Nonprofit Communications

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.

Want more? I’m teaching a webinar on converting your print newsletter into an email newsletter this Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Learn more and register here.

“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).

Thanks to the ADCMW Creatives List for the video tip.

One of the easiest ways that nonprofit communicators can go green in their operations is to use recycled paper all the time — in your office equipment and office supplies like folders and when you buy print. Long gone are the excuses about paper quality and, for the most part, price (or at least they should be, if you shop around a bit.)

There’s just one small problem. Lots of nonprofits like to include “Printed on Recycled Paper” on their documents to promote their environmentally sensitive behavior when they, in fact, have no idea what that phrase really means and aren’t actually using 100% recycled paper. Let me explain.

According to the Federal Trade Commission’s Guides for the Use of Environmental Marketing Claims, which were published a decade ago, if you claim that your document is “Printed on Recycled Paper,” you are saying that it is printed on paper containing 100% recycled fiber. However lots of the office and printing papers on the market today only contain 30% recycled fiber. If you are using those papers, you should say, “Printed on Paper with 30% Recycled Fiber” or something along those lines.

I personally buy and highly recommend Staples® 100% Recycled Copy Paper, so I can include “Printed on Recycled Paper” in my documents without further details. To be technically correct about this particular paper, I could say, “Printed on 100% Post-Consumer Recycled Paper,” which is even better from an environmental perspective.

When something is called “recycled,” that material can come from two sources: Pre-Consumer, which is manufacturing scraps, and Post-Consumer, which is all the paper that we put in the recycling bin at home and work. Manufacturers commonly recycle their own discards for economic reasons, so that recovered paper isn’t as important for consumers like us to focus on as the post-consumer material. The post-consumer material is the paper that we are trying to keep out landfills and incinerators and want to be made into new products; therefore, we should look for post-consumer content when we buy recycled products.

When you are buying office paper or talking to your printer about paper choices, ask for the total recycled content and the highest amount of post-consumer content that you can, too. If price is a concern, look for paper that is 100% recycled, with 30% post-consumer content. Interested in learning more about environmental paper choices? Check out the Conservatree website.

This post is my contribution to Blog Action Day.

Last week I taught my “Strategies for Successful Nonprofit Newsletters” workshop through Duke University’s certificate program in nonprofit management. The workshop focuses mostly on print newsletters, and here are the top five questions that participants said they wanted answered during the course.

You get my bottom-line, three-second answers here. Follow the links to www.NonprofitNewsletters.net for the longer answers.

1) What Should Be the Focus of a Nonprofit Newsletter?

Your target audience. Get the long answer.

2) How Long Should a Print Newsletter Be?

Four pages, published quarterly. Get the long answer.

3) How Long Should a Newsletter Article Be?

600 words. Get the long answer.

4) How Many Fonts and Colors Should We Use?

Two fonts. Four-color (if you can afford it). Get the long answer.

5) What’s a Quick, Easy Way to Evaluate Our Newsletter?

Call some people on your mailing list. Get the long answer.

Disagree with my snappy replies? Relax, have a martini, maybe get in your bikini, but don’t get all Fellini. (Here’s why). Read the longer answers for my explanations, caveats, etc.

Searching for some good article ideas for your next nonprofit newsletter, blog post or website update? Here are 15 places you can look for article ideas.

1. At the receptionist’s desk. Ask whoever answers your organization’s main phone number for the top three questions they get from callers and turn the answers into newsletter articles.

2. In your PowerPoint files. Look at the presentations you’ve given or written for others to give. Pull out a slide or two and turn them into articles.

3. In your annual report. Odds are that most people who receive your nonprofit annual report won’t read it cover to cover. Pull out an excerpt about an accomplishment you are especially proud of and expand it into a newsletter article.

4. In your board minutes. What topical questions did your board members ask at the last meeting? If they are asking those questions, chances are others who are interested in your organization’s work would enjoy knowing your answers too.

5. In your newsletter archive. What did you write about this time last year? Can you freshen up an old article or provide a timely update on something you’ve covered before?

6. In the headlines. Look at the last week’s worth of headlines from your local newspaper. What issues are they covering and how are those news items related to your work?

7. In survey results. Are you querying your donors, clients, or members about the issues they care about (it’s a great idea)? If so, write an article related to one particular statistic generated by the survey.

8. In your “sent” email box. Look at the types of questions you are getting and answering over email and turn those into articles.

9. In your “saved” email folder. Look at the messages you are saving. Do they contain any information that your newsletter readers would enjoy?

10. In your desk calendar. Think about hooks tied into holidays and other special days on the calendar. June includes Father’s Day on the 17th and the first day of summer on the 21st.

11. On lists of special weeks and months. There’s a long list of designated special months. For example, June is Adopt a Shelter Cat Month, National Iced Tea Month, and Rebuild Your Life Month. Chase’s Calendar of Events is the ultimate source for all such occasions.

12. Out your office window. Let what you see outside inspire you, including the seasons. See my previous post on newsletter ideas for summer.

13. In a keyword research tool. Find new phrases related to your favorite topics. Try Google’s free Keyword Tool. For example, if you type in advocacy, it will return bill of rights, civil rights, community service, child care, domestic violence, and more. Alternate keywords like these can help you find new story angles for the same topics you usually cover.

14. In your web stats. Look at your website statistics and you’ll find what keywords people are using at the search engines that are directing traffic to your website. Take those phrases and write detailed articles on those topics.

15. In other nonprofit newsletters. Read newsletters from other nonprofits who work in your subject or geographic area for inspiration.

Where else do you look for article ideas? Share your favorite sources by leaving a comment.

Whether it’s a board meeting, a seminar, or a conference, the events your organization hosts or attends can provide great fodder for newsletter articles — if you highlight the most important points and forget about the rest.When you start writing an event summary, you may be tempted to regurgitate the agenda with a few extra details sprinkled in. We’ve all read these kinds of articles and have been bored stiff by them. “John opened the workshop and welcomed the speakers. Fred talked about ABC. We broke for lunch. After lunch, Jane talked about XYZ. It was a successful workshop.” There’s no value for your newsletter readers here.

Instead, pick just a few highlights from the event. Think of the event as a whole and pick the best resources or information from the day. What three things did you learn? What three points surprised you? What would someone who attended the event go back and tell her co-workers around the water cooler? What points would she highlight to the boss, to emphasize that the registration fee was money well spent? If you feel strongly that you need to mention every speaker, pick the single most important or memorable point from each presentation and focus only on that point.

Leave all the boring, mundane and pro forma details out of your article. Welcoming addresses are typically devoid of real substance and don’t need to be mentioned (unless they were given by a very big name). We also don’t need to know what was served for lunch. It’s not unusual for at least one speaker to bomb, and if you were bored in person, imagine how bored your newsletter readers will be if you try to summarize that person’s entire presentation.

Also think about different article formats that you could use to summarize the event, rather than straight reporting. Try “Top Ten Insights from the Workshop” or “How To (Insert Task): Lessons Learned at the Workshop.”

You can wrap up the article by mentioning speakers you didn’t highlight and suggesting ways that newsletter readers can get more information on the topic. For example, if you hosted the event, ask speakers to provide electronic copies of their presentations or handouts for your website. You can also ask readers to mark their calendars for the next event.