This blog is all about do-it-yourself nonprofit communications and marketing. I love helping small and medium-sized nonprofits communicate more effectively with their members, donors, volunteers and other supporters, so that together, we can all make the world a better place. I do that as a blogger, trainer, coach and consultant.
I believe that even the smallest nonprofit staffs with the most modest budgets can achieve tremendous results through savvy marketing and communications. I hope this blog and my online marketing training and other resources encourage you to do just that, while helping you grow personally as a nonprofit marketer and communications professional.
Here’s a tasty mix of links that I think you’ll find interesting or helpful as you build support for your good cause . . . Happy Friday!
The next edition of the Nonprofit Blog Carnival (founded by yours truly) is coming up and the theme is nonprofit technology. Here’s how to submit your blog post (deadline today!). I’ll send you the link when the Carnival is posted next week.
Nancy Schwartz has opened up nominations for the 2009 Tagline Awards. A strong tagline does double-duty, extending your organization’s name and mission, while delivering a focused, memorable and repeatable message to your base. Enter your tagline and Nancy will send you a free copy of the fully updated 2009 Nonprofit Tagline Report later this year. It’s the only complete guide to building your org’s brand in 8 words or less — filled with how-tos, don’t-dos and models. You can now follow Nancy’s tagline award news on Twitter at @orgtaglines.
Katya Andresen provides a nice summary of the report written by Beth Kanter and Allison Fine on the lessons learned about fundraising through social media from the Giving Challenge that the Case Foundation sponsored with Parade Magazine last year. I’m adding the full report to my reading pile.
Katya has also had some great posts lately on how nonprofits can tell better stories. Check out this and this.
The Cone Nonprofit Power Brand 100 is the first public ranking in the United States to value nonprofit organizations by more than financial standing alone. Which nonprofit brands top the list? YMCA, Salvation Army, and United Way are the top three.
New to the nonprofit tech world? Heather Carpenter has created a great all-in-one-place intro to the field (and challenged me to do the same for nonprofit marketing! I’m working on it.)
So you are checking your web analytics, right? But not sure what the heck to do with them? FutureNow offers you some action steps. This is written for a commercial site, but nonprofits can still learn from these suggestions.
In the Cool Tools Department, we have KnowEm, which lets you check the availability of a username on 120 popular social media sites. Once you set up your presence on a few sites, you’ll see the merits of using the same username.
Posted by Kivi Leroux Miller on Apr 3, 2009 in Mixed Links
Here are some items I’ve bookmarked to share with you.
Shannon, a new director of communications at a nonprofit, has decided to blog the first 100 days of his new job, using “The First 100 Days in Your New Nonprofit Marketing Job” e-book I released in January as a guide. Naturally, I think this is extremely cool and encourage others to do the same! I’ll add Shannon’s experiences and others I hear about to the e-book next time I revise it.
There’s new research on who leaves bequests to charity in their wills (this was especially interesting since we just did a webinar on starting a planned giving program). Bottom line according to this research: go after people without kids.
Web useability guru Jakob Nielsen has released some research showing how bad nonprofit websites negatively affect online donations. Donors said they wanted to know the organization’s mission, goals, objectives, and work and also how it uses donations and contributions. Nielsen also points out some “donation killers.”
Happy Friday! Here are some “Mixed Links” - my version of a Friday cocktail hour of refreshing stuff for nonprofit communicators.
Using Social Media (and Looking Good While Doing It)
First and foremost, I ask you to contribute to the Nonprofit Technology Network’s Scholarship Fund to get underfunded nonprofits to the Nonprofit Technology Conference in April. Executive Director Holly Ross is putting it all on the line by letting contributors decide which of three somewhat humiliating tasks she will perform, including a remake of Beyonce’s “Put a Ring on It” video. That Holly is a much braver woman than I am! Go girl! Check out her video request below (which itself is a great example of a fundraising plea to your constituents!) and her update practicing her moves. The deadline for the matching gift from Convio is next week, so please give a little something today and you’ll get to vote on what Holly does.
Josh Koster explains Al Franken’s online ad buys, and in the process, shows how you can use keywords to reach particular types of audience groups (also via the Social Marketing listserv). For example, if want to reach farmers, buy ads related not to your issue, but to what they are already searching on like “farm supply” and “feed store.”
Getting Your Act Together - Especially in This Economy
Earlier today, Claire Meyerhoff and I hosted Magic Keys Radio on fundraising auctions, featuring Matt Holiday, an expert benefit auctioneer. I learned so much, I see a webinar in our future! For now, you can listen to the podcast below or here. (Sidebar to those of you who aren’t exactly sure what a podcast is: It’s just an audio recording that you can subscribe to if you want, like a blog, so you can get future editions too automatically. But you can also just listen to a single edition if that’s all you want).
Generosity as a Marketing Strategy
Check out this post by Beth Kanter - be sure to click through the embedded slideshow. It’s easy to see how this can work in the for-profit world, especially for those of us who are social entreprenuers. I’m still thinking about the implications for the nonprofit world (other than cause marketing partnerships with businesses), since most nonprofits already give so much away as part of their basic missions. I’ll post more on this concept of generosity as a nonprofit marketing strategy soon . . .
Have a great weekend! I’ll be busy trying to keep my family from eating all the Girl Scout Cookies we are supposed to be delivering in the next week. (I’m toying with writing a post about my problems with Girl Scout cookie marketing . . .)
Claire Meyerhoff and I will be talking about pitching - elevator pitches, pitching your story to the media, etc. - on today’s edition of Magic Keys Radio at 1:00 p.m. Eastern (10:00 a.m. Pacific). The half-hour show is live and you can call in your questions over the phone or send them in via chat. Immediately after the show, you can download it as a podcast.
Elevator pitches are also the topic for next week’s free webinar on Wednesday, February 4. Registration is required, and about 80 nonprofits have signed up so far. Get the details here and join us.
Now on to Mixed Links - great resources, ideas, and commentary for nonprofit communicators:
PotPieGirl talks about her five favorite free keyword research tools. Don’t know what your keywords are? It’s hard to do successful online marketing without them. (Thanks for MarketingProfs for the tip.)
On Your Email Marketing . . .
If you feel like you need to apologize in your email for possibly spamming, it means you are spamming, says Email Marketing Reports. Take note of language you should avoid and the importance of a permission-based list.
More on Online Marketing . . .
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has some fascinating new research out on the future of the Internet — “The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020, and the divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who is connected.” They also have a new report on adult use of social networking sites — “The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years — from 8% in 2005 to 35% now.”
Mobile giving, where people donate via their phones by allowing a charge to be placed on their cell phone bills, is growing faster than online giving did in its first year, says the Mobile Giving Foundation.
It’s only Wednesday, but the bod says it feels like Friday, so let’s have a little Mixed Links Happy Hour, shall we?
The Nonprofit CEO’s Manifesto by Sasha Dichter is making the rounds. Read it if you haven’t yet, in its original form or on Seth Godin’s blog. It’s a nice B-12 shot for those of you who are feeling sluggish about fundraising given the economic realities right now.
Here’s a brief excerpt from the Manifesto on the importance of storytelling: ”People think that storytelling is a gift, not a skill. Learning how to do this – to be an effective storyteller, to consistently connect with different people from different walks of life and convince them to see the world as you do and walk with you to a better future – is hard, but it’s a skill like any other. It’s true that some people are born with it. But it still can be learned and practiced, and if your nonprofit is going to succeed, you’d better have more than one or two people who can pull this off.”
Mike Newton-Ward at the Social Marketing Panaroma Blog has an interesting post on the first few chapters of the book Buyology: Truth and Lies about Why We Buy, which looks at how buying stimulates various parts of the brain. I’m looking forward to more posts from Mike and others on how the research in this book can apply to marketing good causes.
Speaking of how our brains work, I love this list on Donor Power Blog, riffing on CopyBlogger, about understanding some fundamentals of human nature and how people make decisions. Though written about selling, the parallels to fundraising and motivating supporters to help you in other ways are pretty clear.
The Chronicle of Philanthropy has Google-mapped its annual Philanthropy 400 ranking of the nation’s largest fundraising charities. I would have guessed that the map would be very heavily weighted toward the coasts, and there are some vast swaths of the country with very little on the map, but overall, it’s a more even distribution than I would have guessed.
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.”
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).
I’m heading out tomorrow for a week at the beach, but here are some great mixed links for you before I go. And actually, I’ll have a post or two queued up to publish while I’m out (I love that about Wordpress) — including one on where to put your keywords so both people and search engines will find them in your web pages. Stay tuned for that one.
On to some favorite links of late:
The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported on a new study about volunteerism. It says 26% of Americans volunteer and here’s one finding you might find counter-intuitive: Women with children and women who work have higher volunteer rates than other women. Hey, we’re already so friggin’ busy, why not throw some volunteering into the mix too! I know I’m volunteering more now, at a time in my life when I’m busier than ever. What’s up with that?
Marc Pitman shared this New York Times Magazine article on Facebook: What Makes People Give? (See, you can get useful info from social networking sites, even though I am still disgruntled about the Scrabulous debacle. Just installed Scrabulous reborn as Wordscraper. We’ll see . . .) The article looks at the work of economists and social scientists in trying to figure out why and how people respond to various types of charitable solicitations. Very interesting reading, and again, some counter-intuitive results. No one said this stuff was easy!
Rebecca Ruby at Network for Good/Fundraising 1-2-3 has a new article called Determine Your Organization’s Onliness — the thing that only you are known for. Read it if you aren’t sure how to make your organization stand out from all the others around you.
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Here’s a tasty mix of links that I think you’ll find interesting or helpful as you build support for your good cause . . . Happy Friday!
I’m heading out tomorrow for a week at the beach, but here are some great mixed links for you before I go. And actually, I’ll have a post or two queued up to publish while I’m out (I love that about 
