Marketing planning — real marketing planning –isn’t easy. It means you are prioritizing your goals, learning about and defining your target audiences, refining your calls to action, figuring out what will move people to follow through, deciding which communications channels to use, and much more. It’s work . . . which means I often hear…
Your email newsletter can be the engine that drives your online fundraising program, educates your supporters, and inspires them to volunteer with and advocate for you — but not without a strategy behind it and an approach to communicating that’s more like personal gift giving and less like mass e-blasting. Drastically Improve Your Newsletter in…
Happy Friday, everyone! Let’s unwind with a few mixed links – good stuff for nonprofit communicators. Social Media For great insights into nonprofits and Facebook, NTEN has released the 2011 Benchmarks Extra: Facebook which dissects data from 34 nonprofits. Just “like” their Facebook page to receive the report. Carie Lewis of HSUS shares a great…
If you want website visitors to sign up for your email newsletter, you have to make it easy and give them a compelling reason to do so. Let’s look at a few ways to do more than just say “sign up for the newsletter.” Be More Specific About What They’ll Get The easiest approach is…
You know I am a fan of the “new and improved” nonprofit annual report — which I define as anything that is shorter, clearer, and easier for donors to understand than traditional annual reports. I especially like two- and four-pagers and videos. I’m collecting samples of “new and improved” nonprofit annual reports on this wiki,…
Sure there are times when a business will write your nonprofit a check as a charitable donation without much effort on your part. But that doesn’t happen nearly as often as these other two scenarios: 1. The business sponsors an event or otherwise actively participates in a program you are hosting, or 2. You develop a…
I’ve been doing a fair amount of consulting lately with nonprofits on their content marketing strategies, as well as talking with lots of nonprofits about how they handle content creation and distribution, and I see nonprofits falling into two different camps with different needs: Nonprofits That Don’t Have Enough Content These are the groups who…
Today’s guest post comes from Joe Waters, author of Cause Marketing for Dummies and the presenter of next week’s Nonprofit Marketing Guide webinar, Setting Up Marketing and Fundraising Partnerships with Local Businesses, on August 18, 2011. If cause marketing is new to you, join us for the webinar to get up to speed in one hour…
Convio has released a couple of interesting research reports that clearly demonstrate that multi-channel or integrated marketing (where you add online communications to direct mail) increases donor retention rates, giving frequency, and consequently lifetime value. The boost in lifetime value occurred whether or not the donor actually elected to give online (guess what, direct mail donors read email!). Donors who…
For the last guest post in our series on event fundraising, Gail Perry gives us a slightly different take on events. And while she doesn’t suggest you give up on events altogether, she does suggest you take a look at how you currently use events to fundraise. Guest Post by Gail Perry, Gail Perry, Fired-Up…
This week, four guest bloggers are teaching us a thing or two about event marketing. Guest Post by Dawn Crawford, BC/DC Ideas Events are fabulous for the supporters in your immediate area, but what if your supporter base reaches far beyond a reasonable car ride? Social media can be the connection point to push your next…
This week, you are hearing from four guest bloggers about nonprofit events. Guest Post by Ceci Dadisman, Palm Beach Opera Social media is an important piece of the event marketing puzzle. Unlike most nonprofits that are marketing one product all year long (a charitable cause), a performing arts organization markets multiple different products (performances and…
