#SOCIALMEDIA: It’s OK To Say ‘No’ To Your Social Networks
You know you want to…
We are often extolling the virtues of particular social-networking platforms or encouraging specific strategies to reach out to your audience(s) across these platforms. When moving through the ‘tubes’ of our social networks, it is easy to think that each post we prepare is the most important one ever and that if we don’t get to each post on our nonprofit’s wall we’ll be upsetting a potential volunteer or donor.
The fact is, you won’t upset anyone: followers of social networks can feel just as overwhelmed as the producers of content on social media. What can you do to unwind, and what might happen when you do?
| Category Advice, Blogs, Communications, Cross-Post, Health, Marketing Skills, Public Media, Public Relations, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks, Storytelling, Technology, Web and Print, Wellness, Writing | | 0 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#SOCIALMEDIA: Politicians & NonProfits Need Agility With Online Outreach
As the Democratic ‘nominee’ Barack Obama delivered his acceptance speech last night in Charlotte, NC, a record number of tweets on politics were sent out − some 52,756 tweets-per-minute (tpm) being posted as he wound up. By contrast, Mitt Romney inspired 14,289 tpm, which was about half as many as reactions to Michelle Obama’s presentation two nights ago.
But what both parties know well is the fact that they must be ‘agile’ with their social-media outreach. They have to find ways to steer the narrative while many thousands of other voices also have the opportunity to steer that narrative. True, campaigns for the presidency take up far more online space than most any nonprofit, which is precisely why nonprofits can learn something from watching how the campaigns are trying to use social media.
| Category Advice, Cause Marketing, Civics, Communications, Community, Events, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, National/International, News and Current Affairs, Nonprofit, Permission Marketing, Politics, Public Media, Public Relations, SEO, Social Media, Social Networks, Storytelling, Technology, Technology for Nonprofits, Web and Print, Writing | | 0 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#TECH: Title Tags Can Make Or Break Your Site’s SEO
SEO success starts here
Oh, the last official weekend of summer, and it’s three-day long one to boot! You might be itching to get out of the office a bit early today and make it a three and a half day weekend. Before you do, please read some salient advice we took from online marketing specialist John Haydon as soon as it hit our Inboxes. The issue is the placement of Title Tags, the snippets of text − usually the title of the blog post or of a website − that is the first thing search engines scour for the keywords that make your site visible on those engines. With an afternoon of work, you could dramatically improve the ranking of your nonprofit’s site. Here’s what he suggests:
| Category Advice, Blogs, Cause Marketing, Communications, Education: General, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Publications, SEO, Site Administration, Social Marketing, Strategic Marketing, Technology, Technology for Nonprofits, Web and Print, Web Design, Writing | | 0 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#COMMUNICATION: The Best Ways To Encourage Retweets Include…
What could be easier than writing a message in a mere 140 characters? Something grabs your attention, you copy the link, say something pretty relevant about the story/image/file linked, and hit ‘Tweet’. If you’re an occasional dabbler, such a process can be fine and you might indeed occasionally strike a chord with followers who respond or retweet. But for a nonprofit or small business, the odd hit won’t cut it and you should be having higher expectations. Twitter is about outreach, conversation, and engagement. Your organization should be striving to expand on all three counts. And suddenly, tapping out some 140 characters seems a bit more challenging. What can you do to make a bigger splash in the tweetstream?
| Category Advice, Blogs, Cause Marketing, Communications, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Nonprofit, Public Media, Public Relations, Site Administration, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks, Twitter, Twitter, Writing | | 0 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#HOWTO: Connect Your Facebook Page & Your WordPress Blog For Seamless Outreach
Click to enlarge
Last week Facebook and WordPress announced a plugin that will link both social-media platforms: posts on your nonprofit’s WP blog will be updated in your nonprofit’s Facebook Timeline, and your blog entries can have ‘Like’ and ‘Recommend’ buttons on them. One of the great things about the WordPress blogging platform is indeed the plugin feature: most are free and open source. And though establishing a WordPress content-management system (CMS) is not the easiest thing to do, installing plugins is a snap as the established site does all the work for you!
So how do WP and Facebook talk to each other?
| Category Advertising, Advice, Blogs, Communications, Dashboards, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Nonprofit, Public Media, Public Relations, Site Administration, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks, Storytelling, Technology for Nonprofits, Web Design, Writing | | 0 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#COMMUNICATIONS: Is Your Organization Moving At The Speed Of Mobile?
With the rise of the smartphone and its ability to be the computer for millions of people around the world, mobile technology is becoming more powerful and less expensive every few months. And with those technological changes come changes of habit and expectation. One of the changes we and many others have commented on is the rise of text messaging as a medium not only to spread-the-word but also to raise funds for nonprofits and charities. The response to the American Red Cross’s texting campaign to deal with the horrors of the Haitian earthquake of 2010 is usually seen as the watershed event.
How has the nexus between cell-phone use and fundraising been strengthening over the last couple of years?
| Category Advice, Advocacy, Boomers, Campaigns, Case Study, Cause Marketing, Communications, Crowdfunding, Development, Fundraising, iDevice, iPad Apps, iPad/Tablet, iPhone Apps, Marketing, Mobile, Mobile, Newsletter, Newspaper Article, Nonprofit, Public Relations, Report, Resource, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks, Technology, Technology for Aging, Technology for Nonprofits, Volunteerism, Writing | | 1 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#COMMUNCATIONS: Blog Loud & Proud & As Often As Content Warrants
A truism/maxim/cliché that has long inspired me whenever I start a new project is, “You can fight without ever winning. But you’ll never win without a fight.” The statement inspires me because it prepares me for the possibility of not succeeding while reminding me that the only failure is not being willing to try.
And blogging definitely started that way: Could I draw readers? Did we have the material necessary to interest people over the long term? What sorts of conversations could MKCREATIVEmedia help to inspire? With so many great blogs out there, wouldn’t it be easier not to jump into the ring?
Well, a bit over two years on, we’d like to share a few things that have learned in the competition and from it too.
| Category Blogs, Cause Marketing, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Site Administration, Social Marketing, Social Media, Social Networks, Storytelling, Writing | | 0 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#COMMUNICATIONS: The Number One Way To Gain Site Or Blog Readership Is…
If your nonprofit or your charity has any online presence at all, you want readers to engage your content, click through the link(s), visit the site, and get involved with money and/or time. If you are a blog writer, you want pretty much the same, though gifts might also/instead mean advertising dollars because so many people come to your site. And, of course, no reason a nonprofit can’t have a blog that carries those ambitions for the blog and the site that hosts it.
The million-dollar question is: “How do I get people to move from scanning the headline to clicking on it and getting engaged?”
| Category Advice, Blogs, Campaigns, Cause Marketing, Communications, Development, E-Mail, eNewsletter, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Newspaper Article, Permission Marketing, Public Relations, Publications, Storytelling, Strategic Marketing, Writing | | 0 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#ADVOCACY: Make Sure Pitch Has Call To Action, Not Just High Concept
What happens when you get corporate assistance to launch a new campaign, or pro bono development from a commercial ad agency? You can get some fabulous ideas and some valuable insights on establishing your brand. You can get your materials into some of the best publication and on some of the most visited sites on the web.
But as some of our colleagues at Sofii.org have discovered, you can also get a good deal of expensive nothing. The commercial backer or ad agency might not be sensitive to the constituents who want to be involved with various types of nonprofits. They might encourage outreach through channels that are quite unlikely to reach the people your charity traditionally reaches. They might give you a fabulous product on the design board (Indeed, I think it’s safe to say that they certainly will give you a fabulous design.) that falls flat in the real world. Let’s look at a couple of examples from Sofii.
| Category Advertising, Advice, Advocacy, Blogs, Campaigns, Case Study, Cause Marketing, Communications, Copyrighting, Crowdfunding, Design, Development, Donor Acquisition, Fundraising, Graphic Design, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Media Review, Newspaper Article, Nonprofit, Public Relations, Publications, Publications Design, Resource, Reviews, Sponsorship, Storytelling, Strategic Marketing, Study, Writing | | 2 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#INTERVIEW: Debra Askanase, Socialbrite.org Strategist, Offers Useful Advice To Nonprofits Using Social Media
Debra Askanase, founder of Community Organizer 2.0, is an “engagement strategist” who consults with nonprofit organizations on digital media. She is also a strategist for Socialbrite. Her background includes a decade of community organizing experience, followed by seven years in community economic development. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.
MKC: How did you get into digital media? Did you reinvent yourself?
DEBRA: Yes, but it also seemed a pretty natural progression. I started off as a relatively traditional community organizer with multi-issue/low-income organizations. I moved into tenant organizing as well, then into economic development. I saw many of the same skills in leadership development that I saw in community and economic development. I worked with low-income immigrant entrepreneurs to start businesses. After doing that for seven years, I became very interested in business, from the perspective of how business can change society. So I went to business school and there seemed to be a confluence at that point. Social media was just gaining traction – this was 2007 and Facebook had just opened up beyond the college crowd – and I made that leap, intuitively, that social media is really community organizing. Here’s an opportunity where I can use my expertise in business strategy that I had been doing for seven years and my understanding of how people come together to change things. And I wanted to bring that interest to nonprofits. My entire experience had been working with nonprofits, so I understood that world from the ground up.
| Category Advice, Blogs, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, Development, Donor Acquisition, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook, Fundraising, Grants, Grants and Funding, Interview, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Nonprofit, Social Media, Social Networks, Storytelling, Strategic Marketing, Twitter, Twitter, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Don Akchin
#SOCIALMEDIA: Online Communication Is A Team Sport
Prep your staff for social media success
Difficult not to start this post with a shout-out to the Baltimore Orioles, who beat the Red Sox at Fenway last night after 17 innings. One of the best of the many anomalies of the game is the fact that the O’s Designated Hitter, Chris Davis went 0-for-8, with 5 strikeouts − and was the winning pitcher, throwing two shut-out innings when the rest of the staff was used up. It takes a team, and everyone contributes something critical to the overall success.
And it should be that way for your nonprofit or charity as well. Whatever the extent of your staff, you need to structure a social-media team who are dedicated to listening, contributing, and monitoring your outreach both quantitatively and qualitatively.
| Category Advertising, Advice, Blogs, Campaigns, Cause Marketing, Communications, Crowdfunding, Development, eBook, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Nonprofit, Permission Marketing, Public Media, Public Relations, Publications, Resource, SEO, Site Administration, Social Media, Social Networks, Strategic Marketing, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#HOWTO: Get Guidance From Google On Simple SEO Success
Is your site worth searching for?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a social media buzzword: gotta have it, gotta work at it, gotta pack it in to your website or blog! And it is true that SEO needs to be a part of your nonprofit’s online and outreach strategies. Why develop a new site or even update your outdated one if people will struggle to find it, much less relevant information on it? The go-to standard for web searches (including images and videos) is, of course, Google. Even as the e-behemoth develops Android and G+ and even augmented-reality glasses, millions of us use it simply, almost exclusively, for web research.
So why not find out what the folks at Google recommend to bolster the searchability and discoverability of your website?
| Category Advice, Blogs, Cause Marketing, Communications, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Budget, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Nonprofit, Public Media, Public Relations, Resource, SEO, Site Administration, Social Media, Social Networks, Storytelling, Technology, Technology for Nonprofits, Video, Web and Print, Web Design, Writing, YouTube | | 1 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#INTERVIEW: Sean Triner, Co-Founder and Chief Evangelist of Pareto Fundraising
Sean Triner is co-founder and “chief evangelist” of Pareto Fundraising, a direct marketing firm working in Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand exclusively with nonprofit organizations. Sean is a frequent speaker and consultant at international fundraising events. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a regular contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.
MKC: How is your direct marketing model different from the U.S. model?
SEAN: The key difference is volumes. The whole population of Australia is about 20 million. Also, the costs of things are extraordinary. Cars are 40%, 50%, even 60% more here. Petrol is 50% more than in the U.S. With such small populations and such extraordinary costs, to get a direct-mail package out costs literally three times as much. The printing is three times as much. The postal stamp is three times as much. The mailing-list purchase prices are up to three times as much.
| Category Communications, Community, Copyrighting, Cross-Post, Development, Donor Acquisition, E-Mail, eNewsletter, Fundraising, Interview, Major Gifts, Newsletter, Nonprofit, Publications, Special Series, Storytelling, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Don Akchin
#INTERVIEW: Mark Van Gurp, Osocio Blog — Showcases the Best Advertising & Marketing For Social Causes
Mark van Gurp is the founder of Osocio, an international blog devoted to showcasing the best advertising and marketing for social causes. Mark began an earlier blog, Houtlist, in 2005 as a personal collection of nonprofit ads. Overwhelmed by the response, he began Osocio in 2007 with more than a dozen regular contributors. He has kept his day job. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.
MKC: Can you explain what you do in your day job?
MARK: I’m webmaster and web designer for a big publishing house. At the unit I’m working for, we write about advertising and marketing. It is like Ad Age.
MKC: What first inspired you to curate nonprofit advertising and create Houtlust?
MARK: It was a coincidence. I was thinking about working as a freelance designer. And because I’m interested in designing for non-profits, I started collecting inspirational examples in the field. Those were the days before Pinterest and other networks, so I started a blog just for myself. It was my online album accessible from anywhere.
(more…)
| Category Blogs, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, Interview, News and Current Affairs, Nonprofit, Opinion, Politics, Social Networks, Special Series, Storytelling, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Don Akchin
#HOWTO: Tumbler Can Be Social Media Hub, But Other Tools Are Available
We have sung the praises of Tumblr for the past few Thursdays, and we will continue to do so. Tumblr offers nonprofits and charities a free platform (with some themes and extensions costing a few bucks) and host to establish a web presence that is just a couple of clicks away from integrating with your Twitter account and an RSS feed. Tumbr offers elegant simplicity to est up a look and post as quick or as richly developed media-laden posts as your organization cares to produce via its Dashboard.
But most use Tumblr to pursue ‘Tumblogging’. The word morphed from ‘tumblelog’, first used in 2005 but briefly eclipsed by the rather dry ‘microblog’ for a while. It refers to a blog that consists of an ongoing series of focused, but brief, posts that include various visual, aural, and textual media. These tend to be short entries that simply state the immediate context of the subject/object of the post with no effort to tie it to a larger story.
Well, why would a nonprofit want to do that?
| Category Advice, Blogs, Campaigns, Cause Marketing, Communications, Fundraising, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Resource, Reviews, SEO, Site Administration, Social Media, Software Review, Storytelling, Technology for Nonprofits, Twitter, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#INTERVIEW: Joanne Fritz, The About.com Website Guide on Nonprofit Charitable Organizations
Joanne Fritz is the guide to About.com’s “Nonprofit Charitable Organizations” site. A former high school and university teacher, she has also been a senior manager at two nonprofits and two universities. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.
MKC: Is About.com a blog or something else?
JOANNE: About.com is sort of its own animal. It has close to 1,000 guides. Each guide is an expert in a particular topic area. Each of us has a mini-website that includes a blog. So when you first see, for instance, my landing page, it has the blog, but then over to the side are topics, and those links will generally lead you to articles that are meant to be evergreen information. We typically use the blog to keep up with what’s happening in the here and now. The articles go into more depth and are more like reference materials. We’re constantly creating evergreen content because most of our traffic comes from search, and they turn up on one of our articles. I usually blog at least three times a week. There’s a lot going on about nonprofits these days, so it’s a constant struggle to keep on top of it.
| Category Blogs, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, eNewsletter, Facebook, Fundraising, Interview, Marketing, Newsletter, Nonprofit, Publications, Social Media, Special Series, Technology for Nonprofits, Twitter, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Don Akchin
#HOWTO: Tumblr & RSS Feeds – How Do They Work Together?
Last week we promised to discuss the connection that can be made between your nonprofit’s Tumblr site and RSS Readers around the world. Thus far in this series we have focused on the Tumblr side of things, but today it might be of greater value to focus on RSS, what it is and how it can be used as a means to keep your audiences fully up-to-date with your work.
The meaning of the acronym ‘RSS ‘has been debated, but not hotly. Most people understand it as ‘Really Simple Syndication’, though early in its history the letters meant ‘Rich Site Summary’. The readers are also known as ‘news aggregators’ because they pull changes from websites and present them in a listed format for the reader’s convenience − allowing him or her to click on any of the headlines of the ‘new news’ of a website to read the full story. Given the fact that your nonprofit wants to be making news, you want to give your followers the opportunity to sign up for your ‘feed’, and Tumblr makes that process painless.
| Category Advice, Blogs, Communications, Dashboards, How-to, Marketing, Nonprofit, Public Relations, Resource, Reviews, SEO, Site Administration, Social Media, Software Review, Technology, Technology for Nonprofits, Writing | | 2 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#INTERVIEW: Jeff Brooks, Nonprofit Blogger, Author, and Creative Director
Jeff Brooks has been working on behalf of nonprofits for more than 20 years and passionately blogging about fundraising since 2005. He writes the Future Fundraising Now blog and is creative director at TrueSense Marketing. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.
MKC: What do you consider to be the greatest challenge of being a good copywriter?
JEFF: What most people who are not professional copywriters get wrong is they don’t differentiate themselves from their audience. That’s why most fundraising is just bad. It doesn’t succeed the way it ought to because they say, I’m going to make this please me, and then it’ll please the others and then it’ll work. Well, that’s just wrong. That’s not how you create quality fundraising. You have to know your audience, and reach out to them, and 99 percent of the time, you’re going to hate it. You may say, I wouldn’t respond to this! And you’re absolutely correct, and it absolutely doesn’t matter.
Now If you want to talk about professional copywriters, I think what is difficult is taking dry, distilled- down-to-numbers program information and making it sing. Because that’s what you tend to get delivered: We fed this many people, and that’s up x percent from last year. That’s the kind of information you get and you have to say, how do I make somebody care? That’s the minute-by-minute challenge a copywriter faces.
MKC: I’ve been reading your blog for awhile and you’ve been preaching donor-centricity adamantly. Do you get the sense that anybody’s listening?
JEFF: Some people are. The thing is, the people who are reading my blog, or reading blogs at all, are the ones who are curious, who want to grow, and who are willing to change. The ones who need the help, who aren’t donor-centric, aren’t reading anybody’s blog. They’re not curious. So there’s sort of a preaching-to-the-choir quality to blogging.
In the fundraising industry, we are not donor-centric. We are navel gazers, and we expect our donors to gaze at our navels with us. I think that’s why direct mail response rates have been dropping for seven years in a row now. It’s because what we’re doing just doesn’t work like it used to. It’s wearing out. We’ve got a new audience of direct mail donors coming on board and they are more demanding. They want to be communicated with. In their commercial relationships with the companies they buy stuff from, they’re used to service and they’re used to being talked to as who they are. Most fundraising isn’t there. It’s saying, here’s your cancer bill. Pay it. That used to work, for a few reasons. One was, the older generation was more duty-driven: You give because you’re supposed to, you give because your church tells you to, you give because your family has always given. You didn’t have to be skillful at asking a person like that, they would just say, yeah, it’s my time to give. Not only that, but the competition in the mailbox has skyrocketed. There are probably 10 times as many appeals being sent out now as there were 20 years ago. So there’s that overwhelming noise, and the fact that younger donors, and I say younger meaning under 70, are a little more discerning. We actually see a behavior of larger gifts to fewer organizations. In the older donors, 70 and up, there’s just this behavior of sending 15 or 20 bucks to everything that comes across your door. Younger donors are saying, I need to be involved here, I need to know what’s going on, I need to care. So if we don’t get on board with talking to donors, instead of talking to ourselves, we’re in big trouble.
MKC: You also seem to have some strong feelings about nonprofit advertising. Would you like to talk about it?
JEFF: You’re talking about the “Stupid Nonprofit Ads” series. That is really about what I think is a huge scam perpetrated by ad agencies and other brand experts on the nonprofit sector. They bring commercial branding and advertising practices into the nonprofit realm and then misapply them. The reason it keeps happening again and again and again is it’s the glamour of the ad world: these are the big boys, this is where the real money is, they must know what they’re talking about, right? So they come in – and very often its pro bono so the nonprofit thinks, what the hell, I might as well do it, and they get these terrible ads that have no chance of making a dent in the problems of this world and motivating donors to do anything or care, much less give. So I kind of go after it, and I’m pretty mean about it, but it’s because I feel like it’s a big con, and we need it to stop. Plus I just like making fun of stupid stuff.
MKC: Is there anybody who does good advertising for nonprofits?
JEFF: Oh yeah, a lot of people do, and it will never win an award. No one’s ever going to show it anywhere, because it’s “bland,” it’s “ugly,” it’s “old-fashioned,” but it raises money.
MKC: Tom Ahern raves about the Domain Group formula for newsletters and he keeps saluting your role in it.
JEFF: We were doing mostly direct mail at Domain, and sometimes a client would say, could you do a newsletter for us? We don’t have anyone on staff to do it. When we did them, we made money. And at that time, the normal thing was for a newsletter to lose money. We started sharpening the techniques, we did some testing. We found that to be relentlessly donor-focused was critical, that to not be afraid to ask for money was good. I have a lot of clients where you can almost count on a newsletter being a more effective fundraiser than a direct mail appeal is. That’s not true across the board, but I have not lost money on a newsletter in decades. They are an effective fundraiser. The difference is, the old newsletter said, Look at us, aren’t we cool, look at all our great programs. The articles were long and boring, the headlines were dull. We found, just like in direct mail appeals, you had to get your eyes off yourself and on the audience. The reason they’re giving is they want to change the world, so you need to tell them, yes, you are changing the world, instead of, look at us, we’re changing the world. You still tell a story about their cool program, but you turn it a little bit, so it’s, ‘Look, donor, here’s what you made possible.’ You do that in subtle ways and direct, flat-out ways.
MKC: Has anyone attempted to convert the Domain Group formula to email newsletters?
JEFF: I’m trying to. I mean, we try to bring the techniques and the mindset. Email is a little different. I don’t think we’ve quite got it figured out. For now, email newsletters are nothing like as effective as print newsletters as fundraisers, and they’re less effective as fundraisers than e-appeals are.
MKC: You have been blogging since 2005. Have your goals for blogging changed?
JEFF: No, not really. The difference is, when I started, there were maybe three other bloggers in the fundraising space, and way fewer readers. Now I think there are over 100 fundraising-focused bloggers that I know about. I feel like I discover another one every week or so. And there’s just a larger audience. Thousands of people read these blogs now. That’s kind of cool. That means there’s an ongoing professional conversation happening. Before, the national conferences were the only place professional conversation happened, and most people weren’t going to those. So it was way less widespread than it is now. This is good. It means more people are able to get smarter.
Fundraising is a weird medium. A lot of things are counter-intuitive. Things work that you wouldn’t think would work, like longer letters work better than shorter letters. And there’s just a thousand little details like that. Some fundraisers seem to say, ‘We need to throw out everything we know, because it just seems so wrong to me.’ Then they watch their revenue go down the drain. This is very sad, because this isn’t just some stupid shampoo sales campaign. This matters. When you screw up, it matters that you screwed up. It means you can’t serve the way you’re called to serve. There’s a moral dimension to it.
You can follow Jeff on his Future Fundraising Now blog.
Guest blogger Don Akchin writes frequently about marketing and philanthropy at donakchin.com.
This interview series is produced with the generous support of the Nonprofit Marketing and Fundraising Zone.
| Category Blogs, Campaigns, Communications, Copyrighting, Cross-Post, Development, Donor Acquisition, E-Mail, eNewsletter, Fundraising, Grants and Funding, Interview, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Newsletter, Nonprofit, Permission Marketing, Publications Design, Research, Special Series, Storytelling, Strategic Marketing, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Don Akchin
#INTERVIEW: Kivi Leroux Miller, Consultant, Trainer and Blogger on Nonprofit Communications
Kivi Leroux Miller is a successful consultant, trainer and blogger on nonprofit communications. She leads weekly webinars from her website. She also is the author of The Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.
MKC: What was your goal when you started the blogging?
KIVI: My goal from the beginning has really been to help the small nonprofit organizations that don’t have the money to hire staff or to hire big consulting firms, but because of the Internet – especially – can do some very powerful things with just a little bit of time and a little bit of creativity. The blog is just a really easy way to get that kind of content out there. On the business side, it’s been phenomenal for my search engine optimization. I say I owe 90% of the traffic to the blog.
| Category Blogs, Book, Communications, Cross-Post, Fundraising, Interview, Marketing, Newsletter, Nonprofit, Storytelling, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Don Akchin
#Communication: Six Tips To Expand Readership On Your Nonprofit’s Blog
We thank you for reading our blog, and we hope to provide relevant, timely, and interesting material for you for 2012. Producing a timely and engaging blog (at least we hope so!) requires some effort. But the opportunities and results they can produce are well worth the investment. If your nonprofit organization has a blog, you want to ensure regular production of high-quality. And if it doesn’t, you’re missing great opportunities to tell your stories, to turn your passive followers into active volunteers and donors, and to benefit from the multiplier effects of readers sharing, tweeting, and faving your nonprofit’s good work.
Plenty of advice about how to raise your blog’s readership exists in the same blogosphere your organization is already working in. A recent post by Jeff Ogden at SocialMediaToday.com particularly caught our eye because he keeps the advice clear and simple and because he stresses quality over quantity. And let’s face it: the internet largely encourages the latter over the former. So what is on his short list?
| Category Advice, Blogs, Campaigns, Cause Marketing, Communications, Community, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Media Review, Newspaper Article, Nonprofit, Public Relations, Reviews, Social Media, Storytelling, Twitter, Web and Print, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#Interview: Gail Perry, Fundraising Consultant, Trainer & Author of Fired-Up Fundraising
Gail Perry is a fundraising consultant and trainer and the author of Fired-Up Fundraising: Turn Your Board’s Passion into Action. She is a highly sought speaker and writes a popular blog. Her most recent venture is an online coaching group. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.
MKC: What are the issues that are keeping your clients awake at night?
GAIL: I think the economy is just a huge issue. People are worried about whether they can raise the money they need or not. But I’m also seeing a really interesting problem. My consulting clients are struggling to learn how to take donors who are identified as potential major prospects and bring them into the major prospect arena by closing a gift. It’s a very delicate, step-by-step, intuitive process to bring a major donor along. That’s a lot of what I’m teaching my clients, all these little subtleties of developing that type of relationship.
| Category Blogs, Campaigns, Cause Marketing, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, Crowdfunding, Design, Development, Direct Mail, Donor Acquisition, E-Mail, eNewsletter, Facebook, Facebook, Fundraising, Grants, Grants and Funding, Interview, Major Gifts, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Nonprofit, Permission Marketing, Research, SEO, Social Media, Special Series, Sponsorship, Storytelling, Strategic Marketing, Twitter, Web Design, Writing | | 1 Comments
Written by: Don Akchin
#Communications: ‘Tis The Season For Making Lists & Prepping For 2012
In our last blog posting for 2011 we wanted to encourage some meaningful reminiscence over this past year and what it meant for the nonprofit world and to inspire some thinking about the possibilities for 2012. Making lists and checking them twice is a time-honored way to prepare for the holidays, so we present a list of lists and the opportunity for your organization to break onto a list when they are compiled in a year’s time. We have compiled this list based on our own experience with apps, platforms, and issues discussed on these lists.
| Category Advice, Blogs, Campaigns, Case Study, Cause Marketing, Communications, Community, Design, Facebook, Fundraising, Hardware Review, How-to, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Measurement, Media Review, News and Current Affairs, Newspaper Article, Nonprofit, Public Media, Public Relations, Publications, Resource, Reviews, SEO, Site Administration, Social Media, Software Review, Storytelling, Strategic Marketing, Technology, Technology for Nonprofits, Writing | | 1 Comments
Written by: Christopher Gardner, PhD
#interview: Tom Ahern — Author, Award-Winning Journalist, and Communications Consultant
Tom Ahern is the author of four books on fundraising communications, with a fifth on the way. An award-winning magazine journalist, he has written case statements for numerous campaigns and is a popular communications trainer and consultant. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.
MKC: You’ve written four books. You’ve trained hundreds, maybe thousands of communicators, and by now you’d expect everybody knows what to do. Yet you’re still in high demand! How do you explain this?
TOM: How fast can you actually change the characteristic habitual behavior of communications in an industry as big as the nonprofit industry? At one point there were 1.6 million charities in the United States alone, and we’re not the only mature philanthropic market.) Some of the models that are well entrenched are just, I think, wrong. Yet everybody borrows from each other, they copy each other. And so you’ve got widespread bad practices, not best practices.
| Category Communications, Community, Conference/Congress, Cross-Post, Design, Donor Acquisition, Fundraising, Grants, Grants and Funding, Graphic Design, How-to, Interview, Major Gifts, Marketing, Marketing Skills, Newsletter, Nonprofit, Publications, Publications Design, Social Media, Special Series, Storytelling, Strategic Marketing, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Don Akchin
#Interview: Nicole Harrison is the founder of SocialNicole.com and host of #nptalk
Nicole Harrison is the founder of SocialNicole, a Minneapolis agency that provides online and social media communications services for businesses and nonprofits. She is also the host of a weekly Twitter chat about nonprofits, #NPTalk. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.
MKC: Does your agency provide only online services?
NICOLE: Actually, no. What you see on our website is pretty much geared towards online, but we’re actually doing some strategic on-the-ground fundraising help for small nonprofits, such as sponsorships and building their base. A lot of clients come for social media but they need all these other pieces as well. We try to offer solutions and help them see how these different pieces tie together.
| Category Blogs, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, Interview, Marketing, Nonprofit, Permission Marketing, Social Media, Special Series, Strategic Marketing, Twitter, Writing | | Comments Off
Written by: Don Akchin
#Interview: Howard Adam Levy, Principal of Red Rooster Group
Howard Adam Levy is Principal of Red Rooster Group, a New York City-based branding, marketing and design agency for nonprofits. Howard, who began working with nonprofits as a graphic designer in 1991, founded the agency 10 years ago. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVEnonprofit blog.
MKC: What is most challenging about branding nonprofits?
HOWARD: Nonprofits face a wide variety of constituents, from clients, referral sources, donors, partner organizations, board members and others. So a lot more is involved in reaching out and developing messages and strategies for each of those audiences.
Businesses, especially small businesses, can make unilateral decisions on their marketing. Nonprofits are typically more consensus oriented. And particularly when it comes to the brand, you really want to get everyone’s input and have a feeling that everyone is contributing to the process of what we’re all about. So you need a process that can build consensus in a politically neutral environment and get everyone feeling really good about the brand and their role as brand ambassadors.
| Category Blogs, Branding, Campaigns, Communications, Community, Cross-Post, Design, Donor Acquisition, E-Mail, eNewsletter, Fundraising, Grants, Grants and Funding, Graphic Design, Interview, Major Gifts, Marketing, Newsletter, Nonprofit, Permission Marketing, Publications Design, Slide Presentations, Social Media, Special Series, Storytelling, Strategic Marketing, Web Design, Writing | | 1 Comments
Written by: Don Akchin