Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

Which Way Do I Take the Webinar Schedule? Tell Me Which Topics You Like Most

I need your help deciding which new webinars to put on the Nonprofit Marketing Guide schedule for November and December. Do me a quick favor and rank 10 possible topics from 1 - 10, with 1 = most interesting to you and 10 = least interesting.

Here’s the survey.

The top three topics will definitely make it on to the schedule by the end of 2008.

I’ll give away five free webinar passes to a random selection of people who complete the survey.

Thanks for your help!

Media maven Claire Meyerhoff and I are officially launching our Blog Talk Radio & Podcast, Magic Keys Radio, this Friday at 1:00 p.m.!

Here’s the link to listen live, along with the call-in number. You can also get the recording there after the show. This week’s topic is Press Release Dos and Don’ts. We’d love, love, love to hear from you with your great questions about getting the media’s attention.

Magic Keys Radio will be a weekly live radio show on Fridays from 1:00 - 1:30 p.m. Eastern where we’ll share tons of great tips — the “Magic Keys” unlock all the secrets of nonprofit marketing. So put us in your calendar now and bookmark and/or subscribe to our blog or our BlogTalkRadio page. We’ll always save time for caller questions, so feel free to call in whether your question is directly related to that week’s topic or not — all nonprofit marketing questions are welcome!

We’ve been not-so-secretly practicing the show this summer, with three shows now available as podcasts. You can listen to them anytime over the web or download them to your mp3 player or iPod. Get the details and the links on our Magic Keys Radio blog.

Here’s what’s coming up in future shows:

Friday, August 29, 2008, 1:00 - 1:30 p.m. Eastern
Magic Keys Radio: Nonprofit Press Releases - What Works, What Doesn’t

Details/Listen

Friday, September 5, 2008, 1:00 - 1:30 p.m. Eastern
Magic Keys Radio: Telling Great Stories about Your Nonprofit’s Work

Details/Listen

Friday, September 12, 2008, 1:00 - 1:30 p.m. Eastern
Magic Keys Radio: Hosting “the Best Party in Town” for Your Nonprofit, featuring special guest Gail Perry

Details/Listen

Friday, September 19, 2008, 1:00 - 1:30 p.m. Eastern
Magic Keys Radio: Get to the Point with Great Taglines and Messages, featuring special guest Nancy Schwartz

Details/Listen

Here are a few items I’ve found particularly interesting lately:

Community Media Workshop has posted some Myths and Realities to Nonprofit Communications. Do you agree with the myths and realities? I may come up with a list of my own . . .

The Prospecting section of the Chronicle of Philanthropy printed a draft direct appeal letter from a first-time fundraiser and asked for comments on it. If you can skip over the whining about it raising money for a religious organization, you’ll find some great tips in the comments.

Common Knowledge is sharing the results on an online fundraising strategy it calls Rapid Donor Cultivation (free white paper download with registration). It explains how they increased conversion of newsletter subscribers to donors for one nonprofit by 83%. (Thanks to Prospecting for the tip.)

Here is yet another example from Beth Kanter about how you can use a large online social network to raise money quickly. Be sure to click through Beth’s slides at the bottom of this post for some of the secrets to her success. Here’s another one: she only asks for $10 per person, which is very doable if you care about the person asking, even if you don’t really care about their cause beyond “oh, that’s nice.”

For Impact shows you how to hone your message down to just six words.

Still don’t get Twitter? Look at how some associations are using Twitter at Association Marketing Springboard.

Katya Andresen at Nonprofit Marketing Blog shares some great tips on using photos online.

And here is my favorite of the bunch, from Donor Power Blog: Are Your Donors an “Uncontacted Tribe”? This analogy is so hilarious because it’s so true for too many nonprofits. Love it. Will probably steal it for a presentation (with due credit to the brilliant Mr. Brooks, of course).

Guest Blogger Rebecca Jamison

Last week I wrote a post criticizing the Special Olympics’ decision to use a movie boycott to launch a campaign against the use of the word “retard.” The post was picked up by the Chronicle of Philanthropy, where it received quite a few comments on all sides of the debate (some obviously from Special Olympics insiders, though they did not identify themselves that way). I asked Rebecca Jamison, a big movie buff, a big sister to a Special Olympics athelete, and one of my best friends, for her take on the issue. Here’s what she has to say about the use of movie boycotts as nonprofit advocacy and about this specific boycott of Tropic Thunder by the Special Olympics.

~Kivi

When I first heard there was a boycott called by the Special Olympics against Tropic Thunder, my first thoughts went back to two previous film boycotts - the late 1980s boycott by religious conservatives of The Last Temptation of Christ and the 1990s boycott by gay activists of Basic Instinct.

Now I guess the boycotts achieved something in that I remember them, but not in glowing or effective terms. The Last Temptation boycott seemed very ill advised to me at the time and I was a junior in a Kansas Church of the Brethren founded college! This was a Martin Scorsese film adaptation of a novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, the same guy who wrote the beloved Zorba the Greek. I read the book and found it moving and helpful in interpreting the life of Jesus and appreciating all the more what he may have faced, experienced as a mortal man asked to fulfill an incredible destiny. The Devil, as described in the Matthew, Mark and Luke, did tempt Jesus. Why a dramatization of another temptation was wrong or should be banned, I never understood.

It reminds me of the sentiments that led to the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. For in his Booker Prize winning novel, Satanic Verses, Rushdie envisioned the Prophet Mohamed also dealing with the Devil’s temptations. Many Americans thought that the reaction of Iranian followers of Islam was absurd. Interestingly the fatwa and the Last Temptation boycott were both in 1988-89.

And Basic Instinct, what is there to say about that boycott? Do folks now even remember there was a controversy? Leftist liberals in San Francisco took exception to gay characters being represented as serial killers. They’d had enough of it, with earlier films such as Cruising with Al Pacino, The Eyes of Laura Mars with Faye Dunaway, and The Fan with Lauren Bacall to name a few. Gay=killer in too many films and the 1990s boycott was against this stereotype.

However, the Basic Instinct boycott didn’t work; it did not curtail the movie’s box office or derail the career of its two stars, Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas. Ironically, Sharon Stone is now a huge gay icon. If anything I think it increased interest in “alternative” lifestyles. I am probably one of five people who remember there was a boycott.

So Kivi asked me to contribute to this debate on Tropic Thunder because I have a brother who is mentally and physically challenged, and has several Special Olympic gold and silver medals adorning his bedroom wall. Terry has a rare disorder that is yet to be defined as familial or non-familial dysautonomia. The genetic test is at the lab as I type.

Has he ever been called the “R” word? Not in my presence. How would I feel were he were called that? Livid of course. But my thoughts would then steer to the uneducated, unenlightened status of the person wielding the insult, not to the disadvantaged person who received it, be it my brother or someone else. I don’t like the “R” word, but I personally do not think it historically or socially is equal to the “N” word.

And then there is Tropic Thunder. I watched this film in a New York City Upper East Side movie theatre, a bastion of intellectual liberalism if there is one, except perhaps LA from where most of the characters in the film hail. The NYC audience laughed at the “R” word’s usage between Robert Downey, Jr. and Ben Stiller as they discussed why Stiller didn’t win an Oscar, let alone got a nomination–Because he went “full r-tard” whereas other winners only had versions of the disability.

The audience around me laughed — I didn’t but I was watching, critiquing for this write up. Otherwise, I might’ve laughed. Why? Tropic Thunder is a satire, which all too often Americans just do not get. It seems too French or something. Satire is, and I borrow this definition from the Random House Unabridged Dictionary: the use of irony, sarcasm, ridicule, or the like, in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice, folly, etc. [emphasis added].

The characters use of the word in Tropic Thunder demonstrated how utterly stupid, shallow and callous they were, not only in using it but in the approval of others from their community, e.g. Hollywood or the film/theatrical community in accepting its use. The use of the “R” word in Tropic Thunder was meant to point out that even in liberal Hollywood or New York, where people trip over their leftist sentiments, some words and ideas are still, wrongly, accepted, like the “R” word. The whole film is a critique of the ludicrousness of the Hollywood lifestyle and its’ values.

Now as to Kivi’s point that the boycott was perhaps ill advised. I now have to wonder, was it? I originally saw her point of view recalling the two other films mentioned earlier and was dismayed at the vitriol of the comments she received to her column questioning the efficacy of a boycott. But here we are talking about the use of the word. And that generally is the most a boycott can realistically expect to do-get us to talking.

Maybe, just maybe Ben Stiller who has been working on this project for 10 years wanted us to do that all along-see Hollywood for how insufferably frivolous it is. And to stop idolizing the idiotic people who work there. Or is that giving him too much credit? Let’s just be thankful its out in the open and we can now proclaim the use of the word Retard is obnoxious for everyone be it LA or New York or Kansas.

So denounce the word– not a satiric movie or Kivi for raising a question. Because if you have done the latter too, I’m afraid you’ve missed Ben Stiller and Kivi Miller’s points entirely.

Not sure where to begin or where to head next with your online marketing? Next week’s webinar will help.

I’m teaching “Online Marketing Basics for Nonprofits: From Email to Social Media” next Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern (10:00 a.m. Pacific).

It’s a one-hour webinar and for $35, you can gather everyone around a computer monitor and speakerphone, listen to the webinar together, and then afterwards, discuss what you learned and how to apply it your nonprofit’s communications work.

Here’s what a few people who attended this webinar in April said about it:

“A great primer that cleared up many points of confusion I had. I feel like I understand this all much better and have a basis to continue exploration in different directions. Definitely worth both the time and money!” ~ California

“This was so helpful. You helped with many questions I had and I learned a lot of new things too!” ~ Florida

“Well done. Fast paced, yet not too fast. Lots of useful information and tips. Looking forward to next one.” ~ Alaska

During the webinar, I’ll help you make sense of all of your various online marketing options by showing you how they all fit together and explaining the important differences between so-called Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

You’ll get tips on how to sort through what’s best for your nonprofit, so you’ll know where to start. You’ll also get a solid understanding of where you can take your online marketing strategy over time.

Learn more and register here.

Want to attend, but have a schedule conflict? Go ahead and register, and you’ll get a link to the recording that you can watch for up to two weeks after the live event. Or get the All-Access Pass and review recordings whenever you want. You can follow-up with any questions you have for me directly via email.

This is also the best option if you live outside the U.S. or Canada and don’t want to pay for the international long-distance call. The toll-free line works only for people in the U.S. or Canada.

UPDATE 8/20/08: The Chronicle of Philanthropy picked up this post. Please feel free to comment here or there, but do participate in the conversation! I’ll respond to comments in both places. ~ Kivi

Advocates for the intellectually disabled, led by Special Olympics, are boycotting the movie Tropic Thunder because of the use of the word “retard” in the movie. The boycott has received a fair amount of press coverage, but I learned that they are simultaneously launching a “Change the Conversation . . . Stop Using the R-Word” campaign only when I searched online for their official press release about the movie. They believe the R-word is similar to the N-word and should be considered hate speech.

I think the “Stop Using the R-Word” campaign is a great idea and support it wholeheartedly, but using a Tropic Thunder boycott to launch it was a big tactical communications mistake, in my opinion.

Predictably, the new campaign isn’t getting much press coverage; only the movie boycott is. A Google search for “Special Olympics protest Tropic Thunder” gets 33,000 hits; “Special Olympics Tropic Thunder r-word.org” gets only 258 and many of those are Special Olympics sites.

By linking the campaign to a movie boycott, Special Olympics comes off as a bunch of humorless finger waggers, which makes them very easy for the public to ignore. People don’t like to be made to feel guilty about laughing at a very funny movie that’s getting great reviews from the nation’s top film critics.

But the real point here is that Tropic Thunder is an intense satire of the movie industry. Who delivers the line in question, “Never go full retard”? Robert Downey Jr. in BLACKFACE for crying out loud! The African-American community is talking about Downey’s performance, naturally, but you don’t see the NAACP protesting. Downey’s performance isn’t about trying to mock black people; it’s about mocking actors who will do anything, no matter how distasteful, for a chance at an Oscar nomination and audience adoration.

The whole R-word discussion revolves around Ben Stiller’s character’s attempt to redeem his career by playing “Simple Jack” — and his disappointment in not getting an Oscar nomination for doing it. The Simple Jack storyline in the movie shows us just how lame it is for actors to portray disabled people so superficially. Other subplots, including whether the characters played by Tom Cruise and Matthew McConaughey will let Stiller’s character die in the jungle to cash in on the insurance, also skewer the Hollywood industrial complex.

So what could Special Olympics and their coalition have done instead to capitalize on this huge movie without coming off like a bunch of whiners?

How about something that’s as equally creative, sharp, and satirical as the movie itself? What about coming up with a faux “Actor’s Guide to Playing a Retard” that puts the advocates’ issues with Hollywood out there in a stark yet humorous and intelligent way? Or what about a faux thesaurus of more acceptable slurs than the word “retard”?

Yes, these are both very edgy concepts that would demand a great deal of smart, creative talent to produce and near-perfect execution. Like all satire, including the movie, they could be very easily misunderstood. But the payoff could be huge. I’m certain they would have received much more press coverage and ultimately lots more support for the “Stop Using the R-Word” campaign than a lame movie boycott.

Of course, launching an edgy campaign takes lots of guts, which is not really in great supply in the nonprofit communications world. We are often too willing to trade off reaching new people and touching them more deeply for playing it safe with a staid message that’s sure to offend no one.

But in cases like this, I think it’s much better to fight fire with fire. Make me laugh at something outrageous and I’ll remember you and your message much longer than this movie will be in theaters, and infinitely longer than the chanting at the movie protest. Tropic Thunder is a Blunder? C’mon . . . nonprofits can do a whole lot better than that.

P.S. I’ve asked one of my BFFs, Rebecca Jamison, for her take on this topic. Rebecca is a huge movie fan (NEVER challenge her to a movie trivia contest!) and her little brother Terry is physically and mentally disabled. She’ll write a guest post for us next week. Until then, leave your thoughts here by clicking on “Read Comments.”

With the end of summer approaching and a busy fall right around the corner, it’s a good time to look at some of the trends in the nonprofit sector. How does your experience mesh with what these bloggers are seeing? Leave a comment and take part in the conversation.

It’s All About Social Media

The biggest trend (or at least the one people are talking most about) is how nonprofits can use social media. Michelle Murrain at Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology admits she was rather curmudgeonly about social media initially, but now that a broader range of people are using it (not just 20-something and tech geeks), she believes social media will be a major part of online communications, thus nonprofits need to be there.

Just take a look at all the panel titles related to nonprofits and social media being considered for next year’s SXSW conference on Beth’s Blog. Jordan Viator at Connection Cafe highlights several great case studies on how nonprofits are putting social media to work for good and Norman Reiss at Nonprofit Bridge discusses the concept of groundswell - where people use technology like social media to connect directly, rather than going through traditional institutions.

What’s Happening in Fundraising

Jason Dick at A Small Change - Fundraising Blog applauds the trends of multi-year grants and more strategic giving by foundations. Phil Cubeta at Gift Hub also sees some big trends in philanthropy, including the role financial advisers play in gift-making decisions.

Randal Mason at Fundraising Breakthroughs was surprised to learn just how big the giving circles concept has become.

Nonprofits who work with the elderly, disabled, and other groups that have traditionally relied on subsidized housing can expect some big changes in how they are funded as government gets out of the housing business, says Jane at FIO Partners Perspectives.

What’s Not Hot, But Should Be?

Katya Andresen at Nonprofit Marketing Blog says great photos on nonprofit websites should be trend, even thought it’s not yet.

Melanie Guin at Adventures in Good Governance says strategic planning, not good intentions, is what’s needed in the nonprofit sector.

Aaron Hurst at Pro Bono Junkie’s Blog says that the nonprofit sector needs to invest more into getting good data, rather than relying on thin, faux data that creates misleading conclusions.

This is the first edition of the new format for the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. You’ll find the same great roundups as always, but now just twice a month. The September 2 edition will be hosted by A Small Change, with the September 15 edition at FIO Partners Perspectives. See you there!

Danielle Denhardt with the Fancy Cats Rescue Team is working on the group’s annual report and had this question for me:

“When we list the Board of Directors, do we list the people who were on the Board during the FY on which we are reporting, or do we list the current Board members? We generally have elections in January, so the new Board is in place before the annual report is produced.”

When your board year and fiscal year don’t match, which is common for a variety of reasons, I recommend listing the boards for both years in your annual report. The board that presided over the accomplishments you mention should be listed, but readers will also be interested in your current board — the one sitting when they read the annual report — thus my reasoning for including both. (Same goes for staff lists too, by the way).

If it just doesn’t make sense to include two full lists, because of space or duplication concerns, you can combine them into one list and then use an asterisk or other symbols by the names to note FY 2007 only or FY 2008 only, or served both years — whatever makes the most sense given how many people actually served when.

Here’s an example.

Say your board year runs January-December, but your fiscal year is July - June to match your state government’s budget year. The text on your annual report accomplishments should match your fiscal year budget details. But since your fiscal year starts and ends in the middle of board terms, you really have two different boards serving during a single fiscal year. So, you might have board lists that look something like this.

2007 Calendar Year Board of Directors

Jane Anderson
Robert Brown
Frank Evans
Sally Jones
John Smith

2008 Calendar Year Board of Directors

Meredith Ayers
Frank Evans
Craig Freeman
Sally Jones
John Smith

Option #1 would be to include both of these lists as is and let readers deduce who was actually serving on the board during which parts of the fiscal year (before and after January 2008 in this example). The advantage here is that it’s easy to see who is on the board right now, as we are reading the report in late 2008. But it takes up more space.

Options #2 and #3 would combine the two lists, with the goal of saving space and making it more clear who served during the fiscal year.

FY 2007-2008 Board of Directors

Jane Anderson*
Meredith Ayers+
Robert Brown*
Frank Evans
Craig Freeman+
Sally Jones
John Smith

* served in 2007 only
+served in 2008 only

Option 3 would be another variation, where every name is tagged in some way

FY 2007-2008 Board of Directors

Jane Anderson*
Meredith Ayers+
Robert Brown*
Frank Evans*+
Craig Freeman+
Sally Jones*+
John Smith*+

* served in 2007 (first part of fiscal year)
+served in 2008 (second part of fiscal year)

Which format you use really depends on how big your board is, how much overlap you have between years, how much space you have in your annual report, and how important you think it is to clearly match your board with your actual fiscal year.

What Else Belongs in Your Annual Report?

If you aren’t sure, download a copy of my e-book, “How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report,” for $29.99. This version of the guide explains how to write a traditional annual report of 8 pages or more.

I’m currently revising the e-book to include a section on shorter annual reports (2 and 4 pages) and alternative formats like PowerPoints and videos. Once those sections are added later this fall, the price will go up, so if you are most interested in the traditional format, get your copy at the lower price today.