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.
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.
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.
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.
Ideal for anyone who contributes to a nonprofit website, blog, or email newsletter. Online writing needs to be personal, quick, and relevant to the reader. In this encore of one of our most popular webinars, I’ll share how you can transform your online writing so your web and email content work for you and your supporters.
Are you ready to start fundraising online, but not exactly sure what you need to do to make it work? Hint: A “Donate” button isn’t enough! During this webinar, you’ll learn about all of the key components of a solid online fundraising program.
Ready to kick your online fundraising up a few notches? Alia McKee of Sea Change Strategies is our special guest speaker. Alia will show you how to go beyond the basics of donor-friendly websites and engaging email copy by creating a program that wows your donors into giving again and again.
What’s Coming Up in May and June
I also just opened registration for several webinars in May and June, with a few more to come soon.
You can attend all of the webinars we host in a 12-week period for just $97 with your All-Access Pass. Otherwise, a la carte registration is $35 per webinar. That includes everyone in your office who can fit around one computer.
In my online marketing workshops, I ask nonprofits to imagine the day when practically every prospective donor checks to see what current donors think about their organization by reading online reviews. Something like 3/4 of people say customer reviews influence their purchasing decisions and it’s not much of a stretch to see how that can morph from reading reviews before you buy a camera to reading reviews before you make a donation. That day far off in the future just got a whole lot closer.
Guidestar is now working with GreatNonprofits to share user comments about charities with each other. Comments posted on one site will appear on the other as well. I did a quick check and the nonprofits that are “most reviewed” and have the “highest ratings” are nearly all local or regional nonprofits, which means that they are actively asking their supporters to write reviews, rather than waiting for it to happen naturally. Smart cookies!
Instead of getting panicky about the idea of negative comments about you being posted there, use this instead as an opportunity to collect stories from your supporters, in their own words, about how fabulous you are.
Here is how you can take advantage of this: Go to the GreatNonprofits Welcome Page for nonprofits and set up your account. This will let you add text, photos, video, etc. to your page. Then email all of your fervent supporters the comment link and ask them to write a little blurb for you.
Project Homeless Connect in San Francisco is the most reviewed nonprofit on the site today and it looks like nearly all of the reviews were written by volunteers. On their website, in the menu, is a link called “Tell Your Story” that goes directly to the GreatNonprofits page. GreatNonprofits also gives you a badge that you can put on your site to collect and promote your reviews, if you want to take it up a notch. You can also use the reviews in other marketing pieces by simply identifying them as “GreatNonprofits.org User Reviews.”
How long will it be before the average donor knows where to go to check for reviews? Still quite awhile, I bet. But why not get out front and use GreatNonprofits and GuideStar to present positive testimonials to prospective donors and to reinforce the great work you are doing with your current supporters?
David Simpson, the chairman of GoldMail, called a few weeks ago asking me to check out his new service. Like most bloggers with more than 10 subscribers, I get a lot of requests like this, most of which I ignore. But this, my nonprofit friends, is one cool tool that I think a lot of you could use to do some amazing marketing.
GoldMail calls itself “voice over visual messaging” - sort of a combination of voicemail and email. It allows you to record your voice over a series of slides that you create within GoldMail using whatever you have available - photos, screenshots, PowerPoint slides, PDFs, etc. You end up with a nice multimedia message that you can link to in an email or embed in your website or blog. You typically need software like Camtasia Studio or PowerPoint plugins like PointeCast, which are much more expensive and have fairly steep learning curves, to produce something like this.
GoldMail lets you create a simple but effective version of the same thing, without requiring a lot of time, money, or technical know-how. After watching a few quick how-to’s, you can create a message in minutes. And it’s only $9.99 per month. It’s perfect for quick, on-the-fly messages, but can also be used for more polished presentations too. You can record up to 10 minutes, but the most effective uses will be much shorter than that, I think.
I used GoldMail today to create a 3-minute tour of the Nonprofit Marketing Guide All-Access Pass. I’ve embedded the file below and I’ll also be sending out the link to it in an email message to my Nonprofit Marketing Tips subscribers. Hit play to see what GoldMail produces, and to go behind-the-scenes with the All-Access Pass:
(Don’t see the viewer or want to see a bigger, full-screen version? Click here instead.)
Here are three creative ways your nonprofit could use GoldMail:
1) Personalized Thank-you Message. Grab a few photos (or even just one really good one!) that show the results that your donor helped bring about. Record a one-minute thank-you message over those slides, using the donor’s name and referring to their gift specifically, and then email the link to them. “Jack, I wanted you to see for yourself what your $200 has made possible . . . take a look at these photos . . . . isn’t this wonderful? Thank you so much, Jack, for making such a difference . . . “ You can also add in pre-recorded sounds, like your clients saying thank-you in their own voices.
2) Weekly Updates to Members, Boards, Committees, Etc. Do you have a core group of people who need regular updates on your activities? Record a weekly GoldMail message for them with the week’s highlights. It’s show and tell!
3) Event Invitations. Spice up your invitation by talking about all the great things you have planned for this year over fun photos from last year’s event.
I hear some of you asking, but isn’t video so much better? Probably. But video is waaaaay harder to pull off than this. This is easy. And yes, I have Camtasia Studio, and I’ve still put off making the “All-Access Pass Tour” above for months, because there are just too many settings in Camtasia to deal with. For me, too many options is just as bad as too few. I’ll say it again: this was easy.
Two quick tips from my experience today:
- Get your slides in the right order and practice a few times before you actually record. The ability to edit your audio recording is pretty limited and if you decide to move slides around, you have to start the audio recording over from scratch. Make sure you have all the slides you want, and you have them in the right order, before you record the audio.
- Turn up your microphone volume within your control panel. Even though I do webinars all the time with my headset and the audio is just fine, it was way too low on my first GoldMail recordings. Crank it up a bit on your computer before you record.
David Simpson says the San Franciso Zoo used GoldMail to create a message about new zoo babies and the email to donors with the GoldMail message outperformed the standard email message by 650%. You can’t argue with those kinds of results. David is interested in exploring how other nonprofits can use GoldMail. How might you use this kind of service? Leave a comment with your ideas.
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.
I’ve seen lots of interest from nonprofits in using video to communicate with supporters about their causes, along with an equal amount of trepidation about how to do it. I’m not a video expert, but I know several people who are, so I put out a call over Twitter for some guest posts to share with you. I’m expecting several more, but I’ll share two that have come in some far:
On Tuesday, March 10, at Noon Eastern, the Chronicle of Philanthropy is hosting an online chat on how nonprofits can effectively use video. Even if you can’t attend live, be sure to check out the transcript later.
Here are some additional resources I think you’ll find helpful:
Last week I gave a short talk at a statewide conference for the United Way. If I had to pick one slide that summed up my talk, it would be this one:
As Claire Meyerhoff, who was also on the panel, put it, you can spend a whole day writing a press release and trying to get a reporter to use it, and get nothing. Or you can spend that time creating your own content, using it in several different places, and having it work for you for months to come.
Nonprofits are no longer dependent on the media to get their messages out beyond their inner circles, and yet so many groups are still fretting about whether to double-space a press release. Traditional media still plays an important role, but it’s not what it used to be.
Instead of thousands of newspapers landing in the driveways of your potential supporters, you should be looking at ways to generate thousands of messages from members of your inner circle to their own inner circles, talking about your cause, using everything from email to social media to do it. The tools to make that happen are now easy and inexpensive. Anyone, or any nonprofit, can be a publisher, broadcaster, and media mogul.
I’ll be talking a lot more about this on Wednesday, February 11, during the webinar called “Online Marketing Basics for Nonprofits: From Email to Social Media.” During the webinar, I’ll help you sort through your online marketing options, emphasizing how they all fit together, and helping you see how they can help you form your own media empire.
For those of you who are really ready to dive into the social media components of this in particular, check out NTEN’s We Are Media wiki.
You might also find two additional webinars helpful: Blogging for Nonprofits on February 12 and Creating Online Evangelists on February 17 March 20. Single webinars are $35 and the All-Access Pass for 12 weeks is $97 (attend as many live webinars as you want and watch the rest as recordings).
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