I presented the Thursday night keynote at the City of Jacksonville’s Board Development and Training Program last week (this North Carolina city requires nonprofit grantees to send their board members to free professional development training – a brilliant idea!). My topic was the importance of storytelling, and how as board members, they needed to help…
If we agree that we should develop messaging that resonates with our donors, what should we do when that messaging might be offensive to others? Take the case of donors who make substantial gifts to charities rather than leaving assets to their “good for nothing” adult children. I presented a “Storytelling for Fundraisers” workshop in…
Welcome to another edition of Mixed Links, a weekly roundup of good stuff for nonprofit communicators. I had some technical difficulties yesterday (Windows . . . Grrr . . . ), so I not only broke my daily blogging streak but also had to postpone yesterday’s webinar. So, the silver lining is that if you…
Yesterday, we heard from Melinda Pearce McKee about how NCGives transformed its tagline. Today, I’m sharing an interview with Nancy Schwartz, queen of all things nonprofit tagline and publisher of Getting Attention.org. In this 17-minute interview, Nancy shares How your nonprofit can explore the nearly 5,000 taglines in her new database, searching by several criteria,…
Is your collection of Nonprofit Marketing Guide e-books complete? When you register for a free membership with our Learning Center, you can download all four of these e-books at no charge: 2011 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report . . . and What It All Means for Your Good Cause This 22-page report reveals what 780 nonprofits…
Another week over, another round of Mixed Links! Blackbaud has a couple of things for us this week. The Blackbaud Index reports some good news for small nonprofits: The Index found that three-month overall giving for small organizations (prior year revenue of < $1 million) increased 18.2% in November. Giving at medium organizations (prior year…
A flurry of questions came in at the end of today’s webinar on Writing for Social Media, so I’m going to try to quickly answer a bunch of them here. I didn’t get permission to use people’s names, so I’m sharing these questions anonymously. We have both the Facebook Page and the Group. I know…
Putting aside for a moment whether we should call them “target audiences” or not, it’s always good to remember that, as a nonprofit communicator or fundraiser, you are very rarely the kind of person that you are trying to communicate with. Even if you match the demographics, the fact that you are employed by your…
Back in June, I shared some of my favorite tips for writing Facebook and Twitter updates. In that post, I urged you to think of your social media writing goals in terms of the reaction you were looking for. Do you want someone to DO something, THINK something, or FEEL something in response to what…
I woke up this morning and saw a tweet from Drew at Throwing Light, asking me if I ever deal with information overload. In his own post today, Drew talks about how he blames all the blogs he wants to read for his recent creative slump and explains what he did to overcome. Since I…
It’s Friday, so it’s time for some Mixed Links, my roundup of good links for nonprofit communicators. Wild Apricot Blog has a list of 30 Great Podcasts for Nonprofits. With experts ranging from The Chronicle of Philanthropy to my own podcast (Magic Keys Radio) with Claire Meyerhoff, there are a lot of good resources to…
It’s dry. It’s boring. It’s dead — or deadly. It’s nonprofit writing! Not all nonprofit writing, of course, but a fair amount of it. Here are 20 ways you can bring your writing back to life. 1. Use more descriptive nouns and verbs. Don’t say child when you can say teenager or toddler or even 16-year-old or 3-year-old. 2. Add…
