Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog

“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!

I’ve made a few changes to the schedule for the Nonprofit Marketing Guide weekly webinar series.

This week’s webinar, “Easy and Effective Ways to Grow Your Email List” had to be postponed. The new date is Thursday, June 19 at 2:00 p.m. Thought you missed it? No worries, you still have plenty of time to register.

“How to Create Nonprofit Messages That Motivate,” originally scheduled for June 19, has been canceled. The guest speaker ended up having a scheduling conflict.

So, here’s the quick list of the next four webinars.

June 11 - How to Write a Quick and Dirty Marketing Strategy
June 19 - Easy and Effective Ways to Build Your Email List
June 25 - Must-Have Features for Nonprofit Websites
July 16 - Nonprofit Writing Stinks! How to Bring Your Writing Back to Life

I’ll be adding more topics to fill out the summer and early fall schedule within the next week or so.