Nonprofit Communications

Photo by RaeA

If you’ve been waiting for me to make the recordings from the Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar series available, wait no more. The following titles are now all available when you purchase an All-Access Pass.

For $97, you’ll get to view all of these webinars and any I add in the next twelve weeks. You also get to attend any and all live webinars I host for the next twelve weeks, at no additional charge.

Nonprofit Storytelling: How to Write Your Nonprofit’s Best Stories
Recorded May 14, 2008.

How to Connect with Generation Y
Recorded May 7, 2008. Featuring Sam Davidson.

What Do Baby Boomer Donors Want from Your Nonprofit?
Recorded May 1, 2008. Featuring Jeff Brooks.

Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email
Recorded April 24, 2008.

How to Write a Press Release Reporters Will Love
Recorded April 17, 2008. Featuring Claire Meyerhoff.

Branding for Nonprofits: What Is It and Should You Do It?
Recorded April 10, 2008. Audio only, featuring Nancy Schwartz.

Converting Your Print Newsletter into an Email Newsletter
Recorded March 20, 2008.

How to Write a Four-Page Nonprofit Annual Report
Recorded March 13, 2008.

Can We Find You on Google? Keywords and Search Engine Optimization for Nonprofits
Featuring David Westbrook. Recorded March 6, 2008.

How to Make Your Nonprofit Brochures Pop! - The Crash Course
Recorded February 27, 2008.

What Should We Write About? Storytelling Ideas for Nonprofits
Recorded February 13, 2008.

Getting Reporters to Cover Your Nonprofit: Tell Your Story So They’ll Tell It Too
Recorded February 6, 2008. Audio only, featuring Claire Meyerhoff.

Yes, it’s a ton of great training at a very reasonable price. Ready to get your pass? Register now.

I used some early results from my survey on webinar topics to fill out the Nonprofit Marketing Guide weekly webinar series through early May. (Haven’t taken the survey yet? Do it now. It’s fast, I promise.)

Here is the complete schedule, with an asterisk by those just added:

March 13 - How to Write a 4-Page Nonprofit Annual Report - A Crash Course Webinar

March 20 - Converting Your Print Newsletter into an Email Newsletter

*April 3 - Online Marketing Basics for Nonprofits: From Email to Social Media

April 10 - Branding for Nonprofits: What Is It and Should You Do It? - Teleseminar

*April 17 - How to Write a Press Release Reporters Will Love

April 24 - Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email

*May 1 - What Do Baby Boomer Donors Want from Your Nonprofit?

*May 14 - Nonprofit Storytelling: How to Write Your Nonprofit’s Best Stories

All of these webinars are $35, with the exception of the conference-call only teleseminar on branding on April 10, which is just $20. Your registration covers as many people from your organization as you can fit around one speaker phone and computer monitor.

See several you’d like to attend? Get the All-Access Pass and attend any webinar/teleseminar we host for 12 weeks for just $97!

Email newsletters are great tools for nonprofits because they are so much cheaper to produce and distribute than print newsletters. The only problem is that they can be deleted in an instant or trapped forever in spam filters. And even when they are opened, they are often too *yawn* boring to grab the readers’ attention and move them to action.

I’m the special guest for Network for Good’s “Nonprofit 911″ training series next week and I’ll be talking all about e-mail newsletters — the good, the bad, and the ugly. Come get some great tips for your email newsletter during the free conference call on Tuesday, February 26 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern. Register here.

I finally got my social networking act together and invite you to follow, connect with, and be-friend me online. You’ll find links to my profiles on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook in my blog sidebar and here in this post.

Twitter lets you keep up with what I’m doing throughout the day. If you aren’t familiar with it, the two best descriptions I’ve heard are “it’s like being a fly on the wall in your friends’ lives” and “it’s like one big instant messaging party all day long.” You should also check out the Nonprofit Twitter Pack for more nonprofit sector folks to follow.

LinkedIn lets us share business connections. I also love LinkedIn Answers, a Q&A feature, which has a special section on nonprofits. You’ll find some great sharing going on there.

Facebook lets us share on a more personal level. Because of the personal nature of this profile, please remind me how we know each other when sending friend requests.

See you there!

I’ve added four new events to the weekly webinar series schedule at Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com:

March 6: Can We Find You on Google? Keywords and Search Engine Optimization for Nonprofits. Can your supporters find you online? It all depends what Yahoo! and Google think your site is about. Featuring David Westbrook.

March 13: How to Write a 4-Page Nonprofit Annual Report - A Crash Course Webinar. Learn how to turn your annual report into a gift your donors and supporters look forward to receiving — all in four pages!

March 20: Converting Your Print Newsletter into an Email Newsletter - A Webinar. No, you can’t just email a PDF and call it an email newsletter. Learn the right way to go from print to pixels.

April 10: Branding for Nonprofits: What Is It and Should You Do It? - A “Hot Seat” Teleseminar Blending in with the crowd? Learn how branding can set your nonprofit apart. Featuring Nancy Schwartz.

Don’t forget, I’m also doing webinars on storytelling ideas for nonprofits next week, followed by dos and don’ts of online writing, and how to make your nonprofit brochures pop.

I’ve been using PowerPoint for years to teach workshops and while I usually get great reviews from participants, I’ve always felt like something wasn’t quite right about the way I used the slides. When I decided to launch the weekly webinar series on nonprofit marketing this year, I knew I’d be using PowerPoint much more often, and since participants wouldn’t see me, the slides had to work really well. It was time to address that nagging feeling.

I purchased two books: “Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007 to Create Presentations that Inform, Motivate, and Inspire” by Cliff Atkinson and “Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery” by Garr Reynolds. I highly recommend both. Here are a few key points and my take on the strengths of each book, if you can’t fathom reading both.

While the tone of the books is very different, the authors are totally in sync on several points.

1) Remove all those bullet points from your slides.

2) Instead, fill your slides with a photo or graphic, with very minimal text (one short sentence).

3) Use storyboarding techniques to map out your presentation.

4) Treat your slides like the visual channel and your voice like the audio channel, creating one seamless presentation that feeds your participants’ minds in a more natural way. It’s apparently impossible for our brains to read text on slides while also listening to words and to process both fully. (This makes perfect sense if you think about how annoyed you get when you try to talk to someone who is reading and they refuse to stop. You know they aren’t really listening to you - because they can’t.)

5) Therefore, stop treating your slides like your presentation notes (my sin) or like handouts. The slides, your speaking notes, and handouts are three distinct items all with their own needs.

6) Both love istockphoto.com. I already purchase credits there by the hundreds, so at least I’m getting that part right.

7) Chuck the provided templates and don’t put your logo on every slide.

On to the differences in the books . . .

Beyond Bullet Points (BBP) is three times the size of Presentation Zen (Zen). It took me about two weeks to get through it, reading in bits and pieces. I read Zen in one day (yesterday, Superbowl Sunday) despite dozens of household interruptions. BBP is published by Microsoft Press and it looks and feels like a manual, including black-and-white graphics. Zen is a much more beautiful book, with full color slides, very clean design, nicer paper, etc.

BBP is better if you really have no clue how to structure a talk. The heart of the book is showing you how to use a three-act structure to create your presentation and how this structure matches up with how people learn and retain information. Even though I think the structure of most of my courses is fundamentally solid, I did pick up some great tips about how people take in information and will be making some adjustments accordingly.

For example, it’s better to have three times as many slides and keep only one point per slide than to crowd fewer slides with multiple bullet points. Some of my five-hour workshop presentations have about 60 slides and I now see how I could easily triple that, following the “one slide per minute” rule of thumb. (I do lots of exercises, so during a five-hour workshop, I’m probably only speaking two-three hours.) BBP also contains lots and lots of PowerPoint how-tos, much of which I skipped over since I’m fairly comfortable with the software. I did learn a few new tricks though, so do skim those sections.

Zen is better if you are seeking advice on what your slides should actually look like. Where BBP tells you what to do with your slides, Zen really shows you. The three chapters on design really make the book. Zen doesn’t explain how to outline your presentation in anywhere close to the level of detail of BBP. Instead, it talks much more conceptually about what makes a good presentation and leaves it up to you to decide whether a three-act structure or some other format works best for your material.

I’m glad I read them in the order that I did. BBP is more of a how-to manual and primer on how people take in data and process it. It shows you how to take your zillion bullet points and tame them into a presentation that people may actually remember.

Zen speaks at a much higher level about incorporating “six aptitudes for the conceptual age” into your presentations. These are design, story, symphony, empathy, play, and meaning. As the author says, Presentation Zen is an approach, not a method (like BBP). I really enjoyed Zen, but I think much of that has to do with just finishing BBP. I think if I would have read Zen first, I might have been left yearning for more methodology. But with the BBP foundation, Zen really helped me see how to bring my own creativity and personality into a well-structured presentation. And like I said earlier, the slide design chapters alone are worth the price of the book.

Whether you give presentations with PowerPoint to hundreds or thousands of people at conferences or to small groups of supporters or board members, you need to read these books. They will change the way you prepare for every talk you give and your audiences will be eternally grateful.

Claire Meyerhoff

Last month, Claire Meyerhoff called to interview me about nonprofit storytelling for some articles she is working on, and we ended up having an hour-and-a-half chat about how hard it is for so many nonprofits to get press coverage, even though they have such great stories to tell.

We shared all kinds of theories about why this is true, and one of Claire’s points was really on target: Nonprofits need to cut the bull! Blathering on about your wonky mission statement, the infinitely deep root causes of a problem, and the complicated system-wide solutions required just doesn’t work for print reporters who need to think in terms of hundreds of words, not thousands, and TV journalists who can give you only 30 seconds of airtime.

I was so impressed with Claire’s down-to-earth perspective that I asked if she’d be interested in doing a teleseminar with me. Then she told me a bit more about her history and I couldn’t wait to host this event.

If you can spare $20 for some great media training, here’s where you should spend it:

Getting Reporters to Cover Your Nonprofit: How to Tell Your Story So They’ll Tell It Too!

It’s next week’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide teleseminar (in other words, it’s a toll-free conference call) on Wednesday, February 6, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific). Gather ’round the speaker phone — as long as you are all from the same organization, $20 buys training for your whole staff.

Here’s what you should know about Claire, and why I was so eager to introduce her to all of you. Claire is a communications professional who has spent twenty-something years spreading the word with no muss and no fuss. As a news writer in CNN’s Washington bureau, she took complex stories and honed them into :30 worth of copy fit for Judy Woodruff and Wolf Blitzer. She also helped the National Safe Kids Campaign make the CBS Evening News — and I’ll have her share the story about why that wouldn’t have happened if she had done what the “higher ups” wanted her to do.

She has also reported on Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath on XM Radio’s “Red Cross Radio” channel, and she wrote and narrated an award-wining video for Ronald McDonald House of Durham, NC. Simply put, Claire gets nonprofits and on Wednesday, she’ll help you get the media.

I’m calling this a “Hot Seat” interview, which means I’ll spend the first 15-20 minutes of the hour-long call peppering Claire with some good, tough questions. Then it’s your turn. You can submit questions in advance and during the teleseminar via email to ask AT hotseatquestions.com or send them in via AIM to hotseatquestions.

Get the details and register for the teleseminar now.

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.