Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

Image by CJ Sorg on Flickr

Does this belong on our website? What should go on our home page? How can I make our website more user-friendly? How can we grab our website visitors’ attention and keep it?

My answers to these very common questions from nonprofits usually include some form of this response: It’s all about the answers your website visitors are seeking and the actions they want to take on your site. If you focus on making your site about answers and actions, you’ll successfully address the concerns behind these questions. (Learn more about online writing during this Thursday’s webinar.)

Answer Your Visitors’ Questions

People use the Web to find answers to their questions. What questions would someone have when they come to your website? That will all depend on what it is you do, but let’s look at a few examples.

If you run a local humane society, people will have questions about adopting pets.

If you run a Meals on Wheels program, people will have questions about receiving meals and delivering meals as a volunteer.

If you run a “Save the Squirrels” group, people will have questions about why the squirrels need saving and what they can do to help you save them.

Figure out the top three questions people have related to your group’s work and make the answers prominent on your website — on your home page and in your site navigation. Immediately upon visiting your site, visitors should either see the answers or see where to click to get them.

Make It Easy for Your Visitors to Act

In addition to finding answers to their questions, website visitors also want to take actions online, and they expect those actions to be easy and time-saving over doing it in person or over the phone.

Let’s look at the same three organizations and review the actions visitors would like to take on their websites.

If you run a humane society, it would be great for visitors to see which pets are currently available for adoption and to fill in adoption forms online (or at least print them out and start them on paper).

If you run a Meals on Wheels program, visitors will want to apply for meal delivery and complete forms to volunteer online.

If you run a “Save the Squirrels” group, visitors will want to advocate for the squirrels in some way, such as by signing a petition or sending an email to an elected official.

And, of course, every nonprofit should let visitors sign-up for an email newsletter and donate online.

Learn More

Want more online writing tips? Don’t miss this Thursday’s webinar: Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email, Thursday, August 14, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern.

When you write your web content, you are writing first for real people and second for search engine spiders. For your website to be as successful as possible, you need to keep both in mind.

Prominent keywords are important for both audiences. They help real people skim your page, so they can decide if they are in the right place or not and they help the search engines figure out what your page is about.

So where do you put them? Here are nine good places to use keywords.

1. In your page title. This is what appears at the top of the browser window when someone visits your website. It appears in the page code in between the title tags in the head section.

2. In your page description. Visitors don’t see this, but the search engines do. This is the two lines of text that appear below the main title in search engine results. It appears in the page code between the description tags in the head section.

3. In your page URL. Using your keywords in your page URL (what goes after the www.) can also be helpful with search engines. That’s why lots of blogs, including this one, use post titles in their URLs.

4. In your headings and subheadings. Make it easy for your readers to very quickly see what your page is about by using lots of headings and subheadings.

5. In your first sentence and your first paragraph. Make sure your important keywords appear here — the earlier, the better.

6. In your last paragraph. Use your keywords at the end of your content too.

7. Elsewhere in your body copy. When keywords fall naturally throughout your article, consider bolding them. Don’t go overboard with it or it will be a distraction. But if it makes the article easier to skim, bold those keywords.

8. In your link text. Instead of linking to words like “click here,” use your keywords in your link anchor text.

9. In your ALT tags on images. The search engines can’t read images (yet). With every image, include a bit of text called the ALT tag and use your keywords in that text.

Don’t worry about the keyword tags in the head section. Though it would seem like the obvious place to put keywords, it’s too obvious, and the search engines don’t pay much attention to that tag any longer.

Learn more about writing for the web during the August 14, 2008 webinar, Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email.

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!

My friend and tagline diva extraordinaire, Nancy Schwartz, has a nice summary of a recent report called the State of Nonprofit Marketing. Since Nancy summarized it so nicely for you, I won’t bother.

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.

If you don’t read Fundraising Success, you should. But if you don’t, you may have missed the interview Katya Andresen did with me on nonprofit storytelling. Katya reprinted it on her blog.

NTEN’s Blog posted an article by Jonathon Coleman at The Nature Conservancy on how to use social news sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to generate huge spikes in traffic to your website.

That’s it for now!

Photo by Nataliej on Flickr

If you live in the eight states or seven Canadian provinces/territories below (or know someone who works for a nonprofit and does), read on. I’m extending the deal I mentioned last week through the end of August, to give all of you summer vacationers time to get back in the work groove.

So here is the deal. If you live

in these 8 U.S. states: Delaware, Hawaii, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Wyoming

or

in these 7 Canadian provinces/territories: Saskatchewan, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and Labrador, Yukon, and Nunavut

I will convert a $35 webinar registration into an All-Access Pass (usually $97) at no additional charge. You pay for one webinar, but you end up getting access to all of our live webinars for 12 weeks, plus access to the webinar archive and our on-demand courses.

All you have to do is live in one of the places mentioned above and register by August 31, 2008 for any webinar currently on our schedule (the webinar can take place after 8/31; you just have to register before then). I’ll keep an eye out and convert your registration to an All-Access Pass.

Why am I doing this? Because these places are missing from the roster of locations represented by the nearly 500 nonprofits who have participated in the Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com weekly webinar series and this kind of stuff drives me crazy. Take advantage of the lunacy. Get your All-Access Pass for a measly $35.

Pass it on!

The biggest mistake that a nonprofit can make with its website is to use it as an old-fashioned brochure, where you immediately hit the visitor with your long, jargon-filled mission statement, right at the top or smack in the middle of the home page, followed by bulleted lists of “projects” or “services.”

Why is this so bad? Because it’s all about the organization (and usually the most boring parts at that) and it shows little interest in what your website visitors really care about.

But isn’t our website supposed to be about us, you ask?

Yes and no. Yes, it’s about you and what you do, but organized in a way that’s easy and intuitive for your site visitor. What they want is more important than what you think they should be interested in.

Two Easy Ways to Organize Your Site for Your Visitors

Let me show you what I mean. There are two easy ways to organize your website so it is more audience-focused.

The first is to divide sections according to who the visitors are. The home page of KidsHealth.org is a splash page with links to sites for parents, kids and teens. Each group is going to respond best to information presented in ways that speak to their age groups and specific needs and questions. Ultimately the facts may be the same on each mini-site, but the language and presentation are totally different depending on the audience.

The second way, and the one I usually prefer, is to organize your website around (1) the answers to the top questions people are most likely to have and (2) the actions they want to be able to take on your website. What three main questions would a potential website visitor have and what three things would they like to be able to do on your site? Figure that out and organize your site accordingly.

The New York City Meals of Wheels program, for example, has three tabs right across the top: Get Meals, Volunteer and Support Us. That about sums it up, doesn’t it? The overwhelming majority of people who come to a Meals on Wheels website will want to find out how to get meals delivered or how to volunteer to deliver them, and “support us” is thrown in for good measure. The left side menu includes additional information, but those three tabs right at the top stand out, and show me that they know exactly why people are coming to their website.

Learn more about nonprofit websites during these upcoming webinars: July 30 - Attracting More Website Visitors: Traffic-Building Tips for Nonprofits | August 14 - Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email | August 28 - Online Marketing Basics for Nonprofits: From Email to Social Media

Photo by kevindooley on Flickr

The nonprofit blogerati have been weighing in lately about how nonprofits are bad, bad, bad for looking at social networking as a way to market their organizations. And “communications” seems to have become a dirty word too.

Here are a few samples:

Online Social Networks are Not Mailing Lists by Michael Gilbert of the Gilbert Center. “Once the idea of ‘online social networks’ starts tugging at their sleeve, these are the unfortunate kinds of questions that nonprofits start asking: How do I reach new audiences? How can I get my message out? . . . ”

Holly Ross at NTEN agrees in R-E-S-P-E-C-T. She sums up Gilbert’s points this way: “He argues that thinking about how to use social networks as communications channels is disrespectful” and says that she agrees with him.

In last week’s Chronicle of Philanthropy chat on online marketing, in response to a question about creating online publicity, Beth Kanter said “The word ‘publicity’ implies communications, broadcasting - not social media.” And to a question about using Twitter, she replied “Twitter is not a promotion device!!”

Why I Disagree

Their key point seems to be that nonprofits should use social media/social networking only for listening and learning through engaging in conversation. You cannot expect anyone to listen to what you have to say, unless you are listening too and responding in kind. With this basic premise, I do agree.

However, I strongly disagree with this whole notion that nonprofits who want to use social networking as part of a larger communications strategy, including as a way to get their messages out and to reach new people, are somehow being disrespectful for even considering it.

I’ve gained immeasurably from Michael, Holly, and Beth’s work and insights on technology issues. But this kind of flagellation of nonprofit communicators makes me want to pull my hair out.

How It Looks from Here

It feels to me like they are giving special golden status to what is really just one more set of tools (albeit some very cool ones) that help people communicate with one another and connect in different ways.

Maybe they are talking about the big nonprofits with budgets in the many millions of dollars with staff whose job descriptions actually include words like “social networking.” And maybe those organizations should be much more sophisticated than they are about their approach to social networking.

But those are not the kinds of organizations I work with and train on a daily basis. The nonprofits I work with are much, much smaller and have much more limited resources. They often don’t even have a full-time staff person dedicated solely to communications or even to fundraising.

So for these groups, let’s get real: “listening” and “learning” are luxuries.

“Listening” is something that might happen once a year in a survey. I know many readers of this blog don’t even have a budget line item for traditional training, let alone some extra hours in the day for “learning via social networking”. The to-do list is already miles long, and unless they can find a way to show their executive director or board how using social media is going to pay off in some tangible way, it will stay way down at the bottom of that to-do list.

In other words, the decisionmakers will ask “If we can’t use social media to market our cause, why bother?” And if you listen to the voices above, your answer will probably be, “Listening and learning are important. But you are right — we just don’t have time for that right now. We need more than listening and learning as an outcome. Nevermind.” And that, I think, would be a real shame.

A Better Way to Look at This Issue?

Instead, I turn to my friend Katya Andresen’s definition of respectful nonprofit marketing: “Asking people what they care about and then relating our cause to their values is respectful. Good marketing is a conversation.” This is from her post, Is Marketing Slimy? and I believe that it applies to social networking as well. The harm is not in using social media as a communications tool, but in treating that tool as if it were a megaphone. “Communications” is NOT automatically one-way (as many nptech bloggers seem to think), but includes one-way, two-way, and every-which-way movement of information and insights.

When you use social media/networking tools as they were meant to be used — to engage in real conversations where you neither control nor dominate the dialogue — then I see no problem with using them to talk about your cause and your work and to make new connections too. And when you do that the right way, you will also learn a whole lot in the process, too. It need not be an either/or situation.

UPDATE on 7/24/08: The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Give & Take section picked up this post. Leave a comment here and continue the conversation over there!

“Conversation in the Clouds” by Swamibu on Flickr

The Chronicle of Philanthropy hosted a live chat earlier this week with Beth Kanter (Beth’s Blog) and Jonathon Coleman (The Nature Conservancy) called “Building Your Online Presence on a Tight Budget.”

Beth and Jonathon are two of my favorite social media experts, so I took a few minutes to read the transcript today.

I recommend that you look over the whole transcript yourself, but here are a few points that stood out for me:

- Beth has an insane amount of material online and available to you! I knew this already, and it’s one of the reasons she is a favorite, but all of the links she shared during the chat definitely reinforce the value of the treasure trove that is her blog, wiki, etc.

- Lots of people are questioning the amount of time they need to invest in social networking sites like Facebook and what you get out of them for all that time. The metrics are still evolving, but focusing on what you learn from the conversation versus more standard fundraising or marketing metrics is the way to go right now.

- Search engine optimization and linking strategies are still incredibly important to the success of your website, as is great content. David Westbrook and I will be spending much of the hour during our July 30 webinar, “Attracting More Website Visitors: Traffic Building Tips for Nonprofits” on these topics.

- You don’t need much money to be a rock star in the nonprofit world online (although it certainly helps). What you do need is big buckets full of time. Time to read all the great how-to and what-for material out there. Time to sort through your options. Time to experiment. Time to participate in the conversation. Time to contribute in meaningful ways. So I take that back. You do need money to pay your staff for all this time they are spending working on your social media strategy!

- There’s some tension between the idea of using social media for publicity or promotion and using it more strictly as a conversation tool. I don’t think these two ideas are mutually exclusive — having good conversations with people can be a type of promotion — but I do agree that the conversation should come first.

- Nonprofits are overwhelmed by the options and the long list of to-dos associated with doing social media and online marketing right. I hope this blog and my nonprofit marketing webinar series are helping you feel less overwhelmed and more like you can tackle these tasks with confidence!

Photo by Nataliej on Flickr

I was just reviewing the registrations to date this year for the Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar series. We are approaching 500 nonprofits participating, from 42 U.S. states, 6 Canadian territories/provinces, and a handful of other countries (Yes, you Aussies and Kiwis can register and view the recording the next day, so you don’t have to get up at 4:00 a.m.!)

I’d really like to be able to say that nonprofits in all 50 states have participated in our webinars, so that means I need nonprofits in these eight states to register:

- Delaware
- Hawaii
- New Hampshire
- North Dakota
- Rhode Island
- South Dakota
- West Virginia, and
- Wyoming

Here’s a big incentive: I will convert the $35 webinar registration of every nonprofit in these eight states into an All-Access Pass ($97), which gets you access to 12 weeks of live webinars, plus the webinar archive and our on-demand courses. All you have to do is register by July 31, 2008 for any webinar currently on our schedule.

Spread the word to your nonprofit friends in these eight states!

UPDATE: Now there’s a deal for Canadians too!