Nonprofit Communications

The days when your nonprofit could get away with not having an online marketing strategy are over. Even the smallest or most locally based organizations are expected to use email and have some kind of website (or at a minimum, a web page on another organization’s umbrella site). And most nonprofits should be doing much, much more than that.

If you’ve been approaching online marketing in a piecemeal fashion, I recommend the following five-step approach to start pulling together a real nonprofit marketing strategy. (You can learn more about online marketing and this strategy for nonprofits during this week’s “Online Marketing Basics” webinar.)

1. If Your Website Sucks, Fix It. Here’s my 10-Point Basic Website Checklist for Nonprofits. Make sure your website passes on all ten points before worrying about anything else. Don’t have your own domain? They are dirt cheap. Get one now. No excuses.

2. Build Your Email & RSS Lists Everywhere, All the Time. The two best ways right now to communicate directly with your supporters online are through email and through RSS feeds. Learn more about RSS at TechSoup. Yes, there are other ways to reach people online, such as through social networking sites, discussion lists, and text messaging. But email and rss are going to reach the overwhelming majority of people. These lists are easy to manage and easy for your supporters to join and leave (if you have them set up correctly).

3. Create Tools and Great Content for Your Biggest Fans. The beauty of online marketing and Web 2.0 is that it is so easy for friends to pass info on to other friends. You can build your network of friends of friends of supporters of your organization incredibly fast online. But that means you have to identify the “influencers” or “patrons” in your network — your biggest fans — and give them the tools they need and the information that excites them, so they’ll pass it on. This is what Seth Godin calls “Flipping the Funnel.”

4. Dip into Social Media, But Dive into One Tool. Yes, social media is all the rage. You’ve got everything from Facebook Causes and Care2 to Digg and Flickr. It’s impossible to be everywhere in any kind of meaningful way. At the same time, social media is the new web, and you need to be a part of it in some way, if only to understand what others are doing. Pick one or two social media or social networking sites and dive into those. Learn how to use them and become a part of those communities.

5. Measure, Learn, and Adjust. Return on Investment (ROI) for social media is a hot topic right now and the best ways to measure success are still to come. But one of the great aspects of online marketing is that measurement is built right into most of the tools. You can tell how many people are subscribed to your e-newsletter and RSS feeds. You can tell how long people are staying on your website. Keep track of what you can, learn from both your successes and your failures, and adjust your strategy over time.

Learn more during the Online Marketing Basics webinar.

If you were starting from scratch, how would you spend an annual budget of just $1,000 to market your nonprofit online?

Let’s say you have a computer with the basic Microsoft Office package and you have a high-speed Internet connection. But that’s it.

Here’s how I would spend the money. Let me know how you would spend it by leaving a comment (if you are reading this via email or in a reader, click on the title to go to the blog).

$150 — to register a domain name and pay for decent web hosting for a year, with a dedicated IP.

You can get cheaper hosting, but these days it’s worth a little extra to get a “business” package with your own dedicated IP address so you aren’t sharing one with a spammer site. I personally use GoDaddy and Apollo Hosting, but there are certainly plenty of other reliable companies out there. See “A Few Good Web Hosting Providers” by Idealware.

Install Wordpress or some other open-source content management system/blogging software. See “A Few Good Tools to Manage Content on Simple Sites” by Idealware. (Yes, Idealware is my go-to site for tech recommendations.)

$300 — to pay a web designer to customize a free/cheap Wordpress template for your website/blog and a free e-newsletter template.

A little professional design help can go a long way in making free templates look like they were designed just for your organization. The templates I use for both this blog and NonprofitMarketingGuide.com were purchased from TemplateMonster and customized. Your email newsletter provider (who you’ll hire in just a second) will also provide lots of free templates that your designer can spiff up.

$300 — to get an annual plan with an email marketing service.

This lets you send out regular e-newsletters and timely e-blasts. $300 will let you email a list of around 2,500, so you have plenty of room to grow from zero. They will also give you the code to put an email newsletter sign-up box on your website. Your web designer can help you insert the code if you can’t figure it out. I email to lists mostly out of my shopping cart system, but I also use iContact. Here is another Idealware article: A Few Good Email Newsletter Tools.

$200 — to buy a decent point-and-shoot digital camera.

Great photos of real people working with your organization on its mission are incredibly valuable. Use photos on your website, in your email newsletters, and on your social networking sites (those are free). Your camera will come with basic photo editing software.

$50 — to spend on a little training.

Figure out where your biggest skill gap is and fill it with either an affordable webinar or a how-to book. Skills to work on include writing for the web (see 4/24/08 webinar), email newsletters (see 3/30/08 webinar), HMTL/PHP (so you can trouble-shoot your site and newsletters), basic digital photography and photo editing (so you can work with your images), as well as nonprofit marketing in general (start with “Robin Hood Marketing“).

Spare Change — spend on stock photography credits.

If you are under-budget anywhere, spend a few bucks buying credits for stock photography to fill in where you don’t have good photos of your own. I love istockphoto.

That’s it! How would you spend the $1K?

P.S. I’m teaching a webinar on April 2 on online marketing basics for nonprofits.

Rob Blizard

A good friend of mine, Rob Blizard, has written an interesting article (pdf) for the Planned Giving Today newsletter on the effectiveness of online tactics like web pages and email in marketing planned giving to nonprofit donors. If you aren’t hip to the development lingo, planned giving refers to gifts often associated with estate or retirement planning, like leaving a nonprofit in your will or establishing a charitable gift annuity or charitable trusts.

The article includes lots of interesting examples where online marketing is working and where it’s not. Could this be a mismatch of tactics and audience, since most people who are interested in making planned gifts are much older than the typical online donor? Or is it just a case of early adoption, where those nonprofits who are testing online marketing for planned giving now will be the first to see it payoff later as the Baby Boomers age?

Read the article for Rob’s take and then let us know what you think by leaving a comment. (If you are reading this through an email subscription, just click on over to the blog to leave a comment.)

Rob is currently the director of gift planning for Mount Vernon and previously worked for the Humane Society of the United States. In addition to your comments on the article, you can also leave questions for Rob here too.

As you know, I’m hosting a webinar this week with search engine optimization (SEO) expert David Westbrook. It’s going to be full of great tips on how to do your keyword research and search engine optimization, which is really essential if you expect your website to produce new supporters. David will speak in plain English, so even if HTML is Greek to you, you’ll still understand the basics. The webinar is this Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern and registration is just $35. Details and Registration Here.

Here’s another free tip from David that was news to me: “Frequently people who have heard anything about search engine optimization, but who don’t follow it closely, have heard that there is a near-magical meta tag called the “keyword meta tag.” This comes from the fact that a few years ago search engines relied on it heavily for indexing Web site pages. Today the importance of the keyword tag is zilch. Most search engine companies have programmed the indexing portion of their engines to ignore the tag altogether.”

And here I was thinking I really needed to go update the keyword tags on several of my sites. I’ll knock that right off the to-do list! Thanks David!

P.S. Take three minutes and tell me what webinar topics you want on the schedule this summer. Just rip through the list, ranking each topic on a scale of 1-5. Five free webinar passes are up for grabs for those who complete the survey. Take the survey now.

Chunking your Web and email text is one of the essential online writing skills I’ll be discussing during “Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email,” a webinar on Wednesday, February 20 at 2:00 p.m. ET. Registration is open until 1:30 p.m. and costs just $35.

When people read on paper, they usually start at the beginning and work their way through in a linear fashion from page one to page two to page three, etc. When people read on the Web, however, they start where Google sent them, and that could be anywhere on your website. Once they get there, your website visitors will quickly skim the page, looking for chunks of text and keywords that tell them they are in the right spot.

What is Chunking?

When you chunk text, you break down what may have started as one really long article into smaller, manageable, more easily understood blocks of text.  Your goal should be to create chunks of information that can stand on their own, but that also fit within the larger context of your website.

How Big is the Ideal Chunk?

So how big or small is the perfect chunk of text on a website? You need to find the sweet spot between too little and too much text. If you put too little information on a page, you force your reader to click around for the details, which is annoying. But if your chunks are too big, you make it difficult for your readers to immediately find the key points they are seeking.

For example, you might break down a 2,000 guide into three web pages of 600-700 words each. On each of the web pages, you could then break those 600 words into three blocks of 200 words each, complete with their own subheadings. Many professional online writers would advocate even shorter pages (no more than 500 words) and paragraphs (no more than 100 words).

Adding bulleted lists, writing in short sentences, highlighting keywords, and linking to related articles and details also contribute to successful chunking.

Which Page Has Better Chunking?

What questions would you have if you were interested in adopting a pet? Take a look at these two pages from two humane societies in Colorado and see who answers your questions more quickly.
Adoption Process Page at Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region

Adoption Process Page at the Dumb Friends League/Denver Humane Society

Both pages discuss the pet adoption process, but one does a much better job at chunking the information.

The Pikes Peak page contains over 1,500 words and only seven subheadings. There are no bulleted lists, highlighted keywords, or links to more details to help visitors skim through the page to find the specific answers they are seeking.

In contrast, the Denver Dumb Friends League page contains about 1,000 words and has ten subheadings. The paragraphs are much shorter and you’ll find several bulleted lists and links to details. Think back to those questions you had about adopting a pet and I bet this page answers them more quickly.

The Pikes Peak page also contains the same kind of information, but in buried form that requires actual reading, rather than skimming.

This article written for teachers at Dartmouth who are putting course materials online provides some additional perspectives on chunking.

Have you heard the one about the breast cancer patient on Twitter and the frozen peas yet? If so, you can skip the next paragraph and move on to why I think this is such a great lesson for do-it-yourself nonprofit communicators. If not, here’s the quick summary:

Susan Reynolds gets a breast biopsy and then a mastectomy. She is an avid social networker, so she’s tweeting and blogging the experience at Boobs on Ice. She posts a photo of herself easing the pain with a bag of peas on her breasts. Long story short, the crowd goes wild, she’s got people all over the place taking photos of themselves with bags of peas, and now there is a Frozen Pea Fund that’s raised over $7,000 for the American Cancer Society. I learned about this story from Craig Colgan, who wrote a great feature for the Washington Post called “How Frozen Peas Started A Movement: Cancer Patient’s Blog Builds Web Community,” which you can read on his blog. Oh, and this all took place in less than five weeks.

The lesson here is not how social networking lets you make friends and influence them to part with cash. We’ve seen tons of examples of that working. The big lessons are instead (1) be completely human and (2) let others run with your ideas. That’s how to build an online community that actually accomplishes something.

While I have never spoken with Susan, I seriously doubt that posting a photo of herself with frozen peas sticking out of her camisole was some calculated move to raise money. Instead, it was authentic, natural, and also a bit funny. In other words, it was completely human. And that’s what people respond to. They don’t respond to monolithic nonprofit organizations with mission statements and action plans. They respond to human beings.

Then, she let it take off. People started taking the pea photos. A online friend suggested donating the price of two bags of peas to breast cancer research. Another suggested setting up an actual fund to group the donations. And another, who just happened to be doing consulting on social media and working with the American Cancer Society brought it all together. Lots of people are doing lots of different things and something tells me Susan is not chained to her computer trying to micromanage it all. She’s got better things to do, like fight her breast cancer. She doesn’t need to do anything else but what she’s been doing all along on Twitter and her blog. It’s happening, in some ways now, without her.

My guess is that the being human part will be much easier for most nonprofit marketers than the letting go part. But if you are willing to run a bit of risk of people going completely off-message, you might find they come up with something that’s way better than you ever dreamed.

Before you launch all of your spectacular new initiatives for 2008, please, please, please all nonprofit marketing professionals, make sure that the organizations you are involved with as staff, volunteers, and board members have taken care of these three items. I admit, they are personal pet peeves, but they are all very basic marketing elements that a surprisingly large number of small- and medium-sized nonprofits have yet to address.

1) Get a clean copy of your logo. It seems like not a day goes by that I don’t see some raggedy, blurred, or skewed nonprofit logo on TV or in print that looks like it has been sent through a fax machine three times. You CANNOT take your little logo off of your website, or copy it out of a Word document, and use it everywhere else. I even see pixelated logos online, which is especially jarring.

Go find your original artwork files. They are most likely Illustrator or PhotoShop files. Once you find those, label them “original” in the filename so you know not to mess around with them. Then make copies and start saving them in different formats and resolutions appropriate to various uses, putting “web” and “print” in the filenames to help you keep them straight. I know this may be Greek to a lot of you, so here is the quickie lesson on file formats and resolution.

For online use, the resolution should be 72 ppi (pixels per inch). So if you want your logo to appear as 1.5 inches square on your website, the dimensions would be 108 pixels by 108 pixels (that’s 72 x 1.5). The file size (how many KBs or MBs it is) will vary based on how complicated the logo is, how many colors it uses, etc. Save web resolution files as jpgs, gifs, or pngs. Use these on websites, blogs, and in email.

For print use, the resolution should be at least 300 ppi. So your same 1.5 square-inch logo on a piece of paper would now be 450 x 450 pixels (300 x 1.5). Save these as eps or tiff files. You can also use jpg, but just make sure that the resolution and size are set high enough.

For TV, I recommend sending the highest quality logo you have and letting the company you are working with adjust the size and resolution to match their needs.

Can’t find your original artwork files? Get them redrawn. Either ask your graphic designer to do it or find a volunteer or college student who knows Illustrator. You’ll need to know which fonts you used or be willing to have the designer take a guess. Unless your logo is extremely complicated, it will probably take a designer about an hour to redraw an old logo. The $100-$200 you spend on this will pay for itself by making your organization look much more professional.

2) Add online giving to your website. I recently did a quick survey of more than 35 small nonprofits in the rural North Carolina county where I live and I found that only one organization told its website visitors how to give online. This is simply crazy. You don’t have to accept credit cards yourself. You don’t need a fancy shopping cart or a secure socket layer or any of the high-tech business that scares off so many small organizations.

All you need to do is go to NetworkforGood.org and search for your organization (use the legal name you use with the IRS or try your zip code if you have a hard time finding your organization — you are there somewhere). You’ll find your very own donation page. Now, simply link to that page from your own website. Network for Good gives you detailed instructions on how to do this and how to get one of their “Donate Now” buttons for your site. And ta-da, you are accepting online donations!

3) Make sure all staff and board members can nail your elevator pitch. Your staff and board members should be able to very clearly and very briefly describe the value of your work and exactly what it is you do. This is NOT memorizing your mission statement. It’s explaining who you are, what you do, and why you do it in three-four short sentences. Here are my tips on writing your nonprofit elevator speech.

Get these three tasks taken care of this month and start 2008 off right!

If the boomers have all the money and time for nonprofits, it seems like getting on social networking sites like TeeBeeDee, Multiply, and Eons would be a much better investment of time for nonprofits seeking new donors through social networks than creating MySpace and Facebook pages.

This New York Times article describes several recent rounds of venture capital investments into social networking sites like these aimed at the over-40 and -50 crowd.

“There are 78 million boomers — roughly three times the number of teenagers — and most of them are Internet users who learned computer skills in the workplace. Indeed, the number of Internet users who are older than 55 is roughly the same as those who are aged 18 to 34, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, a market research firm.”

Newsweek ran an essay by Robin Wolaner, the founder of TeeBeeDee last week that provides some additional enlightenment:

“We boomers behave online just as younger people do—shopping, banking, learning—but we have not yet committed to social networks. Sites like MySpace have felt unsafe or a waste of time . . . The goal was authenticity; that sounds simple, but many ventures aimed at our generation have failed because they think of us as one big market.”

While these sites target older generations, social networking for boomers is a young field. It’s hard to say which of these sites will rise to the top, but if you see social networking as a growing element of your online marketing strategy (and who doesn’t?), it’s worth experimenting with at least one of them. Compared to Facebook and MySpace, the competition from other nonprofit causes will likely be slim — but not for long.