Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

I’ve played around with lots of different photo galleries, both free and for a fee, for both clients and for my personal blog, where I keep my far-flung family happy with lots of kid photos. I’ve decided that I like Shozam the best (formerly Web Gallery Wizard) and here’s why.

It gives me complete control over how the photos appear and offers several nice templates for the photo galleries. Some of them are a little cheesy, but most are tasteful templates that can work well with many website designs. It’s got a step-by-step process (Steps #1 - 6) that’s really easy to follow, so you don’t get lost in the process of moving your photos from your camera to the web. I don’t have to do anything to my photos before placing them into the program. It takes care of all the sizing, rotating, creating thumbnails, etc. Adding captions is simple and you can also add audio and video clips.

I also like that it comes in several different versions, allowing me to pick the version with the number of tools I needed, and not pay for the ones I don’t. I bought the advanced version for $99.99, and it’s the mid-range version. The Lite version (the most basic version) is $24.95. Naturally, I recommend that you start with the free trial. It will let you test drive the various options before you spend the cash, which is always nice. It took me awhile before I coughed up the money, but after trying several of the free or cheap solutions and being really unhappy in the end, I’m glad I spend the bucks to get the product that works for me.
If you know of a program that does all that Shozam does for the same price or less, let me know by leaving a comment.

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.

I love gadgets. I love office supplies. I go crazy in kitchen supply stores. How many different bundt cake pans and muffin tins does one woman need, my husband wonders. I think this is why I am toying with so many different ways of doing the same thing online with my blogs and websites.

My rationalization for this behavior, of course, is that I like to test lots of online tools so that I can help my clients make better decisions about them. It makes it tougher for me to keep track of sometimes, but I like learning about the pros and cons of various options, and the best way to do that is to actually use them myself.

Take my blogrolls, for instance. “E-Courses and Tip Sheets” is in my Wordpress template. “My Other Sites” and “Selected Clients” are generated from del.icio.us links. The rest of the blogroll (the links to other blogs) is generated by NewsGator, the RSS reader I use the most. On the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants page, I use bloglines to manage the “Big Top” Blogroll. I also use Furl, but that doesn’t show up anywhere on this blog right now.

I also like playing with Wordpress plugins. I’m experimenting with two new ones since I’ve updated this blog’s template: Democracy, the polling plugin, and Social Bookmarks, which places social bookmarking site icons at the bottom of each post, so you can save the ones you like.

I’m also experimenting with content management systems (CMS), but on a smaller scale. I manage my EcoScribe and NonprofitAnnualReports.net sites with regular ol’ HTML. I’m using Wordpress as a CMS on NonprofitNewsletters.net and NewsletterWritingTips.com. Writing911.com currently uses Lore, but I’m in the middle of converting it to Joomla. I’d also like to try Drupal one day.

For the three blogs I write (this one, a personal one about my kids, and Writing for Nonprofits, which is for freelance writers), I’ve stuck with Wordpress. I looked at several other platforms, but found Wordpress to be the easiest to learn and most flexible for my various needs.

Got any opinions to share about these various tools or some to recommend I try?

“Writing Tips” is a free monthly e-newsletter I publish that’s full of . . . you guessed it . . . writing tips. It contains free advice to help you write better at work and covers grammar, writing style, how to write various types of publications, and more.

Here is the table of contents for this issue:

• Starting Sentences: What’s OK and What’s Not
• How-To: Writing Your Elevator Speech
• Do You Live in Arkansas?
• E-Courses Start Monday
• Two Free Newsletters for Nonprofits

Read the Newsletter Online Now

Subscribe to the Newsletter

If you are interested in networking online with other nonprofit writers and editors, check out the new Writers and Editors Affinity Group at N-TEN. It’s essentially an email discussion list, but affinity groups can also produce blogs and wikis.

As of today, there are 39 N-TEN Affinity Groups, so you might find others that interest you as well. I’m also part of the Nonprofit Blogging, Nonprofit Webmasters, and Email Deliverability Affinity Groups, for example.