Nonprofit Communications

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!

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 . . .

Have you heard the one about the breast cancer patient on Twitter and the frozen peas yet? If so, you can skip the next paragraph and move on to why I think this is such a great lesson for do-it-yourself nonprofit communicators. If not, here’s the quick summary:

Susan Reynolds gets a breast biopsy and then a mastectomy. She is an avid social networker, so she’s tweeting and blogging the experience at Boobs on Ice. She posts a photo of herself easing the pain with a bag of peas on her breasts. Long story short, the crowd goes wild, she’s got people all over the place taking photos of themselves with bags of peas, and now there is a Frozen Pea Fund that’s raised over $7,000 for the American Cancer Society. I learned about this story from Craig Colgan, who wrote a great feature for the Washington Post called “How Frozen Peas Started A Movement: Cancer Patient’s Blog Builds Web Community,” which you can read on his blog. Oh, and this all took place in less than five weeks.

The lesson here is not how social networking lets you make friends and influence them to part with cash. We’ve seen tons of examples of that working. The big lessons are instead (1) be completely human and (2) let others run with your ideas. That’s how to build an online community that actually accomplishes something.

While I have never spoken with Susan, I seriously doubt that posting a photo of herself with frozen peas sticking out of her camisole was some calculated move to raise money. Instead, it was authentic, natural, and also a bit funny. In other words, it was completely human. And that’s what people respond to. They don’t respond to monolithic nonprofit organizations with mission statements and action plans. They respond to human beings.

Then, she let it take off. People started taking the pea photos. A online friend suggested donating the price of two bags of peas to breast cancer research. Another suggested setting up an actual fund to group the donations. And another, who just happened to be doing consulting on social media and working with the American Cancer Society brought it all together. Lots of people are doing lots of different things and something tells me Susan is not chained to her computer trying to micromanage it all. She’s got better things to do, like fight her breast cancer. She doesn’t need to do anything else but what she’s been doing all along on Twitter and her blog. It’s happening, in some ways now, without her.

My guess is that the being human part will be much easier for most nonprofit marketers than the letting go part. But if you are willing to run a bit of risk of people going completely off-message, you might find they come up with something that’s way better than you ever dreamed.

This afternoon at the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits Annual Conference, I attended another great session called “Social Media Technology: How to Raise Money, Recruit Volunteers, and Spread Your Message” by Chris Meade, COO of NPower, Charlotte Region.

NPower is a nonprofit consultancy that helps other nonprofits with technology. It has 13 affiliates around the U.S. Chris did an amazing job covering a huge topic in a little over an hour.

He opened the presentation with some general definitions and examples of what social media is and how it differs from traditional, linear communication. After going over some of the implications of using social media, Chris reminded everyone that social media is not a replacement for traditional forms of communication, but an add-on.

He broke down the field into four categories: Communications (podcasting, vlogs, blogs, rss, listservs), Organizing and Networking (event management, mapping, aggregators), Knowledge and Collaboration (wikis, bookmarking, discussion forums), and Hybrids (mashups, social shopping).

He then described the three ways that nonprofit can use social media.

(1) Raising Money: Friends asking friends for donations (sponsors for a 5K run), affinity shopping

(2) Recruiting and Engaging Volunteers: Friends getting others involved, self-service scheduling and participation (invitation management, meeting handouts), where knowledge is the volunteer’s contribution (support groups sharing stories and creating a body of experience and knowledge), training for staff, volunteers.

(3) Spreading the Message: Campaigning and advocacy, marketing and storytelling about mission and programs.

Next he shared some specific examples.

Komen effectively uses the “Friend to Friend” fundraising model for its walks/runs/events. You as a volunteer can use their template to ask friends to support you and you can chart your progress, including an honor roll of givers. You set a limited goal and your personal relationships help you meet it. They also do a ton of affinity shopping (all those pink products, the Garth Brooks Pink CD, etc.)

Kiva, the microlending network, lets donors lend to specific entrepreneurs in the developing world in very small amounts. At end of the loan period, you can get your money back. Default rate is less than 1%. It’s a very good way of taking wealth and helping other people on a one to one basis. The social media technology allows these very personal investments and connections to be made between people who are worlds away from each other. Volunteers have created a whole community around microlending.

wikiCancer — Allows people to create and edit the content of the site with stories and “what to do when diagnosed” tips. Wikis allow you to bring others in and compile resources and the latest thinking on an issue. You don’t have to wait for someone else to tell you the answer, because you are creating the answers yourself as a group.

Volunteermatch — A match-making site for nonprofits and volunteers that has grown into an online community, so you can hook up with other people who are interested in the same things you are.

NPower uses Sharepoint as a portal for its board, so they can share documents, calendars, etc. You don’t have to mail that board packet if everyone can easily access it online. Npower also uses Sharepoint as the CMS for their website.

Greenpeace is doing great work with viral videos on YouTube. (The hotel wireless blocked YouTube, so Chris couldn’t show the videos he wanted in the session, but I found them.) Share your message in 1-2 minutes. Well-linked videos allow you to dig deep and explore.

In closing, Chris offered these questions for nonprofits who are thinking about social media:

Is your audience online? More and more people will be, so it’s good to start now, even if your audience isn’t really there yet.

Are you willing to let others shape and morph your message?

Are you willing to share the “secret sauce?” You have to be willing to share strategy before it’s fully baked.

Do you have the time and interest to seed the process?

Chris suggests experimenting with social media as a new means of communication or volunteer engagement before using it as a fundraising tool. Move in slowly. Explore the various free sites, then procure and explore paid tools and technology that you can manage, once you have a good feeling for how it can work for you.

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)

When Emily at the Nonprofit Blog Exchange assigned the Camp ASCCA blog to me as part of this summer’s Nonprofit Blog Exchange Virtual Event, I was excited because I had already included it as a good example of how nonprofits can use blogs in my Blogging for Nonprofits course. This assignment from Emily gave me a good reason to revisit the blog and see what’s new.

Here are few things that I love about this blog, which is about the Alabama Special Camp for Children and Adults with disabilities:

–Tons of personal stories about campers, counselors and others who participate in the programs.

–Tons of video inserted into the blog posts.

–Very well integrated with other social networking sites, including Facebook and Flickr.

–The blog’s main page functions like a website home page in that it has lots of permanent links to the pages and information people want, like applications to attend the camp. It’s a good example of how to use a blog to effectively replace your typical nonprofit website, rather than just throwing the blog on to an existing static html site as an afterthought.

–It looks like the blog has undergone a nice redesign since I last visited and it looks much more streamlined.

The only thing that I think might be missing is a bit more personal information about the staff who are posting. I assume they want the blog to be about the campers and counselors, not about the full-time staff, but I’d welcome a little something more about the staff who post regularly.

Kudos to Camp ASCCA!