Kristina Leroux

A few Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com readers have asked about QR codes so I thought it would be a good idea to get my assistant, Kristina, to explain what they are and how you can use them.  ~Kivi

Guest Post by Kristina Leroux of Kristina Leroux.com

QR Codes have actually been around for a while. They just took a while to catch on here in the U.S. Our friends at Wikipedia tell us that QR (Quick Response) Codes were originally created by a Japanese corporation to track car parts. It’s a two dimensional bar code that was designed to allow for quick decoding, but honestly, I know you don’t really care about the science behind it, right?

You just wanna know what’s the big deal and what the heck it does, right? Well, that little box stores information such as addresses, contact information, or website addresses. Anything you’d like it to, really. So, if you have a QR Reader on your cell phone (and there are several apps available), it will scan the code with your phone’s camera and automatically take you to, let’s say, a website on your cell phone’s browser. Pretty cool, huh?

How to Create One

It’s easy! You just need a QR Code Generator. I have used Kaywa and QR-Server before. I’ll be using QR-Server’s generator, called GOQR.ME, for this post since it gives you a few more options.

Once you have downloaded the image, you can add it anywhere you could add a photo or other image.

How to Read One

You will need a QR reader for your phone. Some phones have them installed, but you may have to download an app. You can find them in your carrier’s app marketplace and there are a lot of them.  I have a Droid X and use QR Droid.

Each app will vary, but basically you will be prompted to scan the QR code. That sounds all sci-fi, but it really just consists of you using your phone’s camera. Just hold the phone still until it is done scanning the code. Once it has “read” the code, you should be prompted to either visit that website or download whatever information was in the code.

What to Do With One

The possibilities are pretty much endless. Ask yourself:

• Where are the folks I want to reach?
• What do I want those folks to do?

Some ideas:

Fundraising: Direct potential donors to your “Donate Now” page.
Business Cards: Contact info could simply be scanned into your phone.
Marketing: Put QR Codes on brochures or fliers at your events or any place where people will be out and about.
Services: Add a QR code to the front door of your facility that sends people to your services page.
Calendar of Events: Link to your event’s page.

Now keep in mind, people scanning your QR codes will then be using their phone to look at what’s linked to the cod. If your website or donate now page is difficult to navigate on a mobile phone, rethink sending them there.  You can create simple pages that are better for cell phone browsers and use those.

I recently received this direct mail piece from Samaritan’s Purse. That QR code takes you to a video about their mission.

How might you use QR codes? Leave your ideas in the comments.

Kristina Leroux is Kivi’s little sister and executive assistant. She also runs Kristina Leroux.com, a virtual assistance service that provides online administrative support to nonprofits and entrepreneurs who need to spend more time focusing on their passion to help others and less time worrying about administrative and technical issues. You can find her on Facebook and Twitter or email her at kleroux [at] kristinaleroux [dot] com. For more “how-to” posts, check our her blog also.

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I use Hootsuite to automatically send new blog posts to both Twitter and Facebook. That is, until May of this year, when the Facebook integration failed. I’ve tried to reconnect the two accounts a few times without success (yes, following Hootsuite’s instructions), and then I forgot about it until last week. It’s been almost three months since the blog posts appeared automatically on our Facebook page.

This creates a few interesting questions:

• What’s been the impact on traffic to the blog?
• What’s been the impact on the Facebook page?
• Should I get the posts flowing to the page again with or without Hootsuite?

Here’s what the data says . . .

According to Google Analytics, traffic to the blog from Facebook didn’t change much at all. Apparently, not that many people were really clicking through before, or people are finding the blog links elsewhere on Facebook now. The amount of traffic to the blog from Facebook is really, really small (less than 1% of our total traffic), so I’m not that concerned about this either way.

I’m much more concerned about what Facebook Insights says.

Our active users have been growing steadily from the beginning, but you’ll see that when the blog posts stopped (which represents the majority of our wall posts overall), our active users started declining. If I had made a concerted effort to post to the page every day after the outage, perhaps the decline wouldn’t have occurred. But the reality is that I posted non-blog updates to the page just about as much before and after the outage. So I do think the differences here are attributed directly to the blog posts no longer appearing.

The page interaction data is even more startling. In the three months prior to the blog posting outage, we had a total of 242,636 post views and 312 post feedbacks.

In the three months after the blog posting outage, we had only 71,777 post views and 180 post feedbacks.

Again, if I had changed my manual posting behavior, and updated the status of the page personally every day, perhaps the drop wouldn’t have happened. But I didn’t, which tells me that a lot of the interaction on the page was around the blog content.

This data tells me to get this fixed, but I wanted to get some anecdotal support too, so this afternoon, I asked directly on the page if I should put the blog posts back on — and 100% of the people who commented in the first two hours said Yes!

So we have our answer! I’ll get the blog posts back on the Facebook page, with or without Hootsuite’s help. It will be interesting to see if/how the numbers recover over the next few months.

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I’m a content creator. In any given week, I’m creating content for my own blog, e-newsletter, webinars and e-clinics, and upcoming in-person workshops. I’m also frequenting writing guest posts for others, drafting new e-books, and creating materials for clients. Last year, I wrote a paperback version of The Nonprofit Marketing Guide.

It’s no wonder that people often ask how I keep everything organized. My answer is that it’s always a work in progress. What I’m doing today if different from what I did six months ago and will probably be different from what I do six months from now.

But for today, here’s my list of favorite tools that I use daily to keep everything I need organized. You are a content creator too, so I hope you’ll share your favorite content and project  management tools in the comments.

Google Apps

I use Google Apps email, calendar and docs daily (more like hourly).

I use several labels within Google Apps Gmail to get emails out of my inbox while saving them to a specific place so I can find them later. To keep my most important labels at the top of the list (instead of the default alpha order), I use symbols like @ or | before the label name.

I have different Google Apps Calendars that I use as editorial calendars for my blog, email newsletter, and book marketing. Those are layered on top of additional calendars for my schedule, my family’s schedule, and recurring tasks (mostly personal, like giving the dog her monthly heartworm pill). At first having all of these calendars felt like overkill, but I love it now. It’s so nice to be able to hide all but one calendar when I need to focus on a specific slice of my workload and to turn them all on to see the full picture.

I also store lots of information, such as instructions on how to do lots of different things behind the scenes (e.g. like setting up webinars) in Google Docs. This is especially helpful for jobs that I only do once every month or two and usually can’t remember the most efficient way to do them off the top of my head. It’s also handy for boilerplate that I often need to cut and paste for others to use (e.g. like different versions of my bio).

Google Apps syncs perfectly with my Droid X, including all the labels and calendars, and I can control which I see on the Droid independently of which ones I see on the desktop.

Email, calendar, and tasks are the holy project management triumvirate for me, and Google is great for two of the three. It’s just plain awful with tasks, however. I’m currently using two different tools to fill in the gap: Basecamp and Remember The Milk.

Basecamp

I use Basecamp to manage tasks that I’m working on with others, primarily my assistant. We mostly use the Project and To-Do features, which allow us to assign tasks to each other and to make notes on those tasks as we go along. We are still working out the kinks, but my hope is that this will minimize the amount of daily email we send back and forth, which is how we were previously (and badly) managing all of the to-dos.  I also use the Droid app, Beacon, to manage Basecamp on the go.

Remember The Milk

While I should probably be doing this via Basecamp too, I am experimenting with using Remember the Milk as my personal daily to-do list. Whereas I put anything and everything that needs to get done into Basecamp, no matter how far away the deadline might be, I am trying to use Remember the Milk for items that need to happen in the next few days. Everything in Basecamp is professional to-dos; RTM includes work and personal tasks that need to happen within the next 72 hours.

Delicious and Diigo

4/12/11 update: I’ve transitioned from Delicious to Diigo for bookmarking, because it has a few more nice features and has better support than Delicious.

Delicious is my bookmarking tool of choice. I use it to tag web pages I want to save by topic but also by how I will use them later. Then if I want to share my bookmarks on a specific topic with webinar participants for example, I can give them one URL for a specific tag instead of giving them links to all of the individual articles. For example, you can see all of the articles and examples I’ve saved on nonprofit storytelling at http://www.delicious.com/ecoscribe/nonprofit-storytelling

I know there are lots of Evernote fans out there and I have tried it a few different times. While it looks amazing in theory, for whatever reason, I just haven’t been able to make it a habit. But definitely check it out if Delicious is too simple for you.

Hootsuite

This is my favorite Twitter management tool, after trying just about all of them. It lets me not only manage my own tweets, but also group all the incoming tweets in various ways. I highly recommend that you use not only the List feature within Twitter but Tabs in Hootsuite to group everything in ways that make sense to you.

My Alltop

I oversubscribed to too many blogs in my Google Reader and now I can’t go near the thing without fear of my head exploding (sound familiar)? So, what I do instead is scan my personal Alltop page where the headlines of the last five posts from my 40-or-so most favorite bloggers appear. This tool has been a total lifesaver in helping me feel like I’m keeping up with what the people I respect most are saying. It’s about time to go through and take some off and add some new voices, but I highly recommend that you create your own Alltop page as a way to manage your high priority blog reading. Or feel free to visit mine if you can’t get around to creating your own.

WordPress

Every website I manage is now in WordPress, including this blog. I use the .org version for all of my content, but also help some small nonprofits manage their websites via the hosted .com version as well. It’s my favorite content management system.

Dropbox

When I’m creating and sharing lots of files with others, I’ve found Dropbox to be the easiest way to go. While you can file share through both Google Docs and Basecamp, Dropbox leaves everything in its native format and automatically gives people access to the most current version of a file both online and on their own computers.

I’ll share my favorite tools for actually creating the content another time (e.g. PowerPoint, Flickr, SnagIt, Vimeo, etc.). Also check out the October Nonprofit Blog Carnival that also focused on tools.

What content organization tools do you like best?

P.S. Join me for How to Create and Reuse Your Online Content on Thursday, November 4, 2010 to learn more.

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David Simpson, the chairman of GoldMail, called a few weeks ago asking me to check out his new service.  Like most bloggers with more than 10 subscribers, I get a lot of requests like this, most of which I ignore. But this, my nonprofit friends, is one cool tool that I think a lot of you could use to do some amazing marketing.

GoldMail calls itself “voice over visual messaging” – sort of a combination of voicemail and email. It allows you to record your voice over a series of slides that you create within GoldMail using whatever you have available – photos, screenshots, PowerPoint slides, PDFs, etc. You end up with a nice multimedia message that you can link to in an email or embed in your website or blog. You typically need software like Camtasia Studio or PowerPoint plugins like PointeCast, which are much more expensive and have fairly steep learning curves, to produce something like this.

GoldMail lets you create a simple but effective version of the same thing, without requiring a lot of time, money, or technical know-how. After watching a few quick how-to’s, you can create a message in minutes. And it’s only $9.99 per month. It’s perfect for quick, on-the-fly messages, but can also be used for more polished presentations too. You can record up to 10 minutes, but the most effective uses will be much shorter than that, I think.

I used GoldMail today to create a 3-minute tour of the Nonprofit Marketing Guide All-Access Pass. I’ve embedded the file below and I’ll also be sending out the link to it in an email message to my Nonprofit Marketing Tips subscribers. Hit play to see what GoldMail produces, and to go behind-the-scenes with the All-Access Pass:

(Don’t see the viewer or want to see a bigger, full-screen version? Click here instead.)

Here are three creative ways your nonprofit could use GoldMail:

1) Personalized Thank-you Message. Grab a few photos (or even just one really good one!) that show the results that your donor helped bring about. Record a one-minute thank-you message over those slides, using the donor’s name and referring to their gift specifically, and then email the link  to them. “Jack, I wanted you to see for yourself what your $200 has made possible . . . take a look at these photos . . . . isn’t this wonderful? Thank you so much, Jack, for making such a difference . . . “  You can also add in pre-recorded sounds, like your clients saying thank-you in their own voices.

2) Weekly Updates to Members, Boards, Committees, Etc. Do you have a core group of people who need regular updates on your activities? Record a weekly GoldMail message for them with the week’s highlights. It’s show and tell!

3) Event Invitations. Spice up your invitation by talking about all the great things you have planned for this year over fun photos from last year’s event.

I hear some of you asking, but isn’t video so much better? Probably. But video is waaaaay harder to pull off than this. This is easy. And yes, I have Camtasia Studio, and I’ve still put off making the “All-Access Pass Tour” above for months, because there are just too many settings in Camtasia to deal with. For me, too many options is just as bad as too few. I’ll say it again: this was easy.

Two quick tips from my experience today:

- Get your slides in the right order and practice a few times before you actually record. The ability to edit your audio recording is pretty limited and if you decide to move slides around, you have to start the audio recording over from scratch. Make sure you have all the slides you want, and you have them in the right order, before you record the audio.

- Turn up your microphone volume within your control panel. Even though I do webinars all the time with my headset and the audio is just fine, it was way too low on my first GoldMail recordings. Crank it up a bit on your computer before you record.

David Simpson says the San Franciso Zoo used GoldMail to create a message about new zoo babies and the email to donors with the GoldMail message outperformed the standard email message by 650%. You can’t argue with those kinds of results. David is interested in exploring how other nonprofits can use GoldMail. How might you use this kind of service? Leave a comment with your ideas.

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Wow – yesterday’s post about thank you notes and the lack thereof got the conversation started! Thanks to everyone who took the time to add some thoughts to the debate.

Several people mentioned that the practical realities of nonprofit management mean that getting thank-you notes out promptly, especially when donations come through non-traditional channels for your organization, can be difficult.  Many nonprofits are chronically underfunded and understaffed and often under-skilled in the technology that could make things easier. I get it — really. Been there, done that. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a relatively small gift of $25 may not produce more than a shrug from the development office. I get that too, although I’m certainly less sympathetic to that point of view.

But here’s the thing. Think about how much time a typical nonprofit spends on generic “outreach,” like newsletters, with the purpose, at least in part, of generating new supporters.  If you are so pressed for time, wouldn’t those precious hours be better spent thanking the people who have taken the next step and given you money, no matter how much or through what method?

Just yesterday, before I wrote the post, I did a webinar on Nonprofit Marketing with Next to No Budget. One of my key points was to focus in on the people who matter most and to get personal with them. I specifically pointed out that saying thank you and doing it well, just by itself, was a major strategy for making your nonprofit stand out in donors’ eyes, because so few nonprofits do it well. If you are going to spend anytime on communications at all, shouldn’t it be with the people who have already demonstrated a commitment to your cause by contributing?

Advice to My Frazzled Nonprofit Friends

Give higher priority to your thank-you notes than to any other piece of communications you work on. The newsletter doesn’t go out, the website doesn’t get updated, your report to your board doesn’t get done, until you have sent some kind of thank-you to your donors. Take control of your work life and make it happen. If you don’t, I can pretty much guarantee that over the long haul, you will remain underfunded and understaffed.

Do what NPR did with my gift. If you get an email address, copy and paste it and shoot out a generic thank-you. This is what they sent me, with “NPR Thanks You!” as the subject line:

Dear Friend:

Thank you for your 2008 contribution to National Public Radio, made through Capital One. Your support helps NPR provide Morning Edition, All Things Considered, Talk of the Nation, Car Talk, News & Notes, From the Top and other news and cultural programming to listeners from Alaska to Florida and many countries overseas.

Again, many thanks for your generosity. NPR simply could not do it without you.

Sincerely,

Annie Callaway Davis,

Vice President for Development

(Sent by)

Dayna Taylor
Grants & Contributions Administrator

Granted, I would not hold this up as the best thank-you note ever, but the point is that they sent it, and they sent it promptly. It was the first one I received. I’m not rushing out to put NPR in my estate plans because of it, but this is good enough for me to donate another $25, should they get around to asking me to, and who knows after that. You can do this – anyone can!

Dealing with Donations Through Payment Services

It doesn’t matter whether you like getting gifts through Network for Good (NFG) or any other payment processor or not – you have to deal with it! The donor should get to make the decision about how they donate. You should certainly encourage them to use your preferred channels and to make that super easy, but don’t dis donors who don’t do it your way.

I happen to think that Network for Good is one of the best things to happen to the nonprofit sector in a long time. Yes, I’m friends with Katya Andresen, the COO, but I became friends with her because I admired so much what she was doing at NFG and on nonprofit marketing in general. NFG makes online giving possible for so many nonprofits who couldn’t pull it off on their own and they have also opened up lots of new ways for donors to fund causes they care about online. Look who NFG processes payments for now:

* Charity Navigator
* Guidestar
* Causes on Facebook
* Causes on MySpace
* Capital One (which I used as part of my experiment)
* Change.org
* And many others!

If you hope to use social media to raise money, you are going to have to figure this out, no matter how big or how small your nonprofit is.  NFG is trying to make it easier for you. They take care of the emailed tax receipt so the donor knows the transaction was successful, but it’s up to you to make the personal connection with your supporters. And right there in the email you get from NFG when they process a donation for you, they remind you to thank your donors directly. Sure, any system can always be improved, and Katya told me today that she and her staff are keeping track of all of the suggestions in the comments.

About Those Eight Nonprofits that Didn’t Acknowledge My Gift . . .

I just did some research on Guidestar. Only one of the eight is truly a small organization with a very limited budget and staff. The others are huge in comparison – they all have gross reciepts over $1 million. Two fall into the $30-80 million range and three are bringing in more than $100 million. These gifts were made over three months ago. It’s not about doing it in a timely fashion at this point, it’s about doing thank-yous at all. These organizations have the resources to acknowledge small gifts contributed online, if they really wanted to.

Keep the conversation going – leave a comment here or on the other post.

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Or, Can a Girl Get a Thank-You Note, Please?

Back on November 24, 2008, I cashed in a bunch of credit card miles through Capital One’s No Hassle Giving Site, converting them into cash gifts to charities. Capital One partnered with Network for Good to deliver the donations to the charities. I specifically selected 12 national charities that I had not previously contributed to, but whose missions I support, in order to see what the communications response would be to my $25 gift. On the form, I opted-in to share my contact information with the charities and provided both email and mailing addresses. I called it the “What I Got When I Gave” experiment.

I’ve been waiting all this time to report back on the experiment in hopes that the results would change, but they haven’t. It’s pitiful. Of the 12 national charities I gave to, only four — a measly 33% — acknowledged the gift in any way. (I also gave to three regional charities where I live and the percentage was the same – only 1 of the 3 acknowledged the gift.)

The fastest response came from National Public Radio, which sent me an email thank-you note addressed to “Dear Friend” on December 10. Personalization would have been nice, but at least they get the Gold Star for timeliness. I haven’t received any other communication from NPR since.

The next three all came within a day of each other, on January 6-7, 2009. Both Interplast and The Alliance for Climate Protection sent paper thank-you letters, addressed to me personally.

The Alliance mentioned receiving the gift through Network for Good on December 15, which would have been Network for Good’s next payment distribution day after my gift. Given the holidays, I have no problem with the date I received the letter. It was a standard form thank-you letter – nothing stand-out about it, but adequate.

Interplast’s thank-you letter was great. I’m a big fan of their blog because of their effective storytelling, and the thank-you letter does the same thing. Instead of a bunch of generic successes (which are better than none at all, I guess), they tell me a story and include before and after pictures! I’m constantly telling people to include pictures in thank you notes (see here and here), so I’m glad to see a nonprofit doing it well. Way to go, Interplast!

I haven’t received any additional communication from either Interplast or the Alliance for Climate Protection since the thank-you letters.

St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital didn’t send a thank-you note, but they did add me to their Hopeline email newsletter list and I’ve received the January and February 2009 editions.

I’m obviously really disappointed in not hearing a peep from the other eight. But, ever the supporter of nonprofits, I have come up with several potential reasons (uh, excuses) why this may be the case:

• $25 is chump change to them and doesn’t merit acknowledgment. I know there is significant debate out there about what you do with low-dollar donors. I hoped that $25 was high enough to generate some kind of response, but apparently not.
• Since I cashed in miles, they don’t think it’s a “real” gift (even though Network for Good sent them real money).
• It was the holidays and the gift fell through the cracks.
• Giving through Network for Good is not their preferred means of receiving online gifts — they’d prefer to get them through their own website — so they are not set up to acknowledge gifts like mine.
• The post office and/or Gmail’s spam filter ate their thank-you notes.

Do any of these hold water with you?

You may also be wondering what I was really expecting. I think each charity should have acknowledged the gift either via email or in print. Either one or both is acceptable, given that it was an online gift. Since I supplied my email address, I would have been fine being added to an e-newsletter list. Or, they could have strongly encouraged me to join a list in the thank-you note (or subscribe to a blog), with very explicit instructions for how to do that and a motivating description for why I would want to. So, none of the four who responded knocked it out of the park for me, but they all get kudos for responding at all.

Right about now, you are probably dying to know who the other 8 organizations are. I’m really torn about naming names, because as I said at the top, I really do believe in the missions of every single one of them and I would hate for their inclusion in this post to tarnish them in any way. So I’m not printing them here, at least not right now. But I definitely thought about it . . . C’mon, people, can’t a girl get a thank you note?!?

What do you think? Do these results surprise you or not?  Are any of the rationales for no response legitimate? What would your group have done with a $25 donation from out of nowhere? Please leave a comment and let’s talk about it!

3/12/09 Update: Here is my follow-up post: Saying Thanks Even When It’s Inconvenient or Time-Consuming

3/13/09 Update: The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s “Prospecting” section picked up this post. Read more comments there.

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I’ve seen lots of interest from nonprofits in using video to communicate with supporters about their causes, along with an equal amount of trepidation about how to do it. I’m not a video expert, but I know several people who are, so I put out a call over Twitter for some guest posts to share with you. I’m expecting several more, but I’ll share two that have come in some far:

Steve Braker of  Worthwhile Films | Nonprofit Media posted some do-it-yourself video tips on Facebook (you should be able to see it even without a Facebook account). Steve is @worthwhilefilms on Twitter.

Cymberly Pierce on her blog, Clever Title, also offers some fast tips on nonprofit video. She’s @cymberly on Twitter.

On Tuesday, March 10, at Noon Eastern, the Chronicle of Philanthropy is hosting an online chat on how nonprofits can effectively use video. Even if you can’t attend live, be sure to check out the transcript later.

Here are some additional resources I think you’ll find helpful:

DoGooder.Tv (Produced a video in 2008? Enter it in the annual Nonprofit Video Awards by March 26!)

YouTube’s Nonprofit Program

Flip’s Camera Giveaway Program “Video Spotlight”

Nancy Schwartz’s 9 Keys to Using Online Video to Increase Your Nonprofit Marketing Impact and How Six Nonprofits Are Putting Great Online Video to Work

Endless Plain’s Nonprofit Video Shootout

Share your video tips by leaving a comment and I’ll add those guest posts as soon as they come in.

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Interplast’s blog is one my top favorites in the nonprofit world, because it does such a fabulous job of sharing success stories and letting readers behind-the-scenes, which are two of the best uses of blogs by nonprofits, in my opinion. (Here’s more on different ways nonprofits can use blogs.  Also see my Blogging for Nonprofits webinar happening this Thursday.)

Interplast provides free life-changing surgery for children and adults with clefts, disabling burns and hand injuries, and the blog shares the stories of the surgical volunteers and the people receiving care.

Before the holidays, I interviewed Liliana Vazquez, Interplast’s Communications and Technology Coordinator, about their blog. Apologies for just now getting around to posting it, and special thanks for Liliana and Interplast for generously sharing their perspective. Here’s the interview . . .

What did Interplast hope to get out of blogging?

It’s been an amazing tool for us. We really see it as one of our best tools to communicate with donors. We use Typepad and we blog through Flickr, so the pictures are tied to the stories. We also use the blog to announce what else is going on within the organization. We also answer questions that come in through comments.

The posts from surgical trips are written by the volunteers. How do the posts get online?

Our volunteers are doing the writing in their own voices and taking the photos. Since a lot of the countries we travel in don’t have good Internet connections and the volunteers are busy doing surgeries, we ask that they simply send us an email and attach the pictures. Blogging is such a foreign idea for many of the older volunteers, so we had to make it really simple for them, to convince them it would work. Now the volunteers love it too. They send the links to their families as a way to keep in touch while they are traveling.

How much editing do you do?

Outside of grammatical editing, we try not to edit them too much because they are writing from the heart, from their personal experiences. Sometimes the posts come in as stream of consciousness and we clean those up a little bit. We do edit the pictures, because we do get a lot of gory medical stuff.

A lot of it is not specifically written for the blog. We’ll take stories out of quick emails we get or from the back of napkins! Sometimes we’ll hear cute stories about kids donating and we’ll turn that into a blog post.

How many people contribute content to the blog?

We are relying on everyone to contribute: staff, volunteers, everyone who can. We ask people to keep their eyes open to everything going on around them and we pull in stuff from everywhere. It’s easy to ignore the every day, but a lot of impressive stuff is going on! We have over 100 people telling their stories on the blog.

How do you handle comments?

We don’t spend a lot of time on comments. We get lots of positive comments that don’t need a response. For those that do require a response, like a referral, we’ll contact the person directly. We haven’t had any bad experiences on the blog with comments, although we have had some people making inappropriate comments on photos on Flickr and we’ve deleted those and blocked those people.

How does the blog fit in with your other communications?

When we do an e-newsletter, we link to the blog. We also use blog content in the e-newsletter, our print newsletter, and in donor reports. If someone donates to a specific trip, we can acknowledge the donors in the posts about the trip on the blog and keep them updated on the trip. It’s also a great archive for us internally.

Are you considering any changes to the blog?

Interplast does more than surgical trips. We also empower and train local doctors. I’d like to give that part of what we do some more screen time.

What has surprised you about blogging?

I was surprised to see how the blog is being used to refer patients to us, which is also great. We’ve seen people who are traveling and meet people who need our help use the blog to put us in touch with those people. So it helps with our mission that way too.

Want to learn more about nonprofit blogging? Check out Blogging for Nonprofits, this week’s webinar.

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If you moan to 10 of your nonprofit colleagues about how you don’t have time to get your nonprofit on Facebook and other social media sites, I’d guess seven of them will tell you to get an intern to do it for you. (The other three? Two will just nod sympathetically and the other one will have no idea what you are talking about.)

If you are thinking about giving a social media project to an intern or a new employee who is a recent college grad, keep these four tips in mind. They’ll not only make your intern’s experience much better, but your organization will benefit too.

1. Make it a team effort, led by the intern. Social media is . . . well, social. And that’s why it holds so much promise for nonprofits. You can connect with friends of friends of friends you might never otherwise reach. But the organization needs to be at the center of this network, not some intern who is leaving in three months. The intern can lead the way and set everything up, but permanent staff, long-time volunteers and board members must be a part of it too.  The team approach also gives your intern valuable project and team management experience, so she isn’t just sitting alone in front of a computer.

2. Be clear about why you are doing it. “Getting on YouTube” is not a marketing goal. Who are you trying to reach and with what message? What do you want these new friends you’ll make to do? Why is getting on Facebook or YouTube the right tactic? Know the answers to these questions ahead of time so that your intern and the team can create a presence online that complements your existing communications work.

3. Make training a part of the assignment — and you get schooled. For your social media project to succeed, the senior management of your organization needs to understand it. Even if you as the executive director or development director don’t login everyday, you still need to understand the culture and vocabulary of the site, what people actually do there, and how your organization is being represented. Give your intern at least fifteen minutes every two weeks to show you and other senior managers what they are doing online and to give you some quick lessons on how you can do it yourself.

4. Open your mind. If the only way you can see your nonprofit getting on to social media sites is by asking a younger person to do it for you, there’s a good chance that you don’t fully understand what it’s all about and just why “everybody’s doing it” in the first place.

For example, you may not be entirely comfortable with the idea that other people (those friends of friends you covet) may be talking about your organization and your issues in their own words, ignoring your talking points and failing to keep all the facts straight.

This is where you have to remember that social media is not just about pushing information out, but also about conversations about that information and collaboration that grows out of those conversations. Relax and go with it. Gently correct when it’s really important to do so. Thank your new friends for caring. You may be pleasantly surprised at the new ideas and insights you discover.

Want more? Check out our February webinars on online marketing basics, blogging for nonprofits, and creating online evangelists.

Get all of our webinars and e-books for one price with the All-Access Pass! Get a full year for $465, or 90 days for $145.

Thinking about starting a blog in 2009?

Before the holidays, I asked some nonprofits to share with me their blogging lessons learned. Here are some of the comments I heard through  NTEN’s Nonprofit Blogging Affinity Group List. (NTEN groups are a great resource, by the way, and this same list just had a great discussion about some of the best nonprofit blogs online. You’ll have to join NTEN and the Blogging group to learn more).

From Mike Sweitzer-Beckman: “I run a blog in my spare time for progressive young adult Catholics. I wish I had known ahead of time that we would need not just writer’s guidelines, but commenting guidelines. We post them on our site now at www.youngadultcatholics-blog.com. The other thing I wish I had known was how to implement advertising. We just haven’t thought it through. There are more and more people that are requesting that we put their website information up, but we’re hesitant to do it without some guidelines and parameters, not to mention rates.”

From Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog: “I wish I had know about Feedburner so I could have tracked my subscriber metrics from the beginning and consolidated by RSS feeds. I also wish I had a benchmarking process so I could measure and track and improve what I was doing.”

From Barbara Christensen of Conservation Northwest: “If only I’d known how hard it would have been to convince the rest of the staff a blog was worth the effort, I would have compiled more research on industry standards, conversion rates, etc, as well as some anecdotal stories of blogs working for other environmental advocacy NGOs (I see tons of info
on web 2.0 successes for non-profit service oriented groups, but so little for folks like us who don’t offer so concrete a product as people served or acres purchased).”

For me personally, I wish I had given more thought to the difference between post categories and tags. I’ll blame part of my confusion on the earlier versions of WordPress, where they were one and the same. Now that WordPress supports both, I have a list of categories a mile long that could really be knocked down to a dozen categories, with the rest as tags. Fixing that is on my blogging to-do list.

I also wish I had taken an hour or two to learn how CSS really works so I could have tweaked my blog templates more easily. I ended up learning as I went along, but I think I could have saved myself lots of hours in the end had I just sat down and worked through some tutorials. (I like to play around too much to pay someone to make all those little changes for me.)

How about you? What blogging lessons have you learned the hard way? Leave a comment to add your voice to the conversation.

P.S. I’m teaching an intro to nonprofit blogging on February 12 — Get the details on Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps, and Tales.

Get all of our webinars and e-books for one price with the All-Access Pass! Get a full year for $465, or 90 days for $145.