From Our Brains to Yours
Stop Preaching Only to the Converted
On Tuesday, Shayna posted her reflections on the Web of Change Conference she attended a few weeks ago. Each of the themes she pulled away from the event will stimulate your thinking about the work your organization does and its effectiveness.
One challenge that probably hits home for many who’ve worked any type of campaign is [...]
What newbies to social media should know
I finished college just before Friendster starting becoming popular. You remember Friendster right? Although nowhere close to the original network, it was the first that was widely popular. Over the next few years, MySpace briefly took the lead before Facebook became king of the hill, at least for the moment. Twitter is right on Facebook’s [...]
Should you change up your (print) newsletter?
Newsletters are great tools to provide regular, updated content to your members. Whether your content is safety tips, success stories, career advice or continuing education, newsletters can provide an opportunity to to put new content in front of members in an organized and predictable manner.
Newsletters are also hardly new. The monthly or quarterly newsletter has [...]
Apply Lessons Learned the Right Way
Success invites imitation. Great success invites even more. We are always looking for new best practices or success stories about how an organization, campaign or project was successfully conceived and implemented. Many of us have pulled what we thought were the best practices from a previous experience or case study and, when implemented, were not [...]
How strong is your signal?
http://www.connectioncafe.com/posts/2009/august/update-nonprofits-power.html
Over at Connection Cafe, there is a great post about all of the non-profit messages the writer encoutered between Thursday at 5 PM and Sunday at 5 PM, so essentially the weekend. We often talk about how much advertising we see in any given day, but I had never thought about how much of it [...]
Return on overhead investment
My very first post on this blog in January was a response to a post from Sasha Dichter about separating “program” expenses from “overhead” expenses. The non-profit world generally looks down on high overhead relative to program expenses. And program delivery is the key component for fulfilling the organization’s mission. My may point was:
“I think [...]
Not to beat a dead horse
Seth Godin reinforces the point that tactics (tools and plans) are not strategies, points we’ve made here and here.
Godin said it well:
“In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy… and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in [...]
Blogging as practice
Stories
Another thought about keeping content fresh: Blogging is as much about refining and practicing the delivery of your message as it is about actually delivering and spreading a message.
All non-profits have a message they are trying to deliver. And messages are best delivered as stories that strike a chord with your audience (donors, activists, advocates, [...]
Where are you on Google?
The question asked most frequently when launching a new web site is, “How do I get our new site to the top of Google’s search results?”
The short and simplest answer is to make sure the content of your site includes the terms that people will search for to find you. So if your name is [...]
Keep your content fresh
We all know that content is king. If you expect people to visit your web site more than once, then you need to provide something of value to bring them back. No amount of fancy bells and whistles on your web site keeps users coming back for too long. Your users can get value from [...]