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.
In my online marketing workshops, I ask nonprofits to imagine the day when practically every prospective donor checks to see what current donors think about their organization by reading online reviews. Something like 3/4 of people say customer reviews influence their purchasing decisions and it’s not much of a stretch to see how that can morph from reading reviews before you buy a camera to reading reviews before you make a donation. That day far off in the future just got a whole lot closer.
Guidestar is now working with GreatNonprofits to share user comments about charities with each other. Comments posted on one site will appear on the other as well. I did a quick check and the nonprofits that are “most reviewed” and have the “highest ratings” are nearly all local or regional nonprofits, which means that they are actively asking their supporters to write reviews, rather than waiting for it to happen naturally. Smart cookies!
Instead of getting panicky about the idea of negative comments about you being posted there, use this instead as an opportunity to collect stories from your supporters, in their own words, about how fabulous you are.
Here is how you can take advantage of this: Go to the GreatNonprofits Welcome Page for nonprofits and set up your account. This will let you add text, photos, video, etc. to your page. Then email all of your fervent supporters the comment link and ask them to write a little blurb for you.
Project Homeless Connect in San Francisco is the most reviewed nonprofit on the site today and it looks like nearly all of the reviews were written by volunteers. On their website, in the menu, is a link called “Tell Your Story” that goes directly to the GreatNonprofits page. GreatNonprofits also gives you a badge that you can put on your site to collect and promote your reviews, if you want to take it up a notch. You can also use the reviews in other marketing pieces by simply identifying them as “GreatNonprofits.org User Reviews.”
How long will it be before the average donor knows where to go to check for reviews? Still quite awhile, I bet. But why not get out front and use GreatNonprofits and GuideStar to present positive testimonials to prospective donors and to reinforce the great work you are doing with your current supporters?
David Simpson, the chairman of GoldMail, called a few weeks ago asking me to check out his new service. Like most bloggers with more than 10 subscribers, I get a lot of requests like this, most of which I ignore. But this, my nonprofit friends, is one cool tool that I think a lot of you could use to do some amazing marketing.
GoldMail calls itself “voice over visual messaging” - sort of a combination of voicemail and email. It allows you to record your voice over a series of slides that you create within GoldMail using whatever you have available - photos, screenshots, PowerPoint slides, PDFs, etc. You end up with a nice multimedia message that you can link to in an email or embed in your website or blog. You typically need software like Camtasia Studio or PowerPoint plugins like PointeCast, which are much more expensive and have fairly steep learning curves, to produce something like this.
GoldMail lets you create a simple but effective version of the same thing, without requiring a lot of time, money, or technical know-how. After watching a few quick how-to’s, you can create a message in minutes. And it’s only $9.99 per month. It’s perfect for quick, on-the-fly messages, but can also be used for more polished presentations too. You can record up to 10 minutes, but the most effective uses will be much shorter than that, I think.
I used GoldMail today to create a 3-minute tour of the Nonprofit Marketing Guide All-Access Pass. I’ve embedded the file below and I’ll also be sending out the link to it in an email message to my Nonprofit Marketing Tips subscribers. Hit play to see what GoldMail produces, and to go behind-the-scenes with the All-Access Pass:
(Don’t see the viewer or want to see a bigger, full-screen version? Click here instead.)
Here are three creative ways your nonprofit could use GoldMail:
1) Personalized Thank-you Message. Grab a few photos (or even just one really good one!) that show the results that your donor helped bring about. Record a one-minute thank-you message over those slides, using the donor’s name and referring to their gift specifically, and then email the link to them. “Jack, I wanted you to see for yourself what your $200 has made possible . . . take a look at these photos . . . . isn’t this wonderful? Thank you so much, Jack, for making such a difference . . . “ You can also add in pre-recorded sounds, like your clients saying thank-you in their own voices.
2) Weekly Updates to Members, Boards, Committees, Etc. Do you have a core group of people who need regular updates on your activities? Record a weekly GoldMail message for them with the week’s highlights. It’s show and tell!
3) Event Invitations. Spice up your invitation by talking about all the great things you have planned for this year over fun photos from last year’s event.
I hear some of you asking, but isn’t video so much better? Probably. But video is waaaaay harder to pull off than this. This is easy. And yes, I have Camtasia Studio, and I’ve still put off making the “All-Access Pass Tour” above for months, because there are just too many settings in Camtasia to deal with. For me, too many options is just as bad as too few. I’ll say it again: this was easy.
Two quick tips from my experience today:
- Get your slides in the right order and practice a few times before you actually record. The ability to edit your audio recording is pretty limited and if you decide to move slides around, you have to start the audio recording over from scratch. Make sure you have all the slides you want, and you have them in the right order, before you record the audio.
- Turn up your microphone volume within your control panel. Even though I do webinars all the time with my headset and the audio is just fine, it was way too low on my first GoldMail recordings. Crank it up a bit on your computer before you record.
David Simpson says the San Franciso Zoo used GoldMail to create a message about new zoo babies and the email to donors with the GoldMail message outperformed the standard email message by 650%. You can’t argue with those kinds of results. David is interested in exploring how other nonprofits can use GoldMail. How might you use this kind of service? Leave a comment with your ideas.
When creating a message that works, you need to start with the action that you want others to take. Unfortunately, lots of nonprofits take the easy (lazy) way out and say that they want people to “be informed” or “be aware” of their issues. But that’s not really a good goal for your communications. What is it that you want people TO DO after they are aware and informed?
In the book, Rebecca says that Mothers Against Drunk Driving could have had educating people about the dangers of drunk driving as a goal, but that would not have been nearly as effective as asking people not to drink and drive and to pick a designated driver instead. Clear actions make all the difference and add an incredible amount of clarity to the process of creating your messaging.
After you create your core message, you should create a few subset messages that more directly address the specific desires of particular segments of your target audience. For example, if you have one core message about early child education, you might have one subset message for parents, one for pediatricians, and yet another for day care providers.
I know the idea of creating multiple messages has created some heartburn for nonprofits I’ve worked with before (and for me too) — Won’t it be confusing? What if one target audience sees the message intended for a different target audience? How can we figure out who gets what message?
Rebecca says not to worry, because the reality is that people only tune into messages that appeal to them personally and pretty much ignore everything else. So as long as your subset messages don’t contradict each other and support the core message, it’s OK if the day care providers also get the parents’ message. In reality, a day care provider may also be a parent, and may be interested in both perspectives, reinforcing your core message.
I’ll share more tips when I finish the book. But I can say that I definitely recommend it. In fact, I’ve asked Rebecca to speak during an upcoming Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com webinar called “How to Create Nonprofit Messages That Motivate” on June 19. She’s agreed to boil down the best of the book into a one-hour webinar with plenty of time for your specific questions (although you should still buy the book too!) Learn more now.
I’ve been reading several books on storytelling, most of which were written for a corporate audience, in search of great advice and tips for nonprofits. I’ll share some of the best stuff during this Wednesday’s webinar, “What Should We Write About? Storytelling Ideas for Nonprofits,” and in future posts here. But for now, here is my quick take on three of these books, in case you’ve been considering a purchase.
As a whole, I haven’t learned much. The majority of the pages in these books are dedicated to (1) convincing the reader of the value of stories in influencing others and (2) helping the corporate reader accept the idea that good stories include emotional elements, even if the corporate landscape is normally devoid of emotion. Since I already believe in the power of good stories, and since I think most of the nonprofit sector doesn’t suffer from the same “business-only straight-face” corporate persona problem, I got very little out of big sections of these books.
“The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative” by Stephen Denning is probably the best of the bunch. It explains eight different types of narratives with explicit information on what elements should be included in each of the different types of stories in order to achieve the stated goal. For example, when using the “Motivate Others to Action” story pattern, you don’t want to include lots of details about the person or place in the story, because what you are actually trying to do is to have your audience members see themselves in the story. If you include too many details, you prevent your audience for placing themselves within it.
I like the way that this book helps readers see the various components of a story and how those can be emphasized or eliminated depending on the goal of the storyteller. I’m going to spend more time with this book to really consider the ways that these various narrative patterns could work in the nonprofit sector. Most of the chapters are not perfect matches for nonprofit marketing, but I think the important kernels are all there. If Denning would write this same book, but for nonprofits, I think it would be a huge asset to the community.
“The Elements of Persuasion: Use Storytelling to Pitch Better, Sell Faster, and Win More Business” by Richard Maxwell and Robert Dickman advocates following a basic story formula that includes the Passion, Hero, Antagonist, Awareness, and Transformation. They tell lots of interesting and entertaining stories themselves, but the how-to advice is too vague and one-size-fits-all. It’s hard to make the leap from the corporate stories to the nonprofit sector. Still, it’s a pretty quick read and it does include some instruction, so I’d give it a tepid thumbs-up.
“The Story Factor: Inspiration, Influence, and Persuasion through the Art of Storytelling” by Annette Simmons. This book was the least satisfying of the three for me because it really focuses on the broader concepts of why storytelling works without much how-to. It includes tons of meaningful stories, but it’s really short on how to identify your own stories and make them work in specific situations. If you aren’t convinced of the power of stories, this book will convince you. If you are already sold on the idea, it won’t do much else for you.
This post is part of my participation in Michele Martin’s Blogging4Learning Challenge. I’m blogging to learn more about how nonprofits can use storytelling in nonprofit marketing and communications.
After trial runs with both GoToWebinar and ReadyTalk this fall, I’m launching my 2008 webinar series on nonprofit marketing topics using ReadyTalk. And after hearing from a woman in one of my Duke classes that her nonprofit adoption agency paid a ridiculous sum of money (in the several hundreds of dollars) to host a webinar for less than a dozen prospective adoptive parents, I realized that nonprofits are looking for cost-effective, easy ways to deliver training and information too.
Here is my take on these two services.
GoToWebinar
What I Liked:
-The user-interface was very easy to follow and figure out.
-They offer fully integrated tools for promoting your events, tracking registration, sending automated reminders, etc., although not all of the system emails can be customized as much as I would like.
-The fixed monthly fee was very appealing, because it would allow me to budget for the expense regardless of how many webinars I did per month, or how many people attended. I see that as a big bonus for some nonprofits too.
-They have advanced tools to monitor participants during the webinar. For example, you can tell how long your webinar was the top window on someone’s computer and how often they were working on something else.
-I could start the trial immediately through their website.
-GoToWebinar lets you poll the audience live by presenting multiple choice questions on the screen that participants can click on, giving you instant, compiled feedback about what people think about various topics. Several participants in the webinar I did said they really loved the instant polling feature.
What I Didn’t Like:
-While all the data on participants is nice after the fact, for me, all of those monitors and icons were in the way during the live event. I couldn’t present the webinar and monitor all those panels at the same time, so they were distractions more than anything else.
-Other than sending in chat messages, there was no way for me to know which specific participants had questions or would like to participate in exercises with me.
-To record the webinar for later viewing, I had to record the audio on my own hard drive, and then allow GoToWebinar to integrate the files. It worked OK, but seems fraught with potential for problems. I understand that GoToWebinar is fixing this in its latest upgrade.
ReadyTalk
What I Liked:
-The “Raise Hand” feature allows me to see the name of the person who has a question, allowing me to ask that person to unmute their line and ask a question or participate in an exercise.
-The system uses Java, instead of its own program requiring a download (like GotoWebinar), which makes it very easy for everyone to use (although no one complained about the GotoWebinar download).
-The audio and video recordings are fully integrated.
-You can show your presentation slides from your desktop (as GoToWebinar requires), or you can upload your presentation and run the slides through ReadyTalk. Not only does the upload eliminate bandwidth issues, but it also allows me as the presenter to preview slides and skip around much more easily without the audience seeing everything I’m doing. And I can still show my desktop or specific applications when I want to.
What I Didn’t Like:
-I had to wait on a customer service rep to start my trial run. While my rep ended up being very helpful, he insisted on talking to me on the phone and then was out sick, so I had to wait several days before I could really get started. I do a lot of online tinkering after my kids are in bed, so I prefer fully automated trials.
-The ReadyTalk website doesn’t include pricing information and you have to wait for your sales rep to come back to you with pricing packages. That always feels a little bit like used car buying to me. I’m not unhappy with what I’m paying, but I do prefer upfront, fixed rate pricing options, which GoToWebinar offers.
-ReadyTalk offers virtually no support (except for some ugly email invitations) for promoting your webinar and registering participants. I understand that they will be introducing a new module that will take care of many of these tasks later this year. But for now, you have to use another system for everything.
-The user interface is rather sparse. It’s easy enough now that I have figured out where everything is, but it is not as intuitive or rich in features as GoToWebinar.
-Their security system for preventing unregistered people from participating is not as rigorous as GotoWebinar’s.
Why I Ultimately Chose ReadyTalk
I decided that ReadyTalk’s technology works better for my needs than GoToWebinar’s. ReadyTalk has also made significant inroads into the nonprofit community, which means that many of you who will be registering for my webinars will already be familiar with their system. For me, these two reasons outweighed GoToWebinar’s far superior tools for webinar promotion and management. But not by a whole lot, especially given that GoToWebinar is cheaper given how much I plan to use the service.
While ReadyTalk did offer me the NTEN membership enterprise deal for unlimited web connections, no flat rate is available for the audio connections. For me to be a full-blown ReadyTalk evangelist, they need to unveil their new event management system and they need to develop better flat-rate pricing packages that are more competitive with GoToWebinar’s rates.
This is the fifth in a five-post series on a direct mail make-over currently being tested by the University of California at Berkeley (Cal). Read Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
This week I have chronicled the story of how Cal’s fundraisers took a new approach to turning alumni into annual donors by creating a graphic-driven, audience-directed, full-color brochure. While the results of the direct mail campaign aren’t in yet, I believe you can still pull several lessons from their experience.
1) Connect with your audience’s memories and emotions. A large group of alumni has never responded positively to Cal’s annual appeals. Instead of continuing to send them more of the same kind of mail that didn’t work, hoping that the alumni would change their minds, Cal conducted focus groups. They honed in on some themes they heard directly from those alumni, and worked with those concepts, even though they weren’t all necessarily positive (e.g., Cal is big, impersonal place.)
2) Try something new and test it. This is the first time Cal has produced a brochure as bold as this one. But rather than sending it out in the world all alone to see how it performs, they also wrote a traditional business letter using the same theme. This split-testing will tell them much more about the success of the brochure than if they had sent it out alone.
3) Let your ideas evolve. Cal started with a cookie cutter theme based on focus groups. But it simply didn’t work. Rather than abandoning the concept completely or sticking with it simply because the focus groups had used that terminology, the fundraising team let the idea evolve into one that worked. I compare it to kneading bread dough until it is smooth and shiny. I have a folder on my computer labeled still cooking for article ideas that aren’t quite ready for publication. I’ve found that it takes at least three iterations from the original concept before the images and text of an idea really gel. (Enough cooking metaphors; you get the idea.)
4) Let the graphics talk. The Cal piece works graphically because it appeals to our natural curiosity, but still provides enough clues that we don’t stray too far away. Take the Trendsetters tagline, with the Rolling Stone cover of Bono. Now, I know Bono didn’t go to Cal, so I’m thinking, “What’s the connection? Let me read this small type down here.” Turns out Jann Wenner, ‘67, is the cofounder and publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine and upon closer inspection of the image, I see that he wrote the cover story on Bono. (I personally think that using the Bono cover is also a subliminal message since he is now one of the faces of modern philanthropy, but Cal says that’s not the primary reason why they chose it.)
5) Use “You” Without Being So Obvious. The first drafts were full of “you” statements –“you this, you that” and they were too presumptuous. While I am completely on the “You” bandwagon for nonprofit marketing, especially donor communications, some people are taking it too far. I believe smart donors can see through it, and once everyone employs this technique, the effectiveness of that single word alone will dim. What will not fade, however, is the power of more creative, sophisticated messages that are built off the concept of “You, the donor” without overdoing it.
I hope you enjoyed the series this week. Let me know what you think by leaving a comment on any of the installments.
Special thanks to Amy Cranch and Virginia Gray of Cal for their detailed, honest accounts of the process!
The direct mail makeover by Cal fundraisers highlights the cultural contributions of alumni and asks other alumni to support the next generation of innovators, while also thanking the graduates “for being who you are.â€Â
The brilliance of this approach is not in its originality – it rarely is. Using famous alumni is not new. Asking alumni to support future generations is not new. And yet it works beautifully. What is new is the twist on these concepts. What’s new is the juxtaposition of meaningful cultural icons that came out of Cal alumni and inviting other alumni to think of themselves as peers to those innovators.
I’m one of those slightly disaffected Cal alums who Virginia Gray, Cal’s associate director of annual giving and regional programs, is trying to squeeze some bucks out of. I enjoyed my time there and appreciate the education I received, but I feel no special connection to any particular people or places on the campus. But this piece grabbed me.
Rather than talking about all the Nobel Laureates and other Big Brains who went to Cal, the piece talks about their impacts in images and words that are relevant to me, right now. A computer mouse. Saving the planet through energy efficiency. MySpace. Apple, Inc. Dilbert. Bono on the cover of Rolling Stone. This piece of mail takes an education at Cal that happened decades ago and makes it meaningful to my life today. It makes it incredibly easy for me to see how my contribution will lead to the next great thing I’ll have on my desk tomorrow.
Remember: They started with a cookie cutter. “We tried it one way, and it didn’t work out, but we kept going. The new idea was really good, and the copywriting and graphics told a great story,†says Virginia.
I admit, my interest in this piece was piqued first by professional curiosity. When I saw the big, yellow “You†on the cover panel after getting years of canned letters from Cal, my first thought was, “OK, somebody just took some donor marketing training and has gulped down a big cup of the ‘You-Not-Us’ Kool-Aid.†But when I opened it up and read the piece, I immediately felt like I was part of this amazing group of innovators simply by virtue of being an alumna. Check one slacker alumna off your list, Virginia. I gave online for the first time since I graduated in ’91.
Virginia is new to nonprofit marketing, but she has a strong direct marketing and branding background and knows the importance of finding emotional hooks. Her focus groups told her what she already knew. Cal is huge and there are not a lot of common experiences there that create unifying emotions in alumni. But those same alumni also told her what their hot buttons were — that they weren’t cookie-cutter Ivy League graduates and yet were proud to have graduated from one of the top universities in the nation.
Did it work on other alumni as well as it did with me? We’ll see. The mailing list includes 100,000 graduates of Cal’s College of Letters & Science who are not currently donors. The list was not broken out by age or other demographics. Half got the full-color brochure and the other half got a standard business letter with similar messaging in much longer text and no graphics. See the Brochure. See the Letter.
Virginia says it takes a good two-three months before they can judge the performance of a direct mail campaign, but she will pull the first numbers at the end of November and has agreed to share them with us. By split testing similar messages in drastically different formats and comparing them to other campaigns, she hopes to determine what was more important to success: the message, the package, or both.
We’ll find out in a few weeks. Stay tuned by subscribing to this blog right now (see upper left of blog home page), so you don’t miss the results!
Coming Tomorrow: Lessons you can learn from what Cal did
The creative team has gone back to the drawing board. Gone are the cookie cutter imagery and the direct language about “you, a Cal alumni†being innovative, creative, etc. Instead, the team creates a piece that finally works: On the cover, it asks, “Who are you? Cal alumni are . . .†The “you†is in big, bright yellow letters, standing out against a black background. As you open the piece and unfold it, you see a series of panels:
Movement Leaders & Story Weavers
Creators & Innovators
Educators & Crusaders
Trendsetters & Friend Seekers
Activists & Satirists
Each tag includes a clear simple image with a small blurb about an alum who exemplifies that description. With Movement Leaders, you see a bunch of asparagus, and “Alice Waters, ’67. Acclaimed chef and pioneer behind the worldwide movement to eat local, organic foods.â€Â
With Friend Seekers, you see a screenshot of Tom’s MySpace page with 201,904,463 friends. It says “Tom Anderson, ’98. Cofounder and president of MySpace.com and first friend to every user.â€Â
The ten images represent a great diversity in alumni in age, gender, ethnicity, and subject area. They are chefs, writers, teachers, scientists, programmers, inventers, cartoonists, and athletes who have all had a profound impact on today’s culture. Look at a PDF of the full piece It’s flat here, but you can imagine how it would unfold in your hands.
On the donation form and envelope, it closes with these simple phrases that say it all to the alumni-would-be-donors: “Cal alumni are changing the world. Won’t YOU champion the next generation of innovators?†followed by “Thanks for being who you are. We appreciate your generosity.â€Â
In creating the design, Amy Cranch, the piece’s principal editor, knew they had to choose between pictures of the alums or pictures of things that represented their contributions to society. “The thing is way stronger,†says Amy. “It makes a crisp design, and it’s much easier to relate to.†Most people wouldn’t recognize or know who Douglas Engelbart is, but everyone uses what he invented: the computer mouse. “We tried to be careful not to pick just famous people, but to emphasize the impact that these people have on our daily lives,†says Amy.
“Instead of ‘You are this or that,’ it became an invitation to explore the categories of people, and to feel some excitement or pride that the thing you use everyday came from someone who went to the same school as you,†says Amy. The new approach still allowed Cal to play off the original concept of not being a cookie cutter and to still use “You†directly, but without jamming in onto people. “I firmly believe that using the personal stories opens the doors for further connections with people,†says Amy. People first, organizations second. Alumni first, Cal second.
Coming tomorrow: Find out why I think this piece works so well and about the test that Cal is running.
Want to Reprint a Post?
You may reprint post headlines and excerpts as long as you link back to the post's permalink. To reprint an entire post, please contact me for permission.
Kivi on Twitter
The Webinar Buzz . . .
"Excellent, usable information that can be implemented immediately. This was a very well spent hour!
How to Get Your
Nonprofit Marketing
Questions Answered
I'll gladly answer your questions (or try to anyway), but I prefer to do so in a public way, so others can benefit from our conversation and join in with their thoughts too. Here are the best ways to ask your questions and get free advice.
Live Office Hours on Fridays - Most Fridays, when I'm not on the road, you can either call in your question to Magic Keys Radio or chat with me live on this blog's homepage. Check the calendar for details.
See Your Q&A on the Blog - I'll post your question and my reply on this blog and/or in my e-newsletter when you submit your question at Ask Kivi.com.
For Webinar Participants Only - Ask a question in advance of the live webinar and see what others are curious about too (coming soon!)
Email Me Directly - Last resort for general questions, and probably the slowest, because I'm putting priority on answering questions in the places above first. Here's the contact form.
For questions about webinars, coaching or consulting, please feel free to email me or to call me at 336-499-5816 anytime and I'll get back to you promptly.
Magic Keys Radio/Podcast
A couple of times per month, Kivi Leroux Miller and Claire Meyerhoff host a live Internet radio show and podcast.
Looking for the 
In my online marketing workshops, I ask nonprofits to imagine the day when practically every prospective donor checks to see what current donors think about their organization by reading online reviews. Something like 3/4 of people say customer reviews influence their purchasing decisions and it’s not much of a stretch to see how that can morph from reading reviews before you buy a camera to reading reviews before you make a donation. That day far off in the future just got a whole lot closer.
4) Let the graphics talk. The Cal piece works graphically because it appeals to our natural curiosity, but still provides enough clues that we don’t stray too far away. Take the Trendsetters tagline, with the Rolling Stone cover of Bono. Now, I know Bono didn’t go to Cal, so I’m thinking, “What’s the connection? Let me read this small type down here.” Turns out Jann Wenner, ‘67, is the cofounder and publisher of Rolling Stone Magazine and upon closer inspection of the image, I see that he wrote the cover story on Bono. (I personally think that using the Bono cover is also a subliminal message since he is now one of the faces of modern philanthropy, but Cal says that’s not the primary reason why they chose it.)
Douglas Engelbart is, but everyone uses what he invented: the computer mouse. “We tried to be careful not to pick just famous people, but to emphasize the impact that these people have on our daily lives,†says Amy.
