Free Training on E-Newsletters

I’m doing another free conference call for Network for Good’s Nonprofit 911 series, this time on Ensuring Your E-Newsletters are Read – Not Dead – On Arrival This Year. Join us next Tuesday, February 9 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern.

As for our weekly webinar series here at Nonprofit Marketing Guide, here’s what’s coming up next:

February 10: How to Write a Quick and Dirty Nonprofit Marketing Strategy

February 16: 10 Ways to Engage Your Facebook Fans

February 18: Nonprofit Storytelling: How to Write Your Nonprofit’s Best Stories

February Sweetheart Deal on the Pass *Plus*

This month, I’m offering a special deal on our new Pass *Plus*. It includes invitation-only coaching calls with Nancy Schwartz, Sarah Durham, and Gail Perry, plus I’ll buy you a copy of Sarah’s awesome new book, Brandraising: How Nonprofits Raise Visibility and Money Through Smart Communications.” Get the details on the Sweetheart Deal here.

Online Outreach on a Budget – Nonprofit Blog Carnival

The first 2010 edition of the Nonprofit Blog Carnival is now online at Issue Lab’s Footnotes and it’s all about doing online outreach on a budget. It connects you to some really great posts, so save a lunch hour this week to read them over.  Joanne Fritz at About.com for nonprofits has taken over management of the Carnival from me. Thanks Joanne for doing such a great job with that baby! Next month’s edition will be hosted by Katya Andresen at the Nonprofit Marketing Blog. The theme will be your best and/or worst moments as a nonprofit professional – and what you learned from them. Submit your blog posts here.

A Nonprofit Messaging Crisis

Nancy Schwartz is sharing the results of her recent survey on nonprofit messaging and has concluded that nonprofit communicators are in a state of crisis. See why she feels that way, and get some solid advice from Nancy on what to do about it. Nancy will be sharing her expert advice on messaging with our Pass *Plus* holders on a February 17 conference call.

Great Storytelling about Giving

I *love* this idea from Triangle Gives Back, a project led by the Triangle Community Foundation here in NC. At the foundation’s holiday party, executive director Andrea Bazán passed out envelopes to attendees that contained $10 and a challenge: Match the $10 with at least $10 of your own, give the money to someone you do not know or an organization doing good in the region, and then share the story.  Check out the creativity that ensued. I heard about this because one of the attendees at the party works with my husband at the Conservation Trust for NC. We collected change to add to the $10 to send a kid to camp.

Affordable National Press Releases

PR Newswire is offering Web News Releases to nonprofits for just $69. This is a great way to get your news into the big national news engines like Yahoo! News and Google News, via PR Newswire. Through my partnership with PR Newswire, your nonprofit can also get a 12- month membership at no charge. Details here.

More Marketing Mixed Links

Think donations to your group will suffer because everyone’s giving to Haiti? Katya says think again.

Allison Fine reflects on what we’ve learned about giving via text message.

From ProBlogger: 13 Types of Posts that Always Get Lots of Comments

From Jeff Brooks in Fundraising Success magazine: Easier Said Than Done: 25 Tips for Better Fundraising Copy

On the Power of Twitter: Got a Gripe? Send a Tweet. I saw this work myself not too long ago when I tweeted that I was having a hard time getting a certain nonprofit to call me back about a quote in my book. Within two minutes, the phone rang, with quote approval from said nonprofit.

Only 5% of websites have a Facebook or Twitter link, reports Care2. Sounds like we need some social media integration! (The recording of our webinar on integrating your website, email newsletter and social media sites is available in the Recording Archive for All-Access Pass holders).

Beth Kanter presented a great webinar on how to incoporate social media into your training programs. If you do any training or even plain ol’ public speaking, check it out. She inspired me to incorporate the Twitter backchannel into all of my webinars and trainings from here on.

Have an idea worth spreading? Check out Seth’s random rules for how to do it.

That’s all for now. I’m off to Toledo this afternoon to teach “Low-Budget, Real-World Nonprofit Marketing: Picking the Right Strategies and Telling the Right Stories” for the Toledo Community Foundation. Enjoy the links, and let me know if you learned something new by leaving a comment.

I have to admit, it’s a rather ambitious topic for one hour. I’m in the middle of the PowerPoint deck now trying to find the sweet spot between giving you enough information to really make a difference in your online marketing strategy and giving you too many to-do list items that you run screaming from the whole idea of integration.

Here’s the framework I’m using right now. Please share any comments you have as I’m sure I’ll be playing around with this until sometime tomorrow morning! For those of you attending, I promise to have the handout available an hour before the webinar (but probably not much sooner!)

You can integrate your online marketing in three steps:

(1) Connecting

Make sure everything links to everything else. Do that by putting links into web and e-news templates, email signatures, and social media profiles. Use social media icons (search “free social media icon set” for tons of them) to make these links more obvious. If your e-news provider offers it, use the social media sharing links at the bottom of your e-newsletters (otherwise add your own).

Consider whether auto-updating makes sense. You can connect your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to update each other. Think about whether and how that makes sense given the type of content you share, how often, and with whom.

Ensure basic branding is in place. Your website, blog, e-news, and social media sites don’t need to be 100% identical, but it should be crystal clear that they are all produced by the same people.

(2) Strengthening

Think holistically about your online content creation. Integrate what you put out there by using an editorial calendar, while at the same time, recognizing which channel is best for what (e.g. email good for clear calls to action; social media good for awareness). Don’t  think of your website as something entirely different from your e-news, or your e-news as entirely different from your Twitter feed. Figure out what you want to communicate, and spread that across the channels in a way that makes sense.

Think about the paths. Think about how you want people to travel from channel to channel, and what they will see at each stop along the way. For example, if your e-news links to your website, what’s on that landing page? Does that landing page urge visitors to discuss the topic on Facebook or Twitter? If someone starts on Facebook, how are you encouraging them to sign-up for your e-newsletter? Again, it goes back to understanding how to get the most out of each channel.

Encourage multiple connections. Many of your fans will connect with you in multiple ways without being asked (e.g. they will subscribe to your e-news, blog feed and Twitter stream), but others will need some prodding. Connecting with people in multiple ways increases the odds that your messages will actually get through to them. You may need to offer some incentives (e.g. people on the email list get certain benefits, or get them first).

(3) Reinforcing

Learn from your metrics. Watch what’s happening along the paths that connect your online channels. Where are people coming from and where are they going? Are certain types of your supporters more likely to use one channel or another? What content produces the most interaction (e.g. clicks, comments, forwards, shares) in which channels?

Listen to the conversation, and bring in back into your content. You’ll learn a great deal from the conversation in social media that you can use to inspire and inform you e-news and web content.  For example, a conversation on Twitter can transform into a new update you send out via your e-newsletter. Blog comments can direct updates to other parts of your website.

Make sense? What’s most important? What’s missing? Please share your thoughts in the comments and I’ll see you on the webinar!

Get all of our live and recorded training for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Want access to Kivi’s office hours? Try the Pass *Plus* for just $75 more. Get the Details Here.

The problem is that there really aren’t all that many writers who specialize in producing the kind of content that nonprofits need. At the same time, there are lots of freelance writers who would love to do more work for nonprofits, if they only knew how.

To help solve both problems, I’m launching a new “Writing for Nonprofits” Coaching Program. The four-week program will begin March 1, 2010 and will be limited to just 10 participants.  It will include a live training or coaching event once a week and lots of tips and resources online, along with weekly challenges. It won’t just be me sharing advice; I’ve asked five other successful freelancers to serve as guest experts too.

Working directly with nonprofits is still my number one priority, which is why I’m keeping this new coaching program small, and I’m not sure when I’ll offer it again. If you are a freelance writer, take a look at the program. If you know a freelance writer who you wish knew how to produce the materials you need, pass it on to them.

P.S. I’m offering an early-bird special . . . register before February 1 and use the coupon code JAN100 to save $100.

Get all of our live and recorded training for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Want access to Kivi’s office hours? Try the Pass *Plus* for just $75 more. Get the Details Here.

What did you do?

Whom did you help?

On what did you spend money?

Where did that money come from?

But the single most important question that your annual report must answer is “So what?”

You did a bunch of stuff. So what? What changed in the world as a result?

You helped a bunch of people. So what? How are their lives different now, and why does that matter?

You raised money and you spent it. So what? What do your income and expenses tell us about your values, your decision-making, and your impact?

It all goes back to showing your donors that, with their support, you are making a difference. (But don’t tell us you are “making a difference” in your report. Instead, show us what that difference looks like.)

On Thursday, I’m teaching one of our most popular webinars, “How to Write a Four-Page Nonprofit Annual Report.” I’ll explain how to appeal to both the hearts and the minds of your supporters, all in a four-page format that’s affordable to print and easy to share online too.

Get all of our live and recorded training for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Want access to Kivi’s office hours? Try the Pass *Plus* for just $75 more. Get the Details Here.

I want to include lots of real-world anecdotes and lessons learned in the chapter. Do you have a story you can share about your newsletter experience, either print or email (or both)?

Here’s what I’ll be trying to communicate through the stories:

• Dos and don’ts, especially those that took awhile for you to grasp. What do you know now with some experience behind you that you wish you knew back when you started?
• What’s most challenging about producing a nonprofit newsletter, and how are you addressing those challenges?
• What mistakes have you made that you’d like to spare your nonprofit colleagues from repeating?
• What experiments have you tried with your newsletter and how did they turn out?
• What other words of wisdom would you share about producing a newsletter with someone new to the nonprofit world?

Any stories that help answer one or more of these questions would be wonderful! Please share in the comments or email me directly. If you email, please put Newsletter Story in the subject line.

Thanks!

P.S.  Here’s what’s coming up on the our training schedule . . .

January 21: How to Write a 4-Page Nonprofit Annual Report – A Crash Course Webinar

January 27: Integrating Your Website, Email Newsletter, and Social Media Sites

February 10: How to Write a Quick and Dirty Nonprofit Marketing Strategy

February 16: 10 Ways to Engage Your Facebook Fans

Get all of our live and recorded training for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Want access to Kivi’s office hours? Try the Pass *Plus* for just $75 more. Get the Details Here.

Today is Beth’s 53rd birthday and with this post, I’m joining 53+ other bloggers in thanking Beth for all that she has given us, and will continue to give us. Thank you, Beth, for your great wisdom, insight, inspiration, prolific blogging, and most of all, your generosity to the nonprofit community! If you want to say thanks, Beth is asking friends to help her send 53 students to school in Cambodia, which is where she adopted her two kids. I’m making a donation right after I post this, and I hope you will too.

Now on to my other predictions . . .

1. Social Media is Real Life so “IRL” Should Die

Everyone agrees: Social media is here to stay in one form or another. It’s changed forever the expectations people have about sharing information and opinion with others. People use “IRL” online as an abbreviation for “in real life.” In 2010, IRL is obsolete, because we all realize by now that when we communicate with each other online it’s just as real as when we do it in print or even face-to-face.

Social media isn’t a monologue, or even a dialogue, but a trialogue. Rather than isolating people, the use of social media and other online technologies increases how well-connected people feel to each other and to the causes they love. In 2009, we saw many examples of how online tools are bringing people together offline (Tweetup anyone?). Friends are the new filter for information overload.

If you still think of your online strategy as something wholly apart and different from your “IRL” communications strategy, you are doing it wrong. Stop, and learn to merge.

2. More Nonprofits will Experiment with Real-Time Communications

We expect current information and answers to our questions instantaneously. Mobile Internet access (e.g. smartphones) is narrowing the digital divide. We can get and give info/opinion anywhere, anytime, and now with a geographic overlay. New apps allow people not only to share, but to self-organize (e.g. FourSquare.com, GroundCrew.us, Plancast.com) Guess where I learned about two of these sites.

Can I read your e-newsletter on my Blackberry? What’s the most useful, timely, interesting or exclusive stuff you do? What would your supporters like to know in real time (is there something they’d like to track or be alerted about)? Can you deliver it via text messages or Twitter? Think about ways to share the here and now with your supporters, as it is happening.

3. To Succeed Online, You Have to Think Like a Media Mogul

You aren’t just a communications director. You are a content creator, a publisher, a broadcaster. Heck, you are your nonprofit’s resident media mogul. Instead of sending a press release to your newspaper, TV station, and radio station, you are producing your own e-newsletter, podcast, and YouTube channel. You even have your own versions of the 24-hour cable news networks — they are your Twitter and Facebook accounts. Your blog is your nonprofit’s reality TV show.

It’s a lot to manage, but try to manage it you must, if you want your supporters to really connect with what you are doing, and to make it a part of their own lives. This is communications in 2010 . . . it’s multi-channel, real time, transparent, and personal. It’s what people are getting in all other aspects of their lives and I bet the nonprofits that do it well will be rewarded with more attention from their supporters.

So what do you do with these trends and how do they affect your 2010 marketing strategy? That was the topic of last week’s interactive conference call. If you missed it, you can listen to the mp3 recording and download the two-page handout when you purchase an All-Access Pass. The handout includes basic, intermediate and advanced steps for addressing each of these trends.

Get all of our live and recorded training for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Want access to Kivi’s office hours? Try the Pass *Plus* for just $75 more. Get the Details Here.

Getting organized is a sanity saver. Photo: LizMarie on Flickr

On Tuesday, January 12, I’m hosting an interactive conference call on “Nonprofit Marketing: Doing It Yourself Without Doing Yourself In.” It’s a new training based on a section in my upcoming book that’s written especially for all of you who are one-person communications departments or executive directors do it all on your own. I’ll share a bunch of sanity savers that will help you do it all yourself without doing yourself in.

Here’s one of those tips: Organize the stuff you’ll need again and again as you implement your communications plan. Every nonprofit marketer needs to get his or her hands on the same files over and over again. Get all that information together in one place. It’s the work equivalent of cleaning out your closet, which can be a real chore, but it’s so much better once it’s done.

Here’s what you definitely need:

Get Clean Copies of Your Logo in the Proper Resolutions. It seems like not a day goes by that I don’t see some raggedy, blurred, or skewed nonprofit logo on TV or in print that looks like it has been sent through a fax machine three times. Don’t lift your logo off your website or from a word processing document and expect it to look good elsewhere.

Go find your original artwork files. They are most likely Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop files. Once you find those, label them “original” in the filename so you know not to change them.  Then make copies and start saving them in different formats and resolutions appropriate to various uses, putting “web” and “print” in the filenames to help you keep them straight.

For online use, the resolution should be 72 ppi (pixels per inch). So if you want your logo to appear as 1.5 inches square on your website, the dimensions would be 108 pixels by 108 pixels (that’s 72 x 1.5). Save web resolution files as jpgs, gifs, or pngs. Use these on websites, blogs, and in email.

For print use, the resolution should be at least 300 ppi. So your same 1.5 square-inch logo on a piece of paper would now be 450 x 450 pixels (300 x 1.5). Save these as eps or tiff files. You can also use jpg, but just make sure that the resolution and size are set high enough.

For TV, I recommend sending the highest quality logo you have and letting the company you are working with adjust the size and resolution to match their needs.

If you can’t find your original artwork files, get them redrawn. Either ask your graphic designer to do it or find a volunteer or college student who knows Adobe Illustrator. You’ll need to know which fonts you used or be willing to have the designer take a guess. Unless your logo is extremely complicated, it will probably take a designer about an hour to redraw an old logo. The $100-$200 you spend on this will pay for itself by making your organization look much more professional.

Gather Your Boilerplate Text. Put all of those chunks of text that you use over and over in one place. That includes your mission and vision statements, plain-English descriptions of your programs, your history, your elevator speeches, staff bios, press release boilerplate, organizational Frequently Asked Questions, and anything else that you find yourself frequently copying and pasting.

Start a Style Guide. Much time is wasted correcting inconsistencies in everything from your branding, which includes how staff use your logo, colors, or fonts, to which editorial styles you prefer (anyone want to argue about serial commas?). Spare yourself and everyone else who creates content for you the misery of these arguments by creating style sheets.

An editorial style sheet is a chart you fill out showing how you will use, format, and spell certain words.   You can also include rules about abbreviations, capitalization, acronyms, and anything else related to how words, numbers, and punctuation appear in your publications.  Include anything and everything that you end up correcting when editing someone else’s work. Here are some common decisions for your style sheet.

• When do you spell out numbers? Under 10 or 100?
• Do you use periods in acronyms or not, such as USA or U.S.A.?
• Do you hyphenate certain words? For example is it email or e-mail? Decision-maker or decisionmaker?
• 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?

You should also create design style sheets that specify which fonts, colors and other design elements you use, and when and where you use them.

Distribute your style guides widely and put them in places staff and volunteers can easily access, such as an electronic copy on your intranet or printed copies on an office bulletin board. Supplement the style guide with a running list of examples or answers to style questions raised by staff.

Track Supporter Data. Nonprofit communicators waste time when they can’t find the data they need to connect with their supporters in the way they’d like to. Whether you use a simple database or spreadsheet or a more robust customer/constituent relationship management (CRM) package, you need to centralize your contact information and donation history for your supporters. Look at every form, both in print and online, where your organization asks supporters for personal information and ensure that the form matches up with the fields in your database. Establish and religiously implement a system for getting data collected offline into the database.

I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve wasted over the years working as a staff member, consultant, and volunteer with nonprofit organizations simply because they didn’t have these communications basics organized. Spend an hour this week getting all of this stuff together and I guarantee you’ll be glad you did.

Then join us on Tuesday for more sanity savers!

P.S. Here’s the full January training schedule . . .

January 7 Teleconference: Trends for 2010 and Your Marketing Plan for the New Year

January 12 Teleconference: Nonprofit Marketing: Doing It Yourself Without Doing Yourself In

January 21 Webinar: How to Write a 4-Page Nonprofit Annual Report – A Crash Course Webinar

January 27 Webinar: Integrating Your Website, Email Newsletter, and Social Media Sites

Get all of our live and recorded training for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Want access to Kivi’s office hours? Try the Pass *Plus* for just $75 more. Get the Details Here.

This year, I’ve picked three words that popped out at me when I read What Matters Now, a series of short essays each on a different word.  It’s a free ebook conceived by Seth Godin and edited by Ishita Gupta that includes Mark Rovner, a great friend to nonprofit marketers and one of my Lexulous pals.

Here are my three words for 2010:

ENOUGH. I have a too-long to-do list, waaaay too many feeds in my RSS reader, Twitter and Facebook friends whose updates I never see, and four racks of files sitting on my desk. ENOUGH. This year I pledge to only commit to what I can reasonably see, hear, and do without making myself crazy. I’m going to use the tools at my disposal, like lists in Twitter and Facebook, so I can see what’s most important — and ENOUGH — more quickly.

EASE. 2009 was a wonderful year in many ways. I wrote my first book. More than 2,500 nonprofit staff participated in our weekly webinar series. I traveled around the country speaking to some really great groups of nonprofits about nonprofit marketing. I love it all.  But I push myself hard, and while I can take it, it’s not always fair to those I love most of all. Our kitten Luna can fit in my inbox, but my kids can’t, and they shouldn’t have to try. So I’m going to EASE up on how tightly I schedule commitments so I have time for everything that’s important to me, rather than letting deadlines run (and sometimes ruin) my life.

LEAP. This word returns for an encore, although it’s taken the form of  ”Just Do It”  in previous years. I do a lot of decision making by the seat of my pants. Most of the time, it works. LEAP stays on the list this year simply as a reminder to have faith in following my instincts, even when decisions aren’t as carefully considered as the more analytical parts of my personality might prefer.

Chris Brogan’s three words are Ecosystems, Owners and Kings. See what they mean to him. Chris’s blog post inspired many other people to pick three words too.

What are your three words for 2010? Leave a comment on this post or link back to it with your own post to share.

P.S. We are kicking off the new year on Thursday with an interactive conference call on Trends for 2010 and Your Nonprofit Marketing Plan for a New Year. I hope you’ll join us for an enlightening discussion. I’ll be asking participants to share their three words too.

Get all of our live and recorded training for 90 days for just $145 with the All-Access Pass. Want access to Kivi’s office hours? Try the Pass *Plus* for just $75 more. Get the Details Here.

Here’s what I’ve come up with: The Pass *Plus*

This is like our regular All-Access Pass to the weekly webinar series, but with two important extras. In addition to getting access to all of the live and recorded training, you also get personal coaching in two ways:

1) Access to a monthly coaching call with me and a guest expert. In January, it’s our media relations expert Claire Meyerhoff. Branding and messaging expert Nancy Schwartz will be joining us in 2010 as well. These calls will be much smaller and more informal than our usual trainings, so everyone who wants to will have a chance to talk and get questions answered.

2) Access to my office hours schedule. Each week, I’ll open up a few hours on my schedule for Pass *Plus* Office Hours. The times will vary week to week. You’ll be able to sign up online for 15- or 30-minute appointments, which can be either conference calls or GoToMeetings. I’m not limiting the number of appointments you can make at this time . . . we’ll see how it goes and adjust as needed.

The Pass *Plus* is on sale now through December 31 for just $155 for 90 days or $499 for the whole year. Those prices will go up on January 1 to $220 and $705 respectively. Get your Pass *Plus* today and you’ll save a bunch.

If you are just interested in the training, it’s still a good idea to get your All-Access Pass now. The current 2009 prices of $97 for 90 days and $330 for one year will also be going up to $145 and $465 on January 1.

P.S. Here’s what’s coming up next on the training schedule . . .

January 7 Teleconference: Trends for 2010 and Your Marketing Plan for the New Year

January 12 Teleconference: Nonprofit Marketing: Doing It Yourself Without Doing Yourself In

January 21 Webinar: How to Write a 4-Page Nonprofit Annual Report – A Crash Course Webinar

January 27 Webinar: Integrating Your Website, Email Newsletter, and Social Media Sites

Get Your All-Access Pass to Our 2010 Webinar Series for the 2009 Price. The Price Goes Up January 1. Get the Details Now.

Photo by Orin Zebest on Flickr

I just donated $20 each to 10 national charities via the Capital One No Hassle Giving site, using my credit card miles. Want to guess how many thank-you notes I’ll get?

I’m not talking about the automated emails that Network for Good, the payment processor, sends. I received those immediately. I’m talking about real thank-you notes from the charities.

I call this the “What I Got When I Gave” experiment, and when I did the same thing last year, the results were dismal. I heard back from only a third of the charities and the follow-up even from the ones I heard from has been limited to non-existent over the last year.

The original purpose of this experiment was to learn how some of the nation’s top nonprofits cultivate new donors through communications over time. That’s hard to do when they don’t communicate with donors at all.

Will this year’s recipients do a better job? I’ll let you know  in January.

Thank you notes aren’t the last step you take after receiving a gift; they are the first step you take in receiving the second gift. If you want some help learning how to write a really amazing thank you note that helps turn a one-time donor into a long-term supporter, join us on Thursday, December 17 at 3:00 p.m. Eastern (Noon Pacific) for our next webinar, “Writing Thank You Notes that Inspire Future Gifts.”

Get All of Our Webinars & E-Courses for $97. With the All-Access Pass, you can attend all of our live webinars, watch recordings, and take on-demand courses whenever you want for 12 weeks. Get the details.