Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

Searching for some good article ideas for your next nonprofit newsletter, blog post or website update? Here are 15 places you can look for article ideas.

1. At the receptionist’s desk. Ask whoever answers your organization’s main phone number for the top three questions they get from callers and turn the answers into newsletter articles.

2. In your PowerPoint files. Look at the presentations you’ve given or written for others to give. Pull out a slide or two and turn them into articles.

3. In your annual report. Odds are that most people who receive your nonprofit annual report won’t read it cover to cover. Pull out an excerpt about an accomplishment you are especially proud of and expand it into a newsletter article.

4. In your board minutes. What topical questions did your board members ask at the last meeting? If they are asking those questions, chances are others who are interested in your organization’s work would enjoy knowing your answers too.

5. In your newsletter archive. What did you write about this time last year? Can you freshen up an old article or provide a timely update on something you’ve covered before?

6. In the headlines. Look at the last week’s worth of headlines from your local newspaper. What issues are they covering and how are those news items related to your work?

7. In survey results. Are you querying your donors, clients, or members about the issues they care about (it’s a great idea)? If so, write an article related to one particular statistic generated by the survey.

8. In your “sent” email box. Look at the types of questions you are getting and answering over email and turn those into articles.

9. In your “saved” email folder. Look at the messages you are saving. Do they contain any information that your newsletter readers would enjoy?

10. In your desk calendar. Think about hooks tied into holidays and other special days on the calendar. June includes Father’s Day on the 17th and the first day of summer on the 21st.

11. On lists of special weeks and months. There’s a long list of designated special months. For example, June is Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, National Iced Tea Month, and Rebuild Your Life Month. Chase’s Calendar of Events is the ultimate source for all such occasions.

12. Out your office window. Let what you see outside inspire you, including the seasons. See my previous post on newsletter ideas for summer.

13. In a keyword research tool. Find new phrases related to your favorite topics. Try Google’s free Keyword Tool. For example, if you type in advocacy, it will return bill of rights, civil rights, community service, child care, domestic violence, and more. Alternate keywords like these can help you find new story angles for the same topics you usually cover.

14. In your web stats. Look at your website statistics and you’ll find what keywords people are using at the search engines that are directing traffic to your website. Take those phrases and write detailed articles on those topics.

15. In other nonprofit newsletters. Read newsletters from other nonprofits who work in your subject or geographic area for inspiration.

Where else do you look for article ideas? Share your favorite sources by leaving a comment.

Only 37% of nonprofits are tracking the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, according to a new survey by Nancy Schwartz at Getting Attention. This is, of course, a real shame, because tracking is what helps you figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how you can be more effective over time. The great news is that there are some very simple and cheap tools you can use to track your online marketing campaigns. In fact, most online marketing tools have tracking built into them — you are already paying for them. You just have to use them.

Websites

Any half-way decent hosting package will include a basic statistics package. Idealware just did a report on web analytic packages that’s definitely worth a read. If you are pressed for time and only want to track a few elements on a monthly basis, my top five would be

- Visits - the number of people looking at each page. This tells you the most popular pages on your site.
- Unique visitors - how many different people are visiting your site, regardless of how many times they returned.
- Referrers - where your visitors were before they came to your site. Are they finding you through Google, by typing in your URL directly, or by clicking on a link from someone else’s site?
- Click Path - where people come into your site, where they go, and where they leave. You can also look at top entry and exit pages, but the full click path gives you a better sense for how people typically use your site.
- Keywords - which words people are using in search engines to find your site (and conversely, which words are important to you that aren’t bringing people in).

Email Newsletters

You really should be using an email newsletter service like Intellicontact or Constant Contact (both of which I recommend) for your e-newsletters and not trying to send them out of Outlook or Thunderbird. More on that some other time. When you use a service like this, you get all kinds of great tracking data. Again, my top five to track would be

- Released or Sent Successfully - your total list minus bounced messages. This helps you track the quality of your list over time. The fewer bounces, the better.
- Open Rate - how many people are opening the email (HTML email only).
- Click Throughs - how many people are clicking on a link in the email. This shows they are reading it and taking action or looking for more information. You can also see which links they are clicking on.
- Forwards - how many people are forwarding your message to someone else.
- Unsubscribes - how many people are getting off your list. Don’t be alarmed if you regularly lose a few people. But if your unsubscribes spike, carefully examine what in that particular message sent people fleeing from your list.

Blogs

Why are you blogging in the first place? The answer will determine what you should be tracking. Register with Feedburner and Technorati to get whatever stats you need that your blogging platform doesn’t provide it. All of the stats above for websites also apply to blogs. In addition to those, you might also track

- Subscribers - how many people have affirmatively shown interest in your blog by subscribing to your RSS feed.
- Technorati Rank - where you rank in the greater blogosphere, as determined by the number and variety of links to your blog.

As you read this list, you may have said “Doh! How obvious!” But are you actually using all of these tools to the fullest? It’s like when I walk around my house on hot summer days looking for the source of that strange smell. After looking in every room for some kid-induced odor source, I usually end up saying, “Doh! It’s the neighbor’s barnyard!” I know it’s there, but it’s become part of the background, and I forget about it. Get these tools back into the foreground and your marketing campaigns will surely improve over time.

As the founder of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, I’m happy to see that the success of this carnival has inspired two of our participants to start their own carnivals. Sean Stannard-Stockton at Tactical Philanthropy started The Giving Carnival and Michele Martin at the Bamboo Project started the Wiki Carnival.

A quick web search will uncover the basics on starting a carnival (there’s even a new Blog Carnival Tips Blog). I’d like to offer some not-so-obvious tips.

1. Use BlogCarnival.com to manage your carnival. At first, I was updating my own list of past and future editions on my blog as well as the BlogCarnival list, and it was a pain. BlogCarnival has a widget now that lets you add their schedule to your blog. It works great — see it in action here. I highly recommend using BlogCarnival’s tools to manage your carnival. I update the Carnival on their site and the changes automatically appear on mine. Plus, it’s where everyone interested in carnivals will go, so you want to be listed there so new contributors and readers can find you easily.

2. Give your carnival its own feed. If your carnival will move around to other blogs, readers will easily lose track of it. I created a Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants category within my blog and when each edition of the Carnival is posted by the week’s host, I create a post on my blog in that category. Nothing goes into that category but the Carnival posts (not even this post).

I then created a separate feed at FeedBurner just for that category of my blog. This way, people who want the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants can get it each week without having to also subscribe to the rest of my blog or the blogs of all of our hosts. People who subscribe to my blog as a whole also get the Carnival, since it’s one of my categories. Readers could just check the Carnival home page or BlogCarnival.com each week, but a separate feed is much more reader friendly. As of today, 85 people have subscribed to the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants feed.

3. Create a central submission process, no matter who is hosting. Keeping track of a carnival can be tough for contributors too. If you use BlogCarnival.com, you’ll get a submission form page like this one for the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. I also recommend creating a separate email account just for your carnival. This way contributors will know exactly where to send their posts each week, even if they don’t remember who is hosting. Your BlogCarnival.com submission form results can also be sent there automatically. Then give your hosts access to the email account and they will have all the posts for that week in one place.

4. Create a contributors’ mailing list. We are all busy, and people need to be reminded about your Carnival deadlines. One way to do that is to create a contributors’ email list that people can subscribe to on their own. I send one message a week to the list, which currently has 36 subscribers, with a reminder about the deadline, who is hosting that week, and any theme for the week. We limit the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants to seven posts a week, so if a third of the people currently subscribed respond each week, the host has plenty to pick from. I use IntelliContact to manage this list.

5. Limit the number of posts per edition. Lots of carnivals print everything they receive each week, and if the goal of your carnival is passing out link love, then that’s great. But if you have a more specific goal in mind, like compiling the best of the blogosphere on a specific topic each week, you need to be more selective. Keeping the number of posts relatively small also makes hosting the carnival much easier. Readers also know that they are getting a manageable chuck of information to digest, instead of some massive link list they will never get through.

In closing, I want to give a shout out to The Tarheel Tavern, which is the first blog carnival I ever submitted to. The Tarheel Tavern is a carnival of North Carolina bloggers and inspired me to start the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. If you live in NC, please join us and if not, stop by the Tavern anyway — it’s always an eclectic group!

In December 2006, I taught a “Blogging for Nonprofits” workshop as part of Duke University’s certificate program in nonprofit management. You can access the course materials here: Kivi’s “Blogging for Nonprofits” Course.

Here is the course outline.

Blogging Basics

• What is a Blog?
• Blogging Lingo
• How Blogs are Different from Other Online Tools
• How Nonprofits Can Use Blogs
• When NOT to Blog
• Your Blogging Questions

The Five W’s and H of Blogging: How, Why, Who, What, When, and Where

• How: Setting Up Your Practice Blog
• Why: How Can a Blog Work for You?
• Who: Who Writes and Reads the Blog?
• What: Writing Good Blog Content
• When: Fitting Blogging In
• Where: Blogging Platforms

Review and Wrapup

____

The blogroll on the course site contains links to many great resources for nonprofit bloggers, as well as lots of example blogs to illustrate the points made in the course.

As I started to put the course together, I actually created two PowerPoint slides before hitting myself upside the head and asking, “I’m teaching about blogging. Why am I using PowerPoint, when I could use a blog?!?” Using the blog as the course lecture materials/e-handouts worked well since I was teaching in a computer lab where each student could pull up the blog on his or her own monitor. No one complained about the lack of paper handouts. Had I been in a typical classroom or conference room, it probably wouldn’t have worked as well.

I’d love feedback on the course blog from people who teach blogging, as well as nonprofit staff who are looking for these kinds of resources. You can leave a comment here or on the “Welcome” message on the course blog.

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. Remember to visit the Carnival home page to subscribe to the feed so you’ll know when each edition is published or to join the contributors’ mailing list for reminders about deadlines, themes, etc.

I also offer an especially warm welcome to four new contributors this week, who you’ll find in the first four posts.

On to the show . . .

Kevin Kennedy of Clay and Wattles (our first Canadian contributor) makes a strong case for why nonprofits, and especially activists, should switch to open source software in “Organic, cruelty-free, fair trade, green, CFC-free, low-fat, shade grown, free range, 100% post-consumer recycled computing or Software for Activists.”

Nedra Kline Weinreich at Spare Change explains how nonprofits can promote their issues by developing social marketing campaigns around movie or television programs in “Movie Marketing and Murderball.”

Heather Carpenter at Aspiration offers “Nonprofit Office Space Searching Tips.” If you are looking for new office space for the first time, Heather’s post will point you in the right direction.

Katie at Aridni offers “Weekend homework: dream up your squad quads.” This blog’s focus is on getting money to work for you, instead of the other way around. The message translates easily to nonprofit fundraising.

Ken Goldstein at the Nonprofit Consultant Blog asks “Foundation Relations: Is it what you do or who you know?” and answers that connections mean nothing and relationships are everything.

Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog continues his plea for nonprofits to be direct and honest with donors in “Passive-aggressive fundraising — just stop it!”

Leila Johnson at Data-Scribe Blog offers recommendations to give you a “Jump Start on Nonprofit Direct Mailings.” Print marketing is expensive and Leila’s tips will save you a few bucks.

And the Bonus Host Post . . .

This week I explain why writing your newsletter for just three people is a wise decision in “The General Public? Write for the People Who Matter”

I’ll host next week’s carnival here at Nonprofit Communications one more time before we start rotating it to other blogs. Next week we have our first theme, “Advice for New Executive Directors.” What would you tell someone hired for the first time as an executive director? Submit your blog post by Friday, June 23 at 8:00 pm ET to npc.carnival AT yahoo.com.

Many consultants who specialize in the nonprofit sector are offering fabulous advice and resources through their blogs. To help get that information out to more organizations, I am launching the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. Blog carnivals are traveling collections of the best blog posts of the week on a various topic (tips for nonprofits in this case). The carnival will start here at Writing911.com and then begin moving around to other consultants’ blogs.

To learn more about this carnival, visit the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants home page. From there, you can sign up for our contributor mailing list and you can also subscribe to the carnival feed to find out when and where new editions have been posted. You can also get a copy of the carnival badge to post to your own blog or website.

I am helping a nonprofit client set up a blog for the group’s annual conference and exposition. Since I’ve never created a blog for this purpose, I tried to find some info online about conference blogging. While there are a zillion posts from people blogging conferences they are attending, there are very few by the conference hosts themselves discussing their experiences about hosting an “official” event blog. Here is what I did find:

10 Tips for Extending Your Education Conference

Conference and Corporate Blogging as a Marketing Tool

Tips for Live Bloggers This one is for the bloggers at the event, but it’s also instructive for conference sponsors.