Nonprofit Blogger Q&A with One of My Favorites

Interplast’s blog is one my top favorites in the nonprofit world, because it does such a fabulous job of sharing success stories and letting readers behind-the-scenes, which are two of the best uses of blogs by nonprofits, in my opinion. (Here’s more on different ways nonprofits can use blogs.  Also see my Blogging for Nonprofits webinar happening this Thursday.)

Interplast provides free life-changing surgery for children and adults with clefts, disabling burns and hand injuries, and the blog shares the stories of the surgical volunteers and the people receiving care.

Before the holidays, I interviewed Liliana Vazquez, Interplast’s Communications and Technology Coordinator, about their blog. Apologies for just now getting around to posting it, and special thanks for Liliana and Interplast for generously sharing their perspective. Here’s the interview . . .

What did Interplast hope to get out of blogging?

It’s been an amazing tool for us. We really see it as one of our best tools to communicate with donors. We use Typepad and we blog through Flickr, so the pictures are tied to the stories. We also use the blog to announce what else is going on within the organization. We also answer questions that come in through comments.

The posts from surgical trips are written by the volunteers. How do the posts get online?

Our volunteers are doing the writing in their own voices and taking the photos. Since a lot of the countries we travel in don’t have good Internet connections and the volunteers are busy doing surgeries, we ask that they simply send us an email and attach the pictures. Blogging is such a foreign idea for many of the older volunteers, so we had to make it really simple for them, to convince them it would work. Now the volunteers love it too. They send the links to their families as a way to keep in touch while they are traveling.

How much editing do you do?

Outside of grammatical editing, we try not to edit them too much because they are writing from the heart, from their personal experiences. Sometimes the posts come in as stream of consciousness and we clean those up a little bit. We do edit the pictures, because we do get a lot of gory medical stuff.

A lot of it is not specifically written for the blog. We’ll take stories out of quick emails we get or from the back of napkins! Sometimes we’ll hear cute stories about kids donating and we’ll turn that into a blog post.

How many people contribute content to the blog?

We are relying on everyone to contribute: staff, volunteers, everyone who can. We ask people to keep their eyes open to everything going on around them and we pull in stuff from everywhere. It’s easy to ignore the every day, but a lot of impressive stuff is going on! We have over 100 people telling their stories on the blog.

How do you handle comments?

We don’t spend a lot of time on comments. We get lots of positive comments that don’t need a response. For those that do require a response, like a referral, we’ll contact the person directly. We haven’t had any bad experiences on the blog with comments, although we have had some people making inappropriate comments on photos on Flickr and we’ve deleted those and blocked those people.

How does the blog fit in with your other communications?

When we do an e-newsletter, we link to the blog. We also use blog content in the e-newsletter, our print newsletter, and in donor reports. If someone donates to a specific trip, we can acknowledge the donors in the posts about the trip on the blog and keep them updated on the trip. It’s also a great archive for us internally.

Are you considering any changes to the blog?

Interplast does more than surgical trips. We also empower and train local doctors. I’d like to give that part of what we do some more screen time.

What has surprised you about blogging?

I was surprised to see how the blog is being used to refer patients to us, which is also great. We’ve seen people who are traveling and meet people who need our help use the blog to put us in touch with those people. So it helps with our mission that way too.

Want to learn more about nonprofit blogging? Check out Blogging for Nonprofits, this week’s webinar.

Tags: Interplast, nptech
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Why Your Nonprofit Should Build Its Own Media Empire

Last week I gave a short talk at a statewide conference for the United Way. If I had to pick one slide that summed up my talk, it would be this one:

As Claire Meyerhoff, who was also on the panel, put it, you can spend a whole day writing a press release and trying to get a reporter to use it, and get nothing. Or you can spend that time creating your own content, using it in several different places, and having it work for you for months to come.

Nonprofits are no longer dependent on the media to get their messages out beyond their inner circles, and yet so many groups are still fretting about whether to double-space a press release. Traditional media still plays an important role, but it’s not what it used to be.

Instead of thousands of newspapers landing in the driveways of your potential supporters, you should be looking at ways to generate thousands of messages from members of your inner circle to their own inner circles, talking about your cause, using everything from email to social media to do it. The tools to make that happen are now easy and inexpensive. Anyone, or any nonprofit, can be a publisher, broadcaster, and media mogul.

I’ll be talking a lot more about this on Wednesday, February 11, during the webinar called “Online Marketing Basics for Nonprofits: From Email to Social Media.” During the webinar, I’ll help you sort through your online marketing options, emphasizing how they all fit together, and helping you see how they can help you form your own media empire.

For those of you who are really ready to dive into the social media components of this in particular, check out NTEN’s We Are Media wiki.

You might also find two additional webinars helpful: Blogging for Nonprofits on February 12 and Creating Online Evangelists on February 17 March 20. Single webinars are $35 and the All-Access Pass for 12 weeks is $97 (attend as many live webinars as you want and watch the rest as recordings).

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Trio of Online Marketing Webinars Coming in Feb. - Reserve Your Spot Now

Looking for an online marketing crash course for your nonprofit? I have a trio of three webinars just for you.

Online Marketing Basics: From Email to Social Media (Wednesday, February 11). We’ll start the series with an overview of online marketing that will help you put all of your options in perspective and give you some tips on coming up with a strategy that works for you. How often should you email your list? Should you be on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or some other site du jour? Should you blog? This webinar will give you the big-picture perspective you need to sort all of that out.

Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps, and Tales (Thursday, February 12). While it isn’t right for everyone, I confess to being a huge advocate of nonprofit blogging. It’s an easy way to connect more personally with your supporters, to let them behind-the-scenes, and to engage in conversations with your professional community — not to mention that it also improves your search engine rankings. If you are ready to explore blogging for your organization, join me for this webinar.

Creating Online Evangelists: How to Excite and Motivate Your Supporters (Tuesday, February 17). If you want to move beyond the basics and really start to support your biggest fans — individuals who want to advocate for you and your cause — you’ll want to hear what guest speaker John Kenyon has to say during this webinar. Learn how nonprofits are using Web 2.0 and social networking in particular to empower their current supporters and to reach entirely new groups of people — and how you can do it too.

Each webinar is $35 and includes as many people in your office as you can fit around one computer. Want to attend all three? Then the All-Access Pass is the way to go. For $97, you can attend these three webinars and all of the others we host in a 12-week period. That also gets you access to our Webinar Archive, so you can view recordings whenever you like, whether you attended live or not.

I hope you’ll join us!

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Blogging: If I’d Only Known Then What I Know Now

Thinking about starting a blog in 2009?

Before the holidays, I asked some nonprofits to share with me their blogging lessons learned. Here are some of the comments I heard through  NTEN’s Nonprofit Blogging Affinity Group List. (NTEN groups are a great resource, by the way, and this same list just had a great discussion about some of the best nonprofit blogs online. You’ll have to join NTEN and the Blogging group to learn more).

From Mike Sweitzer-Beckman: “I run a blog in my spare time for progressive young adult Catholics. I wish I had known ahead of time that we would need not just writer’s guidelines, but commenting guidelines. We post them on our site now at www.youngadultcatholics-blog.com. The other thing I wish I had known was how to implement advertising. We just haven’t thought it through. There are more and more people that are requesting that we put their website information up, but we’re hesitant to do it without some guidelines and parameters, not to mention rates.”

From Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog: “I wish I had know about Feedburner so I could have tracked my subscriber metrics from the beginning and consolidated by RSS feeds. I also wish I had a benchmarking process so I could measure and track and improve what I was doing.”

From Barbara Christensen of Conservation Northwest: “If only I’d known how hard it would have been to convince the rest of the staff a blog was worth the effort, I would have compiled more research on industry standards, conversion rates, etc, as well as some anecdotal stories of blogs working for other environmental advocacy NGOs (I see tons of info
on web 2.0 successes for non-profit service oriented groups, but so little for folks like us who don’t offer so concrete a product as people served or acres purchased).”

For me personally, I wish I had given more thought to the difference between post categories and tags. I’ll blame part of my confusion on the earlier versions of Wordpress, where they were one and the same. Now that Wordpress supports both, I have a list of categories a mile long that could really be knocked down to a dozen categories, with the rest as tags. Fixing that is on my blogging to-do list.

I also wish I had taken an hour or two to learn how CSS really works so I could have tweaked my blog templates more easily. I ended up learning as I went along, but I think I could have saved myself lots of hours in the end had I just sat down and worked through some tutorials. (I like to play around too much to pay someone to make all those little changes for me.)

How about you? What blogging lessons have you learned the hard way? Leave a comment to add your voice to the conversation.

P.S. I’m teaching an intro to nonprofit blogging on February 12 — Get the details on Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps, and Tales.

Tags: nptech
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What Type of Blog Should Your Nonprofit Write?

This Wednesday’s Webinar: Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps and Tales October 29, 2008 1:00 p.m. Eastern (10:00 a.m. Pacific) Get the details and register

Let’s assume for a minute that your nonprofit should write a blog in the first place (more on that question some other time). What kind of blog should you write?

You’ll find different categories of blogs, including a color-coded version and even a debate over whether we should categorize blogs at all.

I certainly think you can mix and match blog types, and I bet most  successful blogs do. But I also think that it’s helpful to have one primary direction in mind and to categorize nonprofit blogs based on what your organization hopes to achieve by blogging and how you want your nonprofit to be perceived by your blog’s readers.

Your blog must be part of a larger communications strategy, and thinking of your blog in terms of your marketing goals will help ensure that integration. Take a look at these six goals and the kind of blog you would write as a result.

If you want to be known as a go-to source on a particular topic  . . .

Write a news blog where you summarize and analyze the latest reports and commentary mostly from other sources, but also from your own organization. This kind of blog will include lots of links to other websites and blogs, with a great system of categories and tags to keep everything organized. These blogs are a mix of “reviewers” and “pointers.” This kind of blog is also a great way to combat your own information overload and to organize all the public stuff that your organization wants to keep track of. If you are big into social bookmarking (e.g. Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon), this is your kind of blog.

If you want to be known as the “voice” on your issue . . .

Write an advocacy blog where you regularly explain situations that need changing and help us explore why your approaches are the best ways to bring about those changes.  These nonprofit blogs help bring readers along by educating them on the issues, explaining the various options and positions out there (e.g. what works and what doesn’t) and helping us “see the light.” These blogs can range from policy wonk to zealous champion, but are very issue-oriented. They are mostly “producers” with some “reviewer” and “pointer” thrown in here and there.

If you want to be known as a resource, problem solver, or technical assistance provider . . .

Build a toolbox blog that’s heavy on how to’s, lists, case studies, interviews, and success stories. Show people how to solve their own problems, how to effect change for your cause, and where to go for more help and ideas. Give advice that empowers people to help you change the world.

If you want donors to better understand the need for and impact of your organization . . .

Create a storytelling blog where you share lots of anecdotes about the people you are helping, the partners you work with, the volunteers and donors who help you, and the staff  and board who keep everything moving forward. I also sometimes call this the “insider” blog because much of the storytelling is about what happens behind the scenes, including the little victories and struggles along the way that may not be press release worthy, but still shed light on the realities of your work. Through stories, you are really letting donors see the world through your eyes and giving them an insider’s perspective.

If you want to build confidence in and support for your organization’s decisionmaking, leadership, and approaches . . .

Write a CEO/Executive Director blog, where the top executive for the organization writes about the nonprofit’s work, with a personal flair, in his or her own voice. This can be equally effective for large institutions that need to put a human face back on their work and for small or new organizations that need to build up trust and credibility with funders and partners. These blogs are also good venues for talking about the big picture and strategic decisionmaking. They don’t have to be written by the CEO per se, but are typically written by someone with significant authority within the organization.

If you want to capture your staff’s passion for their work without having an “official blog” . . .

Encourage staff to write professional life blogs. These blogs are technically personal blogs, but the content includes lots of information about the staff member’s work life and profession. They can be hosted on personal domains or on organizational domains, depending on the mix and just how much influence the organization will have over the content. These blogs are often focused on one particular niche within the larger field that a nonprofit works in. Sometimes they can go with the person when they leave the nonprofit and other times they stay with the position itself.

I can hear the screaming now . . . WHERE ARE THE EXAMPLES? I am leaving off examples on purpose for now, because I want to see if these categories ring true for you without placing specific visions in your mind. Do the nonprofit blogs you write and read fit these categories? Which nonprofit blogs fit into which categories? Which don’t? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think and what examples you’d suggest for the various categories. I’ll do a follow-up post where I refine these categories based on your comments and add links to example blogs I’m thinking of.

Learn more during this week’s webinar, Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps, and Tales on Wednesday.

Tags: nptech, wearemedia
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Are You Getting This Blog Via Email? Consider a Reader

Several people have unsubscribed from this blog recently citing “too many updates” — all of them were receiving the feed via email. If you are getting the email version, but aren’t happy with the amount of email it’s creating in your inbox, please consider changing your subscription from email to an RSS reader.

RSS readers allow you to subscribe to many blogs at the same time and have all of the posts grouped together (”aggregated”) in one place, instead of your email box. Google Reader, Bloglines, and Netvibes are three popular RSS readers with other subscribers of this blog. Using these free services allows you to read blog posts on your own schedule, but without having to visit each and every blog separately and without creating more email to sort through.

Once you’ve got your account established, you can easily return to the blog homepage and get the feed. Just look for the little orange logo with the two curved lines. Put that link into your reader and you’re done!

Tags: feed, reader, RSS
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It’s Reader Appreciation Day: Free Training for You

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 . . .

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I Heart My Readers - Win Free Annual Webinar Pass

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 . . .

More Goodies: Get Kivi's Nonprofit Marketing Tips E-Newsletter (2-3 times per month)