One challenge that probably hits home for many who’ve worked any type of campaign is that constant struggle to make sure we’re not just talking to each other. It’s very easy to do.  Early victories in any campaign (fundraising, advocacy, electoral) are almost always the result of successfully engaging folks already on board – the proverbial low hanging fruit.  But then it’s easy to keep going back to that group to help achieve the second or third benchmarks in your campaign.  While you may be able to accomplish those, you begin to fall into the trap.  Everyone feeds off of each other and while you may be generating activity, you’re not moving the ball towards the ultimate goal.

Those early benchmarks are not the end game.  They help get your effort moving, but the change your campaign is seeking (most likely) requires that new people be enlisted and engaged.  And that’s this week’s Three Things: Three Things to Help Stop Just Talking to the Converted.

1) The importance of segmenting – I know, you’re thinking that if I’m talking about segmenting then I’m talking about folks already on your team.  That’s partially true.  But can you identify people from how, when and why they started following your cause?

If you can screen out the folks who are still learning about your cause and talk to them differently, then you can potentially activate a whole new group of people who may be on board but not ready to take action. Not to mention, having a real understanding of the how, when, and why people got to be on your team helps you better…

2) …Identify who’s missing.  Where is the hole in your coalition?  Do you need more Democrats, Republicans, or Independents?  Men or Women?  Business Leaders?  Faith leaders? Elected officials?  Supporters of related issue X, Y, or totally unrelated issue Z?

Talking to and engaging new folks is good.  Talking to and engaging the right new folks to help you get closer to the goal is better. Once you know who you need, you can better figure out to find and approach them.

3) You can’t be the only one talking. While there is plenty you can be doing to reach new people, you’ll be a lot more successful if you’re not the only one singing your cause’s praises.  For each target group you need to engage, you need messengers who can help you find the right networks of people, validate your purpose to them, and bring the willing on board.

New tools can be helpful here as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and the works can make it easier for those on board to spread your message to their networks.  That’s only helpful if your new targets are easily engaged online.  If not, you’ll have to rely on the old-fashioned social networking of lunches, receptions, conferences, phone calls and meetings to get people’s attention.

Note: All of this applies offline as much as it does online.  Sure the tools and technologies are different, but you still have a list, you still have channels in which to communicate and you still have a need to bring in new people to your coalition.

Changing your approach so you’re not preaching only to the converted can be hard, but most of the time it’s absolutely necessary to make the change you’re seeking.  Do you have more thoughts about reaching new audiences, offline or online?  Share them below and I’m sure we’ll continue this discussion in future posts.

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 heals.  I bring this up because all of these networks were new to me as I started working.

And I’ve found that’s the case with many organizations.  Leadership in many organizations are nervous about committing resources to social media because using the tools can feel like speaking in a foreign language: you can feel the energy but can’t quite understand what’s happening.

That is this week’s Three Things: Three things to help those new to social media feel more comfortable getting started.

1) It’s just technology. You know a tool that can be used for many things including connecting with old friends or sharing news, wisdom, photos, powerful stories, random stories and much more.  We did most of the things that social media allows us to do before Friendster or Facebook.  We used to find old friends in our alumni directory.  We sent newspaper clippings or other short stories around the office or mailed them to old colleagues.  We sent newsletters or created elaborate annual reports for members and donors.  We communicated by phone, mail and email.

Now, social media, like all new technology, makes it easier to communicate with bigger audiences using less resources.  And more importantly it makes it easy for your audience to spread your story to their networks.  Anything you used to share offline can now be shared online.

2) Like with everything in the world, persistence pays. While social media makes it easier to do things, it’s not magic.  Sure you may know an organization that got lucky or had a brilliant idea that spread like wildfire and accomplished amazing things on Twitter or Facebook.  But in general, the rewards of social media come from consistently using a tool, and constantly measuring and improving your performance.

You’ll undoutbtedly make mistakes early on as your learning the community you choose to engage.  Learn from them.  As long as you know what you’re trying to accomplish and what progress looks like, then keep at it. Keep sharing relavent content, keep learning and improving and your persistence will reward you.

3) It’s not new. As Adam Singer points out, it’s been around in one form or another for a decade.  In many ways it’s reached a tipping point.  Especially when you consider the number of parents who now join Facebook because it’s the only way they can see pictures of their grandchildren.

But just because it’s new to many folks (like your organization), doesn’t make it new to everyone. If your organizations’ target audience (members, donors, etc.) is already online, chances are they are already pretty active on one or more social networks. If they aren’t yet, they will be next month or next year.  That’s an opportunity for your organization.  Make sure it’s not a missed opportunity.

That’s it.  There is plenty more to learn that others can help with or that you will learn on your own along the way, but if you start here, you can begin to invest in this not so new tool so it can pay off for your organization down the road.

Newsletters can be 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 been used organizations of all shapes and sizes has long as printing presses have been easily accessible.  I’ve heard recently that the old fashioned printed newsletter is becoming “not worth” the hassle.  The common complaints are that they take too much time, cost too much to print and mail and that people just don’t read them anymore.  In a world that is increasingly moving online that trend certainly easily fits into my worldview.  Although like many things, the obvious is not always the right answer.  We’ve written before about online newsletters (see “Is your Email Newsletter a Waste of Time?“).  To address the offline end of the question, we offer us this weeks three things:  Three things to consider before making changes to your newsletter.

1) What purpose are you serving? Are you delivering articles that will help your members keep up to date in your profession or with your issues?  Are you delivering a message through stories that keep your members connected to your cause?  Are you informing folks about upcoming events and opportunities to get more involved?  All of these purposes are valid for newsletters and all can be done through different mediums online or offline.

2) Who is your target audience? Whether you’re moving online, to social networks or changing your deliver mechanism in anyway, make sure you know who you want to read your stuff.  Are your most valuable members older and used to getting content in this format?  Or are they younger and looking for something online?  Is your target audience a community that has limited high speed Internet connections?

3) How will you know you’re successful? Are you trying to increase traffic to your web site?  Increase membership renewals, engagement or donations?  Are you trying to maintain the same level of service while cutting costs?  Knowing what a win is before you decide to make a change will help you evaluate it next quarter or year.

What’s your thought process on changing your newsletter?  Any success or horror stories – please share in the comments.

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 able to achieve the expected results.  It’s always difficult to determine why this happened?  Poor execution?  A bad read of the environment?  It could be that we just learned the wrong lessons. And that brings us to this week’s three things.

Three Things to Ensure You Learn the Right Lessons (from success and failure)

1) Apply lessons learned to the appropriate problems. A lesson learned about fundraising is not necessarily appropriately applied to a advocacy problem.  A communications strategy to help influence or move public opinion may not work for when you’re trying to motivate constituents to take action.  Before reviewing best practices, clearly identify the problem you’re trying to solve and be clear about the ways it differs from the examples you’re modeling.

2) Be clear about the difference between tactical lessons and strategic lessons learned. Sending emails without fancy HTMLs is a tactical lesson; sending a much higher volume of emails to different segments of your list is a strategic lesson.  Some successes are based on innovative strategy, others are examples of tactics will applied.  Knowing the difference is critical.

3) Do savvy situation analysis. Are your lessons learned from an eighteen-month campaign, but you’re applying them in the context of a six-month campaign? Perhaps the the application of your new knowledge will be different in the compressed timeframe.  Campaigns to fund a Presidential campaigns for a rock star candidates and campaigns to fund local non-profit operations are so different so as to make application of lessons learned very tricky.  Be savvy about your environment, audiences, goals, and resources to accurately identify what’s applicable and what’s not.

Did we miss something?  Do you have an example of learning the wrong lesson?  Share them in the comments!

Over at Connection Cafe, there is a great post about all of the non-profit messages the writer encountered between Thursday at 5 PM and Sunday at 5 PM, so essentially the weekend.  He was exposed to 250 messages fro 189 organizations in 72 hours. We often talk about how much advertising we see in any given day, but I had never thought about how much of it was for non-profit causes.

I’ll have to redo his test in my community, but I would bet that his findings are spot on.  There is a ton of noise out there about non-profits. Organizations are competing for attention just as intensely as automakers, soda companies and any other product sold.  With all of that competition, it is more important than ever that your have a strong signal that allows your message to break through.

There are a few ways to improve the strength of your signal:

1) Be loud:  If you’re louder than everyone, people will hear you more.  Although they might not be happy with how loud you’re being, which doesn’t help you in the long term.  (Think spam, loud TV commercials and overly extravagant displays).

2) Find places to speak where there is less noise. Less noise means that your signal is easier to hear and understand.  As long as these targets are people that are real prospects for your message (whether it’s donors, volunteers, activists or anything else), then this is an excellent way to limit competing messages.

2a) One great way to find a place with less noise is to honestly get permission to speak to your targets.  If people really have asked you to keep them informed and you do so in a timely, relevant way, your signal will get through.  While you may not eliminate all the noise, those who have given you permission have tuned to your frequency.

3) Increase your resonance. Does your message evoke a response?  Your signal can cut through if it the message behind it is more powerful.  Connect with your audience on an emotional level with a story that is meaningful.  Those whose attention you capture early will help spread the message.  So not only will your signal be amplified, but it will be multiplied by people sharing your story with their own audience.

There are certainly more ways, but these cover the basics.  Either be loud (and potentially obnoxious), find a more quiet space (and thus relatively louder), or pack more punch with every word.  Regardless, realize that you are not the only one sending a signal, but you can work to ensure that your signal breaks through others’ noise.

How strong is your signal?

-Stephen

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.  While program delivery is the key component for fulfilling the organization’s mission., my main point was:

“I think my point is that we need to view all expenses as investments.  You don’t invest in anything unless you at least have a target return in mind.  If your annual report can articluate the return on all of your investments, including overhead, and that number improves over time, then you’re well on your way to making an impressive case for an increase in funding from investors.”

As usual, Dichter is back on topic and says it even better:

“Let us not, as a sector, fall into the trap of listening to critics who say that we should minimize the dollars, effort, brain power, and ingenuity that goes into everything but the “real” work (programs).  In so doing, we risk forgetting that our role is BOTH to find solutions to the persistent problems of inequality and injustice and malnutrition and infant mortality and safe drinking water and AIDS and malaria…AND to figure out how to explain to the world that these problems matter, that we have the tools to solve them, and that if was have the tools to solve them, then we must all act.”

I think a snapshot financial summary that separates overhead from program expenses but does not spell out the return on your overhead investment misses the mark.  And when your data is incomplete, the decisions based on that data is likely to be less than optimal. Good enough -maybe.  But room for improvement – definitely.

So the question for the week: what’s the return your getting on your marketing, fundraising, communications and administrative expenses (aka investments)?  How do you know?  Can you demonstrate it?

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 the first place.”

Shiny new things (tools, tactics, and plans) are great.  But you’ll never know how successful they are until you can articulate specifically where you are and where you want them to take you.    Obsess over the destination until you know its where you really want to go.  Then decide the best way to get there.

-Stephen

Another thought related to keeping content fresh: Blogging (or updating your web site) can be 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, legislators, etc, etc, etc.).  What you say on your blog shouldn’t just be delegated to your communications or online team, but the ideas for posts should also be cultivated and refined by your senior leadership.  Maybe not daily or even weekly, but regularly, because practice does make prefect.

Not to mention, everyone loves to hear, read and share a good story.

Hat tip to Sasha Dichter for reminding us about this.

-Stephen

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 Barack Obama, you’ll want to make sure your name is prominent on your web site and preferably in multiple places.  Obama is in luck that there aren’t a lot of Barack Obama’s in the world (and that a lot of people are looking for him).  I’m out of luck on the name front as the NFL player certainly gets a lot more attention than I do.

You most certainly want people to find you if they know the name of your organization, but how else should people be able to find you?  Are there words, phrases, terms, keywords that when people search they would ideally find your organization? If you know what those words are, then you can begin the process of trying to attract people looking for them to your web site.  That process is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.

SEO can very complex, very fast. But just to give you the slightly longer, but still relatively simple answer, check out this primer that Birsch Studio put together.  Part 1 helps you think about how search works and part 2 begins to discuss what to do on your web site to optimize it for search engines.

There are tons of resources around the web on SEO.  It’s very easy to get lost in reading through them.  My best advice on the topic is to not dig to deep into it from the start.  Start with the simplest, most obvious ways to want people to find your content. Your name and brand, specific issues that you are talking about this year are the best places to start.  If you can answer that question – how should people find us – then you’ve already done the hard part.   Start there before seeking help.

-Stephen

To keep them coming back, the content has to be there and that means someone has to create the content.  Easier said than done. We’re here to help with this week’s Three Things – Three Things to help ensure you keep your content fresh, and your users coming back.

1) Let your activity pull you. Even if the most recent entry in the latest news column on your home page is from last quarter’s annual fundraising dinner, you’ve probably been busy in the last 2 months.  Make sure those visiting the site see that. Some quick examples to keep things current:
-Take 2 minutes at the next board meeting and snap a picture of members in action with a paragraph about the most important thing they discussed that day.
-Take 5 minutes to record a quick video report from your latest member training workshop.
-Recap any significant event within a day of it happening.  Remember to include the pictures and video.

Beyond remembering to always take pictures and video, not much forethought is necessary to give quick summaries and show that your organization is alive and kicking and making a difference in the world.  Make sure your web site reflects the hard work your organization does in day to day and week to week.

2) Push next steps. What’s next?  There is always a next step: for you, for your members, for your partners.  Reporting on what’s happened helps show activity, but connecting last week’s success to next week’s plan gives your members an update this week and a reason to come back again next week.  Two examples:
-Post a quick report from the email call to action you sent the week before.  Thank the 400 people who contacted their member of Congress and include a quote in the press from a member announcing their support for your legislation.  Now if you could only find 3 more votes to get it out of committee.
-Create a graphic for your homepage that shows the status of your annual fundraising campaign and a pitch from one of your grassroots fundraisers.  This shows progress, makes an ask and gives another voice to your pitch. Not to mention, your supporters will check back to see what other grassroots leaders are saying.

3) Plan. Ideally, you’re not only doing both of the above, but there is already a plan for the next quarter about what will happen when.  You know what events are coming, what your fundraising goals are and what your priorities are for this quarter and next. Step back with your organization’s calendar and add the new web content that needs to be created around events and activities.  Some you can outline now and then finish when the time comes.  Some you need to be ready with the camera to take pictures, capture video or antecdotes from participants.  With your content calendar planned a few weeks or month in advance, you can see where the holes are.  No updates planned during the first week of September?  Too much in the last week of August?  If keeping content fresh is important and you know where the gaps are a month out, you’re a step ahead of the rest.

Pull, Push and Plan – that’s this week’s three things to help keep your web content fresh and your members coming back.  Let us know what you think in the comments below!  (And if you need help making it all come together, we’ve love to help, so drop us a note or give us a call).

And if you’ve got Three Things to get off your chest that will make others lives a bit easier, shoot us an email – we’d love to feature your ideas in this space!