for a full year, along with free access to the on-demand learning center that is nearly ready to launch at Nonprofit Marketing Guide. It’s a $330 value.

Since I have no way of knowing who most of you are, to enter the drawing, you’ll need to email me at this address I set up just for this occasion: reader@nonprofitmarketingguide.com. All I need is your name, organization, and email address by 5:00 p.m. Eastern, Wednesday, April 16. That’s when I’ll randomly select the name and disable the email address.

More goodies of thanks to come tomorrow . . .

By Guest Blogger Claire “Voyant” Meyerhoff

In the old days, before the Internet and even fax machines, the Press Release (aka News Release) was Queen of P.R. All over the country, Newsroom Assistants earning $4/hour sorted mail, opened envelopes, unfolded press releases and stacked them in neat piles. For many of these bottom-of-the-totem polers, it was their first real taste of “the power to decide what is news.”

“Hmmm, Senator Charles Grassley is spearheading an effort to make July ‘National Corn Month.’ I’ll put that in the ‘boring government stuff’ stack,” thought Debbie Duespayer, a Desk Assistant in a broadcast newsroom, circa 1984.

“Oh, Mothers Against Drunk Driving is holding an event where they’re going to get a local celebrity intoxicated and do their blood alcohol level on the spot. I’ll put that in the ‘my producer might like this’ stack,” thought Debbie, as she looked at her watch and noticed it was 2:00 a.m. “I leave here in two hours; I hope my VCR recorded Cheers,” she thought. (Note: Never forget that your news release may be read by a person making even less money and working worse hours than you. And you work for a nonprofit . . . so that says something.)

This is what used to happen to press releases. They were put into piles, then the chosen ones were plucked out and put into the “Future File.” Then, the day before, an assignment editor would pull the Future File for the next day and look at all the press releases to see if there was anything worth covering. The rest were chucked in the bin.

My former boss at all-news WTOP, Holland Cooke, even wrote a book called “How to Keep Your Press Release out of the Trash Basket.” Something like that. I would call him to get the exact title, but he’s in Vegas right now attending the “Media Consultants Rule the World But Have to Travel 350 Days a Year to Do It Expo” and I don’t want to bother him.

Out of the trash basket and back to this blog . . .

Obviously, from the senders point of view, it was very important to have a good press release that had the four C’s — CATCHY, CLEAR, CONCISE, and CORRECT — in order to keep it out of the trash basket. Putting all the “go to” information right up top helped, too. I can’t tell you how many times Debbie Duespayer got ticked off because there was no location listed for an “Urgent Press Conference.”

That was then . . . this is now. The Internet has changed things. Debbie Duespayer is now Destiny Duespayer. She’s still working the overnight shift, but she’s reading e-mails pitches instead of opening envelopes.

That’s what we’ll talk about this week during the webinar Kivi and I are doing on Thursday called “How to Write a Press Release Reporters Will Love.” Be there. Or beware: Destiny may delete your e-release.

Michelle Murrain at Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Tech has posted this week’s edition of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. It’s a really interesting mix this week ranging from the economy and ethics to cause-related marketing and Twitter. Check it out here.

Next week, the Carnival will be hosted by Jason Dick at A Small Change - Fundraising Blog. The theme will be Ingredients to a Successful Capital Campaign. Details here if you want to submit a post.

Thanks to everyone who took the survey on which topics should be on the nonprofit marketing weekly webinar series schedule for this summer. Staff at more than 130 nonprofits voted and here are the top five webinar titles (schedule and registration pages coming soon):

- Must-Have Features for Nonprofit Websites

- How to Increase Traffic to Your Nonprofit Website

- Nonprofit Storytelling: How to Tell Your Nonprofit’s Best Stories (registration now open for May 14 webinar!)

- How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Campaigns

- Creating a Compelling Message

As promised, all five of these topics will be scheduled this summer, along with several other high-ranking topics, including “Easy and Effective Ways to Build Your E-Newsletter List,” “Best Practices for Nonprofit Email Newsletters,” and “Writing a Quick and Dirty Marketing Strategy for Your Nonprofit.”

If you are subscribed to this blog, you’ll be the first to know when registration opens.

Curious which topics were NOT of interest to nonprofit communicators? Here are the five lowest ranking topics on the survey, which included 40 different titles:

- How to Create Your Nonprofit’s Channel on YouTube

- Using Election-Year Politics to Get Publicity for Your Cause

- Pitching Your Story to Shows Like Oprah and Ellen

- Writing Refresher: Avoiding the Most Common Grammar Mistakes

- Crash Course in Using MS Publisher for Nonprofit Publications

Congrats to the following people who took the survey and are each receiving a free webinar pass (my five-year-old Ava randomly selected the record numbers).

Laura Harrington, Friends of Norris Cotton Cancer Center
Marcos Martinez, Entre Hermanos
Joanna Scott, Victory Ministries
Danielle Thompson, Mascoma Valley Health Initiative
Brian Winters, Star Island Corp.

I’m hosting this week’s edition of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, and I asked what people in the nonprofit sector were looking forward to (spring always puts me in that kind of mood). Here’s what some of your colleagues are eagerly anticipating . . .

Social Butterfly is looking forward to lots in life, the blogosphere, social marketing, and the nonprofit arena.

Marc at The Fundraising Coach is looking forward to speaking gigs in May.

Edith at Dream Think Act is looking forward to a poverty-free world.

Next week the Carnival will be hosted by Michelle Murrain at Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Tech.