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, speaker, 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.
Kivi Leroux Miller of Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com reviews “Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications” by Sarah Durham. Highly recommend. Buy it!
I just wrapped up an hour-long teleconference for Network for Good’s Nonprofit 911 series titled “Ensuring Your E-Newsletters are Read – Not Dead – On Arrival This Year.” The focus of the call was on creating a newsletter strategy that really provides value for your readers.
I created two new pages at Nonprofit Marketing Guide for the call:
I have to admit, it’s a rather ambitious topic for one hour. I’m in the middle of the PowerPoint deck now trying to find the sweet spot between giving you enough information to really make a difference in your online marketing strategy and giving you too many to-do list items that you run screaming from the whole idea of integration.
Here’s the framework I’m using right now. Please share any comments you have as I’m sure I’ll be playing around with this until sometime tomorrow morning! For those of you attending, I promise to have the handout available an hour before the webinar (but probably not much sooner!)
You can integrate your online marketing in three steps:
(1) Connecting
Make sure everything links to everything else. Do that by putting links into web and e-news templates, email signatures, and social media profiles. Use social media icons (search “free social media icon set” for tons of them) to make these links more obvious. If your e-news provider offers it, use the social media sharing links at the bottom of your e-newsletters (otherwise add your own).
Consider whether auto-updating makes sense. You can connect your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to update each other. Think about whether and how that makes sense given the type of content you share, how often, and with whom.
Ensure basic branding is in place. Your website, blog, e-news, and social media sites don’t need to be 100% identical, but it should be crystal clear that they are all produced by the same people.
(2) Strengthening
Think holistically about your online content creation. Integrate what you put out there by using an editorial calendar, while at the same time, recognizing which channel is best for what (e.g. email good for clear calls to action; social media good for awareness). Don’t think of your website as something entirely different from your e-news, or your e-news as entirely different from your Twitter feed. Figure out what you want to communicate, and spread that across the channels in a way that makes sense.
Think about the paths. Think about how you want people to travel from channel to channel, and what they will see at each stop along the way. For example, if your e-news links to your website, what’s on that landing page? Does that landing page urge visitors to discuss the topic on Facebook or Twitter? If someone starts on Facebook, how are you encouraging them to sign-up for your e-newsletter? Again, it goes back to understanding how to get the most out of each channel.
Encourage multiple connections. Many of your fans will connect with you in multiple ways without being asked (e.g. they will subscribe to your e-news, blog feed and Twitter stream), but others will need some prodding. Connecting with people in multiple ways increases the odds that your messages will actually get through to them. You may need to offer some incentives (e.g. people on the email list get certain benefits, or get them first).
(3) Reinforcing
Learn from your metrics. Watch what’s happening along the paths that connect your online channels. Where are people coming from and where are they going? Are certain types of your supporters more likely to use one channel or another? What content produces the most interaction (e.g. clicks, comments, forwards, shares) in which channels?
Listen to the conversation, and bring in back into your content. You’ll learn a great deal from the conversation in social media that you can use to inspire and inform you e-news and web content. For example, a conversation on Twitter can transform into a new update you send out via your e-newsletter. Blog comments can direct updates to other parts of your website.
Make sense? What’s most important? What’s missing? Please share your thoughts in the comments and I’ll see you on the webinar!
I’ll share my three predictions for nonprofit marketing in 2010 with you in just a second, but here’s one prediction that I know for a fact will come true: I’ll keep referring you to Beth Kanter for all questions social media that are too difficult for me to answer. You all have a lot of great questions, so it feels like not a week goes by where I don’t send someone off to Beth’s Blog for answers. She will continue to reign supreme in 2010 and beyond.
Today is Beth’s 53rd birthday and with this post, I’m joining 53+ other bloggers in thanking Beth for all that she has given us, and will continue to give us. Thank you, Beth, for your great wisdom, insight, inspiration, prolific blogging, and most of all, your generosity to the nonprofit community! If you want to say thanks, Beth is asking friends to help her send 53 students to school in Cambodia, which is where she adopted her two kids. I’m making a donation right after I post this, and I hope you will too.
Now on to my other predictions . . .
1. Social Media is Real Life so “IRL” Should Die
Everyone agrees: Social media is here to stay in one form or another. It’s changed forever the expectations people have about sharing information and opinion with others. People use “IRL” online as an abbreviation for “in real life.” In 2010, IRL is obsolete, because we all realize by now that when we communicate with each other online it’s just as real as when we do it in print or even face-to-face.
Social media isn’t a monologue, or even a dialogue, but a trialogue. Rather than isolating people, the use of social media and other online technologies increases how well-connected people feel to each other and to the causes they love. In 2009, we saw many examples of how online tools are bringing people together offline (Tweetup anyone?). Friends are the new filter for information overload.
If you still think of your online strategy as something wholly apart and different from your “IRL” communications strategy, you are doing it wrong. Stop, and learn to merge.
2. More Nonprofits will Experiment with Real-Time Communications
We expect current information and answers to our questions instantaneously. Mobile Internet access (e.g. smartphones) is narrowing the digital divide. We can get and give info/opinion anywhere, anytime, and now with a geographic overlay. New apps allow people not only to share, but to self-organize (e.g. FourSquare.com, GroundCrew.us, Plancast.com) Guess where I learned about two of these sites.
Can I read your e-newsletter on my Blackberry? What’s the most useful, timely, interesting or exclusive stuff you do? What would your supporters like to know in real time (is there something they’d like to track or be alerted about)? Can you deliver it via text messages or Twitter? Think about ways to share the here and now with your supporters, as it is happening.
3. To Succeed Online, You Have to Think Like a Media Mogul
You aren’t just a communications director. You are a content creator, a publisher, a broadcaster. Heck, you are your nonprofit’s resident media mogul. Instead of sending a press release to your newspaper, TV station, and radio station, you are producing your own e-newsletter, podcast, and YouTube channel. You even have your own versions of the 24-hour cable news networks — they are your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Your blog is your nonprofit’s reality TV show.
It’s a lot to manage, but try to manage it you must, if you want your supporters to really connect with what you are doing, and to make it a part of their own lives. This is communications in 2010 . . . it’s multi-channel, real time, transparent, and personal. It’s what people are getting in all other aspects of their lives and I bet the nonprofits that do it well will be rewarded with more attention from their supporters.
So what do you do with these trends and how do they affect your 2010 marketing strategy? That was the topic of last week’s interactive conference call. If you missed it, you can listen to the mp3 recording and download the two-page handout when you purchase an All-Access Pass. The handout includes basic, intermediate and advanced steps for addressing each of these trends.
The first week of a new year is always one of my favorites . . . there is something so hopeful and fresh about it. In addition to the typical resolutions about doing more of this and less of that, I also like to pick a theme for the new year. Sometimes it’s a few words, or a personal tagline, or even a song.
This year, I’ve picked three words that popped out at me when I read What Matters Now, a series of short essays each on a different word. It’s a free ebook conceived by Seth Godin and edited by Ishita Gupta that includes Mark Rovner, a great friend to nonprofit marketers and one of my Lexulous pals.
Here are my three words for 2010:
ENOUGH. I have a too-long to-do list, waaaay too many feeds in my RSS reader, Twitter and Facebook friends whose updates I never see, and four racks of files sitting on my desk. ENOUGH. This year I pledge to only commit to what I can reasonably see, hear, and do without making myself crazy. I’m going to use the tools at my disposal, like lists in Twitter and Facebook, so I can see what’s most important — and ENOUGH — more quickly.
EASE. 2009 was a wonderful year in many ways. I wrote my first book. More than 2,500 nonprofit staff participated in our weekly webinar series. I traveled around the country speaking to some really great groups of nonprofits about nonprofit marketing. I love it all. But I push myself hard, and while I can take it, it’s not always fair to those I love most of all. Our kitten Luna can fit in my inbox, but my kids can’t, and they shouldn’t have to try. So I’m going to EASE up on how tightly I schedule commitments so I have time for everything that’s important to me, rather than letting deadlines run (and sometimes ruin) my life.
LEAP. This word returns for an encore, although it’s taken the form of ”Just Do It” in previous years. I do a lot of decision making by the seat of my pants. Most of the time, it works. LEAP stays on the list this year simply as a reminder to have faith in following my instincts, even when decisions aren’t as carefully considered as the more analytical parts of my personality might prefer.
What are your three words for 2010? Leave a comment on this post or link back to it with your own post to share.
P.S. We are kicking off the new year on Thursday with an interactive conference call on Trends for 2010 and Your Nonprofit Marketing Plan for a New Year. I hope you’ll join us for an enlightening discussion. I’ll be asking participants to share their three words too.
Last week I had the opportunity to chat with Politico’s managing editor, Bill Nichols, over a dinner hosted by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. (I was there to teach local and state school choice advocates how to develop nonprofit marketing strategies.)
Bill gave a fascinating presentation about the start-up of Politico, emphasizing many of the qualities that have turned it into one of the most popular and influential sources of national political news in just a couple of years.
Though the scale is obviously different, I see many parallels between Politico’s model and what I advocate that nonprofits do: become your own media mogul (or mini media mogul).
Define your niche. Decide what you want to be known for and good at. Politico focuses on Congress, lobbying, and the White House. They don’t cover state or local news or anything else happening in DC. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Be selective.
Hire and mentor smart people. Politico was launched by a handful of veterans who had been covering the national political scene for decades and were already very well-respected. But they also hired some great young journalists. The energy and Web 2.0 smarts of the younger staff combined with the savvy and experience of the veterans creates a powerful team. Never underestimate the value of your really good and really smart staff members, no matter how young or old they are.
Be transparent. Politico wants to be a trusted, non-partisan source of national political news, which strangely enough is no longer assumed for a media outlet. That means they need to be super-transparent, especially when they make mistakes. Bill described the day they had to retract a story as one of the worst of his life, but admitting the errors and being completely honest about how they happened was far more important than saving face. In today’s world, being transparent IS saving face. Hold integrity and truth in the highest esteem, and admit right away when you screw up.
Be willing to experiment. Politico’s website is its hub, but they also produce a profitable print edition and you’ll frequently see and hear Politico reporters on the radio and TV. Play around with all the different media available to you and find the combinations that work best for your own media empire.
Get out there and update as you go. Bill said stories on the Politico website will often be updated multiple times during the day. What starts out as just a few lines will grow into several paragraphs, then pages. You don’t have to wait until you have all of the details to start conversations with your supporters. That’s the beauty of the web and social media in particular.
Claire Meyerhoff and I are planning to create a series of guides and webinars on how to become your own media mogul in 2010. Stay tuned!
If you ask veterans of hard-fought political campaigns which matters most, what a person feels or what a person thinks about your candidate, without exception, they will tell you that heart overrules head in the voting booth. The same goes for the way we make purchasing decisions, the way people vote on juries, and whether we support charitable causes.
Several advertising studies show the same thing. As described in Brand Immortality: How Brands Can Live Long and Prosper by Hamish Pringle and Peter Field, the UK-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising analyzed 1,400 case studies of successful advertising. They compared the profitability boost of ads that appealed primarily to emotions versus those that relied on rational information, like statistics. Ad campaigns with purely emotional content outperformed the rational only content by two-to-one. Ads that were purely emotional also performed better than ads with mixed emotional and rational content, though by a much smaller margin.
These results affirm what Dr. Robert Heath of the University of Bath’s School of Management found in 2006. He found that U.S. and U.K. television advertisements with high levels of emotional content made the advertising successful, not the message itself. The emotional ads enhanced how people felt about brands being advertised. Ads with low levels of emotion had no effect, even when they were factual and informative.
So why do so many nonprofits still insist on a “just the fact, ma’am” approach to nonprofit marketing?
On Tuesday, September 29th, I’m teaching a writing workshop via webinar where we’ll look at ways to add more emotion into everyday nonprofit marketing and fundraising text to make it more effective with your supporters. We’ll also look at using both negative and positive emotions and discuss the differences in those approaches, while also exploring the different emotional buttons that successful fundraisers and volunteer recruiters most often push.
This is brand new webinar, so I hope you’ll join us on Tuesday! As always, registration is $35 a la carte, or it’s included in your All-Access Pass.
P.S. Check out the Neuromarketing Blog for more on “where brain science and marketing meet.”
The American Red Cross wants every household to do three things: to build an emergency kit, to create a communication and evacuation plan, and to be informed about the disasters that are common in their communities. Fair enough, but how are they going to make it happen? By working the basics of a good marketing strategy: Defining their audience, creating a message that resonates with that audience, and delivering the message through channels their audience already trusts and uses.
Yesterday I spoke with Mark Ferguson, who manages the “Do More than Cross Your Fingers” campaign and other corporate partnerships for the American Red Cross. He shared some of the back story behind what you’ll see at www.redcross.org/domore, which officially launched yesterday.
Defining the Audience: Moms with Kids at Home
Mark says that historical research and experience shows that moms with kids under 18 living at home are especially receptive to messages about disaster preparedness. No surprise there — if anyone is going to care about the nest and the babies in it, it’s mom. But some recent research also shows that 82% of moms say they drive household purchases. So if you are trying to get a family to organize a disaster preparedness kit that will most likely require some purchases, reaching out to the people who decide what to buy makes sense.
Creating the Message: Testing the Campaign Slogan
But what do you say to a busy mom to get her to make this a priority?
Mark says that it was important for the Red Cross to come up with a message that spoke to moms but that also had broader appeal to the American public at large. Even if moms were the target, the message needed to be appropriate for a much wider audience as well.
It was also important, says Mark, for the message to start from where people are now and to help them move forward with their family disaster planning, regardless of how much they may have already done. Through their research, they knew that about 80% of families had taken one of the three key steps (getting a kit, making a plan, or staying informed) and this campaign was about moving them to take another.
To come up with the right message, the Red Cross hired the firm Catchword Branding which specializes in naming. They provided 1,000 possible slogans to the Red Cross, many of which were simple variations on one idea. Using a cross-functional team (marketing, development, disaster preparedness, field staff, etc.), the Red Cross whittled the list down to the best five. Those five were then tested through an online survey with Harris Interactive to find which one resonated best both with moms and with the public at large.
Of the five options, says Mark, one was in the form of a question and one played on the “heroes” theme that the Red Cross has used successfully before. Another one was deemed too snarky or too clever (survey respondents said it just didn’t sound like the Red Cross). The chosen theme, Do More Than Cross Your Fingers, stood out among the five with both moms and the public at large. “It was fresh,” says Mark, “but not in any way offensive.”
I think the message works for two reasons. First, it meets the stated goal of starting where most people really are, which is crossing our fingers. Second, it urges us to take action, to “Do More” and not so subtly points out that finger crossing is not really a valid approach, but without being pushy or preachy about it.
Delivering the Message: Going Where Moms Are and Using Voices They Trust
With a message in hand, the next decision was how to get it out to moms. “We know that moms are really active online,” says Mark, quoting a Nielsen survey this year that said that 20% of the active online population are moms aged 25-54 with at least one child living at home. Thus the campaign centers on redcross.org/domore and all of the other online and offline tactics will point back to that page.
The Red Cross also wanted to emphasize that each family is different and so what’s in their emergency kits should be different too. Thus one of the key components of the website is a game called Prepare 4 that helps you build your own personalized kit.
“One of the goals is to make disaster preparedness simple and interesting,” says Mark, “Not just a brochure or ho-hum shopping list. We wanted something interactive and friendly.” During the game, you answer questions that help you build a kit that’s customized for your family, right down to including something fun for the kids to do while the power is out. At the end of the game, your list of items in emailed to you so that you can go gather up the items from around your house and go shopping for what’s missing.
You can also share what you are including in your personal kit with others in the My Kit section, as spokesperson Jamie Lee Curtis has done on the site via video. The selection of Curtis as the spokesperson is another move that connects well with moms.
The Red Cross’s social media maven Wendy Harman has been reaching out to Mommy Bloggers (one of the biggest forces within the blogosphere) who have blogged about disaster preparedness before. They are also pursuing coverage in traditional print magazines focused on women and parenting. Cause marketing partnerships with Clorox (a brand many moms use daily) and FedEx (many moms also run small businesses and FedEx is already reaching out to NASCAR moms with the preparedness message) round out the campaign channels. FedEx is distributing disaster preparedness brochures and Clorox is sponsoring a radio media tour.
Measuring Results
Mark says that the Red Cross will use its annual fall survey with Harris Interactive on how well prepared American households are for a disaster to help measure the effectiveness of the campaign, including a survey later this month. They’ll compare those figures to a baseline survey completed in August.
No matter how big or how small your nonprofit may be, going through these basic steps in creating your strategy is always a smart approach. Just like with disaster preparedness, you have to do more than cross your fingers with nonprofit marketing too!
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I just wrapped up an hour-long teleconference for 
The first week of a new year is always one of my favorites . . . there is something so hopeful and fresh about it. In addition to the typical resolutions about doing more of this and less of that, I also like to pick a theme for the new year. Sometimes it’s a few words, or a personal tagline, or even a song.
