Nonprofit Communications

This week’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar is Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email (Thursday, 4/24/08, 3 pm ET, $35). I’ll be talking about these three tips and many more.

Answer readers’ questions. Yahoo! and Google are the most popular sites on the web because people are searching for answers to the questions they have. The ubiquitous “FAQ” page is so popular on websites because it directly answers those questions. There’s an important lesson here: Your website content should be focused on the needs and interests of your site visitors. Write your content with your audience in mind at all times.

Write in chunks. Your website is made up of pages and those pages are made up of paragraphs. Each page and each paragraph should be about one specific thing. Organize your text into small, manageable blocks (chunks) of information. Read more of my tips on chunking specifically. Chunking also makes your site easier to skim, which is how most people actually read online.

Cut everything back. Online writing must be much shorter and tighter than what you’d traditionally write for publication on paper. The general rule of thumb is to cut your print text in half when putting it online. Shoot for headlines that are 4-8 words and sentences that are no more than 20 words. Limit paragraphs to six sentences and articles to 500 words. Of course, these are just guidelines, but they’ll help you get closer to where you need to be.

Learn more during this week’s webinar.

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.

Chunking your Web and email text is one of the essential online writing skills I’ll be discussing during “Online Writing: Dos and Don’ts of Writing for the Web and Email,” a webinar on Wednesday, February 20 at 2:00 p.m. ET. Registration is open until 1:30 p.m. and costs just $35.

When people read on paper, they usually start at the beginning and work their way through in a linear fashion from page one to page two to page three, etc. When people read on the Web, however, they start where Google sent them, and that could be anywhere on your website. Once they get there, your website visitors will quickly skim the page, looking for chunks of text and keywords that tell them they are in the right spot.

What is Chunking?

When you chunk text, you break down what may have started as one really long article into smaller, manageable, more easily understood blocks of text.  Your goal should be to create chunks of information that can stand on their own, but that also fit within the larger context of your website.

How Big is the Ideal Chunk?

So how big or small is the perfect chunk of text on a website? You need to find the sweet spot between too little and too much text. If you put too little information on a page, you force your reader to click around for the details, which is annoying. But if your chunks are too big, you make it difficult for your readers to immediately find the key points they are seeking.

For example, you might break down a 2,000 guide into three web pages of 600-700 words each. On each of the web pages, you could then break those 600 words into three blocks of 200 words each, complete with their own subheadings. Many professional online writers would advocate even shorter pages (no more than 500 words) and paragraphs (no more than 100 words).

Adding bulleted lists, writing in short sentences, highlighting keywords, and linking to related articles and details also contribute to successful chunking.

Which Page Has Better Chunking?

What questions would you have if you were interested in adopting a pet? Take a look at these two pages from two humane societies in Colorado and see who answers your questions more quickly.
Adoption Process Page at Humane Society of the Pikes Peak Region

Adoption Process Page at the Dumb Friends League/Denver Humane Society

Both pages discuss the pet adoption process, but one does a much better job at chunking the information.

The Pikes Peak page contains over 1,500 words and only seven subheadings. There are no bulleted lists, highlighted keywords, or links to more details to help visitors skim through the page to find the specific answers they are seeking.

In contrast, the Denver Dumb Friends League page contains about 1,000 words and has ten subheadings. The paragraphs are much shorter and you’ll find several bulleted lists and links to details. Think back to those questions you had about adopting a pet and I bet this page answers them more quickly.

The Pikes Peak page also contains the same kind of information, but in buried form that requires actual reading, rather than skimming.

This article written for teachers at Dartmouth who are putting course materials online provides some additional perspectives on chunking.

Do you know the important differences between how people read on paper and how they read on a computer screen? Do you understand how those differences drastically change the way you should write for your website visitors and email newsletter readers?

If you aren’t sure, I’ll show you how to go from confused to confident in under an hour. Register for my next live webinar happening Thursday, December 13, at 2:00 p.m. ET. (That’s 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. CT, Noon - 1:00 p.m. MT, and 11:00 a.m. - Noon PT).

From the comfort of your own desk, you’ll learn the important differences between reading and writing on paper and online, how to make your writing more appealing to online readers, and simple word choice and formatting tricks that can drastically improve your website’s or email’s performance.

You’ll also learn ways to organize your thoughts and ideas to match the way people use the Web and how to convert your existing print publications for use online.

If you want your website visitors and e-newsletter subscribers to actually read what you write, instead of quickly navigating away from your web pages or deleting your email, you have to learn to write in a whole new way. This webinar will show you how.

Registration costs just $49. When you consider how much time you spend on your website and e-newsletter, that’s a tiny investment to make sure your messages get across. During the webinar, you’ll have the chance to ask questions over the phone or via chat, using a toll-free, user-friendly webinar service.

Get the details and register today!

I hate to do this, but I’m postponing the webinar scheduled for this Friday on how to write for the web and email. I’ve got a terrible chest cold and if I talk for more than five minutes at a time, my voice cracks like a 13-year-old boy’s and then disappears into a barely audible whisper. I’ll reschedule soon!

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox for March 12 (always a must-read e-newsletter) covers “10 High-Profit Redesign Priorities.” The tips are focused on ROI — return on investment — for commercial sites, but many of the tips are applicable to nonprofits too. Here are a few of my favorites, with some comments.

– Publish an email newsletter, if you aren’t already. It’s the perfect way to stay connected with someone who has visited your website. Make the sign-up form highly visible (include it in your template so it appears on every major page) and keep the form simple (don’t ask for a life history — name and email should do it). Email newsletters are cheap to distribute and as Jakob points out, they help liberate your site from being dependent on search engines.

– Differentiation and comparisons. Jakob talks about products and services, but the concept applies to nonprofits too. How does your nonprofit and what you do vary from what other similar organizations are doing? Website visitors want to know they are in the right place and how your work is the same or different from groups they are already familiar with.

For example, my husband works for the Conservation Trust for North Carolina. People always want to know if his organization is like the Trust for Public Land or The Nature Conservancy. While they all work in land conservation, they come at it with different priorities and approaches. TPL cares more about public parklands, TNC cares more about wildlife habitat, and CTNC cares more about protecting farmland and scenic byways from development. Their websites are fairly clear about these distinctions. If your organization is in a similar situation, clear up the confusion for your site visitors.

–Support for reordering (or for nonprofits, renewing). It annoys me when I can’t renew my nonprofit memberships or annual support online. I really like when I can login and the site automatically fills in data like my address. It’s a great timesaver.

Create a valuable site for your visitors by giving them the information they want, letting them save time by working online, and making it easy to stay in touch with you.

Copyblogger is showing people how he would rewrite some of their blog headlines, including notes on why he made the changes he did. I do a similar exercise in my newsletter writing courses and it’s always fun. So, let’s try it here. Either leave a comment or send an email to me at kivi *AT* writing911.com. Provide a link to a newsletter article or blog headline you’d like to see rewritten. If you don’t have the article online, email me the original headline and the lead paragraph.

ALT tags are the bits of text that you can attach to images on webpages and in email messages and e-newsletters. As I explained yesterday, using the ALT tag is essential when including images in email campaigns and e-newsletters, because if the people reading your email have image blocking turned on, they won’t see the image, but they will likely see the ALT text. ALT tags are also needed by visually impaired people who rely on screen readers.

ALT stands for alternative — this text will be shown as an alternative to showing the image itself. Many people advocate that you simply describe what is in the photo, especially for ALT tags on websites. But ALT tags can also be used as marketing text, and this approach makes sense for email where you are most likely trying to encourage some type of action on the reader’s part.

Here are a few tips for your email ALT tags.

1) Always use them! You don’t need them on decorative items like bullets, but use them on all photographs and artwork of significance.

2) Keep them short, but not too short. Don’t use “Logo” when you can use “Smith Community Library Logo.” Shoot for three to seven words.

3) Use words that are meaningful to your readers. Treat writing your ALT tags like you do headlines and captions. Use keywords that will grab your readers’ attention. Don’t say “Kittens at the shelter” when you can say “Kittens ready to be adopted today at the shelter.”

4) Encourage readers to turn images on. Your newsletter will look much better and be more effective if people see the images you placed there. You can use the ALT tag to encourage them to turn on the images. For example, ALT tags like “Turn on images to see why Jim is smiling” or “Turn on images to see what your donations purchased last month” give the reader an incentive. A tag like this on every image would be annoying, but using them sparingly may convince some of your readers to take that extra step to see your images.