Political campaigns, especially in presidential years, are great testing grounds for new communications and fundraising techniques that eventually transfer over to the nonprofit world. Howard Dean revolutionized small-dollar online giving and Barack Obama was the first to integrate mobile/texting both for campaign advocacy and fundraising.

I wonder what we’ll learn about in the coming year?

Well, nevermind all that for now. It’s more important that you have a half-way decent website . . . and it seems that’s a lesson that several current presidential campaigns still need to learn.

As Colin Delany reports on his great e.politics blog, even presidential candidates still make “major and painfully avoidable mistakes.” Colin summarizes the results of a new study from Normal Modes, which ran the current Republican hopefuls’ sites through usability tests.

Here are just three of Colin’s points, all of which apply to nonprofit websites too:

• People hate email-gathering splash screens, which are now standard-issue on most campaign sites. In fact, some users (older ones in particular) found them so confusing that they tried to leave the sites entirely.

• Once users got past the splash screens, the sites frequently did a terrible job of collecting email addresses on internal pages.  (Colin notes that “nonprofits have known to put a clear email signup form or button on every page for years” but I think he’s actually being pretty generous with us on that one. Lots of work to do there still!)

• One phrase that turned out to be particularly confusing: “join the campaign,” wording that’s also become standard on campaign websites. People found it off-putting since the text didn’t actually tell them what clicking on a “join the campaign” button would imply. Colin suggests making the wording specific, as in “get emails from Mitt” or “volunteer in your community” or “donate.” (I’ve lectured about lame calls to action before, so you know I agree on this one!)

Check out Colin’s full post and the full report for more details.

P.S. Here’s what’s coming up next on our webinar schedule . . .

December 1: Trends for 2012 and Your Marketing Plan for the New Year

December 7: Writing Thank-You Notes That Inspire Future Gifts

December 14: The New and Improved Nonprofit Annual Report

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During my webinars and workshops on how nonprofits can use social media successfully, I often urge nonprofit staff to take a friendly, fun, and more light-hearted approach to their social media communications.

But that’s often a tough sell with organizations that deal with very serious issues, like abuse, rape and death.  Obviously those situations do demand greater care, but I still think that “doom and gloom” isn’t going to work as well as more positive messages, especially on a platform like Facebook.

What advice do you have in situations like these? Here is a real-life question for you from Sarah Sperring, executive assistant of KIDS Center:

“I attended your webinar regarding Putting Real Strategy into Your Social Media Outreach (which I loved) and had some questions for you. I work for KIDS Center and I have taken on our marketing, as we didn’t really have a person dedicated to it before. Our nonprofit is a child intervention center where we see, evaluate, and treat abused children, so it’s a somewhat difficult and emotional subject.

We do have a Facebook and Twitter page, but have fallen into the trap of  ”prevention of child abuse” posts or events. Since your webinar, I have put a list of some fun things we could try and do, but I was hoping you also might have some ideas for us. We have a small base of around 400 Facebook fans and 116 following us on Twitter. We would also love to grow that but don’t really know how.

Here are some of my ideas, but I would love to know what you think.

• Comment of the donations we receive in-kind
• Questions to poll – do you think…?
• Emotional stories
• Human side of KIDS Center – staff spotlight / funny parts of the job/ parts we love / behind the scenes
• Funny things that kids say
• Summer memories
• What was your favorite book or toy
• Fall ideas – where to go in the area that are kid friendly
• Giveaways – give a free pass to a training or win a Body safety workbook
• Multiple choice questions – guess how many children are seen here, etc.

Thoughts?  Thank you so much!”

I think Sarah has some great ideas here!

What do you think she should try first? What other suggestions do you have? Add your thoughts and ideas in the comments!

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I originally wrote this article as a guest post on the Nonprofit Technology Network’s blog, but just realized I hadn’t shared it with you, so here it is!

Your website is out there for all to see. You never know who’s going to end up visiting. So how can you create website content that all kinds of potential visitors will find interesting and engaging?

We could get into a traditional marketing discussion about target audiences and personas, but let’s go at this challenge in a different way. Let’s think about the stages that your supporters go through as you build rapport with them over time. To keep it simple, let’s group your website visitors into three categories:

Strangers: People who know nothing about you.
Friends: People who like your organization or cause.
Fans: People who LOVE your organization or cause.

What kind of content does your website need for each of these groups?

Strangers: People Who Know Nothing About You

If someone knows nothing about your organization and lands on your website, what’s the first thing you want them to see?

It’s not your mission statement. Trust me.

What you want them to see is the answer to their question.

If a stranger lands on your website, odds are they are searching for the answer to a specific question about something going on in their lives right now. Maybe it’s a problem they want to solve, or something they heard from a friend or saw on TV that piqued their interest. They went searching, and Google or another website with a link to yours pointed that stranger to you, thinking that you might have the answer.

What three questions are strangers who land on your site most likely to have? For some nonprofits, the answers are obvious. If you run an animal shelter, one question will be “What animals are available for adoption?” If you run a Meals on Wheels program, one question will be “How can a senior get food delivered?” If your organization addresses a particular disease, one question will be “What is the treatment?”

The best way to build rapport with strangers is not to babble on about yourself; it’s to be a good Samaritan who answers their questions. These questions are almost always programmatic in nature, and rarely about donating, volunteering, or otherwise helping you out.

Devote space on your home page and/or within your navigation to answering the three big questions most likely to bring strangers to your site. When you do, they are more likely to become friends, which brings us to our next group of visitors.

Friends: People Who Like Your Organization

Friends know you, at least a little bit. They may have an incomplete picture of you, but the one they do have is favorable. What do they want to see on your website?

No, it’s still not your mission statement.

Tell your friends some good stories.

Stories are the quickest and most memorable way to explain what it is you do, how you do it, for whom, and why. You want these friends to get it.

Tell stories about people like them, so they can see that they belong. If you are trying to get more young families to participate in your program, tell a story about (you guessed it) a young family already in your program.

Tell stories that appeal to their inner guardian angels. Show them how they – through being your friend — can look out for someone else or change someone’s life for the better, even if only in a small way.

Tell stories with a sense of adventure or wonderment. Appeal to that inner child that’s looking for a break from the day-to-day responsibilities of adulthood.

Help them learn more about what you do, but not through long statements of need or bulleted lists of programs and services. Images tell stories too – often better than words – so don’t forget photographs and video as you create your website content. Connect with your friends through good storytelling, and some of them will grow into big fans.

Fans: People Who Love Your Organization

Fans are people who know you well, and they love you. They are ready and willing to help – as long as you make it easy for them. What do they need from your website?

Anyone for the mission statement? Anyone? Of course not!

Give your fans clear calls to action so they know exactly what they can do to help or support you – which means not asking for them for “help” or “support.” That’s too vague. Be specific. Ask them to donate $50 towards a specific campaign. Ask them to volunteer for an hour. Ask them to retweet your event invitation to their followers.

Empower them to help you on their own time and in their own ways. Give them downloads and checklists they can use at home, work, or in their community to advance your cause in their own small way (it will feel big to them). Give them pass-along content like short videos and sample email text that they can share with their friends.

Give your fans the personal touch by encouraging them to connect with you in lots of different ways. When they mention you on Twitter, comment on a Facebook update, or reply to your email newsletter, respond with a thanks or some other kind of encouragement.

Integrate your real-time communications channels into your website, for example, by using Twitter or Facebook widgets or RSS feeds that bring the live conversation to your site. It reinforces for your website visitors that you are “here and now” with your fans if they can see that ongoing conversation.

You Never Know Who’ll Come Clicking

You never know who will stop by your website, so be prepared. Answer questions for strangers. Tell stories to friends. Make it easy for fans to interact with you.

And what about that good ol’ mission statement? If it’s a paragraph full of jargon or otherwise meaningless words to most website visitors, bury it on your About Us page. If it’s short, in plain English, and meaningful to your next door neighbor and your next door neighbor’s mom, then you can put it on your home page. But only after you’ve made room for those answers, stories, and interactions.

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If you want website visitors to sign up for your email newsletter, you have to make it easy and give them a compelling reason to do so.

Let’s look at a few ways to do more than just say “sign up for the newsletter.”

Be More Specific About What They’ll Get

The easiest approach is to simply be more specific about what you are sending out in your newsletter.

Here’s the signup box from the Humane Society of the United States, promising the latest news and action alerts:

Here’s one from Network for Good, offering free tips with a clear benefit (improving your fundraising):

Let Them See a Sample

The Nature Conservancy’s sign-up box includes a “View Sample” link that takes you to the latest edition, so you can see what you are really signing up for.

Every Now and Then, Hijack the Home Page

While I don’t recommend you do this all the time, for specific campaigns, you can hijack your home page with an email list sign-up. Here’s one that United Way is doing right now, centered on a pledge to volunteer.  This is what you see on the home page . . . clicking Skip at the bottom takes you to the regular home page.

When you take this approach, your initial emails to the people who sign up should be focused on the pledge or campaign specifically, but then you can transition them to your regular e-newsletter. This same tactic is also used with online fundraising, particularly at the end of the year.

Want More Tips?

On Tuesday, August 23, 2011, I’m teaching a webinar called Building Your Lists of Email Subscribers, Friends, and Followers where I’ll share tips from nonprofits (as well as my own experience) on how to build your lists of e-newsletter readers, blog subscribers, and social media fans/followers.

What Does Your Sign-Up Box Look Like?

Nonprofits, tell us about your email sign-up box and how it’s working for you in the comments — and include a link to your website!

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Convio has released a couple of interesting research reports that clearly demonstrate that multi-channel or integrated marketing (where you add online communications to direct mail)  increases donor retention rates, giving frequency, and consequently lifetime value. The boost in lifetime value occurred whether or not the donor actually elected to give online (guess what, direct mail donors read email!). Donors who actually gave online, in addition to the mail, were shown to be even more valuable (communicate with them and get them giving in more than one channel and you really win).

But integrated marketing is really more than just wrapping email around a direct mail letter. In Convio’s latest Integrated Multi-Channel Marketing Report, they identify it as six key concepts.

1. Constituent Centricity

Convio says this is “aligning processes and communication to respect constituent preferences and optimizing engagement based upon constituent actions.”  In plain English, that means communicating with people the way they want to be communicated with. This encompasses tailoring channel mix, content, program participation and message frequency based upon what your supporters want and how they interact with you. It also means moving away from a pure calendar based communication model to a communications stream that is more events driven, where an event is defined as a constituent interaction. An example is sending a message to encourage a donor to become a monthly (committed) donor after they donate for the second time in six months.

2. Presence in Multiple Channels

Multiple if not all channels (direct mail, phone, TV, email, social media, SMS, etc.) are considered for every campaign as a means of engaging constituents where and how they want to be engaged, and as a means of amplifying a message across different media.

3. Thematic Integration

Regardless of channel or program (fundraising or advocacy) there is a consistent theme and message that tells the same story and uses reinforcing images across multiple formats. Copy does not need to be identical – e.g. you cannot write the same copy for Twitter as you would for direct mail – it just needs to be thematically consistent.

4. Integrated Processes

Using the right combination or sequence of messages or touch points across channels to optimize response and long-term impact. For example, for a renewal, what is the right sequence of messages and channel touches for a given audience segment?

5. Integrated Measurement

Establishing metrics that measure donor behavior and campaign performance across channels, and which focus on long-term value versus a single response. Ideally, metrics should also focus on net return as opposed to gross revenue.

6. Organizational Alignment

All teams work in coordination to ensure internal silos are broken down and campaigns work together as a cohesive unit rather than individualized efforts within an organization.

Convio notes that the participants in this most recent research report tended to focus on some but rarely all of these aspects, and focused primarily on thematic integration.

Where will your organization start? Share in the comments.

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I’m in the middle of developing a marketing strategy, including a website revamp, for a local food bank. As part of any strategy process, I like to take a look at what other similar organizations are doing, so I’ve perused the websites of dozens of small food banks across the U.S.

What food banks do is really not that complicated from a communications perspective: one group of people works to get food to another group of people. The best food bank websites keep it that simple!

My Favorite Food Bank Websites Lead with Simple Stories and Ways to Help

On these websites, you’ll see lots of volunteers who are collecting, sorting, preparing and delivering food. Or you’ll see grateful clients receiving the food. The website navigation is very action-oriented (e.g. donate, volunteer, get food).

Food Gatherers in Michigan does a nice job with this approach to their website, focusing on volunteers with their imagery. You see “Need Food” and “Donate” in several places.

The Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano in California does a nice job too, but with imagery of their clients. They do include some stats on the home page, but in a clear, simple way.

Beware of Too Many Stats, Generalities, and Events

Of course, not every food bank takes this approach.

I also saw several websites that were more focused on public education and programs. They try to make the case for support by reciting a bunch of statistics and describing the problem in that generic  nonprofit language like “The problem of hunger in our community is far greater than most people realize. Now, more than ever, your help is needed.”  Blah, blah, blah. If any nonprofit down the street could use the same language by replacing just one word, what you are saying is too generic.

They also use a lot of jargon and programmatic language on their home pages and in their site navigation like The Growth of Food Insecurity, Raising Awareness about Hunger, Childhood Hunger Programs. This kind of language speaks more to those who work in nutrition or social services than to the people who are most likely to need assistance or to volunteer. I’d much rather see a menu item called “Food for Children” than “Childhood Hunger Programs.”

I also saw quite a few food bank website home pages that were dominated, if not overwhelmed, by event marketing. It’s wonderful that food banks have so many different national partners who want to help them, but when a local group’s website home page is essentially taken over by logos for the USPS Letter Carriers Food Drive, The Biggest Loser Pound for Pound Challenge, and their own local food drives, it’s easy for site visitors to lose the emotional connection with the cause. Promote these partnerships, but not to the exclusion of your core messages.

What I’m Recommending to My Client

I’ll recommend to my food bank client that their website keep it simple with a few stories, while centering on the actions we want people to take.

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Last week, I talked about creating a graphic design style guide. Along with that, you need an editorial style guide. These are just two of several very important tools that all nonprofit communicators should be using.

Your editorial style guide should contain a word list that shows how you will use, format, and spell certain words.

• When do you spell out numbers? Under 10 or 100?
• Do you hyphenate certain words or not? Is it email or e-mail? Decision-maker or decisionmaker? Fundraising or fund-raising?
• How do staff’s proper names appear in print? Robert or Bob? Middle initial or not?

Online communications consultant Kyla Cromer recommends including preferred terminology. For example, do you ask people in email and on your website to “click” on a menu option, or “select” it, or “choose” it? When you save something does a “window” appear, or a “box” or a “pop up”?

You should also include rules about abbreviations, capitalization, acronyms, formatting, and anything else related to how words, numbers, and punctuation appear in your publications.

• Do you use periods in acronyms or not, such as USA or U.S.A.? Washington, D.C. or Washington, DC?
• Formatting phone numbers: use parentheses around the area code or not?
• Formatting email addresses: all lower case or are capital letters OK?
• Formatting website addresses: include the http:// and www. or not? What about capital letters?
• Formatting numbered lists: 1. and 2. or 1) and 2)
• The serial comma: dogs, cats, and birds or dogs, cats and birds
• When should you and shouldn’t you use italics, bold, and underline for emphasis? (Hint: never use underline online unless it’s a link!)

Finally, it’s also a good idea to include the proper wording of taglines, mission statements, and program titles and descriptions. These all belong in your Marketing Bank, whether you include them in the style guide or not.

Include anything and everything that you as the communications pro end up correcting when editing someone else’s work.

But a word of caution: Don’t turn into the Style Police. It’s important to know the difference between undisputed rules of grammar and punctuation and questions of personal style. Where you do have choices, like those I’ve outlined above, decide what you like and stick to it. Consistency is your goal. Strongly encourage everyone in your organization to go along, but don’t go overboard. Pick your battles. (For example, I am totally inconsistent on the serial comma and have decided that I really don’t care. So I’ve stopped forcing myself to proofread for that.)

That’s where relying on one of the venerable style guides comes in handy. The AP Stylebook is the best bet for nonprofits. For a small fee, you can access it online. The Chicago Manual of Style is more formal in style, but also widely adopted as a style guide of choice.

In addition to your editorial style guide, you should also create a design style guide that specifies which fonts, colors and other design elements you use, and when and where you use them. Combine these into one document if that makes more sense to you.

Distribute your style guides widely and put them in places staff and volunteers can easily access, such as online versions on your intranet or printed “cheat sheets” that staff can keep printed out at their desks. Supplement the style guide with a running list of examples or answers to style questions raised by staff.

As Sarah Durham pointed out on the post about graphic design style guides, they are not only helpful in producing better communications today, but they also help you institutionalize your organization’s messaging, too.

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Ever wonder how national nonprofits with hundreds of staff manage all that content on their websites? Who decides what goes online, and who actually puts it there? I do, so I was excited when Kristin Johnson of the National Wildlife Federation agreed to share how they do it.

During this interview, the latest in our series on Junction C: Where Creating and Curating Meet Content and Conversation, Kristin talks about how the NWF web team does it, and how with a new content management system, about 100 staff people now have the rights to add to and edit the site, with 20-50 people making changes on any given day. Kristin’s role as online editorial manager of the website isn’t about writing, or even necessarily editing, but about coaching those program staff  so they put the best content online.

(My camera battery died toward the end of the video, so sorry for the abrupt end of the interview.)

Kristin has agreed to do a series of blog posts for us later this spring, as NWF more fully develops its “governance” structure for managing the website.

P.S. To learn more, join us for these webinars:

May 18: Taming Your Editorial Calendar and Content Creation Process

May 25: Creating Awesome Content: Ideas for Nonprofit Writers

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A flurry of questions came in at the end of today’s webinar on Writing for Social Media, so I’m going to try to quickly answer a bunch of them here. I didn’t get permission to use people’s names, so I’m sharing these questions anonymously.

We have both the Facebook Page and the Group.  I know you said stick with the page.  Do we somehow fold our group members into the page and close out the group?  Does that sound like the right way to proceed?

Now that Facebook has made Pages more like Profiles, they are the way to go. Unless you have a subgroup of folks who really want to talk with each other about something specific (groups can be private, for example), I’d say ditch the group. Just post to its wall and send a few messages to members to explain that you are shutting it down on a certain date in favor of the Page.

When writing blog posts, I am asked to always link it back to our organization so it is the focus.  Should this be the case?

It sounds like your blog might not be on your website? If it is on a separate domain, than frequent linking back to the main site is important. But be sure that you are linking to others just as much, especially to other blogs. It’s fine to have lots of links in a post, both to your site and to blogs or websites of others.

What kind of frequency do you recommend for Facebook posting? What’s enough and too much?

Of course, it all depends on your strategy and what you are using your page for. But as a default starting point, I’d say once a day is good. You could even get away with every other day. On the other end of the spectrum, I’d say more than two or three times a day might be too much, unless, again, there is a real strategy behind it. The culture of Twitter is quite different, where multiple updates during the day are the norm.

There are often concerns about compliments and retweets being seen as endorsements. How do we get around this?

This sounds to me like there might be bigger issue with someone not really appreciating how social media works and how it is different from other more traditional forms of communication. To address this issue, I would sit down and look at real examples and scenarios and try to get a better sense for what people think is OK and what is not. We have two webinars coming up in February that will help with those conversations: Social Media Fear Factor-Getting Over What’s Holding You Back and Creating a Social Media Policy for Your Nonprofit.

I set up a Page for my nonprofit. When the nonprofit does anything on Facebook, it shows up as me doing it, not the nonprofit. For example, I just “liked” a few pages, and it shows up on my personal profile, not of the nonprofit’s page. However, when I add another page as a favorite of nonprofit’s,  it shows up on nonprofit’s page as a favorite.

(2/10/11 Update: Big changes at Facebook! I recommend this post by John Haydon to understand those changes. The answer below no longer applies.)

Unfortunately, what you have described is exactly how it works! While Facebook has made organizational pages act much more like personal profiles do, Facebook does not recognize the Page as a person who can go around and do things on Facebook. So, while you may think you are “liking” something as the Page, you are really doing it as an individual who just happens to also be the Admin of the Page.  You can, however, have your Page mark other Pages as favorites so they appear in the sidebar on your page. It’s confusing, and annoying, but that’s how it works, at least for right now.

We are a research based intermediary so we don’t have pictures of kittens. How do we make facts interesting on Twitter w/out stories? Trivia?

Trivia could be a good approach. Even though you are an intermediary, I would encourage you to work with your organizational partners to identify some stories you can tell that highlight the importance of your work. Even stories about how you help the staff people at your partner organizations is better than nothing.

How much overlap is OK between Facebook and Twitter? Can you post the same stuff in both places?

You’ll find people who will argue with me on this, but I say, yes, you can post the same stuff in both places as a baseline, as long as you aren’t overdoing it on Facebook (The Twitter community is more accepting of frequent updates than the Facebook community.) Then you might supplement with additional material that is really best on Twitter, and do the same with Facebook. But I think some repetition is fine, and actually a good thing.

How do you set up a custom shortened URL?

I use a service called ShortSwitch, which turns links at kivilm.com into my custom short links. You have to have a dedicated URL of your own to use the service.  There are a few others services like that, as well as several programs that you can host yourself on your own server. Search on “custom short URL” and you’ll see a bunch of options.

Thanks for all the great questions!

P.S. Here’s what’s coming up next in our weekly webinar series . . .

January 27: Writing to Raise More Money

February 3: Writing Thank-You Notes That Inspire Future Gifts

February 8: The New & Improved Nonprofit Annual Report

February 16: Social Media Fear Factor: Getting Over What’s Holding You Back

See the Full Webinar Schedule through Mid-March

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If you ask veterans of hard-fought political campaigns which matters most, what a person feels or what a person thinks about your candidate, without exception, they will tell you that heart overrules head in the voting booth. The same goes for the way we make purchasing decisions, the way people vote on juries, and  whether we support charitable causes.

Several advertising studies show the same thing. As described in Brand Immortality: How Brands Can Live Long and Prosper by Hamish Pringle and Peter Field, the UK-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising analyzed 1,400 case studies of successful advertising. They compared the profitability boost of ads that appealed primarily to emotions versus those that relied on rational information, like statistics.  Ad campaigns with purely emotional content outperformed the rational only content by two-to-one. Ads that were purely emotional also performed better than ads with mixed emotional and rational content, though by a much smaller margin.

These results affirm what Dr. Robert Heath of the University of Bath’s School of Management found in 2006.  He found that U.S. and U.K. television advertisements with high levels of emotional content made the advertising successful, not the message itself. The emotional ads enhanced how people felt about brands being advertised. Ads with low levels of emotion had no effect, even when they were factual and informative.

So why do so many nonprofits still insist on a “just the fact, ma’am” approach to nonprofit marketing?

On Tuesday, September 29th, I’m teaching a writing workshop via webinar where we’ll look at ways to add more emotion into everyday nonprofit marketing and fundraising text to make it more effective with your supporters. We’ll also look at using both negative and positive emotions and discuss the differences in those approaches, while also exploring the different emotional buttons that successful fundraisers and volunteer recruiters most often push.

This is brand new webinar, so I hope you’ll join us on Tuesday! As always, registration is $35 a la carte, or it’s included in your All-Access Pass.

P.S. Check out the Neuromarketing Blog for more on “where brain science and marketing meet.”

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