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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.
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me with your questions and comments. You can also learn more about hiring me as a coach or consultant.
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During yesterday’s webinar on “Successful Nonprofit Websites: How to Make Your Website Work for You,” I asked participants to rank their own websites on 8 of the 10 criteria we discussed.
About 30 people participated, mostly from small nonprofits, producing some interesting results from their own evaluations of their websites.
56% said that their website didn’t allow visitors to sign-up for email communication at all. Only 11% said their email newsletter sign-up form appeared either within their site template (and thus on every page) or at least on all of the major pages of the site.
Getting people to your website is the hard part. Don’t let them just disappear back into cyberspace. Encourage visitors to stay in touch with you by signing up for an email newsletter, action alerts, or whatever you’d like to call your email correspondence. The point is to capture those email addresses so you can start a conversation with those website visitors.
In contrast, only 27% said they didn’t offer visitors a way to donate online. Hmmm . . . What’s the reasoning here? You’ll take their money, but not their email address? Maybe because following through with producing the e-communication is more work and throwing a donate button on the site is easy? You need to do both — email communication and online fundraising — and I’m willing to bet that the orgs with donate links with no e-newsletter aren’t raising much online.
72% own just a single domain name. I strongly recommend that at a minimum, nonprofits own the .org, .com, and .net versions of their main domain names. Ideally, you should also own any reasonable guesses that people might make. For example, The Nature Conservancy owns nature.org (its main site), natureconservancy.org, and thenatureconservancy.org. They own most, but not all, of the .com versions as well. When you don’t buy all the versions, someone else will eventually snatch them up and most likely put an advertising site up.
Only 27% said they usually or always have a story on their homepage. 45% said there were no stories on their websites at all! Ack! Storytelling is probably the most powerful marketing tool nonprofits have and yet it’s not being used on websites. Stories are the easiest ways to give examples of the need for your organization, the challenges you face, what you are doing to overcome them, and your successes. If I had to pick one single area for improvement among the group as a whole, it would be this one.
Only 34% said their home page offered visitors a clear path to the top answers and actions they were most likely seeking. To help focus your site on your visitors instead of your organization itself, I recommend that you think about why people would come to your website in the first place. What three questions would they be seeking answers for? What three actions would they like to take (e.g. registering for an event, donating online)? The path to those answers and actions should be crystal clear on your home page.
It’s a lot to absorb, but the good news is that all of these problems are very fixable. Here’s what a few people said about what they learned during the webinar:
“You hit on so many of the issues I’ve been trying to articulate to my organization about our website that I’m thinking about just having them listen to the recording at our next committee meeting. The idea of a CMS, of making the website relevant to our clients (and donors and volunteers) and of loosening IT’s grip on the website is so intimidating to agency management that I feel I need another voice to back me up. They’re open to making changes, so I hope an expert voice will help me make my case!” ~ Rebekah Hickey, Community Services Consortium
“(Liked) the reinforcing comments about having pictures and stories. Also, I like it when you pose questions about how to improve example websites - the interactivity is great. Also nice to hear other suggestions and get my brain thinking, rather than just being a passive listener. ~ Erin Kangas, Manitoba Children’s Museum
“(The webinar) had a lot of practical ideas. We are in the process of selecting a company to re-do our website as part of a capacity building grant and I wanted to have some information on what I should ask for. I got it!” ~ Belisa Urbina, Renovacion Conyugal, Inc
Wish you’d joined us? You can get the next best thing - the video recording - by purchasing an All-Access Pass to Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com. The recording is available in the Webinar Archive right now, along with nearly all the recording from the past year. Your All-Access Pass also let you RSVP for live webinars for the next 12 weeks at no additional cost. Get the details.
P.S. Join us for our next webinar on Tuesday, May 12, Getting Your Nonprofit Started with Social Media.
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Today the Chronicle of Philanthropy hosted an online chat on getting started in nonprofit marketing, based on my free e-book “The First 100 Days of Your New Nonprofit Marketing Job.” Sandra Bate, executive director of marketing for the Indiana University Foundation, joined me in fielding the questions, such as
- Most media outlets don’t want to include event sponsors in the stories. So how do I get the word out and add value for them?
- What are the low resource/cost options for discovering what is gripping or engaging to our market?
- How do you pull the heart strings of prospective donors when your “good cause” is education versus humanitarian aid, animal rights or even art? What is a history museum to do?
- How do you launch an effective campaign to restore the reputation of a nonprofit?
- What are the two most important / effective things marketers can do to help promote their organization to the public, when we have very few dollar and people resources?
- What is the best way to craft a marketing message in this hyper competitive market?
- Are print materials passe?
- When you grant funds, as well as seek funding, how do you balance the two?
- How important do you feel it is to equip your board of directors with effective marketing tools such as a powerful case for support statement?
- In an economic climate where critical needs are looming large, we’re finding it difficult to create a message of “compelling need” when our mission is to open the first dog parks in Birmingham.
- How do you re-energize a longstanding nonprofit’s image in the community?
Read how Sandra and I answered these and many more questions today. Agree or disagree with an answer I gave? Leave a comment on the blog and let’s talk about it.
P.S. Webinar Reminders: Successful Nonprofit Websites: Making Your Site Work for You this Wednesday, May 6 and Getting Your Nonprofit Started with Social Media on Tuesday, May 12.
More Goodies: Get Kivi's Nonprofit Marketing Tips E-Newsletter (2-3 times per month)
My favorite session at last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference was “This is Iron Chef . . . Battle Nonprofit.”
Three teams made up of consultants from four different agencies (Beaconfire Consulting, Forum One Communications, Free Range Studios, and Firefly Partners) got together on a Sunday for a strategy and design competition. Their challenge was to remake the online presence of Youth Speaks, a nonprofit presenter of Spoken Word performance, education, and youth development programs. They were all given the same information and amount of time to develop their programs.
Each team, comprised of 3-4 of the consulting firm frienemies, then presented their online strategy and home page redesigns for the first time at the conference. Take a few minutes to check out the slides to see what they came up with. You’ll see how some very creative firms go about a project like this, how they define online goals, set priorities and timelines, and use a blend of tactics.
I was tweeting during the session and these were my impressions as I listened:
- team 1 seemed a little too kitchen sink for me
- loving team 2’s real focus, storytelling, bringing in rural areas, building fan base for artists
- loving team 2’s thanks for attending email the day after event to get people to go online to share their impressions.
- team 3’s emphasis on artist’s own pages that they can really customize is nice touch.
- think I like team 3’s home page the best, but team 2’s strategy the best.
What made this session so good?
The Open Sharing. How often do we get to see four leading firms talk openly about how they would approach a real project, in quite a bit of detail? Uh, never. This one session saved Youth Speaks thousands and thousands of dollars, but it also let all of us learn about ways to approach these kinds of projects too. I admit that I feared that the firms wouldn’t want to give too much away and the proposals would be lightweight, but instead they were really packed with substance. Kudos to the four firms for really sharing their best ideas!
The Collaborative Spirit. This could have easily been set up as a firm-against-firm competition. But by blending the teams, it removed the real-world winners and losers element, and made it much more fun and less pressure-filled (at least it felt that way as someone in the audience - not sure how it felt to be on a team!)
No Right Answer. While there was certainly overlap between the three approaches, this session proves that there is no one right way to do online marketing - so don’t believe anyone who tries to convince you otherwise. Yes, when in doubt, follow the conventional wisdom or best practices, but don’t be afraid to try something new or to put your own twist on it. Although the intention was for the audience to vote on the winner, people were apparently having trouble getting a signal in the Hilton basement, so they did a “Make Noise” vote instead and called it a tie. More proof that there is no “right way.”
I would love to see more collaborative makeovers like this in the nonprofit marketing world. It doesn’t have to take on the whole Iron Chef theme. You may recall that Britt Bravo asked Nancy Schwartz, Katya Andresen, Nedra Weinreich, and me to review the Social Actions home page back in October. Here’s what we all said.
That wasn’t structured as a competition, but the outcome was similar - lots of concrete ideas that a real nonprofit can sort through and use, while also letting others learn from the analysis and strategies as well.
By the way, it was fabulous hanging out with Nancy, Katya, and Britt at the conference. (Photo of Britt and me by Nancy Schwartz. Photo of Nancy, Katya, and me by Nice Waiter at Foreign Cinema).
I’m already mulling over ways to pull them into some kind of Iron Chef / Extreme Makeover Something or Another for next year’s conference (Mark your calendars for NTC 2010 in Atlanta, April 8-10). Your ideas for a session? Or something we could do sooner online? Leave a comment.
P.S. Webinar Reminders: Successful Nonprofit Websites: Making Your Site Work for You this Wednesday, May 6 and Getting Your Nonprofit Started with Social Media on Tuesday, May 12.
Tags: 09NTC
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Yesterday I attended a workshop organized by one of my favorite bloggers (and NTC roomie) Nancy Schwartz on how you deal with branding issues for your organization within social media. The panel featured Danielle Brigida, National Wildlife Federation; Felicia Carr, National Parks Conservation Association; and Wendy Harman, American Red Cross.
Nancy created a wonderful guide to the session (Word doc) that contains even more great stories and tips than came out in the live event, so download that. What I found most interesting is the debate about whether to centralize or decentralize your brand online. Of course, there is no right answer and you need to sort out what’s best for your organization. Here’s how these three groups are dealing with it.
Danielle at NWF says they are branding many of their individual programs online (Ranger Rick, a campus ecology program, Green Hour for families, etc.). While they hope all the talk about these programs feeds back up to the overall NWF brand, they believe that allowing their supporters to segment themselves and talk about their very specific interests within NWF is a good thing, even if it dilutes the overall NWF brand.
Danielle says that because they are decentralizing their social media presence, they are also empowering and trusting their staff and giving them the ability to represent their own programs online without a lot of heavy handed management. One additional benefit of this approach is that various programs within NWF retweet and link to each other, introducing fans of one program to many others.
In contrast, Felicia at NPCA believes that brand confusion for her organization, particularly with the National Park Service (a federal government agency) is a big problem for them online. She would prefer the NPCA logo to be on everything and does not want individual program managers to set up microsites or their own pages on Facebook. She prefers the more centralized approach.
Felicia also shared a story about how a fan had created a fundraising Facebook Cause for NPCA, but had included a huge National Park Service logo. In contrast to what Clay Shirky suggested - that people will not blame the nonprofit when fans get their facts wrong - she found the opposite to be true. The National Park Service was quite miffed with NPCA, even though they had nothing to do with the Facebook Cause page and had already asked the fan to take off the logo (without getting a response.)
Wendy at American Red Cross says that chapters and individuals had created so many different pages and groups on Facebook that Facebook actually asked the central office to consolidate the American Red Cross presence. There were so many different pages that it was actually hard for users to find what they were seeking. She has worked hard to make sure that there is a consistent look and approach for the American Red Cross across multiple social media sites, and after a brand revitalization project, has created a handbook of standards and is now teaching employees about how to use it.
Need more on nonprofit branding? Nancy is your source.
Tags: 09NTC, branding, facebook
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Thanks to the more than 200 people who voted on the topic of this Thursday’s free webinar! The winner, with 40% of the vote, is “Forget the General Public! How to Define, Research and Reach Your Target Audience.” Registration is free and open now. Join us on Thursday, April 2, 2009 at Noon Eastern (9:00 a.m. Pacific).
Instead of reaching out to everyone and touching no one, you need to focus your marketing and fundraising campaigns on the people who really do matter most to your organization’s success. During this one-hour webinar, you’ll learn how to break down “the general public” into specific groups of people who you need to reach. You’ll discover some easy ways to find out what makes these people tick and what they are most likely to need and want from you. You’ll see how to use that information to craft your campaigns so that they speak directly to these targeted groups, dramatically increasing your effectiveness. Register now.
“Nonprofit Writing Stinks!” came in a close second with 36% of the vote. I’m putting it on the weekly webinar series schedule for June 4, 2009 (more details soon).
P.S. Don’t forget, I’m also teaching “Nonprofit Storytelling: How to Write Your Nonprofit’s Best Stories” this Wednesday, April 1, 2009 at Noon Eastern (9:00 a.m. Pacific).
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This Friday, March 20, John Kenyon will join me in presenting a webinar called “Creating Online Evangelists: How to Excite and Motivate Your Supporters.” Who are these online evangelists that your nonprofit should be exciting and motivating? They are ordinary people who, because of a great personal passion for your good cause, do extraordinary things to help you, whether you personally ask them to or not.
Here are some examples of what John will be talking about on Friday and how you can find and support people like these two evangelists, for your nonprofit.
Twelve-year old-Mimi Ausland from Bend, Oregon has provided over 50 tons of food to needy animals in shelters through two websites she created.
In 2008, after learning about the food shortages many animal shelters face, Mimi - with help from her parents and months of research and planning - created the websites freekibble.com and freekibblekat.com. Her efforts prompted Castor and Pollux, a Portland, Ore. pet products company, to donate 10 pieces of kibble for every answer to the animal trivia questions Mimi posts on her site. Visitors to the site not only help contribute food, but learn something about animals in shelters.
Since April of 2008 she has provided over 713,000 meals to hungry dogs and cats. She has become the sole supplier to 11 shelters nationwide. In the fall of 2008 she was honored by the ASPCA with their “Kid of the Year” award for her efforts. Mimi is one of a new breed of “online evangelists” who promote good causes, often independently, not as agents of the organizations they support.
It’s not just kids taking the proverbial lemonade stand online . . . people of all ages are using the social web for good.
Judith Sol-Dyess was touched by the people she saw who lived at the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, where she works as the Sr. Director of Information Systems.
Judith created a simple yet effective website called Project30W named for the buildings address, 30 W Chicago Ave. Although the building is her office, for many it is their home.
On the site she shares her experience of her neighbors along with portraits of them, showing their humanity and giving viewers a window into the lives of people who live a that Y. Even though she is an employee, Judith is sharing her personal experience and suggesting people make donation to help support the people she now knows as friends.
These are two examples of individuals motivated to help a cause on their own using the online medium. How can you excite your supporters and motivate them to spread your message online?
Learn about the efforts of Mimi, Judith and other “Online Evangelists” in the webinar this Friday, March 20th, and more importantly, what lessons you can learn to encourage your own online evangelists. Get the details and reserve your spot now.
Tags: online evangelists
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Wow - yesterday’s post about thank you notes and the lack thereof got the conversation started! Thanks to everyone who took the time to add some thoughts to the debate.
Several people mentioned that the practical realities of nonprofit management mean that getting thank-you notes out promptly, especially when donations come through non-traditional channels for your organization, can be difficult. Many nonprofits are chronically underfunded and understaffed and often under-skilled in the technology that could make things easier. I get it — really. Been there, done that. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a relatively small gift of $25 may not produce more than a shrug from the development office. I get that too, although I’m certainly less sympathetic to that point of view.
But here’s the thing. Think about how much time a typical nonprofit spends on generic “outreach,” like newsletters, with the purpose, at least in part, of generating new supporters. If you are so pressed for time, wouldn’t those precious hours be better spent thanking the people who have taken the next step and given you money, no matter how much or through what method?
Just yesterday, before I wrote the post, I did a webinar on Nonprofit Marketing with Next to No Budget. One of my key points was to focus in on the people who matter most and to get personal with them. I specifically pointed out that saying thank you and doing it well, just by itself, was a major strategy for making your nonprofit stand out in donors’ eyes, because so few nonprofits do it well. If you are going to spend anytime on communications at all, shouldn’t it be with the people who have already demonstrated a commitment to your cause by contributing?
Advice to My Frazzled Nonprofit Friends
Give higher priority to your thank-you notes than to any other piece of communications you work on. The newsletter doesn’t go out, the website doesn’t get updated, your report to your board doesn’t get done, until you have sent some kind of thank-you to your donors. Take control of your work life and make it happen. If you don’t, I can pretty much guarantee that over the long haul, you will remain underfunded and understaffed.
Do what NPR did with my gift. If you get an email address, copy and paste it and shoot out a generic thank-you. This is what they sent me, with “NPR Thanks You!” as the subject line:
Dear Friend:
Thank you for your 2008 contribution to National Public Radio, made through Capital One. Your support helps NPR provide Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Car Talk, News & Notes, From the Top and other news and cultural programming to listeners from Alaska to Florida and many countries overseas.
Again, many thanks for your generosity. NPR simply could not do it without you.
Sincerely,
Annie Callaway Davis,
Vice President for Development
(Sent by)
Dayna Taylor
Grants & Contributions Administrator
Granted, I would not hold this up as the best thank-you note ever, but the point is that they sent it, and they sent it promptly. It was the first one I received. I’m not rushing out to put NPR in my estate plans because of it, but this is good enough for me to donate another $25, should they get around to asking me to, and who knows after that. You can do this - anyone can!
Dealing with Donations Through Payment Services
It doesn’t matter whether you like getting gifts through Network for Good (NFG) or any other payment processor or not - you have to deal with it! The donor should get to make the decision about how they donate. You should certainly encourage them to use your preferred channels and to make that super easy, but don’t dis donors who don’t do it your way.
I happen to think that Network for Good is one of the best things to happen to the nonprofit sector in a long time. Yes, I’m friends with Katya Andresen, the COO, but I became friends with her because I admired so much what she was doing at NFG and on nonprofit marketing in general. NFG makes online giving possible for so many nonprofits who couldn’t pull it off on their own and they have also opened up lots of new ways for donors to fund causes they care about online. Look who NFG processes payments for now:
* Charity Navigator
* Guidestar
* Causes on Facebook
* Causes on MySpace
* Capital One (which I used as part of my experiment)
* Change.org
* And many others!
If you hope to use social media to raise money, you are going to have to figure this out, no matter how big or how small your nonprofit is. NFG is trying to make it easier for you. They take care of the emailed tax receipt so the donor knows the transaction was successful, but it’s up to you to make the personal connection with your supporters. And right there in the email you get from NFG when they process a donation for you, they remind you to thank your donors directly. Sure, any system can always be improved, and Katya told me today that she and her staff are keeping track of all of the suggestions in the comments.
About Those Eight Nonprofits that Didn’t Acknowledge My Gift . . .
I just did some research on Guidestar. Only one of the eight is truly a small organization with a very limited budget and staff. The others are huge in comparison - they all have gross reciepts over $1 million. Two fall into the $30-80 million range and three are bringing in more than $100 million. These gifts were made over three months ago. It’s not about doing it in a timely fashion at this point, it’s about doing thank-yous at all. These organizations have the resources to acknowledge small gifts contributed online, if they really wanted to.
Keep the conversation going - leave a comment here or on the other post.
Tags: nptech, thank you notes
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Or, Can a Girl Get a Thank-You Note, Please?
Back on November 24, 2008, I cashed in a bunch of credit card miles through Capital One’s No Hassle Giving Site, converting them into cash gifts to charities. Capital One partnered with Network for Good to deliver the donations to the charities. I specifically selected 12 national charities that I had not previously contributed to, but whose missions I support, in order to see what the communications response would be to my $25 gift. On the form, I opted-in to share my contact information with the charities and provided both email and mailing addresses. I called it the “What I Got When I Gave” experiment.
I’ve been waiting all this time to report back on the experiment in hopes that the results would change, but they haven’t. It’s pitiful. Of the 12 national charities I gave to, only four — a measly 33% — acknowledged the gift in any way. (I also gave to three regional charities where I live and the percentage was the same - only 1 of the 3 acknowledged the gift.)
The fastest response came from National Public Radio, which sent me an email thank-you note addressed to “Dear Friend” on December 10. Personalization would have been nice, but at least they get the Gold Star for timeliness. I haven’t received any other communication from NPR since.
The next three all came within a day of each other, on January 6-7, 2009. Both Interplast and The Alliance for Climate Protection sent paper thank-you letters, addressed to me personally.
The Alliance mentioned receiving the gift through Network for Good on December 15, which would have been Network for Good’s next payment distribution day after my gift. Given the holidays, I have no problem with the date I received the letter. It was a standard form thank-you letter - nothing stand-out about it, but adequate.
Interplast’s thank-you letter was great. I’m a big fan of their blog because of their effective storytelling, and the thank-you letter does the same thing. Instead of a bunch of generic successes (which are better than none at all, I guess), they tell me a story and include before and after pictures! I’m constantly telling people to include pictures in thank you notes (see here and here), so I’m glad to see a nonprofit doing it well. Way to go, Interplast!
I haven’t received any additional communication from either Interplast or the Alliance for Climate Protection since the thank-you letters.
St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital didn’t send a thank-you note, but they did add me to their Hopeline email newsletter list and I’ve received the January and February 2009 editions.
I’m obviously really disappointed in not hearing a peep from the other eight. But, ever the supporter of nonprofits, I have come up with several potential reasons (uh, excuses) why this may be the case:
- $25 is chump change to them and doesn’t merit acknowledgment. I know there is significant debate out there about what you do with low-dollar donors. I hoped that $25 was high enough to generate some kind of response, but apparently not.
- Since I cashed in miles, they don’t think it’s a “real” gift (even though Network for Good sent them real money).
- It was the holidays and the gift fell through the cracks.
- Giving through Network for Good is not their preferred means of receiving online gifts — they’d prefer to get them through their own website — so they are not set up to acknowledge gifts like mine.
- The post office and/or Gmail’s spam filter ate their thank-you notes.
Do any of these hold water with you?
You may also be wondering what I was really expecting. I think each charity should have acknowledged the gift either via email or in print. Either one or both is acceptable, given that it was an online gift. Since I supplied my email address, I would have been fine being added to an e-newsletter list. Or, they could have strongly encouraged me to join a list in the thank-you note (or subscribe to a blog), with very explicit instructions for how to do that and a motivating description for why I would want to. So, none of the four who responded knocked it out of the park for me, but they all get kudos for responding at all.
Right about now, you are probably dying to know who the other 8 organizations are. I’m really torn about naming names, because as I said at the top, I really do believe in the missions of every single one of them and I would hate for their inclusion in this post to tarnish them in any way. So I’m not printing them here, at least not right now. But I definitely thought about it . . . C’mon, people, can’t a girl get a thank you note?!?
What do you think? Do these results surprise you or not? Are any of the rationales for no response legitimate? What would your group have done with a $25 donation from out of nowhere? Please leave a comment and let’s talk about it!
3/12/09 Update: Here is my follow-up post: Saying Thanks Even When It’s Inconvenient or Time-Consuming
3/13/09 Update: The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Prospecting” section picked up this post. Read more comments there.
Tags: nptech, thank you notes
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