From Our Brains to Yours

December 7th, 2009

How is [fill in the blank] helping my organization meet its mission?

2010 will be about figuring out what analytics mean, and how to apply them to measuring the results that matter for non-profits and advocacy efforts.

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December 3rd, 2009

Measure More than Inputs

What should organizations, coalitions, and the sector at large measure in the context of unrelenting complexity, widely dispersed responsibility, and, often, a virtual blackout when it comes to timely, reliable data?

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November 19th, 2009

Maximize your Coalition’s Efforts

Being a part of a successful coalition is a great way to leverage assets and drive real change. Here are 3 Things to help ensure your coalition is doing all it can to reach the collective goal.

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October 29th, 2009

Integrating Online and Offline Campaign Tactics

We published a piece over on frogloop, Care2’s nonprofit marketing blog, with best practices for integrating online and offline tactics to best effect. Read the highlights here or Click through to frogloop to read the whole thing.

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October 21st, 2009

Taking My Lumps: Getting Burned in the NYT

Judging by our email inbox this morning, quite a few folks read the NYT article on e-books, which included a few paragraphs indicating that I’m participating in some sort of digital piracy and stealing books from Amazon. My friend and now co-worker, Nikki Enfield, and I both have Kindles registered to Nikki’s Amazon [...]

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October 1st, 2009

Develop Great Messages

Strategy, tactics, evaluation and measurement, may all be in place and spot-on, but if you’re delivering the wrong message it can all be for naught.  This week, three quick things to keep in mind during the message development phase of campaign and communications planning:
1. You are not your audience. Usually, neither is your organization’s staff.  [...]

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August 27th, 2009

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 [...]

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August 24th, 2009

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 [...]

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August 17th, 2009

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 [...]

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August 3rd, 2009

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, [...]

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