In every workshop I teach on nonprofit communications, I always include an exercise on defining your audience, and that exercise always starts with this statement: In nonprofit communications, there is no such thing as the general public! The “general public” includes everyone from my three-year-old daughter to my eighty-year-old grandma. It includes Wall Street brokers,…
Welcome to the very first Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants! I’m Kivi Leroux Miller, the founder of this carnival and this week’s host. I blog on Nonprofit Communications, so check out the rest of this site if you are interested in that topic. Here are the seven posts I’ve selected for this week’s edition. Peter Brinckerhoff…
June 5 is here and we are now accepting submissions for the first edition of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. Consultants, submit your best post of the week containing advice for nonprofits to the Carnival by this Friday, 8 pm ET. Send your name, blog name, and post URL (not your blog home page URL)…
I’ve got three online courses beginning Monday, June 5. Since each week’s materials take one-two hours to complete, you can safely enroll anytime next week and not get behind. All of the courses are four weeks long. How to Write a Nonprofit Annual Report — This course teaches participants the basic steps for creating an…
Magilla Marketing published an article today called Not-So-Obvious Words Trigger Spam Filters, which is based on research by an email marketing firm in the UK. Here are ten of the words that could easily appear in email from nonprofits: acceptance accordingly presently maintained organization percent sincerely somebody statements urgent None of these rise to the…
Nancy Schwartz at Getting Attention wrote yesterday on the value of graphic designers who can write well too, quoting an article by Derek Powazek. While I think it’s incredibly difficult to be both an outstanding writer and an outstanding designer, it is reasonable to expect design professionals to have solid writing skills, and vice versa.…
I decided to stop writing grant applications for clients a few years ago because I simply don’t enjoy that kind of writing. To cut down my reading pile (in paper and online), I stopped paying close attention to magazines, websites, etc. related to fundraising. But I’ve decided to move one fundraising blog on to the…
Forbes.com publishes a list of the top 200 largest nonprofits. Whenever I’m researching a new communications topic or looking for samples for one of my nonprofit writing workshops, I will visit several of these sites to see what the big organizations are doing. If you are looking for samples of annual reports, newsletters, website sections,…
Wake Forest University’s business school held its Seventh Annual Elevator Competition this weekend. Teams of business school students from around the country got two minutes on an elevator ride to pitch their million-dollar idea to a venture capitalist. The winners get a cash prize, free professional services, and a real meeting with a potential investor.…
It’s annual report season for many nonprofits. Here are my top seven tips for writing a nonprofit annual report. 1. Focus on accomplishments, not activities. We want to know what you did, but more importantly, we want to know why you did it. What were the results? Why did you spend your time the way…
I come across a lot of interesting information during the course of running my websites and working with clients, but don’t currently have a good forum for sharing this information or my opinions on it. I hope this new blog will fill that void. Lots more coming soon . . .
