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.
I’ve heard from several nonprofits lately who are only sending their 4-8 page print newsletters to their supporters twice a year. They wish they were sending it more often, but they just can’t make it happen because of time or budget constraints.
My response: What’s the point?
Updating your supporters twice a year on your work is not often enough to keep them engaged in what you do and top of mind when they consider contributing time or money. And each edition of a print newsletter typically costs thousands to print and mail, not including staff time. I really question whether the newsletter is even worth doing at all if you can only do it twice a year.
Instead of spending all that money to contact your supporters just twice, with questionable impact, you might want to try switching over to postcards. Naturally, every situation is different, but in many cases, a full-color postcard will cost about 1/3 of what a typical 4-page color newsletter will cost to print and mail to your list. That means you could contact your supporters six times a year, instead of two, for the same money.
And the best part is that postcards are much more likely to be read, because they fit right in with the way we all sort and read our mail today. In the few seconds we each give a piece of mail in the pile, a postcard can grab our hearts with a great photo (that graphic side is really important), deliver the key point we need to know, and motivate us to take the next step.
What might these six postcards focus on? Here is one possible line-up:
1. Connecting a Donor to a Result. One one side, include a photo of one of your donors — let’s call her Alice — ideally in a setting related to an accomplishment of your organization. On the text side, in three sentences, explain how Alice’s donation helped bring about this great result. Then ask your supporters to join Alice by joining a monthly giving program. Tell them where to find the sign-up page on your website.
2. Encouraging Event Registration. Promote an upcoming event, emphasizing what attendees will get out of it, and tell people how to RSVP. On the front side, include an image that represents your event theme or the good work that will come from the money you raise.
3. Urging Print Supporters to Move Online. Tell them about all the great stuff they are missing if they aren’t going to your website, reading your blog, and subscribing to your e-newsletter. Make your online offerings can’t-miss! On the other side, use a funny cartoon or graphic or a screen capture of something really cool on your website. Or include a photo of your executive director in an “I’m blogging this” t-shirt. Here’s a little more on this from Elizabeth Turnbull.
4. Thanking Your Donors. Reproduce a thank you note from someone your organization has helped on one side and on the other, give us a little bit of the back story on the person. Reinforce that it’s the donors to your organization who really deserve the thanks. Ask supporters to sign up for your monthly giving program or to take some other action in support of your cause.
5. Empowering Your Supporters. What can your supporters do on their own, in their own day to day lives, to further your mission and support your cause? Give them a quick lesson in how to do something on one side, with a picture of someone doing it on the front.
6. Asking Them to Join You and Others. Are you planning a rally? Do you need calls made to legislators or letters sent to editors? State you need them to do, explain the difference it will make, and show your supporters how to join with you and others in making it happen.
Want more? Staying in touch with your supporters regularly is one of the approaches I’ll be discussing during Best Practices in Nonprofit Marketing, a webinar on Tuesday, March 24. I’ll talk more about how to do that cost-effectively next week on Wednesday, March 11 during Nonprofit Marketing on Next to No Budget. Registration for each webinar is $35 and they are also included with the 12-Week All-Access Pass ($97).
Are you using postcards to market your nonprofit? Share your story by leaving a comment!
It seems like every nonprofit I’ve talked to in the last few months is either dropping their print newsletter entirely or carefully considering ways to cut back on the expense of publishing it (e.g. publishing fewer pages or printing fewer copies).
If you are considering moving from print to email, I recommend starting from scratch with your editorial calendar, because much of what you considered appropriate for a print newsletter simply won’t work in email. Here are a few examples:
Letter from the Director. Honestly, these are often ghastly in print because they are typically full of jargon and behind-the-scenes minutiae, all of which is exactly opposite of what works in email. If the director really loves writing that letter, then it’s time to give him or her a blog. Your email newsletter, on the other hand, should be focused primarily on the readers and what they care about and how they can connect to you and your cause. Very brief letters can work, but they must laser-focused on the reader — the letter is simply a format for content you want to share, not an open invitation for the director to ramble.
Calendar of Events. If you have a full page calendar with all the boxes for each day of the week, you can put that online (try Google Calendar, for example), but you shouldn’t try to email the whole calendar. Instead, highlight a few upcoming events and include a link to the full calendar.
Boring Photos. Group photos of your board, “big check” photos, and the like often make it into print newsletters, but waste precious space in email. Photos in email newsletters should be mission-oriented.
Masthead. This is where, in a print newsletter, you’ll often find complete contact information for the group, the list of the board of directors, the staff who work on the newsletter, and the mission statement. While you should include your contact information in your e-newsletter (CAN-SPAM rules require you to include your mailing address), leave the board and staff lists and the rest on your website. You can link to if need be.
Long Articles. Articles in email are much shorter than those in print. Shoot for no more than 500 words. If you need to go longer, include an excerpt in the email and have readers click over to your website to read the full article.
Big Display Ads. The majority of your email should be text, not images. That means those big full-page ads (or even half-page ads) that you include in your print newsletter, advertising everything from your own events to your sponsor’s products and services, need to go. You can create smaller button ads, or even better, turn that advertising into real content of interest to your readers — make what you are promoting relevant to them and to your cause.
Complicated Charts and Graphics. Email newsletters look different depending on which email program you are using to view them, making including charts and tables a crap shoot. Instead, save those items as a single graphic file (e.g. gif) and insert them into your newsletter that way. Remember, they need to be smaller because you are working with less space, so make your graphics as simple as possible.
Profiles of donors, volunteers, clients, and other supporters are a staple of nonprofit newsletters. You can also use them in your annual reports and other marketing materials.
Today I posted 25 different questions you can ask when interviewing the people you’d like to profile. These questions will help find that special something about the person that makes them really worth profiling and that will be of keen interest to your newsletter readers (remember, you still need to write for your reader, even when you are profiling someone special in your organization!).
My friend Rob Blizard, who was coordinating the Marketing Track, asked me to speak about improving the newsletters that planned giving departments send out. And boy do most of them need some improvement! So, I took three hot trends in nonprofit marketing and applied them specifically to these kinds of newsletters. The presentation was very well received — thanks to everyone in the room for participating in the exercises and asking lots of great questions.
Since these trends can be applied to any nonprofit newsletter, I thought you might be interested in the slides:
I’d also like to give a special shout-out to J. Erik Potter, who I met at the conference. He reads this blog and writes his own called A Blog on Giving. Thanks for introducing yourself!
You’ve decided that the benefits of emailing your newsletter to your supporters outweigh the costs and you are ready to make the transition from print to email. Here are seven tips to help you do it right (get more during Thursday’s webinar).
1. Don’t try the short-cuts. Sending a PDF of your print newsletter out as an attachment to an email list is NOT an email newsletter. Neither is sending a one-line email that says “Click here to read our newsletter on our website.” If you are going to use email to communicate regularly with your supporters, create a real e-newsletter, with real content in the email itself.
2. Dissect your old print newsletter. Not everything that you included in your print newsletter will be right for your email newsletter. For example, if you had a large calendar of events in print, it’s best to highlight only a few events in an email newsletter with links to a full calendar on your website. Think about what belongs where online — not everything will work in an email.
3. Consider a more personal tone. Email is a more personal form of communication than print. If you’ve been writing your newsletter articles in the third person (The Dog Lovers Association is seeking volunteers), now is the time to move to a more personal first person- second person style (If you’d like to volunteer to walk dogs, we want to hear from you).
4. Decide on full text, teasers, or a combo. An email newsletter should be relatively short compared to a print newsletter. That means you have to make some decisions about the quantity and length of articles. Some organizations will include one full article in an email newsletter with headlines only for other articles on a website. Others will include teaser text, or longer blurbs, for all of the articles, requiring readers to click over to the website for the full version of each article. Either way is acceptable, but I think it’s best to be consistent from issue to issue.
5. Prepare to spend lots of time on microtext. Working on the microtext like headings and captions is important in print, but it’s absolutely essential in email. Start working now on the kinds of subject lines, headlines, and subheads you’ll use in your email newsletter. A large portion of your mailing list will quickly skim and read only the microtext, so make it good.
6. Use an email newsletter service. Don’t try to distribute an email newsletter out of your desktop email program. The problems with this approach are too numerous to mention. Instead, use an email marketing service provider. The benefits far exceed the minimal monthly costs.
7. Add a sign-up box to your website. Ideally, this will appear in your site template so the sign-up box appears on every page of your website. At a minimum, put it on your homepage and about us or contact us pages. One of the benefits of using an email service provider is that your supporters can add themselves to your list automatically — but only if they can find the form on your website.
“Do we really have to include the letter from the executive director/CEO/president in our newsletter?”
“Do we really have to include an executive message in our annual report?”
Nonprofit staff ask me these questions with the same look on their faces that a child has when she asks, “Do I really have to eat this broccoli?”
That’s because they are equally bland and mushy, and while everything else on the plate (or pages) may be great, you’d rather just pretend that overcooked broccoli (or letters) didn’t exist.
Here’s my order of preference for solving this problem:
(1) Drop it. No one will miss it.
This is definitely true in a newsletter. I think you can argue the case that an annual report is better with a personal message from the director, but only if it’s good. In my “How to Write a Four-Page Annual Report” webinar on Thursday, I’ll recommend either dropping it entirely or cutting it back to less than a third of a page. It’s just not that important compared to some other annual report must-haves.
(2) If you must keep it, move it.
When these letters are really bad, nonprofits seem to always make it worse by putting them on the cover of the newsletter. Move it to less valuable real estate (like the lower half of an interior page). After all, the Op-Ed page in a newspaper is in the middle, not on the cover. For an annual report, it really does need to be near the front. It doesn’t need to take up a whole page, however.
(3) If at all possible, give it a serious makeover.
The letter should serve a purpose other than executive director ego stroking. You should treat it just like any other article in your newsletter. What’s the message? Why do the readers care? How does the letter make your supporters feel good about themselves and your organization? The contents of the letter should be debated just like the rest of the editorial calendar. For annual reports, either use the letter as a personalized executive summary or as an extra helping of thanks to your supporters with a brief preview of good things to come.
This week’s webinar at Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com is “Ten Easy Fixes for Your Boring Print Newsletter.” It’s on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 from 2:00 - 3:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific). Registration is $49.
Not sure if you should take this webinar or not? See if your print newsletter is showing any of these signs of being really boring:
1) The “Letter from the Executive Director” is on the cover or takes up a whole page. This is a tell-tale sign that your newsletter is more about what you think is interesting than what your audience cares about, which is the number one reason that nonprofit newsletters are boring. Even if it is not on the cover, if your executive message fills a whole page anywhere in your newsletter, odds are it’s boring.
2) You’re talking about stuff that happened months ago. Don’t summarize an event that happened three months ago in your newsletter. That tells me that you don’t have enough good stuff going on now and in the future to fill your pages. I’m not against event summaries in newsletters, but make sure they are very recent or that you’ve turned them into some other useful form of information, like a how-to article. Otherwise it’s just boring old news.
3) The photos are all grip-and-grins and fig-leaf lineups. Yes, we want people photos, but the same ol’ award ceremony and big check photos are uninspiring and have nothing to do with your mission. Same goes for the fig-leaf lineups (you know, where everyone is standing with their hands crossed in front of their privates). More on bad photo poses.
4) The word “You” is rarely used. People want to read information that is relevant to them and the word “You” in headlines, subheads, and first sentences of paragraphs signals that the writer is talking directly to the reader. If you aren’t talking to me, the reader, why should I care what you have to say? In other words, talk to me directly, or I’m bored.
5) You’ve reduced the type size to make everything fit. This usually means that you either don’t want to edit what you’ve written or don’t know how, and either way, unedited, rambling text with too many tangential details is really boring.
If you see your newsletter here, register for the webinar on Wednesday. One of my freelancing friends from my days in Washington DC, Ruth Thaler-Carter, will join me in answering your questions. Ruth is a veteran nonprofit newsletter writer, editor and designer and will have lots of great tips to share with us.
Is it possible to do all of your nonprofit marketing online and avoid printing costs entirely? Many nonprofits are dumping their boring print newsletters in favor of email versions, and some are forgoing the printed annual report in favor of a pdf download or basic web pages instead.
The extent to which you can eliminate your print budget depends on your audience and what you are trying to communicate. If the people you are trying to reach all check their email regularly or login to the same websites or check their RSS readers frequently, you might be able to pull it off. But for many nonprofits with audiences who are not tethered to the Internet, print will always be a necessity.
The best approach is to evaluate your options each time you decide you need to communicate with your audience. Don’t assume ahead of time — actually think it through. Is that message best delivered to them in print or online, or in some other way, like over the phone or in person? You have to match the audience, the message, and the delivery.
Of course, the printing industry will argue that print will never die. Check out this very clever video called Printing’s Alive (warning to sensitive ears: it contains bleeped cussing).
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I’ve heard from several nonprofits lately who are only sending their 4-8 page print newsletters to their supporters twice a year. They wish they were sending it more often, but they just can’t make it happen because of time or budget constraints.
“Do we really have to include the letter from the executive director/CEO/president in our newsletter?”
