Nonprofit Communications

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.

Only 37% of nonprofits are tracking the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, according to a new survey by Nancy Schwartz at Getting Attention. This is, of course, a real shame, because tracking is what helps you figure out what’s working, what’s not, and how you can be more effective over time. The great news is that there are some very simple and cheap tools you can use to track your online marketing campaigns. In fact, most online marketing tools have tracking built into them — you are already paying for them. You just have to use them.

Websites

Any half-way decent hosting package will include a basic statistics package. Idealware just did a report on web analytic packages that’s definitely worth a read. If you are pressed for time and only want to track a few elements on a monthly basis, my top five would be

- Visits - the number of people looking at each page. This tells you the most popular pages on your site.
- Unique visitors - how many different people are visiting your site, regardless of how many times they returned.
- Referrers - where your visitors were before they came to your site. Are they finding you through Google, by typing in your URL directly, or by clicking on a link from someone else’s site?
- Click Path - where people come into your site, where they go, and where they leave. You can also look at top entry and exit pages, but the full click path gives you a better sense for how people typically use your site.
- Keywords - which words people are using in search engines to find your site (and conversely, which words are important to you that aren’t bringing people in).

Email Newsletters

You really should be using an email newsletter service like Intellicontact or Constant Contact (both of which I recommend) for your e-newsletters and not trying to send them out of Outlook or Thunderbird. More on that some other time. When you use a service like this, you get all kinds of great tracking data. Again, my top five to track would be

- Released or Sent Successfully - your total list minus bounced messages. This helps you track the quality of your list over time. The fewer bounces, the better.
- Open Rate - how many people are opening the email (HTML email only).
- Click Throughs - how many people are clicking on a link in the email. This shows they are reading it and taking action or looking for more information. You can also see which links they are clicking on.
- Forwards - how many people are forwarding your message to someone else.
- Unsubscribes - how many people are getting off your list. Don’t be alarmed if you regularly lose a few people. But if your unsubscribes spike, carefully examine what in that particular message sent people fleeing from your list.

Blogs

Why are you blogging in the first place? The answer will determine what you should be tracking. Register with Feedburner and Technorati to get whatever stats you need that your blogging platform doesn’t provide it. All of the stats above for websites also apply to blogs. In addition to those, you might also track

- Subscribers - how many people have affirmatively shown interest in your blog by subscribing to your RSS feed.
- Technorati Rank - where you rank in the greater blogosphere, as determined by the number and variety of links to your blog.

As you read this list, you may have said “Doh! How obvious!” But are you actually using all of these tools to the fullest? It’s like when I walk around my house on hot summer days looking for the source of that strange smell. After looking in every room for some kid-induced odor source, I usually end up saying, “Doh! It’s the neighbor’s barnyard!” I know it’s there, but it’s become part of the background, and I forget about it. Get these tools back into the foreground and your marketing campaigns will surely improve over time.

ALT tags are the bits of text that you can attach to images on webpages and in email messages and e-newsletters. As I explained yesterday, using the ALT tag is essential when including images in email campaigns and e-newsletters, because if the people reading your email have image blocking turned on, they won’t see the image, but they will likely see the ALT text. ALT tags are also needed by visually impaired people who rely on screen readers.

ALT stands for alternative — this text will be shown as an alternative to showing the image itself. Many people advocate that you simply describe what is in the photo, especially for ALT tags on websites. But ALT tags can also be used as marketing text, and this approach makes sense for email where you are most likely trying to encourage some type of action on the reader’s part.

Here are a few tips for your email ALT tags.

1) Always use them! You don’t need them on decorative items like bullets, but use them on all photographs and artwork of significance.

2) Keep them short, but not too short. Don’t use “Logo” when you can use “Smith Community Library Logo.” Shoot for three to seven words.

3) Use words that are meaningful to your readers. Treat writing your ALT tags like you do headlines and captions. Use keywords that will grab your readers’ attention. Don’t say “Kittens at the shelter” when you can say “Kittens ready to be adopted today at the shelter.”

4) Encourage readers to turn images on. Your newsletter will look much better and be more effective if people see the images you placed there. You can use the ALT tag to encourage them to turn on the images. For example, ALT tags like “Turn on images to see why Jim is smiling” or “Turn on images to see what your donations purchased last month” give the reader an incentive. A tag like this on every image would be annoying, but using them sparingly may convince some of your readers to take that extra step to see your images.

I always advise nonprofits to include photos in their print newsletters. But what about images in e-newsletters? The answer is not as clear-cut and here’s why: a large portion of your online readers probably won’t see the images automatically. Worse yet, if you don’t watch your design carefully, these readers may see only a big empty box leading them to quickly delete your email without a second thought. You can learn more about why this is the case at Campaign Monitor and EmailExperience.org.

Given this reality, I say you should play it safe with your email campaigns and e-newsletters and assume that some portion of readers won’t see your images. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include images; it means you should do so carefully. Here are a few guidelines you should follow.

1. Use small images. You don’t want to fill up the viewing pane with an image. Try to keep images under 200 pixels wide. If you use a banner image across the top as a nameplate, keep the height small (under 75 pixels). This will leave you room for your text to appear in the viewing pane.

2. Include great copy as close to the top as possible. Put some extra effort into the text that appears at the top of the message or newsletter. You need to grab your reader with those few words they will see in the preview pane if you are losing some of that space to a blocked image.

3. Always use the ALT tag. When you insert an image in HTML, you have the option of attaching words to that image with an ALT tag. Though it’s not a 100% solution, most readers will see this text even if the image is blocked. (More tips on writing good ALT text tomorrow).

4. Include captions. To keep a caption with your image in an HTML email, create a small table with one column that is the same width as your image and two rows. Put the image in the top row and put the caption in the bottom row. Insert the whole table (image and caption) into your email wherever you want it to appear.

5. Never send image-only messages. I’ve seen event invitations sent via email that are nothing but one solid image. With images off, I see nothing but a big empty box. Bad idea. Never use this approach. Always include text in your emails.

I have launched a new online directory for nonprofits at www.500GoodCauses.com. It’s a “word cloud” directory made famous in the past few weeks by Joel Comm and his 500Words.com site. I’ve taken Joel’s software and am using it for good causes!

It works like this: Each of the 500 words or phrases on the site are unique. Only one nonprofit can claim each word, and when they do, it links to their website (or any page they choose), and it’s theirs for the next 2 1/2 years. It’s yet another tool for search engine optimization. I’ll also be buying search engine ads to draw traffic to the directory. Site visitors can’t help but click on the words out of curiosity, so it should lead to some interesting new visitors for the nonprofits who participate.

The fee to claim a word varies based on the formatting you select (size, bold, colors, etc). If you don’t see a word you want, you can make one up for a slightly higher fee. Through Monday, July 10, the prices are all half-off, which means you can claim your word for as little as $25. And the best part . . . I’ll be donating 1/3 of the gross revenues from the directory to randomly selected nonprofits that have claimed words, or had words claimed on their behalf.

Nonprofits, claim your word now, and everyone else, claim a word for your favorite good cause!