I met Julia Reich at the NTC conference (at the 501 Tech NYC Happy Hour to be exact) and being the nonprofit marketing geeks we are, we started talking about the struggles that nonprofits face with design. We seemed to take a similar approach, so I asked Julia to guest blog for us. Her first post…
I’m a sucker for a good metaphor, and I love the one that Marc Pitman uses to describe fundraising: “I like to think of the fundraiser as holding an electrical cord (the donor’s interests) and facing a wall of outlets (various aspects of the fundraiser’s organization). The fundraiser’s job is to get to know the…
A dashboard is a visual way to bring lots of data together easily (hopefully automatically) into an at-a-glance overview of a situation. Nonprofits can use dashboards for all sorts of purposes, including fundraising results, program participation, management reports to boards, and much more. One very popular use of the dashboard concept is to monitor social media conversations about your…
If you find yourself asking your nonprofit’s supporters to . . . Help Support Participate Engage Believe Understand Be proactive Work with you Collaborate Buy in Promote Share Educate Network Connect Partner . . . don’t be shocked when nothing happens. Get five people in a room and ask them to physically do any of…
When Nancy Schwartz and I first put our heads together on how to team up to help nonprofits strengthen their marketing impact, marketing planning was at the top of our list. We want to help you see how, by simply taking a little time to set some clear marketing goals, you can drastically increase your impact and…
When Claire Meyerhoff and I talk about good storytelling, we often talk about honing in on the quirks – those little details that make a story memorable. So I smiled ear to ear when William Neuheisel, communications manager at DC Central Kitchen, talked about how their communications personality is a little quirky. In this latest…
Last week, I talked about creating a graphic design style guide. Along with that, you need an editorial style guide. These are just two of several very important tools that all nonprofit communicators should be using. Your editorial style guide should contain a word list that shows how you will use, format, and spell certain words.…
Ever wonder how national nonprofits with hundreds of staff manage all that content on their websites? Who decides what goes online, and who actually puts it there? I do, so I was excited when Kristin Johnson of the National Wildlife Federation agreed to share how they do it. During this interview, the latest in our…
Happy Friday! Welcome to our latest edition of Mixed Links where I share the good stuff on nonprofit marketing and communications that I’ve come across over the last week or so. With a few tips from me and Nancy Schwartz, the National Clearinghouse on Families and Youth shows what goes into Creating a Simple Marketing…
In this interview in our series on Junction C: Where Creating and Curating Meet Content and Conversation, Wendy Harman, social media manager for the American Red Cross talks about how she and her team make decisions about what goes online and when. A few key points: Wendy calls editorial calendars “a necessary evil” that represent…
On January 3, 2011, I started a daily blogging experiment — and by “daily” I actually meant business daily, Monday – Friday. (Katya Andresen did the same thing, but really did blog every day, including weekends. Here’s what she learned about her 100 posts.) Out of the 64 business days between Monday, January 3 and…
Nonprofit marketing can be an overwhelming job, but it’s one that you can make much easier by using a handful of simple tools, including a Graphic Design Style Guide. A graphic design style guide puts in writing all the various decisions you’ve made about how things should look both in print and online. While many…
