Ever been asked to create a marketing strategy or a communications plan for your nonprofit without any further guidance? You aren’t alone! Let’s sort it all out, so you can figure out what you really need to create. First, let’s address the definitions. Right or wrong, marketing and communications are often used interchangeably in the…
Successful social media strategies demand authenticity. But what does that actually look like when you are juggling a million different tasks, trying your best to stay strategic, and work in a boring office environment that’s not exactly photogenic? Here are 15 ways to bring some authenticity by doing a quick recorded or live video or…
While Instagram is definitely a visual platform and photos are best, you can still manage a successful Instagram strategy without photography. Just take a look at the ACLU’s feed and stories. Most of the work they do is legal in nature, so it’s not like they have tons of great photography options. Instead, much of…
When you want someone to do something, you have to ask. And how you ask matters. Whether it’s clicking on a button or link to donate, volunteer, register or do anything else, when someone takes that action online, we call it a conversion. Conversion copywriting is one of the seven writing styles that all nonprofit…
If you are looking for marketing, fundraising, and communications inspiration outside the nonprofit sector, I suggest you look to political campaigns before looking at corporate ones. They usually start scrappy, focus on issues, and want to recruit individuals for small-donor donations, volunteering and advocacy. Sound familiar? Every time we have a presidential election in the…
News Writing is one of the seven writing styles that all nonprofit communicators should master. In the world of nonprofit comms superlatives, news writing wins for the “Writing Style Used Most Often When It Shouldn’t Be.” Too often, nonprofits write about their issues, programs, and events in a straight news style when they would be…
May is “Editorial Calendar” month around here, so we’d like to provide a bunch of updated show-and-tell videos of nonprofit editorial calendar set-ups using whatever software you use. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Google or Microsoft product, or if you use a project management tool like Trello, Asana, Airtable or Smartsheet. We just want…
Writing for nonprofits is different than writing for other kinds of organizations. We are often trying to accomplish many different things with nonprofit content, and depending on the goal and the intended reader, the style of writing will change. In fact, we believe there are seven essential writing styles that nonprofit communicators should master. With…
I just finished Part 2 of our webinar series on Social Media Strategies for Nonprofits that Won’t Waste Your Time. On Tuesday, we covered the Be Personal side of this framework: Today, we moved to the right side: Be Practical. Nonprofits have things they need to talk about but only have a limited amount of…
I just finished Part 1 of our webinar series on Social Media Strategies That Won’t Waste Your Time. Today was all about the “Be Personal” left-hand side of the diagram. After I went through each section, I did a quick poll to see what participants thought they would work on first. The results are very…
Gary Vaynerchuk has lots of great marketing advice, but one of my favorite bits is “Document, Don’t Create.” (Spoiler alert: Go to the end of this post to see how I just did this on Instagram!) Gary says that the hunger to create perfect content cripples you, and yet in order to get the most…
You want others to get the word out about you and your cause. You want them to be talking about you. It’s the start of going viral – the holy grail of marketers everywhere. Everyone wants to know how to make that happen. There are lots of articles out there about upping your chances of…
