About 100 people have taken the 2019 Nonprofit Communications Trends Survey to date (we like to hear from 1,000 – take the survey here). One of the new questions we asked is: “Which format is your nonprofit most likely to use for its next annual report? Please pick the primary format, even if you will…
You set goals, like these twelve communications goals for nonprofits, including community engagement, raising awareness of issues, and fundraising. And every day you manage tactical communications channels like email, social media, print marketing, PR and more. But what’s in the middle? What connects that tactical work to the larger goals? The answer is Communications or…
If you aren’t following Marketoonist by Tom Fishburne, you are missing out. His recent cartoons on Digital Transformation are perfect for so many nonprofits. There’s the one about the virtual meeting on digital transformation where the tech doesn’t work and someone asks for a fax. And the one where the boss talks about how important…
I just finished up our two-part webinar series on how to measure the effectiveness of your communications work. (If you missed it, All-Access Pass Holders get access to the recordings). Part of the challenge with answering the “what should we measure” and “what numbers should I pay attention to” questions for nonprofits is that it…
In early November, we’ll open up the survey for the 2019 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report. We’ll repeat a lot of questions from previous surveys to expand our “trends over time” data. For example, we’ll be asking about communication team salaries, sizes, and budgets communications effectiveness how communicators spend their time communications frequency in different channels…
Nonprofits love Canva for creating quick, good-looking graphics. Don’t you wish there was something just as quick and easy for video? I know I do . . . Yes, I have video editing software, but sometimes it’s overkill and takes too long to work through. I thought there had to be something much easier by…
No doubt, you’ve struggled with some of these situations before: Program staff who are supposed to be reviewing for accuracy instead want to argue with your punctuation choices. Your executive director pulls the plug on an appeal letter right before the package is supposed to go to print because “it doesn’t sound like me.” Five…
We just wrapped up our new webinar on managing a healthy email list and re-engaging the unengaged on your list. The unengaged would be people who haven’t opened an email in a certain amount of time, like 6 months or a year. I asked three poll questions and thought I’d share the results with you.…
U.S. nonprofits might think they don’t have to worry about spam and privacy legislation elsewhere, but that’s not true. The reality is that if you are communicating online (and who isn’t?) you should really stay abreast of how the rules in other countries, like Canada and the European Union, are changing best practices everywhere. It may…
It’s no fun when someone unsubscribes from your email list. But let’s face it . . . it’s actually much better for your sender reputation to have them unsubscribe than it is for them to never open another email or even worse, to hit the spam button. That’s why you should make unsubscribing from your…
If you are excited about the prospect of doing more email fundraising around Giving Tuesday and Year End, but don’t normally send a lot of email to your list, you need a ramp-up pre-season strategy. Sudden spikes in your email volume can trigger spam warnings. With lots of nonprofit email already going to spam at year…
For years now, we’ve been urging you to clean up your email lists by deleting those email addresses that don’t engage with your content after several months (or at least suppressing them from future mailings if you don’t have the heart to actually delete them). EveryAction’s 2018 Email Deliverability report says that 24% of fundraising…
