Nonprofit Communications

The days when your nonprofit could get away with not having an online marketing strategy are over. Even the smallest or most locally based organizations are expected to use email and have some kind of website (or at a minimum, a web page on another organization’s umbrella site). And most nonprofits should be doing much, much more than that.

If you’ve been approaching online marketing in a piecemeal fashion, I recommend the following five-step approach to start pulling together a real nonprofit marketing strategy. (You can learn more about online marketing and this strategy for nonprofits during this week’s “Online Marketing Basics” webinar.)

1. If Your Website Sucks, Fix It. Here’s my 10-Point Basic Website Checklist for Nonprofits. Make sure your website passes on all ten points before worrying about anything else. Don’t have your own domain? They are dirt cheap. Get one now. No excuses.

2. Build Your Email & RSS Lists Everywhere, All the Time. The two best ways right now to communicate directly with your supporters online are through email and through RSS feeds. Learn more about RSS at TechSoup. Yes, there are other ways to reach people online, such as through social networking sites, discussion lists, and text messaging. But email and rss are going to reach the overwhelming majority of people. These lists are easy to manage and easy for your supporters to join and leave (if you have them set up correctly).

3. Create Tools and Great Content for Your Biggest Fans. The beauty of online marketing and Web 2.0 is that it is so easy for friends to pass info on to other friends. You can build your network of friends of friends of supporters of your organization incredibly fast online. But that means you have to identify the “influencers” or “patrons” in your network — your biggest fans — and give them the tools they need and the information that excites them, so they’ll pass it on. This is what Seth Godin calls “Flipping the Funnel.”

4. Dip into Social Media, But Dive into One Tool. Yes, social media is all the rage. You’ve got everything from Facebook Causes and Care2 to Digg and Flickr. It’s impossible to be everywhere in any kind of meaningful way. At the same time, social media is the new web, and you need to be a part of it in some way, if only to understand what others are doing. Pick one or two social media or social networking sites and dive into those. Learn how to use them and become a part of those communities.

5. Measure, Learn, and Adjust. Return on Investment (ROI) for social media is a hot topic right now and the best ways to measure success are still to come. But one of the great aspects of online marketing is that measurement is built right into most of the tools. You can tell how many people are subscribed to your e-newsletter and RSS feeds. You can tell how long people are staying on your website. Keep track of what you can, learn from both your successes and your failures, and adjust your strategy over time.

Learn more during the Online Marketing Basics webinar.

Beth Kanter has a great fictional example on her blog today about a nonprofit called “Seagulls Global Internship International” that works with students. Those students have turned against the nonprofit by creating a Facebook group to criticize the new organizational logo. Beth asks, what would you do if you were the social networking manager? Would you bash the students, ignore them, defend your decision, or explain the design process? What do you tell your colleagues who are skeptical of using Facebook anyway?

Here’s my advice:

1) Respond directly with respectful humor. Acknowledge the comments right away, engage in the conversation at least initially, but make it clear that the decision won’t be reversed. A little self-deprecating humor can go a long way in cases like this. Admit that the students might have a good point or two. I wouldn’t get into the design process much at all, unless a bunch of the students were actually involved in it. In that case, you should ask those students themselves if they’d be willing to defend the logo decisions to their peers.

2) Then immediately try to redirect their energy into something related but new. Maybe one of the signature initiatives of the nonprofit needs its own logo, or maybe they need a logo for their next worldwide seagull fest. Maybe it’s time to update the design of the student recruitment brochure. Explain exactly how the students can participate in the development of that logo or new design. And make sure it’s legit — that they will actually have some say in the process. The students who are genuinely interested in design and logos will jump at the chance to be a part of something real. It also shows that you really do respect their opinions.

3) Tell the rest of your staff to take a deep breath. Remind your colleagues that you should all be overjoyed that the students are so interested in your organization that they are willing to create their own group to bash a logo. Since they are genuinely interested in the program and are not just “bashers du jour,”  this is really a great opportunity to find ways  to make the students feel  like they have  a real voice and role in the organization.

Next Thursday’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar is on keywords and search engine optimization (SEO) for nonprofits and will feature guest speaker David Westbrook, an SEO expert with lots of nonprofit experience. If you just crinkled your nose and said, “Huh?” or if you are your office’s accidental techie and default webmaster, this webinar is for you. If think you’ve done everything right and your website still doesn’t come up when you put your keywords into search engines like Google and Yahoo!, this webinar is for you too.

I asked David for a sneak peek at some of the insights he’ll share next week and here’s a good one:

“When it comes to esthetics, search engines couldn’t be much more disinterested. This is because every image looks the same to a search engine. Imagine walking through the Louvre and where others see the Mona Lisa all you see is .img and further on where others see Madonna with the Green Cushion, you again see .img. This is the world of a search engine. On the other hand, search engines are voracious readers, and while they can’t interpret a word, they do know how often it appears and they are able to assign a level of importance to it depending on where it appears and what is surrounding it.”

David goes on to talk about the importance of the ALT tag:

“Every image should have what is known as an alt tag (technically an alt attribute). I am sometimes asked if this includes when menu items are images instead of text. As it turns out, they are especially important here. Their importance extends beyond search engines, as they are chiefly important to the blind who use screen readers that have no way of knowing a link exists if it is just an image without an alt tag.”

David will share lots of ways that nonprofits can improve their search engine rankings, whether you have complete control over the design of your website or you can only write articles for it.

Get the details on Can We Find You on Google? Keywords and Search Engine Optimization for Nonprofits, taking place Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern (11:00 a.m. Pacific). Registration is $35 and includes everyone in your office who can fit around a single computer monitor and speaker phone.

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!