Under normal circumstances, communications directors need to collaborate with their coworkers and managers, and that’s even more true now. But collaboration is messy because people are messy! We all have our own opinions, feelings, fears, stressors, and motivators. While solving communications collaboration problems can feel impossible sometimes, if you depersonalize and get strategic in your…
Let’s say you started a new nonprofit communications job. They have all the usual channels set up and your job is to improve engagement. The first rule of creating engaging content is to know WHO you are trying to engage. Who are the people seeing your content and what do they care about? What are…
Back in late March, I shared a post called How to Be Relevant Now (and What Not to Say). I think it’s time for another messaging update, so here’s some advice as of late May 2020. If you aren’t already, it’s really time to set your eyes to the future. How do you want your…
Bold & Bright Media is launching a new book club for nonprofit professionals to help you be more strategic about fundraising, marketing, and communications for the rest of 2020 and into 2021. Join Julia Campbell, Steven Shattuck, Peter Panepento, Antionette Kerr, Jen Newmeyer, Kivi Leroux Miller (that’s me) and Tom Ahern, sitting in for the…
During our Communications Director Mentoring Program group call this week, we discussed ways to get program staff to take and share better photos. Here are several ideas from the group that I thought you could use too! If you do a lot of tabling, instead of having staff take photos of the table (SO. BORING.),…
One important element of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — in other words, getting Google to send traffic to your website — is how many other websites link to your content. You don’t want just any old backlink, but you do want high-quality and related sites to link to content on your site. All of these…
Is it finally time to get a grip on your social media strategy? If yes, Julia Campbell has some great advice for you on how to do just that, and get it all done in three months. Her latest book is called “How To Build and Mobilize a Social Media Community for Your Nonprofit in…
We love metaphors at Nonprofit Marketing Guide. It’s not unheard of for me to use a half-dozen different metaphors in the course of a webinar. That’s because a good metaphor is a perfect tool to help explain something new. It helps anchor new ideas to something that’s already well-understood by the brain. We have a…
Last week I presented our two-part webinar series on nonprofit social media strategies based on our Be Personal / Be Practical framework. I did the same training (minus all the new coronavirus and quarantine examples) about this same time last year. In both years, we asked the same poll questions about what participants would take…
Some of you are being asked to do communications work for the first time. Others have been at it a while but feel like you’re drowning in requests and details. No matter what you are working on, there are a few really simple elements to this nonprofit communications work that you can always use to…
Now is a fabulous time to implement the CALM not BUSY approach to your nonprofit communications work. There’s already a ton of disruption and people are learning new ways to work together. So why not implement new ways to be Collaborative, Agile, Logical, and Methodical in your work? And the price for the Kindle edition…
Every nonprofit communicator should have a list of what we call Core Topics or the topics you want to be known for and that you will talk about often in your content marketing strategy. Let’s say you have a list of 5-10 core topics. How do you decide when to talk about each one of…
