Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

This Wednesday’s Webinar: Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps and Tales October 29, 2008 1:00 p.m. Eastern (10:00 a.m. Pacific) Get the details and register

Let’s assume for a minute that your nonprofit should write a blog in the first place (more on that question some other time). What kind of blog should you write?

You’ll find different categories of blogs, including a color-coded version and even a debate over whether we should categorize blogs at all.

I certainly think you can mix and match blog types, and I bet most  successful blogs do. But I also think that it’s helpful to have one primary direction in mind and to categorize nonprofit blogs based on what your organization hopes to achieve by blogging and how you want your nonprofit to be perceived by your blog’s readers.

Your blog must be part of a larger communications strategy, and thinking of your blog in terms of your marketing goals will help ensure that integration. Take a look at these six goals and the kind of blog you would write as a result.

If you want to be known as a go-to source on a particular topic  . . .

Write a news blog where you summarize and analyze the latest reports and commentary mostly from other sources, but also from your own organization. This kind of blog will include lots of links to other websites and blogs, with a great system of categories and tags to keep everything organized. These blogs are a mix of “reviewers” and “pointers.” This kind of blog is also a great way to combat your own information overload and to organize all the public stuff that your organization wants to keep track of. If you are big into social bookmarking (e.g. Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon), this is your kind of blog.

If you want to be known as the “voice” on your issue . . .

Write an advocacy blog where you regularly explain situations that need changing and help us explore why your approaches are the best ways to bring about those changes.  These nonprofit blogs help bring readers along by educating them on the issues, explaining the various options and positions out there (e.g. what works and what doesn’t) and helping us “see the light.” These blogs can range from policy wonk to zealous champion, but are very issue-oriented. They are mostly “producers” with some “reviewer” and “pointer” thrown in here and there.

If you want to be known as a resource, problem solver, or technical assistance provider . . .

Build a toolbox blog that’s heavy on how to’s, lists, case studies, interviews, and success stories. Show people how to solve their own problems, how to effect change for your cause, and where to go for more help and ideas. Give advice that empowers people to help you change the world.

If you want donors to better understand the need for and impact of your organization . . .

Create a storytelling blog where you share lots of anecdotes about the people you are helping, the partners you work with, the volunteers and donors who help you, and the staff  and board who keep everything moving forward. I also sometimes call this the “insider” blog because much of the storytelling is about what happens behind the scenes, including the little victories and struggles along the way that may not be press release worthy, but still shed light on the realities of your work. Through stories, you are really letting donors see the world through your eyes and giving them an insider’s perspective.

If you want to build confidence in and support for your organization’s decisionmaking, leadership, and approaches . . .

Write a CEO/Executive Director blog, where the top executive for the organization writes about the nonprofit’s work, with a personal flair, in his or her own voice. This can be equally effective for large institutions that need to put a human face back on their work and for small or new organizations that need to build up trust and credibility with funders and partners. These blogs are also good venues for talking about the big picture and strategic decisionmaking. They don’t have to be written by the CEO per se, but are typically written by someone with significant authority within the organization.

If you want to capture your staff’s passion for their work without having an “official blog” . . .

Encourage staff to write professional life blogs. These blogs are technically personal blogs, but the content includes lots of information about the staff member’s work life and profession. They can be hosted on personal domains or on organizational domains, depending on the mix and just how much influence the organization will have over the content. These blogs are often focused on one particular niche within the larger field that a nonprofit works in. Sometimes they can go with the person when they leave the nonprofit and other times they stay with the position itself.

I can hear the screaming now . . . WHERE ARE THE EXAMPLES? I am leaving off examples on purpose for now, because I want to see if these categories ring true for you without placing specific visions in your mind. Do the nonprofit blogs you write and read fit these categories? Which nonprofit blogs fit into which categories? Which don’t? Please leave a comment and let me know what you think and what examples you’d suggest for the various categories. I’ll do a follow-up post where I refine these categories based on your comments and add links to example blogs I’m thinking of.

Learn more during this week’s webinar, Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps, and Tales on Wednesday.

Photo by kevindooley on Flickr

The nonprofit blogerati have been weighing in lately about how nonprofits are bad, bad, bad for looking at social networking as a way to market their organizations. And “communications” seems to have become a dirty word too.

Here are a few samples:

Online Social Networks are Not Mailing Lists by Michael Gilbert of the Gilbert Center. “Once the idea of ‘online social networks’ starts tugging at their sleeve, these are the unfortunate kinds of questions that nonprofits start asking: How do I reach new audiences? How can I get my message out? . . . ”

Holly Ross at NTEN agrees in R-E-S-P-E-C-T. She sums up Gilbert’s points this way: “He argues that thinking about how to use social networks as communications channels is disrespectful” and says that she agrees with him.

In last week’s Chronicle of Philanthropy chat on online marketing, in response to a question about creating online publicity, Beth Kanter said “The word ‘publicity’ implies communications, broadcasting - not social media.” And to a question about using Twitter, she replied “Twitter is not a promotion device!!”

Why I Disagree

Their key point seems to be that nonprofits should use social media/social networking only for listening and learning through engaging in conversation. You cannot expect anyone to listen to what you have to say, unless you are listening too and responding in kind. With this basic premise, I do agree.

However, I strongly disagree with this whole notion that nonprofits who want to use social networking as part of a larger communications strategy, including as a way to get their messages out and to reach new people, are somehow being disrespectful for even considering it.

I’ve gained immeasurably from Michael, Holly, and Beth’s work and insights on technology issues. But this kind of flagellation of nonprofit communicators makes me want to pull my hair out.

How It Looks from Here

It feels to me like they are giving special golden status to what is really just one more set of tools (albeit some very cool ones) that help people communicate with one another and connect in different ways.

Maybe they are talking about the big nonprofits with budgets in the many millions of dollars with staff whose job descriptions actually include words like “social networking.” And maybe those organizations should be much more sophisticated than they are about their approach to social networking.

But those are not the kinds of organizations I work with and train on a daily basis. The nonprofits I work with are much, much smaller and have much more limited resources. They often don’t even have a full-time staff person dedicated solely to communications or even to fundraising.

So for these groups, let’s get real: “listening” and “learning” are luxuries.

“Listening” is something that might happen once a year in a survey. I know many readers of this blog don’t even have a budget line item for traditional training, let alone some extra hours in the day for “learning via social networking”. The to-do list is already miles long, and unless they can find a way to show their executive director or board how using social media is going to pay off in some tangible way, it will stay way down at the bottom of that to-do list.

In other words, the decisionmakers will ask “If we can’t use social media to market our cause, why bother?” And if you listen to the voices above, your answer will probably be, “Listening and learning are important. But you are right — we just don’t have time for that right now. We need more than listening and learning as an outcome. Nevermind.” And that, I think, would be a real shame.

A Better Way to Look at This Issue?

Instead, I turn to my friend Katya Andresen’s definition of respectful nonprofit marketing: “Asking people what they care about and then relating our cause to their values is respectful. Good marketing is a conversation.” This is from her post, Is Marketing Slimy? and I believe that it applies to social networking as well. The harm is not in using social media as a communications tool, but in treating that tool as if it were a megaphone. “Communications” is NOT automatically one-way (as many nptech bloggers seem to think), but includes one-way, two-way, and every-which-way movement of information and insights.

When you use social media/networking tools as they were meant to be used — to engage in real conversations where you neither control nor dominate the dialogue — then I see no problem with using them to talk about your cause and your work and to make new connections too. And when you do that the right way, you will also learn a whole lot in the process, too. It need not be an either/or situation.

UPDATE on 7/24/08: The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Give & Take section picked up this post. Leave a comment here and continue the conversation over there!

“Conversation in the Clouds” by Swamibu on Flickr

The Chronicle of Philanthropy hosted a live chat earlier this week with Beth Kanter (Beth’s Blog) and Jonathon Coleman (The Nature Conservancy) called “Building Your Online Presence on a Tight Budget.”

Beth and Jonathon are two of my favorite social media experts, so I took a few minutes to read the transcript today.

I recommend that you look over the whole transcript yourself, but here are a few points that stood out for me:

- Beth has an insane amount of material online and available to you! I knew this already, and it’s one of the reasons she is a favorite, but all of the links she shared during the chat definitely reinforce the value of the treasure trove that is her blog, wiki, etc.

- Lots of people are questioning the amount of time they need to invest in social networking sites like Facebook and what you get out of them for all that time. The metrics are still evolving, but focusing on what you learn from the conversation versus more standard fundraising or marketing metrics is the way to go right now.

- Search engine optimization and linking strategies are still incredibly important to the success of your website, as is great content. David Westbrook and I will be spending much of the hour during our July 30 webinar, “Attracting More Website Visitors: Traffic Building Tips for Nonprofits” on these topics.

- You don’t need much money to be a rock star in the nonprofit world online (although it certainly helps). What you do need is big buckets full of time. Time to read all the great how-to and what-for material out there. Time to sort through your options. Time to experiment. Time to participate in the conversation. Time to contribute in meaningful ways. So I take that back. You do need money to pay your staff for all this time they are spending working on your social media strategy!

- There’s some tension between the idea of using social media for publicity or promotion and using it more strictly as a conversation tool. I don’t think these two ideas are mutually exclusive — having good conversations with people can be a type of promotion — but I do agree that the conversation should come first.

- Nonprofits are overwhelmed by the options and the long list of to-dos associated with doing social media and online marketing right. I hope this blog and my nonprofit marketing webinar series are helping you feel less overwhelmed and more like you can tackle these tasks with confidence!

Writing is a really tough chore for a lot of nonprofit staff, which is one reason why I’m teaching a webinar called “Nonprofit Writing Stinks: How to Bring Your Writing Back to Life” on Wednesday of this week. I want to share some fairly easy tricks that I’ve learned over the years that will take some of the mystery out of good nonprofit copywriting.

As part of the webinar, I’ll poke fun at the buzzwords we use in the nonprofit sector. I’ve added a Nonprofit Buzzword Bingo game to Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com as a webinar bonus and you can play along too! I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to using the words in the game, so let it be a fun reminder for all of us, professional writers or not!

You can also add tech terms to the nonprofit buzzwords (select “Nonprofit and Tech Buzzwords” from the drop-down menu), creating an nptech version, and you can customize your cards by adding your own words and deleting others from the list. If you feel certain buzzwords are worthy of permanent listing in the game, feel free to leave a comment on this post and I’ll consider adding them.

Thanks to Lukertech for the script!