Cause+Effect

Need help with a press release?

2010-03-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

At C+E, we get asked for help with press releases all the time. I've also addressed the topic on this blog a few times before. But since it seems to come up often, I thought it was worth another short post.

Of course, press release writing is one of the services we provide for our clients, but if you're looking for some quick DIY tips, read on.

Start by writing a short response to each of the questions below:

What's the big news? What's the one thing you want people to know?
Who is it about? Give a little detail on the human being(s) behind the announcement, and what makes them special.
Why is it important? Is it the first time this has happened? Is it a brand new idea?
How can people get involved? Is there a place they can sign up? Find out more?
Who are you? What's your story in 3 sentences or fewer?

Once you have these key building blocks to work with, put them all together so your final release looks something like the template below (note that everything contained in [brackets] should be considered instructional, and replaced/removed before your final is ready for release):

---

[Your name and title]
[Your group or organization's name]
[Your phone#]
[Your email address]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

[Headline]
[Secondary headline - if needed]

[Your city, State] -- [Today's date] Use the first paragraph to answer item #1 from above. You want this paragraph to be about 2 or 3 sentences long - not longer. And it should be written to make the reader want to hear more about the thing you're announcing. Avoid exclamation marks and words like "amazing" and "spectacular" and "out of this world" - editors might think you sound a little silly.

The second paragraph is your answer to item #2 above. This is your chance to make your release feel human. Quotes from key people, a personal story, or a little fun fact is a good way to help the reader connect with your story. Editors are still trying to figure out what makes your announcement of interest to their audience. If you can't help them answer that question, they'll ignore your release - and rightfully so.

The third paragraph is your chance to answer item #3 from above. If you believe your announcement is important enough to be considered "news" - this is your chance to explain why. What's newsworthy about it? Why should it make the papers or the evening broadcast? What's makes it special? Here's another opportunity for a quote from key players, or a human interest anecdote.

Finally, wrap up with an action item. How can people get more involved? Where can they find out more about the thing you're announcing?

[Traditionally, a set of ### symbols is used to indicate the reader has reached the end of your announcement - it should appear centered underneath your final paragraph]
###

About [you or your group]
Include a 2 or 3 sentence summary of who you are immediately under your release. This is your chance to explain why you're qualified to make this announcement, and how to find out more about you. Be sure to include a URL to your website if you have one.

[Traditionally the word 'end' should appear at the end of your release to indicate there's nothing else to read - it should appear centered underneath your 'about' paragraph]
--- END ---

When you're ready to send your release out into the world, consider using the following (free) services:
- PitchEngine (one of our favorites at C+E - check out our agency's newsfeed to see how it works)
- Facebook (you can publish your release as a "note" on your group's fan page and publish it to your followers that way)
- PresseNews (for international distribution)
- Gay Media and Press Network (for LGBT media distribution)

Have other suggestions? Feel free to leave them in the comments section below.

Fighting Hate With History

2010-03-05T18:53:00.000-08:00

The Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report this week confirming that membership in extremist groups in the United States saw exponential growth in 2009. The report, titled "Rage on the Right," said anti-government "patriot" groups saw a 244 percent increase in new groups in 2009 - with the total number of groups growing from 149 in 2008 to 512 (including 127 new militia groups) that year.

"This extraordinary growth is a cause for grave concern. The people associated with the Patriot movement during its 1990s heyday produced an enormous amount of violence; most dramatically the Oklahoma City bombing that left 168 people dead."
-- SPLC Intelligence Report editor Mark Potok.

Hate comes in all forms, but at its root it's not complicated. Change frightens people. Cultural shifts in cultural norms related to skin color, language, religion and gender roles have rocked this country to its core on a regular, almost rhythmic, schedule.

One of the more recent of these shifts centers around sexual orientation. As the overall climate of hate in this country has intensified, hatred specifically directed towards the LGBT community has intensified as well.

On one hand, this new climate has set the LGBT equality movement back on its heels. Those working to pass marriage equality at both the federal and state levels have faced multiple setbacks. Activists are still both stunned and frustrated in the aftermath of California's Proposition 8 still. Larger LGBT organizations face uphill battles over ENDA and DADT. LGBT individuals and communities are witholding political contributions around the country in protest.

On the other hand, though, it appears that the general pattern of social change is simply taking its course. Before each breakthrough -the Suffragettes, the Civil Rights Movement, and others - the tectonic shifts of culture are inevitably preceeded by an intense moment of cultural conservatism. As change looms in the distance, those that are most opposed to its approach expend unusual amounts of energy to stop it.

I choose to believe that is where we find ourselves today. This moment - as we face unprecedented backlash against the very idea that LGBT people could be legally and socially equal to their non-LGBT neighbors - is a necessary evil. Our job is to survive it. And to ensure that our community's children survive it free of the physical, psychic and social scars that so many of us have had to bear.

The truth is, there is only one way to survive intact. And that is to carry our stories - our history - our truths - with us. Without them, we have no community of our own. We have no way to reassure our youth that they have solid, safe roots from which to draw strength when things get hard.

If we don't actively preserve our own stories, our community's history and legacy, we will lose them forever. And we will lose a critical part of what we have been fighting so hard to acheive. Political and legal equality will mean less if we don't collectively remember what it means to live without it.

The only way to win against those that are working so hard to destroy us, is to faithfully remember how far we've come - and that this is simply the last, painful - but so very necessary - step at the end of a very, very long road.

----
There are many efforts underway to collect and preserve the LGBT history that is all around us. A small handful of them are below. Please feel free to suggest additional resources in the comments section.

Superbowl, Sexism and CBS

2010-02-06T16:33:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of discussion about CBS's rejection of the ManCrunch ad proposed for this Sunday's Superbowl game. Some have decided it was all a PR stunt (which, as someone in the PR business, I'm not entirely opposed to), and some have decided it's yet another indicator of how entrenched homophobia and sexism are in our society today (which, of course, is probably true).

[image source: mancrunch.com]

Both sides of the argument have a point. The fact that our culture is still so uncomfortable with the idea of two men kissing is precisely why this event has generated so much attention for ManCrunch.com.

From a PR perspective, ManCrunch was likely to get news coverage whether or not the ad ran this Sunday - a PR win regardless of the actual outcome. From a cultural perspective, there was likely to be some kind of backlash whether or not the ad ran this Sunday - confirming that we still have quite a way to go in our community's quest for acceptance.

From my perspective, though, the real question is whether all of this attention benefits our community as a whole. Is this the kind of storytelling that moves our message forward? Or does this create as many, if not more, problems than it solves?

Of course, I understand that many, many Superbowl ads play to the basest of our culture's sexist impulses. Women in bikinis are inexplicably used to promote technology products. Fast food retailers readily cast obese men, but will only consider emaciated female actresses to market their calorie-laden meals.

I'm certainly not suggesting that Superbowl ads are fair-minded, or culturally-sensitive as a rule. My concern is that the ManCrunch ad is a missed opportunity for our entire community. This is not an ad about same-sex love. It's an ad about sex. And while there's nothing wrong with sex per se, the ad's submission to (and subsequent rejection by) the Superbowl places it squarely in the existing public debate about whether same-sex love is worth protecting.

Rather than using this an opportunity to help put a human face on the validity of same-sex love and relationships in one of the most public forums available, I worry that the ManCrunch ad appears to reinforce the stereotype that gay men are purely sexual creatures. The ad suggests that a simple brush of the hand in a shared bowl of potato chips is enough to catalyze sexual aggression - leaving love and relationship dynamics out of the equation entirely.

What concerns me is that the LGBT community has no ability to offer a counterbalance to images as prominent as those connected to the Superbowl. We know for sure that, for the most part, people who are not themselves LGBT but know someone who is, are much less likely to vote against us when our issues are on the ballot. If this ad was our one shot to introduce the LGBT community to more mainstream Americans than ever before, I'm not sure it's worked to our advantage.

As a community, we can choose to connect with people in our own backyard, and show them that our rights are no threat to theirs – or we can take advantage of their fears and ignorance to further our own commercial enterprises.

The choice is ours, but the long-term impact of that choice must be weighed very, very carefully.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell Is More Than A Military Issue

2010-01-27T00:50:00.000-08:00

With everything else going on - natural disasters, economic meltdown, foreign wars, and more - it might seem short-sighted to fixate on whether President Obama will choose to address Don't Ask, Don't Tell (the military policy that effectively prevents LGBT people from serving their country) in his upcoming State of the Union address on Wednesday evening.

[photo credit: ILRI Clippings]

I disagree. The impact of Don't Ask, Don't Tell on the LGBT community extends far beyond the military. The existence of an environment in which LGBT people are unable to tell their own stories underscores just how far we, as a community, still have to go.

At a basic level, it could be argued that our community only exists as a function of our personal, shared stories. LGBT people grow up, often with a vague feeling that we're somehow different, but we're not sure why. We come out, often in turmoil and fear. We live and love, often in the face of real danger and hardship.

It's these shared experiences, and our varied and personal stories about our journeys through them, that form the foundation of our community. We don't share gender or skin color or geography or language. There's nothing visibly apparent that binds us together. It is the telling of our stories - and our ability to find ourselves in each others experiences - that makes us who we are.

When we can neither ask about, nor tell, our stories we are effectively cut off from community. We are robbed of our ability to connect with one another. We are left isolated and vulnerable.

Whether President Obama addresses the military policy or not in his speech, the fact remains that LGBT people must have the right, and the ability, to tell our stories before we can truly make progress.

At Cause+Effect, our mission is to make sure that the stories of our community's shining stars, fearless leaders, and determined entrepreneurs are told. Their stories, their work, and their experiences, strengthen all of us.

It’s 2010: Time to Toss out the Old Lingo

2010-01-01T13:14:00.000-08:00

by guest commentator, Rachel Pepper

As we know well in the LGBT community, words have the power to unite, disgust, divide, empower, inform, and inspire us. There is a shared lingo among many LGBT folks that give us a source of strength, pride, and humor. On the flip side of this, there are also many words that can and have been both used against us and to describe us in ways that hurt.

[photo credit: torisan3500]

At C+E, part of our job is to promote our community in print. We always strive for the best language to both honor our clients and get others excited about them, too. This makes us especially sensitive about how our words are perceived, and also how others write about LGBT issues.

This got us thinking about words and phrases that we’ve seen over the years, and that we’d prefer just go away. Outdated words. Snide words. Words that the media has regularly used, but shouldn’t anymore. You probably have your own list, and we’d like to hear them. But as we launch into a new year, here are some terms that we could do without in 2010. So say goodbye to incorrect terminology, outdated lingo, offensive ideas, and inaccurate acronyms. And hello to a year where we’re treated—and treat others--with compassion, caring, and consciousness.

Incorrect terminology

“AIDS patient”
AIDS forever changed our community, its culture, and language. However, this term, first used in the epidemic’s beginning, has yet to fade away. The idea of the helpless, un-empowered patient doesn’t jive with the reality of how our community courageously took on AIDS. The LGBT press and other more enlightened media have continually used the phrase “person with AIDS” or “person with HIV” instead, and it’s way past time that this became the standard phrase.

Offensive ideas

“Conversion”
Ok, let’s be clear. Sexuality and even gender are fluid, and we don’t all have to fall at one end or the other of any spectrum. But the evidence is clear that people cannot be “converted” from an innate gay sexual orientation to a straight one. Even the major medical organizations admit this now. So who are these people who claim they can “convert” gays? Usually evangelical Christians who believe that people choose to be gay (and therefore can change), and who believe that being gay is so evil that choosing not to be gay is the only path to happiness and ultimately salvation. As the recent debacle over Uganda’s proposed anti-gay laws in part inspired by Richard Cohen, author of the "sexual reorientation" manual Coming Out Straight, shows, often those claiming to be experts on these matters are religious bigots with no formal therapy training, and certainly no license to actually practice psychiatry. Some are actually people who have struggled mightily with internalized homophobia or traumatic experiences of being gay themselves, and have even gone through “reparative therapy” to try to lose their own same-sex attractions. It’s a dangerous issue, and can only lead to unhappiness and more bigotry.

Inaccurate acronyms

“Act Up”
This year, let’s banish inaccurate acronyms. It’s amazing how many times in the media acronyms for activist groups are misspelled or used incorrectly. Since its inception, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power—referred to from the beginning simply and powerfully as ACT UP has been cited in newspaper articles as “Act Up.” No, people, it’s an acronym. This is just something that people writing about the gay press should know, or find out if they’re going to cover us. Disappointedly, the groundbreaking activist group is often referred to incorrectly even in well-written stories by reporters obviously knowledgeable about LGBT issues. Why can’t our history be such that our stories are told well, by those who really get it? At Cause+Effect, we do get it, and we promise to get the story right.

Outdated lingo

“Hermaphrodite”
Using appropriate language and terminology is a must for respectful coverage of the LGBT community. And language is far from static. So why has the term “hermaphrodite” stuck around for so long? Originally a term born from Greek mythology, and used for scientific purpses since, it has consistently been used to refer to organisms that can change sex or possess both male and female sex characteristics or reproductive capacities. It has also been used to describe people born with “ambiguous genitalia,” living lives of secrecy and shame. That means it’s time to toss out the word hermaphrodite, and both educate ourselves about conditions of intersex, and adapt to this new phrase that we will increasingly see in the upcoming year.

“Fag hag”
Sure, we may all feel we know one, or even be one ourselves. And the idea behind having a term for straight women who flock to gay men isn’t so bad in and of itself. But isn’t it time to rid our culture and vocabulary of the term fag hag? It’s misogynistic and implies that there’s something inherently wrong with women who love gay men. Recently other terms such as “fairy fly” have popped up to take its place, but this isn’t great either. By all accounts, the term fag hag may soon disappear into oblivion: even a supportive national pro-gay organization comprised mostly of self-professed fag-hags, “SWISH-Straight Women in Support of Homos,” is changing its name to include more types of people in its membership. Since it seems even the fag hags themselves are tired of this term, let’s drop it, at once, in 2010.

Taking The Hill - LGBT Activism For A New Generation

2009-10-12T22:41:00.001-07:00

by guest blogger, Rachel Pepper

A new generation of LGBT activists recently inspired us with their vision to energize our movement on Sunday October 11 at the National Equality March for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender on Washington. Under sunny skies, with banners waving and spirits held high, participants promoted the timely message of “Equality Across America.”

[photo credit: Leyla Farah]

Many celebrities were also in the mix, including openly gay Sex in the City star Cynthia Nixon, singer Lady Gaga, and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, all of whom spoke at the event. Celebrities have always been a part of the past Marches on Washington, which occurred in 1979, 1987, 1993, and 2000. Yet, a certain level of societal homophobia has guaranteed that many big names-- especially in the world of professional sports—would never previously have come forward in support of LGBT rights.

However, even as society continues to change, and more people understand that gay rights are human rights, not “special rights,” so too are attitudes in sports changing. Well-known athletes and coaches are finding that their racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes and comments will not go unchallenged, or increase their popularity with fans. In fact, being able to express support for LGBT rights—and therefore also express support and acceptance for their LGBT family members, friends, neighbors, and fans may be a sign of how much progress sports figures, and also our movement, have made.

In fact, even in the NFL, the last cultural bastion of machismo and acceptable homophobia, players are coming out in favor of our rights. Scott Fujita, a star linebacker for the unbeaten New Orleans Saints, recently lent his name to the National Equality March for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights.

[photo credit: M Styborski]

In a recent interview with online Edge of Sports columnist Dave Zirin, Scott Fujita said that he supported the March because it was a cause he personally believed in. “By in large in this country the issue of gay rights and equality should be past the point of debate,” Fujita said. “For me, in my small platform as a professional football player, I understand that my time in the spotlight is probably limited. The more times you have to lend your name to a cause you believe in, you should do that.”

Fujita said that he was partly motivated to speak up for gay rights given his experience of being adopted as a child. Realizing that in some states, gay people are legally prohibited from adopting, adopt, he felt compelled to take a stand. “It just boggles my mind,” Fujita said, “because good, loving homes for any child are the most important thing.” Fujita also said that he didn’t think it was that courageous to speak out about gay rights, and wasn’t worried that people would assume he was gay if he did.

As society and its attitudes continue to change around us, tolerance and acceptance will gradually overcome bias, prejudice, and homophobia. Every time someone takes a stand for the equality of all people, minds and hearts will open. Visibility matters, whether this is through the visibility of our friends speaking up on our behalf, or our own visibility out in the world.

If heterosexual NFL players feel comfortable enough to take a stand for LGBT rights, we know that our movement is on the right track. Yes, visibility does indeed matter. This is why we tell our stories. This is why we do what we do. And slowly, but surely, it is making a difference.

The real difference between Twitter, Facebook and MySpace

2009-05-07T23:22:00.000-07:00

For the last several months, every new client that's come to Cause+Effect has wanted to know the same thing - how are they supposed to decide which of today's most popular social networking sites - Twitter, Facebook and MySpace - they're supposed to use? What's the difference between them. And why are they suddenly being expected to manage so many different things all at once?

It's a good question. Six months ago most people in this country hadn't heard of Twitter, and thought only their kids used Facebook and MySpace (my mother conveniently calls the entire concept of social networking "My FaceSpace" - which I find adorable). Today, Oprah has introduced the concept of Twitter to the masses, Facebook drives more traffic on the web than Google, and MySpace is considered the future of the music industry.

[photo credit: psd]

Here's the thing. It's still just a giant conversation. As new as all of this seems - the truth is that human beings have conversations all the time. All different kinds of conversations. In all different kinds of places.

For a long time, the web was simply about listening. We read articles, we played games, we looked for portals that helped organize information. The introduction of social networking sites has allowed us to return to our conversational roots. It allows us to talk to each other. Because of that, it feels oddly familiar, but because it's online it often feels odd.

The trick is to relate these new online conversations back to our more familiar offline ones. Once we do that with our clients, their eyes light up and suddenly the whole idea doesn't seem nearly as daunting.

Here's our approach to social networking strategy at Cause+Effect:

Facebook conversations = Dinner conversations

This is a simple, and effective explanation of Facebook. We started using it several months ago, and it does the trick every time. Simply put, because the idea behind Facebook is to connect people that *already* know one another, conversations on Facebook follow similar rules as do those amongst friends and acquaintances around a dinner table.

The rules are:

- Be polite (Keep shop-talk and self-promotion to a reasonable minimum)

- Be interesting (Share items that others might find interesting to keep the conversation going. Personal tidbits, interesting current events, and quirky stories are all acceptable.)

- Be upbeat (Although it's likely that everyone at the table generally shares similar backgrounds and values, keep controversy to a minimum to help keep the conversation pleasant and light.

Twitter conversations = Cocktail party conversations

Because the idea behind Twitter is to allow you to connect people that you find interesting, but don't necessarily know, conversations on Twitter follow similar rules as do those amongst relative strangers at a professional or social mixer or cocktail party who have all been drawn to the event because of a shared interest or expertise.

The rules are:

- Stay on topic (On Twitter people are following their interests, rather than existing relationships. For that reason, people who demonstrate that they are the best sources of fresh, interesting information on a particular topic quickly develop the largest followings. Self-promotion, to the extent that it's useful and relevant to the conversation, is ok. Pure self-promotion, however, will get you ignored entirely.)

- Mingle (Conversations evolve organically on twitter, just like they do at a cocktail party. To be a part of the best conversations, you have to be sure you're moving around the room and keeping your ears open. Twitter has developed ways to track conversations using hashtags, retweets, and other loosely defined conventions to help users follow topics that matter to them.)

- Take turns (Good cocktail party conversations aren't dominated by one voice, be sure to find and follow others that are tweeting on topics that interest you and then dive in when you have something useful to say.)

MySpace conversations = High school cafeteria conversations

Because MySpace is all about self-expression, conversations on MySpace follow similar rules as do those amongst teenagers in a high school cafeteria. Conversations revolve around sharing personality driven topics - like music, art and fashion - rather than more content heavy topics like news and politics. People with similar tastes, who may or may not have a real-world relationship, are drawn to one another based on their aesthetic similarities.

The rules are:

- Express yourself (Invest time and energy in presenting a virtual persona that visually and functionally represents your best self. Keep it fresh and current on a regular schedule. It's your primary source of credibility.)

- Find your tribe (Find others who share your interests, reach out and make connections.)

- Interact (Not only do you have to keep your own persona fresh and relevant, you have to show the other members of your tribe that you are an active member of the group that contributes to the group's cohesion and overall cool-factor.)

The rules are familiar because at their core, they haven't changed at all. And the truth is, they apply whether the conversation happens in the real world or the virtual one.

They key - as always - is to know what kind of conversation you're having before you open your mouth.

Learning From the CDC's Response to the Swine Flu Epidemic

2009-05-01T01:09:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Advertising Age analyzes the CDC's response to this very scary Swine Flu - or H1N1 virus - epidemic from the point of view of PR and marketing.

[image source: The Huffington Post]

The key takeaway from the article, is that in a time of crisis, the best communication is "neither sexy nor flashy, but [is] highly effective -- and critically timely." When people are scared and confused, it takes clear, consistent and credible messaging to prevent widespread panic.

Of course the goal of any communications effort should be to deliver clear, consistent and credible messaging. For those of us who are professional communicators, acheiving those goals during a time of crisis is critically important.

During this Swine Flu crisis, the communications team at the U.S. government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC) has turned to Twitter (with nearly 40,000 followers), a web-based "scorecard" on its front page, embedded mobile content, RSS feeds, and a prominent feedback form to help keep accurate information flowing out to the public.

The AdAge article is worth a read in its entirety - but its key points (with my summaries in parentheses) are:

Empower Those Who Want to Help Others: (Providing a central location for accurate and timely information is key)
Make Search Really, Really Simple and Accessible: (Duh)
Syndicate the Message: (Make your content easy to share with widgets, Twitter links, RSS feeds or embeddable mobile apps. Over-produced, flash-heavy sites with un-sharable video, is useless - both in times of crisis and under normal circumstances)
Communicate in Multiple Languages: (Even US based entities have non-English speaking customers - don't discount them).
Push Mobile as a Service Extension, and Don't Make it Complicated: (Services that feed mobile devices - twitter, RSS, facebook, etc - free your message from the desktop)
Be Simple and Selective on Twitter, Don't Over Complicate: (In a time of crisis, make sure everything you share is important, timely and actionable. When it arrives, your audience will know it's important)
Prime the Messaging: (The bulk of your messaging shouldn't change in a time of crisis. Have standard messaging ready to go, then add additional detail as needed)
Update the Scorecard 24/7: (the CDC has done a really good job refreshing and updating the swine flu "scorecard" on the front page. This builds confidence and authority. It keeps people coming back. It doesn't need to be sexy or flashy; it just needs to be reliable and consistent. Timeliness boosts relevance and credibility)
Exploit Sight, Sound and Motion: (Provide site visitors with multiple ways and formats to consume this serious content, from video explanations to podcasts featuring experts)
Proactively Ask for Feedback: (A prominent "Tell us what you think" option on the home page will ensure that in times of crisis, you have the best possible information at all times)

Even without a crisis at hand, these lessons are valuable. If you have information to deliver - whether for your brand, your product or your self, make sure you do so in a way that allows anyone interested in what you have to say to play an active role in absorbing and sharing that information. Make sure they can easily find and follow accurate, updated information and share it with others. Make sure you give them a way to send in feedback. Make sure you deliver the information in a language they understand, and in a medium that conveys both content and emotion.

These are classic tenets of communication, but sometimes it takes a crisis to remind us that they ring true each and every time.

Saving newspapers by turning them in to non-profits?

2009-03-26T00:43:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday, Reuters reported that there is a new U.S. bill seeking to rescue faltering newspapers by giving them the option to reclassify themselves as non-profit entities, rather than for-profit businesses.

[image source: manroland.com]

There's no question that traditional print media, especially print dailies, are teetering on the edge of extinction (I maintain a regular RIP Traditional Media watch as part of my Twitter feed) - but this particular remedy raises a disturbing question.

If the bill were to pass (and it's important to note that the bill doesn't currently have any sponsors beyond its author Senator Benjamin Cardin (D) MD), any paper that opted in to non-profit stats would still be free to report on political campaigns, but they would be prohibited from making political endorsements.

Papers that cover politics provide both in-depth reporting, as well as a summary of that reporting in the form of endorsements. In my experience, voters often rely on both to help them research the often complicated, confusing, and voluminous detail underlying the choices before them.

Endorsements have become as much a part of the political process as any other media tool. Without them, we risk devaluing political journalism in a fundamental sense.

Even if we save the newspapers, we may be slowly destroying the news.

PR lessons from the Civil Rights movement

2009-02-18T23:02:00.000-08:00

Given that it's Black History Month, it seems fitting to take a moment to take a moment to examine the Civil Rights movement through a PR lens.

[image: Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C., Leaders marching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, August 28, 1963.
source: National Archives]

From a PR perspective, the Civil Rights movement made its mark with powerful images.

Images of young people in suits and dresses denied service at lunch counters, old ladies with handbags and hats denied the right to vote, children surrounded by soldiers as they walked to school, fire hoses and dogs turned on civilians as they marched peacefully, and many many more. These images combined to create a clear case for why change was needed, and why those who stood in its way were on the wrong side of morality.

Those images were, in many cases, orchestrated by the leadership of the day, and they served their purpose well. (Rosa Parks was, for instance, specially trained as an activist and was the secretary of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP).

Iconic, compelling images can do more to shift culture than legal or legislative changes. When those images do not occur organically, they can be created, captured, and widely circulated.

This is, of course, classic PR. And it is the one lesson of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's that has yet to be fully internalized by the movements that have followed it - including today's most energized civil rights movement - the post-Proposition 8 incarnation of the Gay Rights movement.

Had this more modern movement taken a lesson from the tightly-scripted visual storytelling campaign at the core of the Civil Rights movement, it's possible that particular battle would have gone quite differently.

It's all speculation, of course, but the point is that PR matters. As much today as it did then.

Credit where credit is due

2009-01-07T13:27:00.001-08:00

The funny thing about using social media for PR, is that we sometimes end up caught between two opposing paradigms.

Generally speaking, writers/reporters/editors would prefer if PR were an invisible part of the process. At the end of the day, we're all working to ensure that the final written product appears to be the journalist's, rather than the publicist's, creation.

Image Source

Social media, on the other hand, works in the opposite way. The network itself finds a way to encourage views of content it deems to be useful, relevant or interesting - for whatever reason. Information - oftentimes supplied by a publicist - gets retweeted, dugg, shared on facebook and myspace, and otherwise moved up the chain of online relevance. The content of the article is what matters - not necessarily the source.

Which is exactly why using social media for PR purposes is so refreshing. Anyone - a non-profit organization, a consumer products company, or a publicity firm - can circulate information online. The only requirements are that:

The content matters to your audience
The content is complete, relevant and timely
The content is easy to navigate and share

Take advantage of the wide-open social media paradigm. Unlike the traditional PR/press paradigm, there's literally nothing standing in your way.

Twitter goes mainstream

2008-12-27T12:54:00.000-08:00

Now that the O'Reilly Radar has released their latest report Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy - 140 Characters at a Time (O'Reilly, $249, PDF), Twitter and the "micro-messaging phenomenon" have officially gone mainstream.

A number of my clients have approached me about whether or not they should use Twitter, and I've posted about using Twitter professionally before and I use Twitter myself, but as Twitter moves more solidly into the mainstream, my guess is these types of inquires will start to come in even more frequently.

The simple truth is that while both technologies and tools come and go, the ability to effectively create a conversation and tell a story are the real keys to success, especially for those of us in PR.

Before your company and/or organization decides to actively engage in the "twitterverse", begin by finding out what people are saying about your organization and/or category in these active communities. Run a simple twitter search to find patterns in the existing conversation, or follow key thought-leaders in your industry anonymously to see how they use the tool.

Watch. Learn. Listen. Then – and only then – make a conscious decision about what you want to accomplish before diving in to the conversation.

As social media – including Twitter – moves to the mainstream, more and more users will begin to dive in to it without thinking through their objectives thoroughly. This is another opportunity to use the “POST” method pioneered by Forrester Research. POST is an acronym for “People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology” and it outlines the order in which organizations should build their online social strategy. (For more information on the POST method, click here.)

While I've long advocated for the value of social media as an effective, and increasingly relevant, PR tool - I've now begun to worry that its misuse could start to do more harm than good.

Update: 1/6/08 -
An excellent resource for using Twitter for Community and Communications professionals from Brian Solis @ PR2.0.

Two new tools I love

2008-12-10T10:42:00.000-08:00

I've recently stumbled across two new tools that I love that I thought were worth sharing.

image source: http://teachers.thelanguagemenu.com/TeachersTools

Note: I'm not advertising for these companies/products - and there may be better tools out there that accomplish these tasks (if you know of any, please share them in the comments section) - I'm just excited about them and wanted to pass them along in case others find them useful as well:

1. Press Release Grader:
A simple web-based tool that checks your release for both basic PR mistakes (missing contact details, etc) and generates a word cloud that shows you how your word use appears to search engines - a critical piece of data for Search Engine Optimization. It also gives your release a numeric grade out of 100, and confirms its overall readability. It's an incredibly quick and helpful tool to help you refine your release before you send it out into the world.

2. Pitch Engine:
An elegantly designed web-based tool that allows you to easily convert your standard/traditional press release into a blog and social-media friendly SMR. It's free to use (you incur costs if you want to archive materials or group them into "newsrooms" - both of which are worth paying for if you ask me) and actually turns your press release into something useful, i.e., something that can be shared online.

Enjoy!

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Update 1/14 - PRN has a press release optimizer as well here. Any other tools out there that deserve to be shared?

Making the most of your press release

2008-11-26T10:35:00.000-08:00

A good article in the Non-Profit Times newsletter today with a reminder of when it's useful to send out a press release, and when it's not.

I've blogged a few times before about what it takes to create a good release, and how best to send out your pitch, but it's been a while - so I'm happy to have the opportunity to post this helpful little checklist from NPT as a reminder.

I've copied the article below to save you the click, but please do take the time to subscribe to some of NPT's newsletters yourself, I often find their information incredibly useful.

Enjoy -
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Marketing ... 6 things the media really wants

The news media can help get the word out about your organization – if you know how to reach them. Press releases can inform journalists and editors about your organization and hook them for a story.

But, you should know what kind of news makes it to print before sending out a press release, according to Janet Rice McCoy, assistant professor at Morehead State University, and Jeanette Drake, associate professor at Kent State University, at Blackbaud’s 2008 Conference for NonProfits. So what are journalists looking for?

Timeliness. It’s great to find out about a Halloween fundraiser – but not in April. Call journalists and find out how much time in advance they need story ideas.

Magnitude. Will your information effect five people or an entire state?
Impact. Journalists want to know what will happen. If you miss a fundraising goal, do you just shrug your shoulders and try again next year? Or will it keep you from feeding 100 people? Let the journalists know what numbers mean to your organization.

Human interest. Numbers only get so far. People want to read stories about others. See if a constituent or donor would be willing to talk about what the organization did, or does, for them.

Celebrity. TMZ isn’t the only media outlet that loves celebrity. Known names can help make headlines – and sell papers.

Proximity. Not all news is national. If you are a state or regional nonprofit, try to tailor news to what will happen in specific communities. If you are a local nonprofit, make sure you explain how things will hit home.

Novelty. Everything in your organization may be exciting to you, but another fundraiser will not lure journalists – or readers. Try to find a new spin that makes your events note-worthy.

The Power Of Visual Media

2008-11-21T17:12:00.000-08:00

Much has been made of the latest video showing turkeys being killed as Sarah Palin addressed the media during the traditional Thanksgiving day tradition of granting a pardon to one of the birds.

source: MSNBC.com

Without commenting on Gov. Sarah Palin as a politician, this does present an excellent chance to talk about the power of the visual media.

In the video, the Governor is responding to a reporter's questions about the recent Presidential campaign and her current duties as the Governor of Alaska. Her comments, however, take a back seat to the visual activity in the camera frame showing the bloody work of an employee slaughtering birds behind her.

Two key publicity principals are illustrated by this footage:

Motion matters:
The fact that the man slaughtering the birds was in motion is key. Our eyes are drawn to anything that moves, especially when the things around it are stationary. In this case, even if the employee had been doing something else entirely with the birds - like feeding them or herding them into a pen - it still would have distracted from viewer's ability to follow Sarah Palin's responses to the reporter's questions.
Lesson: If you are responsible for your organization's publicity and you have video camera's on site, be sure you know exactly what's happening within the camera's frame of reference.
Connect with your surroundings:
The fact that Palin never addressed the slaughter going on behind her is also problematic. Viewer's expect that the action they're watching to be the subject of the conversation at hand. Although the reporter didn't ask any specific questions about the slaughter, Palin - were she more media savvy - should have found a way to address the activity.
Lesson: If you are acting as an on-camera spokesperson for your organization, be acutely aware of your surroundings. If the activity in the background is not part of the conversation, find a way to weave it in to your responses to the press to show the audience that you're paying attention - even if the reporters aren't.

Storytelling During The Economic Crisis

2008-10-13T09:35:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting article in today's AdAge that talks about why different corporations are maintaining their cause efforts during the economic crisis.

In a down economy, marketing is one of the first expenses businesses generally cut. The fact that cause marketing is being spared - or even increased - during this downturn speaks to how clearly corporations see their efforts to "do well by doing good" return value to their bottom line.

The key takeaway here is storytelling. Corporations that attach their product to a larger social conversation are able to create a story that resonates with their audience in a new, and powerful, way.

The example of the Campbell's soup cans above illustrates this well. Generally speaking, mothers buy soup. Generally speaking, women are primarily impacted by breast cancer. Buy tying the two together, Campbell's is able to reinforce the narrative that it cares about women, and that by purchasing it's soup, consumers can contribute to a fight they're likely to care deeply about themselves.

This entire narrative can be conveyed through a cause marketing effort in a much more effective way than through traditional marketing efforts. The storytelling matters. And companies aren't going to give up on that any time soon - no matter how bad the economy gets.

Guerrilla PR - Quad Cities speaking tour

2008-08-18T23:52:00.000-07:00

If you happen to find yourself in Iowa on September 17th or 18th, feel free to come on by the Quad City Public Relations Society of America, the Quad City AdFed and Quad City PR Network to hear me talk about how to use Guerrilla PR tactics to get press for your clients.

I'll be giving the talk twice - once on the 17th in Dubuque and once on the 18th in Davenport.

If you can't make it - here's a brief description of what I'll be discussing. Of course, if you think there are other tactics that are worth discussing, leave me a comment below!

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Guerrilla PR
In today’s media landscape, getting great press for a client takes more than sending out a press release or staging a publicity stunt, it takes true guerilla techniques: nimble thinking, unexpected execution, and a willingness to try something that’s never been done before. The one thing that’s not required? A PR firm. This is do-it-yourself PR at its finest, and it’s available to anyone, anywhere at any time.

Focal Points
Guerrilla PR 101: What is guerrilla PR, where did it come from, and why does it matter? To begin the session we’ll examine the differences between traditional and guerrilla PR tactics, and explore why these tactics grab the attention of both the press and consumers where traditional PR often fails. Finally, we’ll examine how access to new technologies has expanded the role of guerrilla PR in unexpected ways.

Guerrilla Tactic #1: Perception = Reality:
Professional uniforms confer authority, designer labels create value. What impact do consumer perceptions have on your client’s product or service, and what can you do about it? In this portion of the session we’ll examine case studies of guerrilla PR tactics that made headlines – for better or for worse – in terms of consumer perceptions.
Guerrilla Tactic #2: Tease | Twist | Tell:
PR is about storytelling – but a story tends to be more interesting when it’s broken up into small pieces, or when there’s an unexpected twist. Using teases and twists before revealing the whole story helps generate and maintain both press and public interest in exciting ways. In this portion of the session we’ll examine case studies that illustrate how partitioning a PR message into distinct parts can change its impact.
Guerrilla Tactic #3: New is News:
To make news, you have to create something new. Traditional publicity “stunts” are designed to capitalize on this fact, and are valuable when they do so successfully. When they backfire, though, they can sometimes do more harm than good. In this portion of the session we’ll examine publicity stunts that achieved their objectives – and some that didn’t – to clarify how to create the kind of news headlines that will benefit, rather than damage, a client’s PR efforts.

Creating your elevator pitch

2008-08-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

Quick. You're in an elevator and you have 3 floors to tell me what you do and why it matters.

Can you spit it out? Probably not. In my experience, most people fret over their "elevator pitch" and end up with something so long it would last until the 24th floor.

Here's a little help. Complete this sentence and you've got yourself a pitch:

We're the only __________________
that _________________________
for __________________________

It's simple, but not easy. Take the time now to work with your team and come up with a complete sentence that rings true for you.

You might just lose your fear of elevators.

The Conversation Prism

2008-08-12T23:20:00.000-07:00

Brian Solis is one of the most widely respected practitioners at the intersection of social media technology and PR today. A few days ago, he posted an item on his blog called Introducing The Conversation Prism which explores how virtual conversations are happening today - taking in to account all of the different social media options available.

I've reposted the image here because I think it's probably the first comprehensive visual representation of the current state of social media. Which, by definition, means that it's absolutely ground-breaking.

For most of the media's history, the mechanics of conversation were simpler - but much less democratic. Broadcasters and publishers spoke to audiences, and audiences listened. Now that audiences are able to speak as well - through any mechanism that's comfortable to them - broadcasters and publishers (and the advertisers that fund them) are scrambling to learn how to listen and respond.

Solis says in his post:

If a conversation takes place online and you’re not there to hear or see it, did it actually happen?
Indeed. Conversations are taking place with or without you and this map will help you visualize the potential extent and pervasiveness of the online conversations that can impact and influence your business and brand. [...]
As conversations are increasingly distributed, everything begins with listening and observing. Doing so, will help you identify exactly where relevant discussions are taking place, as well as their scale and frequency.

Indeed.

Getting ready for the media

2008-07-13T15:30:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, a great on-air press opportunity for your organization can be a bad thing. If you're not ready for an on-camera, or on-air interview, a great press opportunity can actually backfire - and make your organization look unprepared at best, and unprofessional at worst.

[photo credit: ccarlstead]

I've referred my readers to the Spin Project many times before for great, basic information about how to interact with the media. Their latest tutorial on Broadcast Media and Spokesperson Skills is another wonderful resource for those preparing to go on the air to represent their organization. There are many other, similarly useful guides available online and off. I encourage you to seek them out and use them often.

That said, no matter what reference materials you use to prepare, there is one, immutable truth about appearing on-air:

It isn’t what you say, it’s what they hear.

No matter how prepared you are, how eloquent you are, or how on-message you are, if your audience hears something other than you intended them to, it isn't their fault - it's yours.

So, how do you ensure your message gets across?

1. Preparation:
The key to any press appearance is preparation. You need to know your material so well that the lights, cameras, tough questions and combative opponents don't throw you off of your key messages. Your organization's history, mission, impact, evolution, growth and challenges are all fair game. You need to be able to answer questions about any of them eloquently, accurately, and - most importantly - in 7 seconds or less.

2. Appearance:
When you're on television - what you say is judged by how you look. Your messages will be lost if you don't appear to be credible source - no matter how much you know about your topic.

Be sure to dress well. When in doubt, be conservative. For television appearances, avoid bright colors as well as too much black or white neutral colors are best. Never wear clothing with patterns, stripes, dots or floral designs. Avoid big jewelry, button, slogans or flashy watches. Wear makeup (yes, even men) and smile. Sit-up straight, use natural hand gestures, and make eye contact with the interviewer - don't look around or be distracted by movement off-camera. And above all, stay calm - no matter how argumentative the other guests, or the host might be. It's your job to appear as the most reasonable and rational person on the show.

Some other things you can do to appear comfortable and confident on-air are:
Watch, or listen to, previous episodes of the show to familiarize yourself with its format, environment and audience.
Know the name of the interviewer and any other guests you’ll be appearing with.
Know the slant of the piece or topic of the show.
Know how long you’ll be on the air, and know your key messages (the facts you want to get across to the interviewer & audience) inside and out so you will be sure to deliver them during the interview.
Speak slowly - focus on pronouncing each word fully, pausing between sentences, and adding extra emphasis to key points.
SMILE! If you're on television you will appear to be more relaxed, and if you're on the radio it will sweeten the tone of your voice - which makes you sound more interesting.
Before the interview begins, warm up your voice and be sure you have access to a glass of water to keep yourself hydrated.
For radio interviews, be sure you're in a quiet room on a land-line with the call-waiting disabled, and be sure all other phones, radios and other devices are turned off (they can cause reverb and confusion).
3. Brevity:
Speak in a conversational tone but remember this is NOT a conversation, get to the point, speak with emphasis and be brief - good sound-bites are rarely more than 7 seconds long.
Be sure to pause so that the audience doesn't lose track of your point, and so that you don't appear to be rambling. Remember, you are the expert on your key points, speak with confidence - and avoid filler words or sentences (uh, um, ifs, ands, wherefores, maybes, etc. are more noticeable on air than they are in regular conversations).

Consistent practice, coaching and preparation will help you take advantage of the on-air press opportunities that come your way. It's smart to begin those efforts now, rather than waiting until you're scheduled to appear in the studio. When you have the chance to deliver your organization's message to thousands of viewers and listeners at once, you'll want to be sure you're ready.

Marketing vs. Conversation

2008-07-13T15:06:00.000-07:00

Social Media Today ran a great post recently dealing with the difference between marketing and conversations.

The core message of the post was:

"Conversations are between two or more people. If marketers want to create buzz throughout the social web then they’d better represent a product/service that exceeds people’s expectations. Otherwise trying to interrupt conversations with a product or service that hasn’t performed well may in fact turn the conversations against you."

This is a key point that many organizations miss when they dive in to social networking. It's not enough to join in the conversation. You actually have to have something to say.

Social networking is not an internet phenomena - it's simply an extension of everyday conversations into an electronic medium. Just like at a cocktail party, if you were to walk up to a group of people that are already talking, you'd come off as odd if you were to immediately start speaking about something that's off-topic. Eventually the group would ignore you, and eventually they would shut you out of their conversation altogether if you didn't stop talking.

If you're trying to draw attention to your organization, project or idea in a social networking environment, begin by listening. Only chime in when you have something valuable to add to the conversation.

It's a good rule of thumb both online and off.

The Importance of Storytelling

2008-06-26T17:11:00.000-07:00

I spend a lot of time discussing the importance of storytelling for both non-profit and for-profit communications on this blog.

[photo credit: luiginter]

Storytelling has also been a popular topic in the advertising industry lately. Today's Ad Age ran a piece entitled: (Author)ity: The Importance of Storytelling, in which they quoted Avenue A's recently published "Digital Outlook Report" which had this to say about the subject:

'Narrative is the experience. As the Web becomes the preferred destination for brand exploration, digital experiences must become richer, deeper, and more able to tell compelling stories. If your brand experience depends entirely on pages and clicks, it's time to wonder, 'What is my story?'

The thing that continues to strike me through all of these efforts to examine the role of storytelling within the worlds of business and philanthropy, is the sense that we need to justify the use of storytelling as a mechanism.

Culturally, we associate stories with children. We relegate them to the realm of fantasy and of entertainment. We don't consider them a tool. We don't take them seriously.

In fact, though, stories are the interface to the human brain. They provide the method by which we transfer data from one person to another. They are the keyboard plugged directly into our mental CPU.

Skilled storytelling allows us to take advantage of culturally-defined shortcuts on the keyboard - making data transfer that much more efficient and effective.

When we, as communicators, use familiar storylines (like the "fish out of water" tale, or the "journey to a distant land" tale) we can skip over known quantities, simply fill in a few bits and pieces of new information, and still effectively present a complex point. More importantly, because the end of these familiar stories are essentially pre-determined, our audience is more likely to accept our story's outcome as credible if it follows a familiar pattern.

Our culture's stories create the filing system that allow us to quickly access information. They provide the tools we use to distinguish good from evil, and fact from fiction. In fact, when we encounter cultures that don't share our stories, we are often entirely unable to communicate.

Stories are not limited to childhood. They define our everyday lives. Individuals, organizations and corporations that discount their value run the risk of failing to communicate altogether.

Rockefeller 2.0: Gates relaunches philanthropy

2008-06-25T01:14:00.000-07:00

What could you do with unlimited resources?

Photo credit: Denis / Redux Pictures

The Gates foundation - with $37.5 billion in cash - is facing that question now, and a number of non-profits are watching intently to see what the outcome will be.

A recent article on MSNBC.com (Rockefeller 2.0: Gates relaunches philanthropy - Giving- msnbc.com) sums up the problem, and the possibilities, this way:

“I meet many high net-worth individuals that are watching Gates and what he does and how he does it, and that’s really exciting in a behavioral way,” says Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. “It opens up people’s minds to what’s possible with philanthropy today.” Jeff Raikes, the Microsoft executive who was recently named as the foundation’s new CEO, told Fortune magazine in June: “Bill has an incredible opportunity to help shape the thinking of other multibillionaires by getting them to think about the process, the structure, the best practices” of giving money away."

What to expect from PR

2008-06-18T19:34:00.001-07:00

An excellent post today at Media Bistro by Whitney McKnight about what a company (or an organization) should expect to accomplish with PR.

To paraphrase the article's main points:

Set clear goals
Create a message platform and at least six month's worth of news hooks within the first week.
Have more than a good story -- have the right story
Agree on exactly what your best story is. Ask the question, 'Why should people care?"
Go local
People care about their communities, so they turn to the local media to know what's going on. Local press interest will also help your organization prepare and practice for its moment in the national spotlight.
Connect
Successful PR today is about having great conversations, telling people what you've learned, and what impact that's had.
Work the plan
Establishing storylines and a workable timeframe that is tied to your organization's goals makes it easier to land appropriate stories in the media.
Don't confuse strategic PR with publicity
Getting press too early - when your organization isn't prepared for it - can actually make your job harder and lead to lost opportunity. You risk ending up being perceived incorrectly because you aren't clear about your message, and you risk alienating key press contacts.
Stay up to date
Do you know the trends in your own industry? How do you stay informed about new theories and cutting-edge technologies? If a reporter calls and knows more about your industry than you do, you risk losing the opportunity to be a part of a breaking story.

Publicity for publicity's sake should never be your goal. Clear, strategic communications planning is always worth the effort in the end.

Cause Marketing Case Study - Crate And Barrel

2008-06-13T02:19:00.000-07:00

A great case study from the weekly NonProfit Times newsletter came out yesterday. Unfortunately, it doesn't appear on their website anywhere (that I could locate), so the full text from the newsletter is copied below.

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Crate And Barrel campaign ties consumers to cause
Thursday, June 12, 2008

In trying to help teachers do their jobs better, the for-profit corporation Crate And Barrel learned a valuable lesson: Doing Good is Good for Business.

Crate And Barrel partnered with DonorsChoose.org in a campaign that was outlined at the recent Cause Marketing Forum in Chicago by Crate and Barrel director of marketing Kathy Paddor and DonorsChoose.org executive vice president of strategy and development Brita Lombardi.

Crate and Barrel customers were given gift certificates, custom designed with both brands, that they could redeem on the nonprofit’s Web site. The organization links teachers who request materials and experiences their students need with donors who give to the need they find most compelling. A total of $3.6 million in gift certificates was distributed. Google and Yahoo! use the gift certificates, too.

The redemption rate for spring 2006, spring 2007 and fall 2007 was 11.81 percent, with $558,394 raised for the nonprofit.

Polling results from a test group (which received the gift certificates) compared to a control group (which did not) showed:

82 percent of the test group said they would consider Crate and Barrel for their next home furnishing purchase, compared to 76 percent of the control group.
86 percent perceived Crate and Barrel as a high-quality company, compared to 76 percent of the control group.
75 percent saw Crate and Barrel as community minded, compared to 21 percent of the control group.
74 percent perceived Crate and Barrel as “the store for me,” compared to 64 percent of the control group.
____________

To be clear, this blog is about PR and communications for non-profits, not marketing strategies for large corporations. Still, there's an important lesson in this case study that should resonate with non-profit leaders and communicators: Perception = Reality.

In this case study, the two groups of consumers experienced exactly the same store and products ad sales associates, but those who were given the option to take a philanthropic action after leaving the store, perceived their experience very differently.

While your non-profit probably can't hand out gift-certificates to every person that interacts with your organization, what can you do to ensure they walk away from each experience they have with your organization with a positive perception? Are your volunteers thanked? Your event-attendees featured in organization newsletters and local media? Your visitors (whether online or off) welcomed and provided clear, compelling information?

What can you organization do today to improve the way that others perceive it? If you can improve the way others perceive your organization, you will be making a very real difference in your organization's overall success.

Know Your Audience

2008-05-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

In their May 08 newsletter, BurrellsLuce explores the current state of the generation gap – and how that gap can, and should, impact our communications efforts.

The fundamental question for those responsible for their organization's communications, is how best to communicate your organization's message across a multi-generational audience? Since each generation has formed with different shared values and communication preferences, what's the right way to make your message resonate across the generation gap?

[photo credit: joi]

The first step is to understand what seminal experiences each generation has shared. Although different sources list them with slight variations, the following generalizations are fairly common and are used in the BurrellsLuce newsletter:

Traditionalists (born before 1946) — lived through the Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II, and the Korean War.
Boomers (1947 to 1964) — experienced the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, space travel, and assassinations.
Generation X (1965 to 1976) — dealt with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Watergate, women's liberation, Desert Storm, and the energy crisis.
Millennial (1977 to 1989) — grew up during a time of school shootings, the Oklahoma City bombing, technology, and the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal.

With this information in hand, the next step is to evaluate what core belief each group shares. Again, these are taken from the BurrellesLuce article, but they are widely accepted:

Traditionalists Boomers Xers Millennial

Hard work Optimism Diversity Optimism

Dedication and sacrifice Team orientation Techno literacy Civic duty

Respect for rules Personal gratification Fun and informality Confident

Duty before pleasure Involvement Self-reliance Achievement oriented

Honor Personal growth Pragmatism Respect for diversity

Traditionalists	Boomers	Xers	Millennial
Hard work	Optimism	Diversity	Optimism
Dedication and sacrifice	Team orientation	Techno literacy	Civic duty
Respect for rules	Personal gratification	Fun and informality	Confident
Duty before pleasure	Involvement	Self-reliance	Achievement oriented
Honor	Personal growth	Pragmatism	Respect for diversity

Your core donors probably fall into just one of the four groups listed above. It's dangerous, though, to assume that you only need to talk to that group to achieve your goals. We're all aging. Your organization needs to reach out to younger generations now – to build relationships that will develop those young people into donors, board leaders, and policy advocates over time.

Reaching across generations requires that you understand the demographics of your supporter base as it currently stands, and understand how you want those demographics to evolve over time. You'll also need to understand how each group gets their information.

If you typically communicate with Boomers – who tend to view themselves as team players – remember that Millennials tend to see themselves as confident individuals. To reach them, your organization might need to consider adjusting its "boilerplate" messaging – or consider crafting a series of messages that can be used when targeting specific audiences.

Creating Conversations

2008-05-23T01:32:00.000-07:00

Many organizations have experimented with various social technologies, ranging from maintaining blogs to setting up profiles on popular social networking sites. The most successful of these efforts were originally designed as part of an ongoing effort to create a constant, two-way conversation between the organization and its constituents. The technology is merely a vehicle for that conversation, the conversation itself is the objective.

photo credit: Dano

The key is to ensure the conversation clearly connects to the organization’s larger objectives. Any conversation that occurs in a vacuum, whether online or off, simply isn’t sustainable. A generally accepted way to design a successful online social strategy is the “POST” method pioneered by Forrester Research. POST is an acronym for “People, Objectives, Strategy, Technology” and it outlines the order in which organizations should build their online social strategy.

People
How do the people that your organization is trying to reach use technology? Are they already using Facebook and MySpace? Have they discovered Twitter? Are they joining groups online? Do they rely more heavily on email and listservs? What is changing about their behavior?

Task: Design, distribute and analyze a survey to gather information about the online habits of your organization's target audiences.

Objectives
Given how your audiences use technology, what are your organization's objectives for implementing a social technology strategy? In general, Web 2.0 technologies allow organizations to more efficiently and effectively listen to their existing constituents, talk to new constituents, and energize and support existing constituents and staff.

Task: Articulate both the short-term and long-term objectives that your organization is trying to achieve through this effort. Assign measurable goals to each stated objective.

Strategy
After identifying your objectives, what is your strategy to achieve them? A deep understanding of which Web 2.0 technologies and approaches work for which objectives is the best place to start.

Task: Explore and evaluate existing technologies such as MySpace, Facebook, blogging software, listservs, online groups, and others. Map the strengths and weaknesses of each relative to your stated goals and available resources.

Technology
Once the other steps are done, then your organization will be able to focus on which technologies to use, and how to structure the implementation of each technology option.

Task: Choose those technologies which are most likely to help your organization achieve its stated objectives. Determine tasks, agree to timelines, and assign responsibilities.

Once complete, your organization's social networking strategy will help create an online arena for people to ask and answer questions, share their stories, and find support. It will help position your organization as a trusted resource, and handy reference. It will also help position your organizations as a technologically savvy, state-of-the art institution.

The Cluetrain Manifesto - 10 Years Later

2008-05-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

The Cluetrain Manifesto was the first inkling of the brave new world of online, open, transparent conversations between companies and consumers. And it predicted that those companies that got a clue sooner rather than later would benefit dramatically from doing so.

Ten years after it was first published, its message is still just as timely. Two great quotes that sum up the thesis of the book are:

"A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies."

and:

“The long silence — the industrial interruption of the human conversation — is coming to an end. On the Internet, markets are getting more connected and more powerfully vocal every day. These markets want to talk, just as they did for the thousands of years that passed before market became a verb with us as its object.”

Sally Falkow makes the connection to the world of PR in her recent post:

"the Net certainly has changed that situation in the last ten years. As PR people you’d think we’d be the first ones to get this clue. After all, PR is about communication and conversations... Better late than never. Don’t let another ten years go by. This is the core of PR today. Get the clue and get on board."

If you haven't read the book, it's time. Don't let another 10 years go by before you get the clue.

How Do You Get Your News?

2008-05-15T23:51:00.001-07:00

I get my news from a lot of places. Every day I watch 3 different newscasts, I listen to 4 news radio shows, and I read more print news in more publications than I can count.

But something has changed over the past several years. I watch, listen to and read the news on my own time, in my own way. I've quietly shifted my media consumption to match my own needs, and I'm not alone.

[photo credit: Pingu1963]

I used to listen to NPR's All Things Considered every morning, but now I download NPR's The Bryant Park Project and WNYC's The Takeaway instead - not because the information is better or more interesting (although the content is clearly geared towards a younger audience), but because they're delivered as podcasts and I can listen to them on my own time. I used to watch morning and evening national broadcast TV news shows, but now I record them and watch them when I have time - sometimes not even on the day they were broadcast. I used to receive and read a stack of newspapers every morning, now I scan through my RSS reader to check for headlines that are relevant to me from more than 300 different sources.

And, despite all of that, I get most of my breaking news from Twitter and Facebook. At the end of the day (figuratively speaking), I rely on my social network - people who share my interests - to keep me informed as the media and information landscape changes throughout the day.

The reason all this matters is that regular publicity efforts haven't kept pace with all of these changes. Your organization is as likely to make headlines by maintaining a relevant twitter feed as it is by sending out press releases to a list of reporters in Cision. Sending an alert to your organization's Facebook group is as likely to generate attention as scheduling a press conference.

How are your donors and supporters receiving their news and information these days? Has it changed? Are there new ways to reach them that you haven't explored? When was the last time you asked them? When was the last time you asked your own staff how they get their news. You might be surprised by what you hear.

2008 SPIN Academy Applications Open

2008-05-12T12:31:00.000-07:00

The applications for this year's SPIN Academy are now open. This year's SPIN Academy will take place August 13-17 in Petaluma, CA.

The SPIN Academy, the SPIN Project's signature training conference, is a residential retreat that offers progressive leaders affordable, comprehensive communications training and support. The Academy helps organizations dedicated to social change become more media-savvy. It is ideal for activists new to communications who work regularly with the media and want to improve the progressive movement. The training includes:

Strategic communications planning
Organizational capacity building through improved communications
Communications leadership growth and networking
Practical communications tactics and skills

Experienced Academy trainers lead more than 15 workshops. Participants meet one-on-one with expert consultants, build individual media strategies and receive valuable resources to support their ongoing work, including the Train the Trainers Kit to help participants lead media trainings of their own.

Participants develop cross-movement relationships with other activists faced with the challenge of earning media attentions for progressive issues. This forms a deeper understanding of the connection between strategic communications and the success of progressive movements.

For more information, visit http://www.spinproject.org/SPINAcademy.
For other questions, contact academy@spinproject.org.

The Perfect Pitch

2008-05-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

To get great media coverage, it's not enough just to write a press release, send it out to the media, and then wait for reporters to call. While that might work for regular news makers like Facebook, or the Federal Reserve, most organizations will need to also craft a press pitch and send it out to reporters one by one.

A pitch is a short, targeted message designed to get a specific reporter interested in what you have to say. Its purpose is to open the door to a more detailed conversation by piquing curiosity. It's like an appetizer that arrives before the main course.

[photo credit: flyfshrmn98]

Since each pitch will need to be tailored to each individual reporter, your press list is a critical part of the pitch process. Who is currently writing about your sector? Which reporters have covered your organization before? Focus on 5 - 7 critical reporters and begin to craft a pitch letter for each.

A good pitch answers 5 critical questions that a reporter is bound to have:

Who the heck are you?
A pitch is a personal communication. It's a personalized message sent from you to a unique reporter. If they don't know you already, you need to give them a reason to read your message. Were you given their contact information by a mutual friend? Were you impressed by a story they wrote recently on a similar topic? Why are you contacting them instead of someone else? Make it personal, and make it relevant. If you don't have any way to tie your message in to this specific reporter, they're probably not the right person to receive your pitch.
Why the heck should I care about what you have to say?
Reporters only care about stories that will interest their regular readers. If you can't directly tie your story to their audience, move on. If your story doesn't bring a new twist or angle to a topic that their audience already knows a lot about, move on. If you can't give them something they couldn't find anywhere else, move on. Your job is to make their job easier. If you can't do that, move on.
What is this all about?
Boil your entire story down to the briefest possible description. Try to express your entire story in two sentences. Three at the most. Give enough of a taste of the story to get your point across, without going into the detail provided by your press release.
Does anybody else care about this story?
If your story has already gotten some press, don't be shy about noting prior coverage. Success breeds success. Letting the reporter know that others have found this story interesting might help tip the scales as they decide whether or not to cover your story. A word of caution though: if your story is old news, a reporter is unlikely to be interested in re-hashing it. Highlight coverage that doesn't overlap with the reporter's audience, or that demonstrates your organization has experience working with the media.
How do I find out more?
Be specific about how the reporter can contact you or find out additional information on their own. Include your direct phone number and email address, and suggest some times or days within the next week or two that are open on your calendar. Include a link to your organization's online press kit (if you have one).

Just like in baseball, great pitching takes lots of practice and lots of effort. If it gets your organization more coverage, though, it's well worth it.

Who's Your Messenger?

2008-05-01T23:05:00.000-07:00

When you communicate with people who are interested in your organization and it's cause - who do you use to deliver your message?

[photo credit: blmurch ]

If you're like most organizations, most of your communications sound something like this – "We'd like you to know about X" or "We were able to accomplish Y." Why not let those who benefit most directly deliver your message in their own voice?

Katya Andresen wrote today about making room for the "unlikely yet completely authentic messengers for an important cause" – those who are directly impacted by it. One of her blog's readers went on to make this important point:

When citizens own, operate, and market to other citizens, the cause becomes rooted in the community at a level of connectivity that makes it more likely to succeed and grow.

Did your last communication include any room for your organization's message to be delivered in the first person? Is there a section in your newsletter reserved for testimonials? Have you ever asked people to submit their own stories about how they've been impacted by your organization?

Who better to tell your organization's story than someone who knows first-hand how important your work is – precisely because it's made a difference in their lives.

Who's Talking About Your Organization?

2008-04-21T12:29:00.000-07:00

Did you ever wish you could be a fly on the wall – listening to what your members, donors and supporters are saying about you when they're casually chatting with their friends and neighbors?

[photo credit: psd]

Hopefully, they're saying nothing but good things about your organization – but what if they're not? What if they're passing along outdated or incorrect information? What if they're griping about things you could easily change if you only knew?

Social media (aka "social networking") – including Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and others – has created an enormous, global, non-stop conversation. Some of those conversations might be about you - and if they are, wouldn't you want to know?

There are a number of ways to keep track of online conversations that are about your organization. I've posted before about using Google Alerts as a tool for precisely this need, but some new tools have emerged, including TweetScan and Yahoo!Pipes (note: creating a new Yahoo!Pipe is definitely for more advanced users - but the Social Media Firehose Pipe is already set up and very easy to use). With all this information at your fingertips, it's worth taking the time to find out what people have to say.

Jason Alcorn and Shabbir Imber Safdar wrote a wonderful case study that illustrates how keeping track of what people are saying in the social media universe can help make a difference in your organization's communications strategy.

Now more than ever, knowing really is half the battle.

When to Use Stories Instead Of Statistics

2008-04-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

Kivi Leroux Miller posted recently about when to use stories rather than statistics to make your organization's case to potential donors, volunteers and supporters.

[photo credit: luiginter]

I've posted often about the value of storytelling in non-profit environments, and I'm pleased to see others making similar points. I've summarized Kivi's post (which is definitely worth reading in its entirety) below:

What Do Other People Think About This Group?
Answer with Testimonials. When someone is learning about you for the first time, they’ll be curious what other people think about your organization, your staff and your effectiveness.
Are People Here Like Me?
Answer with Profiles. When someone donates time or money to your organization, they are joining a virtual community of people who believe in the same cause.
Does This Work?
Answer with Success Stories. Do you get the job done? Are you going to make a difference with the money I give you? Success stories show donors (and potential new donors) exactly what it is you do and how you do it.
What Difference Can a Single Person Make?
Answer with Personalized Giving Options. Big problems are overwhelming. One way to overcome this problem is to focus on the difference that a single person can make and clearly demonstrate through storytelling that a new donor, as a single individual, can bring about change by supporting your organization.
Can I Come Along?
Answer with Personal Chronicles. For your supporters to fully engage with your nonprofit, you have to be willing to share what’s really going on.

Does your organization follow these simple guidelines when interacting with potential supporters? If not, it's worth making the effort to do so.

The Value of Volunteers

2008-04-20T17:51:00.001-07:00

The NonProfit Times just released an article with the headline "Volunteers Worth 3.3 Times Minimum Wage." Given that federal minimum wage is $5.85 an hour - that means that each volunteer hour is worth $19.51 to your organization.

[photo credit: Coed]

Your volunteers are much more than an auxiliary workforce. They're the front lines of your organization in the community. They represent your organization as they move through their social circles, and they are the ones who carry your organization's message farther than your marketing efforts ever could.

Most organizations value their volunteers tremendously - but few assign a dollar value to their worth. If your organization were to do so, what would your volunteers add to your bottom line? If the number is significant (maybe more than a staff person's annual salary), it might be time to make sure you're getting enough bang for your buck.

When was the last time you examined your organization's volunteer program? Could you, without hesitating, draw a map of a volunteer's experience with your organization from the moment they transition into your volunteer program, to the moment they transition out?

Given the amount of money at stake, it might well be worth your time.

Making your organization's website work for you

2008-04-15T20:59:00.000-07:00

So many of my clients have websites that were designed by "Volunteer Bob" - who used to code HTML back during the DotCom bubble. Now, Bob doesn't answer emails and phone calls promptly, no one knows how the site really works, and making even the simplest changes is like pulling teeth.

[photo credit: tyger_lyllie]

This is a problem - and not one to be taken lightly. Your donors, volunteers, and constituents expect you to have an online presence that works. It's not optional, it's required.

If you're unable to quickly link to new news stories that appear online about your organization, your press efforts are partially wasted. If you're unable to invite people to join your mailing list, donate money, or RSVP to an event, your organization is missing out on enormous fund raising and goodwill opportunities. If you can't keep your online press kit (Nancy Schwartz's article is also a great reference for information about online press kits) up to date, journalists may opt to cover another organization in your sector that has more readily accessible information.

If keeping your site updated is a constant headache - consider taking the following steps:

Take the time to decide what you want your site to do.
Work with your team to map out, on paper, how each page of your site should look and behave. Take social networking options into account, be clear about who is responsible for maintaining and updating each section of the site, and set a schedule for those updates. A great way to do this is to draw outlines of each page on regular sheets of copier paper, and then tape them up on the wall of a conference to form a giant, life-sized map of your site.
Contact a reputable local web development firm.
Your going to need professional help. It's going to cost money. Using volunteer assistance is probably what caused your problems in the first place. The amount of time, energy and anxiety you've probably already expended is likely to be easily offset by finding someone to do it right the first time. [Some great firms in the Bay Area are Advancing Ideas, and Creative B'stro]
Ask them the following questions:
(a) "Will you provide a back-end interface?" - This interface will allow you to make simple changes to your own site without having to go through a third party
(b) "Do you use open source CMS applications?" - Content Management System (or CMS) applications are engines which store content in a database for use on your site. This means the content isn't "hard-coded" into each page of your site. This is good, because it means you can change the content in the database (through the back-end mentioned in #1) and it wil automatically appear on the site. Open source is good because it means a lot of people are using it and are constantly making it better.
(c) "Do you provide training?" - You're going to need it, and you don't want to end up paying extra for it.
(d) "Do you provide both design and development?" - This could be a great opportunity to consider both re-designing your website and creating a way to make keeping it updated easier. Some shops do both, and do both well. Others specialize in just design, or just development. Know which skills you need, and which they offer, before you begin.

Expect to spend between $75 - $100 an hour for their services. And expect each page of your site to take them about 2 hours to develop. Also be sure to build in time for revisions and changes. And expect to do a full refresh of your site at least every other year.

If your site is losing money and members just because it's out of date, hard to navigate, or difficult to use, think about how much money those problems are costing your organization over a 12 month period. Spending money now on getting your site in shape is a wise investment for most organizations.

What's your keyword?

2008-04-14T12:28:00.000-07:00

One of the most important goals of your organization's communications plan should be to make sure people can find your organization when they are looking for information about your sector.

Does your organization's website appear at the top of search results that include keywords for your sector? A study by RankStat.com confirms that that "most people use 2 word phrases in search engines. Of all search engines world wide, 28.38 percent use 2 word phrases, 27.15 percent use 3 word phrases and 16.42 percent 4 word phrases."

[photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg]

This is a critical piece of data. It means that most people only type in 2 or 3 words when they're searching for information. If you had to express your organization's mission, purpose, vision and values in only 2 or 3 words, which words would they be? If you aren't sure, now is the time to come up with a strategy, and create a plan of action. By elevating the chances that you'll appear in the search results of those looking for organization's like yours online, you're guaranteed to increase your organization's visibility - which is more than can be said for more traditional publicity efforts like mailing out a press release.

Once you've taken the time to determine what your keyword strategy should be - spend the time to make sure your materials - both online and offline - use those keywords deliberately. It's not enough to bury them in your mission statement - or on the "about us" page of your website. Your keywords should be visible everywhere, and repeated as often as possible (without negatively impacting the quality of your written content).

The more you reinforce your keywords' connection to your agency, the more the search engines will do so as well. This practice is often called Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) and it's worth the effort if your organization doesn't appear on the first page of the search results for your chosen keywords.

Taking A Lesson From Starbucks

2008-03-24T18:24:00.001-07:00

Starbucks recently waded into Web 2.0 with its new offering mystarbucksidea.com. The site is designed to allow Starbuck's customers to post, share and discuss their ideas about the company and its products.

I spend a lot of time on this blog encouraging my readers to find ways to do exactly what Starbucks is attempting to do here. In an interactive world, it's critical that both corporations and organizations find ways to have conversations with their constituents in a meaningful and transparent way.

The Starbucks site, however, serves as a somewhat cautionary tale. By creating a online "suggestion box" without also imposing a clear structure, Starbucks risks missing out on hearing clear, focused comments from its users. The site is already being criticized for being "unwieldy" — with "lots of wayward ideas ... suggested [and] repeated numerous times in various categories." Some commentators have said "with so many ideas flooding the site, it makes it more difficult for Starbucks to listen and to follow-through on the suggestions."

The question to ask here is what exactly Starbucks was trying to do. It's often not enough to simply ask for feedback. Generally speaking, people that don't work at your company or organization don't spend that much time thinking about your business/cause unless they've had a very personal experience - whether negative or positive - with it. Asking for general feedback might solicit their individual story, but it probably won't generate much constructive insight. Instead, do your own homework. Create structured questions that can be thoughtfully answered by your supporters - and generate suggestions that can truly benefit your organization.

If your organization has a blog or a newsletter, ask your supporters one question each month and then report back the following month with the best 3 answers/suggestions. Be specific. Ask whether your organization's messaging could be updated for a multicultural audience. Ask what your organization could be doing to reach out to a neighboring city. Ask how to get young people involved as volunteers during their summer break.

Creating a conversation is only helpful if everyone stays on topic, and if you can hear what everyone's saying. If you make the effort to begin a conversation with your constituents, be sure to do so in a way that benefits them, as well as your organization.

Google For Non-Profits

2008-03-23T19:11:00.000-07:00

This past week, Google announced a new suite of tools for non-profits.

While I've posted about how non-profits can use Google's shared tools before (here and here), this new announcement is exciting because it shows how a non-profit can use all of Google's tools in an integrated way.

Here's a list of all that Google offers - most of which are completely free to use:

Gmail
Free Google-hosted email, customized for your domain

Checkout
Collect donations online and process them for free, with no monthly, setup, or gateway fees

Docs
Create and edit documents online and collaborate in real time with staff and volunteers

Calendar
Organize schedules and publicize events with shared calendars

Analytics
Understand how people find and interact with information on your website

Google Grants
Reach and engage your supporters through free online advertising

YouTube
Broadcast your cause to the world's largest online video community

Blogger
Publish instantly and keep your supporters informed and engaged

Maps & Earth
Give life to your cause by illustrating its global context

Gadgets
Drive traffic to your website and interact with your supporters more often

Groups
Communicate easily to staff or volunteers and encourage discussions among supporters

Picassa Web Albums
Create shared photo albums

Google Alerts
Get an email alert each time something new is reported about your sector or industry

Enjoy -

Buliding Your Brand

2008-03-23T18:28:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately, I've found over the years that most of the non-profits I work with don't think too much about their own brand. Most are too focused on the day-to-day tasks associated with their agencies to worry about whether their organization's brand is where it should be. Branding, they assume, is for people that sell things - not people that are trying to make the world a better place.

In my experience, the opposite is true. Your organization's brand is your only asset. It's the only thing that matters. Without a strong brand, non-profits have nothing else to offer. Your brand is the only reason for anyone to ever donate money or time or effort to your cause. Without a strong brand – one that effectively communicates what your organization does and why it does it – there's simply no point.

This is an opportunity to take a lesson from the for-profit sector. As tastes, norms and expectations shift, companies are scrambling to find ways to keep up with their own consumers. Marketers and brand managers are gravitating to a new definition of brand. Paul Isakson over at Space150 has recently offered this definition of brand in a recent presentation:

Brand = What people say, feel, or think about your product, service or company

| View | Upload your own

The key takeaway from his presentation is that your brand is earned by making your audience's life better. For-profit companies do this by creating products that make people's lives more efficient, or more fun. Non-profit organizations can do this by making people's lives richer, more rewarding, and more connected.

It seems like an obvious idea, but don't make the mistake of taking it for granted. It requires that your organization examine the entire experience of being a donor, a supporter, or a recipient of your services. Is the donation experience simple and straightforward? Is the impact of each donation clearly explained? Is the community created by your organization's services able to connect to one another?

Does each person who interacts with your organization leave with a clear sense of brand? To find out, take the time to draw a map of each experience noted above. If it's not ideal, what steps are needed to make it better? And is there really anything more important your organization should be doing right now?

Free Is The New Currency

2008-03-18T23:08:00.000-07:00

Jake Brewer over at The Realist Idealist wrote a post about a recent cover story in Wired Magazine by Chris Anderson entitled “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.”

Brewer summarizes the article this way:

Though Andersen focuses almost entirely on the application of “free” for business (i.e. how Ryan Air can sell you a ticket for $20 and still make money, or how Comcast gives a DVR away, or how you can get a free cell phone, or…you get the idea), his underlying premise should theoretically extend beyond it. That premise: As an entity or commodity (eg bandwidth, storage, phones, processing power etc) goes digital it inherently moves ever closer toward being free.

And then he asks an interesting question: How does this concept apply to the social sector and global issues like hunger, homelessness, or HIV/AIDS?

It's a fascinating question - and one that's worth some discussion. The underlying element, in my opinion, is that free is the new currency in business because value flows from credibility. Since the internet has shifted credibility into the public, rather than the private, arena, establishing credibility now requires massive public exposure - which can only be done without charging for access.

An expert (Jeremiah Owyang is a great example) now establishes credibility in his/her field by giving away expertise in the open market. Once credibility is established, dollars follow from those who wish to consult privately with the guru.

For non-profit organizations, the question is how to similarly establish credibility in the public arena - and derive value from that credibility.

For example, if your non-profit could establish itself as the undisputed expert in the public arena for - say - distributing resources to the homeless, who else might find that expertise valuable? Couldn’t you offer that expertise to private buyers looking to do the same outside of your organization’s reach? NGOs and city governments pay consultants for those services now - why not pay your organization for its insights and advice?

When you're thinking through your organization's communications strategy, how much have you thought about the value of your experts and in-house expertise? Could they fit into the revenue model of your agency? What are you doing to link their market value to your own? How much freedom have you given them to establish credibility for your organization within their sphere of influence?

You might be surprised to find that by giving your expertise away for free, it suddenly becomes much more valuable.

Why Your Non-Profit Organization Should Have A Blog

2008-03-12T13:04:00.000-07:00

I was asked by a colleague this morning for some examples of non-profits that use blogs well.

Britt Bravo over at NetSquared has such a great list - complete with explanations of what they're using their blogs to accomplish - that I simply referred them to her original post.

I'm excerpting a portion of her list below - which matches 10 different reasons to blog with good examples of each - but if you have the time I highly recommend her original post. It really is worth the read.

------------

1. To report back from an event or conference
Example: Patricia Jones, manager of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee's Environmental Justice Program, is blogging from the Fourth World Water Forum on the UUSC blog, Hotwire

2. To involve staff and take advantage of their knowledge
Example: The Walker Art Center's blog contains postings from art center staff and others describing recent and future community programs and educational information about exhibits at The Walker.

3. To involve volunteers and document their work
Example: The surgical volunteer staff who do reconstructive surgery all over the world for Interplast, upload posts to the blog from their worksite. Example: The Urban Sprouts blog is written by one staff member and one volunteer.

4. To provide resources and information to constituents
Example: AARP's blog is an online resource for a variety of aging issues such as retirement security, health and volunteering.

5. To provide resources and information from constituents
Example: The Best Friend Network allows its supporters to create blogs around animal and animal adoption issues that they care about. Example: NetSquared's blog is a community blog that anyone can post to about resources, events and information related to how nonprofits and NGOs can use the social web for social change.

6. To give constituents a place to voice their opinion
Example: Ann Arbor District Library System Uses a blog for the front page of their site. Library users can ask questions and make suggestions about library news, announcements and events in the comments of each post.

7. To give constituents support
Example: March of Dimes' Share Your Story blog allows families with children in NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) to share their experiences with one another.

8. To create the media coverage constituents want
Example: When the men accused of murdering Gwen Araujo, a woman they beat, bound and strangled after they discovered that she was biologically male, went to trial, the Community United Against Violence decided to use a blog to document the trial. Because many of CUAV's volunteer bloggers were more knowledgeable about issues such as the trans-phobic tactics that were being used by the lawyers, they were able to address many issues that the mainstream media missed. The blog also kept people informed during the second trial, when media coverage had diminished, and eventually drew attention to the trial when the blog got news coverage.

9. To give constituents the power and tools to create change
Example: Human Rights Watch doesn’t have a blog, but specifically offers RSS feeds of human rights news to supporters so that they will blog about human rights issues.

10. To reach potential donors
Blogs are not replacements for paper newsletters or e-newsletters, they are an additional way to reach a certain audience. Check out the stats from this article entitled, "Blog Readers Spend More Time and Money Online."

Non-profits And The Long Tail Theory

2008-03-12T00:03:00.000-07:00

If you haven't read the The Long Tail, you should.

Here's the basic idea, according to Chris Anderson, the author:

Traditional retail economics dictate that stores only stock the likely hits, because shelf space is expensive. But online retailers (from Amazon to iTunes) can stock virtually everything, and the number of available niche products outnumber the hits by several orders of magnitude. Those millions of niches are the Long Tail, which had been largely neglected until recently in favor of the Short Head of hits.

When consumers are offered infinite choice, the true shape of demand is revealed. And it turns out to be less hit-centric than we thought. People gravitate towards niches because they satisfy narrow interests better, and in one aspect of our life or another we all have some narrow interest (whether we think of it that way or not).

The Long Tail theory is an economic one, but it has relevance for the non-profit sector as well. I've posted about this idea before, arguing that the new Distributed Funding model made possible by the internet is likely to undermine the major donor bias most organizations currently have.

The idea came up for me again today when I ran across this excellent post by Shabbir Safdar. In the excerpt below, Shabbir does a great job of reiterating why the theory of the Long Tail is so important in the non-profit sector:

What does this mean for public relations, public affairs and non-profits? The expectations of the public are changing. To develop an audience, you are expected to publish and talk about your work constantly... Organizations that don't publish are finding it very difficult to engage their audiences when their opponents and competitors talk to them all the time.

"Does this mean I need a blog?" a nonprofit executive recently asked me. No, it means you, or someone in your organization needs to write something almost every day about the work you do to further your mission. The "blog" is just the vehicle you use to post it. Perhaps tomorrow it's an e-mail list, and the day after it's a posted URL on Facebook. The day after it may be a postcard.

What's changed is the expectation. Today's public expects more out of the organizations they give their attention, loyalty, and money to nowadays, or they withhold it.

The question is, now that your long tail of supporters can easily find and connect with you, how do you keep that group of passionate, committed people engaged with your organization?

You talk to them.

Most of my non-profit clients publish a newsletter, and one or two fund raising letters throughout the year – not enough for a real "conversation" with constituents, and not a good way to reach people that aren't already part of the organization's base of supporters. In this new age of infinite access – via social networking, distributed funding, and non-traditional publicity – organizations are under pressure to keep information flowing at an unprecedented rate.

Organizations that are able to effectively create a platform for an ongoing conversation with anyone in the world who's interested in what they do – one that's able to reach deep into the long tail – are going to significantly better positioned that those who don't.

What is your organization doing to engage donors, volunteers, and supporters in conversation?

Using Experts To Get Publicity For Your Non-Profit

2008-03-09T18:14:00.000-07:00

When planning your organization's media strategy, don't forget to take advantage of the passionate and informed people you have either on staff, on your board, or in your pool of active volunteers. Take the time now to identify potential experts, and approach them about formally serving as a spokesperson for the organization when appropriate.

[photo credit; Mai Le]

Journalists need to be able to quote experts when covering controversial topics so that they can objectively represent both sides of the controversy. Since the journalist must remain objective, they need to find others who can provide thoughtful opinions on their topic. A recent Guidestar post notes that:

Developing experts within an organization and creating platforms from which they can provide their opinions is vital to securing lasting media coverage. A nonprofit should always have a few experts on hand to discuss the organization's objectives, explain the cause or point of view on a particular subject in detail, and provide support to sponsors and donors.
Profiling key spokespeople on the organization's Web site or in widely available expert databases gives reporters easy accessibility to these experts. If your expert can respond to something that is currently in the news, consider sending out a media advisory alerting reporters to the availability of the spokesperson and his/her position on the topic.

If your organization has access to such experts, here are some suggestions for expanding their role in your publicity efforts:

Make sure your local press contacts know your experts exist, and can reach them easily on short notice. Help your experts contact reporters that have recently written articles in their area of expertise and either praise or criticize their work. Provide your experts contact information - highlighting their affiliation with your organization - for the reporter's future use.
Be sure to have media-ready bios (short statements outline the experts qualifications and background) and photos (a high resolution shot taken against a neutral background that shows the head and shoulers) of each expert ready to go - preferably as part of your online or printed press kit.
Consider helping your experts build up a set of written pieces available for journalists to use as reference material by asking your experts to write a guest column in your organization's newsletter, or an informative article that can be featured on your organization's website.

One note of caution: Be sure your experts are able to stay on message for your organization at all times. If your expert is likely to say something damaging during a live interview, consider limiting them to written interactions with press, or work with them in a series of "role playing" type exercises to get them comfortable in the role of spokesperson for your agency.

What Is Social Media?

2008-03-04T19:59:00.000-08:00

I ran across this definition of social media today from Erica O'Grady:

Social Media is NOT about technology or Web 2.0 applications. Social Media is Word-of-Mouth or Community Based Marketing that leverages technology to enable conversation.

I couldn't agree more. So many of my non-profits clients shy away from my recommendation to use social media tools (a.k.a. "social networking tools") to communicate with their constituents because they're afraid of new technology.

As Erica's definition above confirms - it's not about the technology. It's about the conversation. When the technology can make the conversation easier to have - and allows more people to be involved in it - then it's the best tool for the job.

PR 2.0

2008-03-01T22:29:00.000-08:00

The idea that the web has moved away from a one-way conversation (corporate web sites, newspaper articles online, etc.) and towards a multi-layered conversation (users creating and uploading their own content, reviewing products and experiences, and commenting on articles published by traditional media sites) is fairly well established at this point. Generally, you'll hear people call this shift "Web 2.0."

Sarah Lacy's upcoming book Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0 is destined to be the definitive work on this idea.
When her book hits the shelves in May, it's likely to make a lot of non-Silicon Valley types examine exactly how this technological shift impacts the world around them.

For those of us in PR, the shift has been happening for quite a while. Brian Solis fixed the term PR 2.0 in the lexicon when he began a blog of the same name in April of 2006, and Todd Defren has been monitoring the impact of the new web on the communications industry from his vantage point at Shift Communications for the past several years. Of course there are hundreds of other pundits and commentators as well - far too many to mention here.

The point is, they're all saying the same thing. More and more people have stopped simply receiving information and have begun to actively create it. More and more people now get their information from sources that didn't even exist 5 years ago.

My own information habits have changed drastically over the last few years. My morning hours are now spent absorbing information via blog readers, minute-by-minute updates from both industry leaders and personal friends via Twitter and Facebook, broadcast news delivered via TiVo, and radio news delivered via podcast. At no point do I interact with traditional media in any way. And the same is true for most of my peers.

For the PR industry, this poses a particular problem. Since we're in the business of feeding information into an existing distribution structure, what happens when the structure shifts? The answer: We must shift as well. And fast.

While it used to be sufficient to send a standard press release to a set of wire services - now both the release itself, as well as the distribution mechanism, are in flux.

Social Media Releases - Not all content creators are journalists. Journalists are trained to tell stories. Bloggers, pundits and analysts are much more interested in tracking industry changes one fact at a time. Traditional press releases are designed to tell the whole story at once. Social media releases just list the facts, key quotes, and critical issues.
Social Media Optimization (SMO) - Just as search engine optimization (SEO - which I posted about earlier this month) is a critical component of any web strategy, optimizing your publicity efforts so they can be easily spread by supporters using social media sites is now critical as well.

If your publicity efforts are stuck in Web 1.0, now is the time to make a change. Otherwise you might find that you're still communicating, but no one's listening.

Distributed Funding - Keeping Track Of Online Giving

2008-02-26T12:44:00.001-08:00

A number of online giving aggregators - sites that either track or bundle online donations - have sprung up recently adding even more momentum to the idea of distributed funding.

[photo credit: jenn_jenn]

A recent post at Xconomy points to three such sites:

Givvy - providing online tools that give individual donors “more control and more empowerment over why, when, where, and how they give to charities.”
Jackpot Rewards, a site that will donate half of its after-tax profits to children’s charities
Good2Gether - (which I've posted about before) a “hyperlocal giving aggregator”—an advertising-supported, keyword-based widget designed to appear alongside news stories on the websites of major regional media organizations, where it displays information about local non-profit fundraising campaigns or volunteer opportunities related to each article...."the non-profits get to make their pitch to a lot of readers, the newspaper website gets some ad revenue, and the advertisers get the glow of being associated with a humanitarian cause."

All three of these sites (and there are many others doing similar things) have a slightly different take on distributed funding, but all three share the idea that small donations can be combined to create meaningful impact.

For non-profits that have been in the habit of focusing on large, institutional donors for the bulk of their fund raising revenue, the model is changing. Not immediately, but sometime soon, the long tail theory will alter the face of traditional fund raising. Organizations that get ahead of this curve will benefit tremendously from it.

New Features on Facebook Causes

2008-02-26T12:15:00.000-08:00

I got this email today from the Causes application on Facebook:

Dear Cause Administrator,

Since you started a cause on Facebook, you might be interested in an exciting new Causes feature. If you work for the nonprofit for which you started your cause, you can now claim your official Nonprofit Profile on Facebook.

To do so, just submit a nonprofit partner application here:
http://www.causes.com/partners/partners/new

By claiming your profile you become a nonprofit partner, which allows you to control all of your interactions with Causes on Facebook from one central dashboard. Here you can edit your official Nonprofit Profile, select official and featured causes, keep track of all causes benefiting your nonprofit, see a list of all recent donors, and download donor contact information.

If you don't work for a nonprofit but are in touch with someone who does, feel free to let them know about our new system. If you've already submitted a partner application then there's no need to do so again - you're all set.

Thanks,
The Causes Team

This is a really smart move, both for the makers of the application, as well as those who administer applications on Facebook. Popular non-profits tend to have multiple presences on Facebook, and until now there hasn't been a good way to keep track of them all - or to be sure they all originate from people actually representing the organization's best interests.

If you haven't started a Cause on Facebook for your organization yet (click here for reasons why you should) - now is a great time to do so. If you have started a Cause, now is a great time to go through and see how your efforts have multiplied across the network. You might be surprised.

The ROI Of WOM

2008-02-21T14:18:00.000-08:00

I spend a lot of time on this blog talking about how non-profits can use social networking to their advantage. What's important to remember is that social networking is just a new way of generating word-of-mouth (or WOM) marketing.

photo credit: Dano

WOM is the one thing that money can't buy. It must be earned, cultivated, and maintained. the good news is that spreading the word is something that non-profits are good at anyway. In fact, non-profits are - for the most part - doing a better job of using Web 2.0 tools than their for profit counterparts, precisely because it's a natural thing for people that are engaged with a cause to talk about it amongst their peers.

It's not enough, though, to assume that your organization's word-of-mouth will take care of itself. The stakes are simply too high. Consider this post detailing the economic impact of Social Marketing from Esther Lim at the Crimson Consulting Group:

Companies enjoying higher levels of word of mouth advocacy such as HSBC, Asda, Honda and O2 - grew faster than their competitors
Companies suffering from low levels of word of mouth advocacy and high levels of negative word of mouth grew slower than their competitors
7% increase in word of mouth advocacy unlocks 1% additional company growth
2% reduction in negative word of mouth boosts sales growth by 1%
For the average company, a 1% increase in word of mouth advocacy equated to $16M extra sales

Source: London School of Economics, Harvard Business Review

I think it's fair to assume that these metrics translate from the for-profit, to the non-profit sector. What would your organization be willing to invest in terms of time and resources to achieve a 1% growth rate? For a $3 million dollar agency, that translates into $30,000 - the size of a respectable grant.

Free Technology

2008-02-19T09:26:00.000-08:00

For non-profits that need to keep track of donor data, behavior and solicitation frequency, the Salesforce.com Foundation is offering 10 free licenses to Salesforce which essentially allows any non-profit to use their CRM services for free.

For non-profits that need spreadsheet, word-processing, calendaring and email applications, Google is offering its enterprise edition application package to non-profits for free as well.

For organizations that are strapped for resources (and I have yet to meet one that isn't), these free tools open up worlds of possibilities without costing a penny.

Putting Your Best Brand Forward

2008-02-18T13:26:00.000-08:00

Many of the non-profit organizations I encounter don't believe they need to worry about public relations, marketing or branding. Many of them get great press from time to time without really trying, and many of them rely on active supporters to spread their message to new people.

The problem with this organic approach is that it's unlikely to result in a consistent experience for those who happen to encounter any or all of its disparate pieces. Each person walks away with a different impression of the organization, and the cycle continues.

The face of the organization - its brand - is worth deliberate and conscious maintenance at the very highest levels of both board and executive management. Consistent messaging, accessible materials, and clear presentation are the responsibility of the organization - not the press, and not its supporters. The better an organization's public relations efforts are, the more credibility it will have in the long run with the media and with the public in general.

Many organizations are concerned that by looking too polished - too branded - supporters may begin to believe that the organization has become successful and is no longer in need of donations. This, of course, is belied by the fact that the organizations that raise the most money are usually high-visibility brands. The fact that projecting an appearance of success leads to success - and projecting an appearance of scarcity leads to scarcity - is counter-intuitive for many non-profit managers.

Two excellent posts - one from Katya Andresen and one from Michele Martin (h/t Beth Kanter) - came to my attention today that explore how a mindset of scarcity generates more scarcity. Michele Martin explains it this way in her post:

From what I can see, most nonprofits operate from a scarcity mentality. We are constantly talking about what we lack--money, information, staff, resources. There's a strong feeling that there isn't enough to go around and so the focus is on grabbing the largest share possible for your organization and holding onto that share for dear life. In a scarcity mentality, the impulse is to hoard, not to share--at least when it comes to anything of value. And the focus is on the individual organization, on survival and limits, not on the collective social mission and on growth.

While non-profit managers must be prudent about how an organization's resources are allocated, failing to invest in the organization's brand has long-term consequences that shouldn't be ignored. An organization's brand strategy speaks volumes about its ability to both project, and attract, success.

Organization Spotlight - Publicolor

2008-02-17T12:17:00.000-08:00

[photo credit goodmagazine.com]

I've excerpted the Good Magazine article below to highlight what they do.

------------

[original article at goodmagazine.com]

School Colors
by Yvonne Puig

Take a quick glance at a public school in New York, and it would seem as if government painters were restricted to a very limited color palette. Publicolor, a New York City–based nonprofit organization dedicated to brightening the walls of inner-city schools, is betting that kids learn better when their schools are painted a bright sapphire instead of an institutional gray.

Trained as an industrial designer at the Pratt Institute, Ruth Lande Shuman started Publicolor in 1996 after noticing how many schools in Harlem resembled prisons. The organization has since painted nearly 200 schools and community buildings (police stations, pediatric wards) across the five boroughs. After the painting, teachers and students say they feel safer; graffiti and violence also decrease. In each school, the students do the redecorating, learning useful painting skills in the process. "I want our youngsters to paint their way out of poverty," Shuman says. "I want them to paint their way through college."

For more information, check out Publicolor's online press kit (which I highly recommend for any organization) here

Making Google Work For You

2008-02-17T10:37:00.000-08:00

For organizations that already have a solid web presence - meaning a site that explains the mission and vision of the organization in a compelling way and also encourages supporters to provide their contact information and donate to your cause - the next step is to find a way to bring more people to your site.

Begin by typing in some keywords about your organization into Google. The higher your website is on the list of search results for your keywords, the more visitors your site is likely to get. If your organization is dedicated to serving homeless children in New York, type "homeless children New York" into the search engine and see what happens. Is your organization on the first page of the results? Most people don't navigate beyond Google's first page, so if you want to connect with those searching for organizations like yours, what can you do to appear higher in the results?

Search Engine Optimization. Sometimes you'll hear this referred to as SEO in the tech world. This is essentially a series of steps you can take to make sure that search engines can read and catalogue your site easily. Many companies offer SEO services for a fee, but you can probably make many of the changes yourself.
Keep your content fresh. Search engines consider recent information more important than old information. Keep your site updated, read and comment on blogs in your sector, and publish press releases, journal articles and studies regularly to be sure your organization appears in as many new online locations as possible.
Encourage connections. The more places on the internet that link back to your site, the higher your search engines rankings will be. Encourage connections by giving people something to talk about - and a place to do it. Social networking sites create satellite outposts for your organization throughout the web - allowing you to alert supporters to newly published press releases, journal articles, studies and other tidbits of information as they're available on your site. As those supporters discuss and distribute new news, their links back to your site will increase your search engine standings.
Advertise on Google. If your search placement still isn't ideal, consider advertising. Google offers grants to nonprofits who would like to appear in the paid search results that appear at the top and right-hand side of search results.

Have other ideas? Share them in the comments section below!

Distributed Funding - Some Early Statistics

2008-02-15T16:00:00.000-08:00

As the idea of distributed funding becomes more mainstream, it becomes important to settle on some ways of measuring its effectiveness.

Slate recently posted an article on the topic, and points to some early statistics for electronic giving:

To date, sums raised have been relatively modest, though the trend shows movement in the right direction. According to the latest Chronicle of Philanthropy survey, electronic giving to the nation's largest charities, which has been growing at a rapid clip over the last five years, increased at an average rate of 37 percent in 2006. The portals Network for Good and JustGive.org, which allow donors to contribute to a variety of charities, saw increases in giving of 50 percent in 2007. And yet Internet giving still constitutes a tiny portion of total dollars raised—typically between 1 percent and 5 percent of an organization's overall contributions. Donating via social-networking sites (such as Facebook Causes, MySpace Impact, or any number of cause-related networks like dosomething.org or youthnoise.com) accounts for an even smaller share. The greater promise of viral philanthropy may lie not in electronic check writing, but in increased involvement; 21^st-century technology for philanthropos in its most ancient sense.

The fact that electronic giving constitutes a small portion of overall donations shouldn't come as a surprise - it's still early in the game and most established individual contributors aren't accustomed to giving online. In contrast, new donors - younger people who are just beginning to become habitual givers, and those not local to a given organization - are much more likely to use the internet as they look for a cause to support. As these trends become more prevalent, organizations that show up online are much more likely to receive support. A robust presence in multiple locations online will make it that much more likely that your organization will be first in line to receive these new donors.

The key take away though is the idea of "increased involvement" as the most important outcome - check writing is actually byproduct of this primary goal. Engagement is critical for these new donors - and the way to get them engaged is to create an infrastructure in which they can interact with the organization and other supporters. Today, social networking is the best tool available to accomplish that. The tools may change over time, but the underlying trend will not.

The Death of Social Networking For Non-profits?

2008-02-12T12:04:00.000-08:00

Today's NonProfit Times' newsletter has two contradictory posts - one encouraging users to take advantage of the fund raising potential social networking - and one announcing that social networking is already dead.

This contradiction actually mirrors the difficulty many of us have when trying to counsel our client organizations to take the plunge into social networking. So many organizations are reluctant to burden staff with one more task, and so many are barely able to maintain their main website. Why should they make the additional effort if they don't absolutely have to?

The truth is that the benefits of communicating effectively - regardless of the tools one uses to communicate - far outweigh the burdens. Good communications save time and effort because they help minimize confusion, help increase your organization's ability to reach new and existing supporters, and they help ensure that you get the most favorable press coverage possible.

Tools are just tools. Social networking tools, when used strategically, are a great way to help build your organization's network. If your organization uses other tools to use for that purpose, it's worth evaluating whether or not social networking tools would be more - or less - effective. If you don't currently use any tools to build your organization's network, ask yourself why you don't? What would your organization gain if you did?

Since non-profits rely on their networks of supporters in more ways than for-profit organizations, rejecting tools designed to communicate effectively with that network is short-sighted at best. As your network of supporters ages out of printed mail and email - as young people are doing in droves - what's your strategy for communicating with them?

Organizations that eliminate social networking as a communications option will miss out on the opportunities it holds.

Developing Your Distributed Funding Network

2008-02-12T11:15:00.000-08:00

There's even more buzz these days about a movement to a distributed funding model for non-profits who are able to get into the game early.

Today's NonProfit Times newsletter offers these tips to turn your most engaged supporters into an online fundraising network:

Start with social networking - "Social networking may not be a gold mine of donations, but it is a successful way for organizations to educate the public about its mission and cause."
Develop an online communications strategy and plan. "For organizations with limited resources, this can be as simple as a monthly e-newsletter. A more elaborate e-communications plan will include a number of online activities such as social networking, online or virtual events, and video clips in addition to e-newsletters and general Web site maintenance."
Employ viral marketing tactics. "Personalize communications. Offer incentives. Make messages clear, easy to understand, and easy to share."

Have other tips? Share them with the rest of us by leaving a comment on this post!

Crisis Communications

2008-02-11T12:34:00.000-08:00

One of the benefits of doing communications and PR work in the non-profit sector is that the stories we tell are usually of the positive, heart-warming variety.

Sometimes though, we find ourselves faced with a crisis - a financial or personnel scandal, inappropriate remarks by a staff member, a sudden loss of funding, or something similar - that needs to be dealt with by the communications team.

[photo credit: Corrinne Curcio]

If you are responsible for your organization's communications, what should you do in a crisis situation? Like most things, the key is to be prepared.

Create a Crisis Communications Plan. Do it now, before there's a crisis. That way when you need to respond to a difficult situation, everyone will know what to do right away. The plan should be a formal document that is easy to access anytime day or night (on an organization intranet, as a binder in a central location that can be easily referenced, etc.).
Create a Crisis Communication Team. When a crisis hits, it's critical that the right people do the talking. Everyone should know who's responsible for creating and delivering the organization's response so that no time is lost making those decisions along the way. Make sure enough people are on the team to handle media inquires promptly, produce and distribute appropriate materials, staff a press conference if needed, and handle inbound calls from concerned institutional funders, donors and members.
Tell the truth, tell it all and tell it fast. Although you may be counseled by legal staff to withhold certain factual elements, be as forthcoming as possible. Release information as soon as you have it (even if you only have bits and pieces), and be clear about what you know for sure and what you're still waiting to confirm. Always, always tell the truth. That doesn't mean you have to tell everything all at once, but never, ever lie.
Show emotion. Be concerned, use language that shows concern, and take actions that demonstrate concern.
Be prepared. Set a regular schedule for media trainings with your Crisis Communications Team so that team members - especially new ones - can systematically prepare for tough questions. Brainstorm potential problem scenarios, and have each team member take turns playing the part of reporter, and organization spokesperson. Videotape this exercise and play it back for the group to critique so that the entire team will know how to maximize their effectiveness on-camera.

For additional reading on this topic, try these great references:

Press Release Basics

2008-02-08T10:48:00.000-08:00

I've posted before about what separates a good press release from a bad one for non-profit organizations. It's been a while though, so I thought it might be helpful to revisit some basic principles of press-release writing in an easy-to-digest format.

Never forget that a press release is chance to tell a story. And any good story (and therefore any good press release) has the following elements:

A central human story. If your release isn't about people - their lives, passions and struggles, it's a lot less likely to grab the attention of anyone - including the media. Start with the people in your story and deliver your message from their perspective.
A central conflict. A great story requires conflict - something that must be overcome or resolved. Without conflict there can be no transformation, and without transformation your release is likely to fall flat.
A beginning, middle and end. Your release has to answer the question "what happens next?" to grab your readers attention and keep them engaged. Begin by explaining who is telling the story, then discuss what conflict they're trying to resolve, then end with the outcome of that resolution. Skip a step, and you'll lose your reader's attention and interest.
A way to find out more. The point of issuing a press release is to create a reason for the media to write about your organization. If you're successful, reporters will need to contact you to generate a story. Make it easy for them to find out more about your organization (see my earlier post about creating a media kit), and easy for them to contact you directly.

In terms of structure - your release should follow these standard conventions so that reporters can easily find their way through your information.

Your organization's logo should be at the top of the page
Your designated speaker (probably your ED) should be listed immediately underneath your logo along with their direct contact information (land line, cell phone and email address)
When your release can be published (e.g., "For immediate release", or "Release Date: February 24th, 2008")
Release headline (in all capital letters) and (optional) subhead (with the first letter of each word capitalized)
Location and date of the release (e.g., "San Francisco, CA - February 24th, 2008") in bold text
Leading paragraph (a short paragraph that acts as a summary of the release - assume that this is all the reporter will read before deciding whether to throw your release away - make it as engaging as possible)
Body of release (try to keep it to a single page)
A brief descriptive organization paragraph (begin the paragraph "About [orgname] - " in bold text) that describes what your organization does.
Contact information (e.g., "If you’d like more information on this topic, or to schedule an interview with [designated speaker], please contact [name, email and phone number of scheduler for designated speaker].")
A marker that the release is complete (the convention is to use "--- END ---", centered, at the bottom of the release). If you aren't able to keep your release to a single page (which is always preferred), be sure to use the tag (again, centered) "--- MORE ---" at the bottom of the first page, and then "--- END ---" at the end. This is a holdover from when most releases were faxed - and fax machines were notorious for only sending partial documents.

I hope this helps as you generate press releases for your organization. Good luck - and be sure to send me any success stories you might have!

Creating Community

2008-02-08T10:23:00.000-08:00

H&R Block - of all things - has created a great real-world example of how a comprehensive online presence can create a sense of community. If H&R Block can create community around doing taxes - it should be that much easier for non-profit organizations to do so.

A post on the blog Social Media Today outlines H&R Block's strategy that involves Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter and a dedicated Forum. The post goes on to say "It’s great to see a traditional company in an highly traditional industry that’s better known for being incredibly boring starting to reach out to people in a much more helpful and fun way."

To check out what they've done, go to these sites:

Facebook page: www.Facebook.com/HRBlockOnline
MySpace: www.myspace.com/trumangreene.
YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/trumangreene
Twitter: www.twitter.com/hrblock
Financial services forum with blogs, discussion boards and podcasts: http://digits.hrblock.com

At first glance, it might seem like a daunting task to create and maintain this kind of multi-faceted social network for your organization. But think about what you do now - you generate emails to your supporters, you create newsletters and brochures, you submit press releases and you do interviews with the media.

With all of those activities, you're already generating a ton of content. Why not take that existing content and give it a home on the web? Better still, once you do - your supporters will add their own content to your own - creating a rich environment in which your community can truly flourish.

What has your organization done to create a community for your supporters? Is there a community out there already that has formed organically? Are you a part of it?

Building Your E-Mail Base

2008-02-08T01:14:00.000-08:00

Something that many of my clients overlook is the opportunity to collect email addresses - and permission to use them - from their supporters.

Most of my clients have a list of emails they've gathered from donors and event sign-up sheets over the years, but very few have a consistent strategy for either adding to that list, or keeping their existing list current.

Can your organization answer yes to the following questions?

Does your website have a prominent email collection box that's visible on every (or almost every) page?
Do emails that you send to your current list have both a "forward to a friend" button as well a "sign up for our newsletters" button - making it easy for your current supporters to recruit new supporters?
When you collect emails addresses at events, do those new people receive a welcome message from you within one week?
Do your printed mailers include an "update your information" section - pre-printed with the information you currently have - to make it easy for people to notify you when their information changes?
Do you regularly purge invalid emails from your list?

If you can't answer yes to all of these questions, you aren't optimizing your organization's email strategy. Your email list is one of your most valuable assets - make every effort to treat it accordingly.

Focusing On The Customer

2008-02-05T21:40:00.000-08:00

Non-profits don't often ask themselves the question "Who is our customer?"

It's an idea from the for-profit world that doesn't easily translate for many in the non-profit sector. Some non-profits feel it's crass to frame their work in terms of "customers," others simply don't think about what they do in terms of "customers" or "clients."

Just like for-profit businesses that fail to focus on satisfying their customers' needs, non-profits that fail to do so risk becoming eventually becoming irrelevant - a dire outcome indeed.

So who is your customer? Who does your organization exist to serve? How do you communicate with them? How do you know if you're meeting their needs? Do you have a way to measure whether you're doing a better job of serving your customers this year than you did last year?

For-profit businesses actually have an advantage in this arena. Businesses that sell a product or service can use revenue as one metric (among others) of customer satisfaction. For non-profit organizations, revenue is often generated separately from the services the organization is designed to provide. This means that revenue numbers (while clearly important) aren't a reliable measurement of customer satisfaction. It also means that, generally speaking, much more energy is put into communicating with, and understanding the needs of, donors. If you're donors aren't your customers, what's your strategy to find out what your customers are thinking, what they need, and how better to serve them?

The recent conference "Customer Service is the New Marketing" offered a "Company-Customer Pact" that outlines the ideal relationship between corporations and customers.

Since the image is a little tough to read, I've reposted the text of the pact here:

Companies:	Customers:
Be human. Use a respectful, conversational voice, avoid scripts and never use corporate doublespeak.	Be understanding. Show the respect and kindness to company reps that you'd like shown to you.
Encourage employees to use their real names and use a personal touch.	Use your real identity, and foster your long-term reputation with the company.
Anticipate that problems will occur, and set clear, public expectations in advance for how you will address (and redress) issues.	Recognize that problems will occur, and give companies the information and time required to competently address issues.
Cultivate a public dialogue with customers so they feel they are being heard and to demonstrate your accountability.	Share issues directly with the company, or through a forum in which the company has an opportunity to respond, so it can work with you to solve problems.
Demonstrate your good intentions by speaking plainly, earnestly, and candidly with customers about problems that arise.	Give companies the benefit of the doubt, and be open to what they have to say.

While clearly designed for a for-profit environment, these key principals could easily guide non-profit organizations as well as they look to interact with those they serve. Plain language, authentic interactions, public forums and clear problem-solving practices should come naturally tho those who've chosen to work in the non-profit sector, but they often don't.

The Value of Video

2008-02-03T23:15:00.000-08:00

While many of the presidential contenders are using video as part of their campaigns, Barack Obama's campaign (and I say this only by way of illustration, this is not a political blog) has gone one step further and created a music video.

Those in PR in general, and those doing publicity for non-profits in particular, should stand up and take note of this tactic for 3 reasons:

The video is easy to share. The first lesson of the interactive Web (or Web 2.0) is that anything you create in support of your organization must be easy for your supporters to pass on to their own networks.
The video is compelling. The second lesson of the interactive web is that sub-par creations aren't tolerated. Technology has allowed even amateurs to create high-quality, highly engaging pieces. Anything less won't be passed along the network. Your supporters, no mater how fervent, won't pass along anything that puts their own reputation at risk.
Video is the right medium for the message. This message of hope and human aspirations wouldn't have had the same impact if its message had been presented as a PowerPoint presentation or a bulleted list of talking points. If you're trying to communicate emotion, video is the right medium - do it right, and it will have a larger impact than any other efforts you might be considering.

Video is not a fad. It's emerging as a key message delivery system for both for-profit and non-profit organizations precisely because it so effectively conveys information and emotion in a single package.

How can your organization use video to its benefit? If you already have video assets, are they good enough to ensure your supporters would pass them along to their personal networks? If not, what can you do - now - to change that?

Teaching Philanthropy

2008-02-01T00:03:00.000-08:00

Dragon School in Oxford, England has hired a Director of Social Impact and is planning to offer "generosity" classes, which will introduce lessons on philanthropy as an alternative way to give back to the community.

[photo credit: www.psfk.com]

I think this raises a fascinating cultural question - outside training our own children, how exactly do we as a society train our children to become philanthropists? And how do we give them the tools and information they need to evaluate whether or not their actions are helping - or hurting - others?

For those of us charged with spreading the word about the organizations we believe in - how often do we consciously consider speaking directly to an audience of children? What has your organization done - and what should it do - to specifically reach out to this younger audience?

Organization Spotlight - Reeling and Healing Midwest

2008-01-31T22:58:00.000-08:00

This series of articles is meant to highlight organizations doing great things. Of course, there are so many I could never write about them all. And, of course, I tend to be a little wrapped up with work for my existing clients. That said, I'd still love to use this blog to shine a light when and where I can.

If you have suggestions for other organizations that should be spotlighted here, please let me know.

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My thanks to the Nonprofit Blog Exchange for pointing me to the blog of an organization called Reeling and Healing Midwest which champions fly-fishing retreat programs for women who have been diagnosed with, or who are surviving all types of cancer.

I've excerpted a small section below from some recent press they've received to paint a picture of the work they do, and the lives they've touched.

What a wonderful idea - and what a wonderful organization!

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[original article at nurse.com]

Reeling in the Magic
by Catherine Spader, RN

“Fish on!” It’s the fly-fisher’s motto — the equivalent to Nike’s “Just Do It!” But for participants of fly-fishing retreats designed for people with cancer, Fish On! is far more than a slogan — it’s a mantra.

“I became a cancer survivor the day I was diagnosed,” says Kathryn Navin, RN, BSN, a staff nurse on the step-up cardiothoracic unit at Munson Medical Center in Traverse City, Mich. “Fish On! means I have a life that I need to continue, and that’s why I’m still here.”

Navin is a breast cancer survivor who has been a participant and a volunteer with Reeling and Healing Midwest, a Branch, Mich.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to providing women living with cancer with a one-of-a-kind experience that combines fly-fishing with nature, peer coaching, camaraderie, and support. The new-participant retreats offered in Michigan are open to women in any phase of cancer survivorship, from new diagnosis to remission.

Participants do not need fly-fishing experience to attend the retreats. Women receive expert fly-fishing instruction that allows them to discover a sport they can enjoy throughout their recovery and lifetime. The retreats accommodate participants who have a variety of medical and dietary needs and mobility issues. Retreats include services such as healing touch, manicures, pedicures, and massage. Most important, Reeling and Healing Midwest offers a safe, reflective venue in which participants can share their disease and recovery experiences with other women who have cancer.

Volunteers and participants say magic happens in the fly-fishing environment. The retreats are where hope is kindled and spirits are renewed.

“There is something special about being in that rushing water, connecting with your spirit and with other women, and acknowledging where you’re at in your life,” says Navin.

To read the whole article - click here

Finding Your Hook

2008-01-31T21:14:00.000-08:00

Getting your organization's story into the press comes from a combination of great storytelling, great press outreach, and a great hook.

What's a hook? It's that one thing that makes your story interesting, relevant, and immediate. Jocelyn Harmon over at the Non Profit Technology Blog refers to this idea of a hook (she calls it an "X Factor") as:

[...] a precipitating event which brings or gives RELEVANCE to your cause [...] having an X Factor is extremely helpful, if not imperative, in making your cause spread like fire.

A great hook (or X Factor) usually makes the difference between getting a press hit, and not getting one. If you can't find a way to make your story relevant in your press release, it's unlikely that the reporter who receives your pitch is going to find it for you.

Try this exercise (hat tip to Charles Brown for this approach) to get yourselves in the habit of always finding a hook for your story:

Take an article or topic off the web and send it to a group of 5 people asking them to come up with a “connection” to your sector?
What is the key message from the story that resonates for your sector?
Which of your sector's key messages is in line with the story?
Is there a local connection to the story?
What connections are there to your sector's target audience(s)?

No matter how often you tell your organization's story, it's up to you to make it fresh, relevant and compelling each and every time. Get in the habit of scanning headlines and trends for hooks that might work for your organization. Or make your own by publishing research findings, conducting a survey, or hosting a forum.

Try it right now. Go to Google News and see if you can find a connection between your organization and the top news story of the hour. Ask 4 of your colleagues to do the same thing. Are their answers the same as yours? Different?

If it's your job to get your organization into the news, this is a great way to get your PR juices flowing. If you need more inspiration, check out the Non Profit Blog Exchange for links to other articles that might also help get you going.

A Map of The Internet

2008-01-31T18:58:00.000-08:00

An amazing map of the current state of the internet - using social networking, file transfer protocols, corporations, applications, etc. to show how it all connects together.

Wow.

Brand vs. Tribe

2008-01-31T01:45:00.000-08:00

An absolutely brilliant post today by Seth Godin (the author of the book Permission Marketing, among others) about moving away from the concept of brand, and towards the concept of tribe.

I've copied what I think is the key section of his post below -

Brand management was top down, internally focused, political and money based. It involved an MBA managing the brand, the ads, the shelf space, etc. The MBA argued with product development and manufacturing to get decent stuff, and with the CFO to get more cash to spend on ads.
Tribe management is a whole different way of looking at the world.

It starts with permission, the understanding that the real asset most organizations can build isn't an amorphous brand but is in fact the privilege of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them.

It adds to that the fact that what people really want is the ability to connect to each other, not to companies. So the permission is used to build a tribe, to build people who want to hear from the company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

This is a wonderful way for non-profits to internalize the idea of branding - something that is often considered foreign at best, and superfluous at worst.

By focusing on the idea of tribe instead of brand, it becomes much clearer that an organization first connects people around an idea - and that idea then creates community. The organization is a means to create connections. Once the connections are made, and the tribe is formed, the organization has a responsibility to act in the best interests of the tribe as a whole.

More from Seth's post:

...product development and manufacturing and the CFO work for the tribal manager. Everything the organization does is to feed and grow and satisfy the tribe. Instead of looking for customers for your products, you seek out products (and services) for the tribe.

What have you done for your tribe lately? And what does your organization do every day that has nothing to do with the tribe? Your answers to both questions are critically important.

Taking The Plunge

2008-01-30T11:41:00.000-08:00

Todays Network for Good's Nonprofit Marketing & Fundraising Tips newsletter has an excellent list of tips for getting your organization started with social networking. The key message of the article - which I think is spot on - is this: "It's time to turn your message over to your constituents."

I couldn't agree more. There's no way for your organization's staff to reach out to everyone who might be interested in your work. You couldn't possibly find them all - let alone find a way to contact them. More importantly, people tend to pay attention to things that are introduced to them via a friend or trusted contact. While you may grow to play that role in the lives of your supporters - you certainly won't begin your relationship with them that way.

In truth, this is exactly how things have always worked for non-profit organizations. A small group of active supporters recruits new supporters from their circle of friends - those friends recruit new supporters - and so on. This same behavior has simply moved online. The only new element is that organizations now have the ability to fuel this word-of-mouth growth by providing supporters with web-based tools and information to pass along to their friends. It's a win-win situation - if you're willing to do the work it takes to create those tools and make them available online.

Here are the tips offered by today's newsletter (I've edited them down a bit for length) - all of which mirror my own previous posts on this topic -

Pick one social networking channel in which to get involved. Try Change.org, Facebook or MySpace. Or set up a blog. [...] It's better to have a strong presence in one network than to spread your organization too thin across Web 2.0.
Search the Change.org network, Facebook Causes or MySpace pages for a nonprofit with a similar mission as yours. See who their "friends" are and invite them to your cause once you're up and running.
Make it easy for supporters to find you. [...] Name your social networking page exactly as your organization is named. Again, have a strong presence in one channel rather than all of them. [...]
Build your [list of supporters..] give them a strong call to action to supply their email address to you so you can contact them later.
[...] empower [your supporters] to share your charity with others: ask them to recruit friends to volunteer for you, create a charity badge and invite them to post it on their own blogs and social networking sites.

Network for good also has a good white paper on fundraising using social networking if you'd like more info.

Twitter Me This

2008-01-30T00:26:00.000-08:00

Add one more social network site to your organization's list of communications tools - Twitter is the latest in a long list of ways to communicate with, and to, those who are interested in your organization's work.

What is twitter? It's essentially a shared space where people answer the question "what are you doing right now?" with short posts called "tweets". Answers range from the innocuous (someone in my group just posted the name of the movie they're watching), to the political (many people in my group are commenting on the Florida primary results), to the obscure (someone in my group is working on a slideshow about knitting). Just as often, these short tweets will break news or encourage conversations on topics that might not find a home in mainstream media.

I often think of twitter as the hum of background chatter you might hear in a bar when you walk in. It's strangely soothing, and it acts as in indicator of activity - the louder the hum, the more interesting the bar. You can ignore the individual conversations but still feel plugged in to the larger group - or you can pick up on a conversation that interests you and choose to either listen or join in.

How are organizations using twitter? NPR's Bryant Park Project sometimes uses twitter to solicit listener comments and questions during their live broadcast. Barack Obama's campaign (as well as Hillary Clinton's and John Edwards') uses twitter to update supporters on progress and give them an inside view into their campaigns (although, to be sure, campaign staffers rather than the candidates themselves keep those tweets up to date).

How can your organization use twitter? If your organization is focused on a sector where things change quickly, and if your organization tends to have web-savvy constituents, twitter might be an excellent way to keep new news flowing quickly to those who are interested. Before diving in, however, be sure to test the waters. Sign up for an account and begin to follow people and organizations you personally find interesting. If you find you can't stop twittering, it may be worth adding twitter to your organization's online strategy.

For more on using Twitter in the non-profit sector, check out Beth Kanter's great post here.

For a great case study detailing how the Brooklyn Museum is using Twitter, blogs, Flickr and YouTube, read Dave Evans' great post here.

Going Mobile

2008-01-28T13:58:00.001-08:00

I've discussed social networking on this blog a great deal, but I haven't spent much time discussing new ways for organizations to communicate with their audiences offline. Outside of printed pieces like newsletters and donation solicitations, what are an organization's options? What are the most effective ways to communicate with donors that aren't sitting in front of their computers?

Text messaging has emerged as a great way to communicate with younger users. The Student PIRGs’ New Voters Project recently released a study demonstrating the effectiveness of using text/SMS messages to mobile phones to mobilize young voters in the November 2006 elections.

The fascinating study includes some key takeaways that may surprise some of us who can no longer check the "under 25" box when filling out forms (note that I've made some minor edits to their key points below to generalize their findings beyond youth voting):

Young [people] are a very mobile population and are increasingly difficult to reach by traditional ... channels such as telephone calls to landlines.
A quarter of Americans under the age of 25 used a mobile phone as their only telephone in the first half of 2006.
The mobile-only population is projected to reach nearly 30 percent of the entire American public by ... 2008.
Text / SMS messaging is already widely used among young people as a form of communication.
59% of recipients reported that the [text message] was helpful, versus only 23% who found it bothersome.

Another key item I took away from their report was how cost effective Text/SMS messaging was for their efforts. In terms of votes generated, text messaging was less than 1/10th the cost of any other type of effort according to the chart below:

How can your organization use text messaging to reach those who rely heavily on this form of communication? Do you know if any of your key audiences fall in to this category? If they do, do you have their mobile phone numbers and permission to send them text messages?

In an increasingly connected - and increasingly mobile - world, these are going to become critical questions.

Organization Spotlight - GodParents Youth Organization

2008-01-27T11:53:00.000-08:00

CA Bus Driver Takes Kids to Help Others

Despite the manners and behavior of many adolescents in the urban core of Los Angeles (Crenshaw Area), Tanya Walters, through the GodParents Youth Organization (GYO), has created an opportunity for inner city youth to experience and explore more than they find in their own backyards.

In 2005 Ms. Walters formed GodParents Youth Organization, a nonprofit public benefit organization, composed of a core group of California school bus drivers who share a common love for young people. Travel has become a vehicle for GYO to educate, encourage and enhance the lives of youth often left behind for various reasons.

On Sunday, December 26, 2006 GYO will embark on a trailblazing experience called the “Share Care Project”, a week long trek that will take 20 students from California to Louisiana and back. These school bus drivers give freely of their vacation time to provide such opportunities to the students.

Along the way, the group will visit traditional and private colleges, experience geographical and cultural heritage sites, and tour historical memorial locations such as the Alamo. They will visit Phoenix, Dallas, San Antonio and New Orleans. They will journal their experiences at the end of each day. The mission of the “Share Care Project” is to expose urban youth to fresh experiences leaving them with tangible memories that will influence future life choices they will make.

The “Share Care Project” is one of GYO’s programs designed to provide young people with the opportunity to see the world around them while teaching them to give of themselves. They will be distributing needed items in gift backpacks to their peers still living in still living in temporary housing throughout the areas damaged by Hurricane Katrina. They will also be encouraged to become pen pals to one or more of the students they visit. An important objective is to plant a desire for higher learning by having them visit college campuses in these states.

“Why is this cause so vital to me? It’s very personal” states Walters. Her passion for youth and travel drove her and a team of LAUSD school bus drivers to find more time in their already busy schedules to provide a service to those less fortunate. Walters states “Today, our youth are feeling trapped in what we call the “less mess”. They feel helpless and hopeless. Despair in many cases has robbed our teens of the idealism, energy and creativity.”

In talking with students on the school bus, the drivers easily recognized that many of them have never been outside their communities. When questioned about their behavior, the response was “We would do better if we knew better.” Such statements drove the bus drivers to volunteer their free time to chaperon trips beyond amusement parks.

Since touring Northern California with fifteen young people in April, 2006 and a 4,800 mile trek along the Mother Route 66 with 10 youth in August, 2006, the organization has developed and created a buzz among the teens that are willing to venture out, improve their academics, and explore the USA. These tours have sparked an interest in these students to strive toward an avenue for higher learning.

These 20 students who travel to New Orleans will return to their community with an enriched vision of the United States. The organization is registered as a non-profit organization to help California school children learn to give to others.

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For more information:
GYO Website
Oprah
NPR

Bringing Community In-House

2008-01-27T10:21:00.000-08:00

Both Facebook and Google are exploring the idea of portable community - which means that soon corporations and organizations will be able to create and embed applications and widgets from both community networks into their own websites.

Facebook's recent announcement (which is converted from very geeky tech-speak to real language beautifully by Jeremiah Owyang - a true industry guru - here) means that organizations will soon be able to move active Facebook onto the organization's main website more seamlessly.

Similarly, OpenSocial will allow anyone to build an application and embed it on any site that accepts OpenSocial (again elegantly converted from tech-speak to real language by Owyang here) meaning that organizations can build and then reuse the same elements over and over again in multiple settings.

Both of these developments are still very new and still need to be allowed to evolve further, but the idea of portability is what matters. Soon your organization's website - on it's own - will not be enough to spread your message or house your community of supporters. Start thinking now about how to create the kind of presence online that will allow users to interact with you wherever they are - and will allow them to act as evangelists for your organization within their own circle of friends.

More On Distributed Funding

2008-01-26T20:55:00.001-08:00

As I've mentioned before, movement of everyday interactions on to the web (also known as social networking, or Web 2.0) is changing the face of philanthropy by creating a new funding model that I'm calling "Distributed Funding."

PayPal is a natural platform for this type of funding and it's recently launched a promotion designed to encourage non-profits to use it's services to generate online donations rather than the many others out there (like Kintera or JustGive). As part of its promotion, PayPal is offering $50 to organizations that generate $500 in online donations using the PayPal donate button within a certain time window.

Another organization called good2gether appears to go one step further (they have yet to launch, so their service is a little tough to evaluate) by adding search into the mix. (An aside, their tag line is "Transforming Cause Into Effect" - but there's no relationship between Cause+Effect and their company).

All of the entrepreneurial activity in the sector - from both established players and recent entrants - points to continued growth for the "distributed funding" model. Non-profit organizations that establish pathways in this new frontier now will be much better off than those that don't.

Creative Publicity

2008-01-26T15:28:00.000-08:00

The point of publicity is to get your organization noticed. There's no one way to accomplish this goal, but smart organizations make sure there's always a steady stream of new news to report to the press, their supporters and their peers.

One way to keep the publicity pipeline full is to create a way to systematically collect compelling, relevant and fun stories from people who have a connection to your organization. A simple "tell us your story page" on your site (check out some examples here and here) is a great way to collect stories from your supporters that you can use for publicity purposes. Encourage users to submit their stories by adding a clear call to action on the front page of your site, in newsletters, and at events.

You can also encourage people to submit their stories by subtly suggesting topics in advance. A recurring list of "3 simple things you can do" - things that don't involve standard fare like writing a check or volunteering to stuff envelopes - in your newsletter could prod someone to take action, and could generate a great future story. Some ideas for your list could include:

Use your wedding to raise money for charity [services like the I Do Foundation, and Travelers Joy make this easy to do]
Throw a party for a cause [see my earlier post on that topic for more ideas]
Write a letter to the editor [op-ed pieces are a great way to generate buzz - see my earlier post, or check out the great CCMC primer here]

Your organization's stories are some of it's biggest assets - don't miss out on the opportunity to collect as many of them as you can.

Social Networking With a Mission

2008-01-25T08:44:00.000-08:00

The January 17th issue of the Non Profit Times Instant Fundraising Newsletter includes an article on successful social marketing techniques for non-profits.

Using social marketing for non-profit organizations is all the rage these days of course, but this particular list actually brings something new to the discussion in my opinion because it asks a key question that many others miss: "What's it got to do with mission?"

To summarize the article's 4 suggestions - the article recommends that non-profits:

Build Web 2.0 toolkits for donors to use, such as toolbars and donation links to post on blogs and personal pages.
Keep an eye on search engines such as Google and Technorati, to see what people are saying about your organization.
Work toward new ways to measure the audience, such as a Web survey to see how many more members or supporters have you on their blogs, etc., and flag them. Go back in six months to a year and determine the value of that segment.
Develop and implement a conversion strategy that would drive Web 2.0 traffic to become registered users on your site and then on to donors. Remember to measure it all the time.

Those are, of course, all excellent suggestions, but the central point of the article - that non-profits focus on Web 2.0 components that can be worked in to measurable things they are already doing - is the most interesting one.

Social networking is most likely to succeed when it's not seen as yet another task for an already overworked staff member to accomplish. The new social networking tools available on the web are just one more way to feed your organization's mission, spread it's vision and support its values - and any tasks that don't do that simply aren't worth doing.

What tasks do you already do every day that translate well into an online discussion? If your organization distributes a quarterly newsletter or monthly email - could that information be repurposed for use on a MySpace or Facebook page? If you maintain an event calendar, could you just as easily use a google calendar so that volunteers and supporters can subscribe to it and allow your events to appear automatically on their personal schedules? If you regularly generate press releases for the media to highlight your organization's accomplishments, could you just as easily use those to create an official blog for your organization?

Seamlessly integrating social networking into your everyday routine will ensure that it serves as an extension of your organization's existing mission - rather than an unwieldy addition to it.

PayPal Gets In To The Game

2008-01-08T00:49:00.001-08:00

It looks like PayPal has joined the trend of providing badges and widgets for individual users to integrate into their own online profiles. A number of companies - like Network For Good and Chipin - are doing similar things, but the entrance of the financial juggernaut PayPal could change the conversation quite a bit.

A new PayPal Facebook application has popped up which allows users to both create a donation badge and track who else in their network has added the badge to their profiles. It's interesting not only because the average web user is likely to associate a certain amount of information security with the PayPal brand, but also because the Facebook integration allows a user to actually track activity on their network.

Privacy issues aside, this could be a new way for someone working on behalf of a non-profit to actually take full advantage of the network effect generated by online fund raising. Yet another example of why non-profits should be joining the activity on Web 2.0 sooner, rather than later.

The Non Profit Web At Work

2008-01-07T14:53:00.000-08:00

I'm a member of the Non-profit Web 2.0 group on Facebook and today someone posted a link to this article by Alexandra Samuel originally from the blog Social Signal.

The article is called "Best practices for non-profits using web 2.0" and it outlines the following best practices:

Focus your site on a particular goal or conversation.
Invite your community to make contributions other than money.
Play nicely with other non-profit (and for-profit) organizations.
Ease into the web 2.0 culture by making effective use of existing web tools
Be patient with colleagues who need to get comfortable with this new approach.
Stay current with how other non-profits are using web 2.0, and learn from their experiences.

I applaud Alexandra for this list - it's well thought out and very practical. I'd encourage anyone in the sector to read the entire article, as well as the case studies she provides.

The thing I'm most struck by, however, is the way these conversations are now making their way through the internet. If you read the entire post, it follows a thread that began on her blog, moved to LinkedIn Answers, moved back to her blog, and then ended up on Facebook - where all 521 members of the Facebook group are now able to participate in the conversation. This is Web 2.0 at its finest - simple conversations that begin in one location, take on a life of their own, and expand to include hundreds of other voices along the way.

This is the power of information in motion. This is why it's so important for non-profits to engage now - while these patterns of interaction are still forming - to fully benefit from this new way of communicating.

The World Wide Fundraising Web

2008-01-06T13:34:00.000-08:00

I talk about how the internet has impacted communications within the non-profit sector a lot in this blog - and I'm certainly not alone (Beth Kanter, Sean Stannard Stockton, and Katya Andresen are all frequent commenters on this topic as well).

Mainstream media is also picking up on this theme these days. I just ran across this article in the Philadelphia Enquirer that I think makes some good points - so I wanted to pass them along to all of you -

Photo credit: NOELLE THEARD / Miami Herald
Photo caption: Hands On Miami volunteers paint a mural at an elementary school. "Everything we do, our entire business model is built around the Web and our technology," said Pat Morris, president of the group.

Here are some of the key quotes from the article (in my opinion):

"There is no such thing as local anymore," said Ruth Shack, president of the Dade Community Foundation in Miami. "This new generation of givers are very, very different. They see themselves as change agents. . . . They are giving to issues. Global warming or breast cancer or whatever it is they feel close to."
"This new Web 2.0 approach - social-networking sites and that kind of thing - has really started to intensify for charities in the past year or two," said Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy magazine in Washington. "New charities are being created using those tools, and older, established charities are embracing them, too."
"They have a different notion of privacy than their parents, a different idea as to what information they share in a public forum like the Internet," he said. "Most adults I know aren't comfortable with these concepts. They place a greater trust in brands. The kids have a greater trust in their friends, and that's who they want to hear things from."

Have other thoughts on this topic? Add your opinions below in the comments section.

Communicating With Online Donors

2008-01-05T02:18:00.000-08:00

Should the way you communicate with your online donors differ from the way you communicate with other donors?

This great post at White Courtesy Telephone quotes a recent survey from Network for Good which notes the following:

Online donors give significantly more than offline donors.
Online givers are young, with men and women giving in equal numbers.
Donors are not new to giving, but they tend to be new to giving online.
Disaster relief is the leading category of giving and ranks among top searches; other leading giving categories are international causes, animal-related causes, human services and education.
Donors turn to the Internet at times of disaster and for year-end giving.
People seem to be at their most generous on weekdays, not weekends.
The number one reason donors say they give online is convenience: it is easier than writing a check.

If all those things are true, what should change about your outreach messaging? Your thank you notes? Your website's home page? If convenience is key, how can you make your donation process more convenient? How can you reassure new donors that their donations are safe?

It's a lot to think about, but it's worth it.

Measuring Success

2008-01-04T14:36:00.000-08:00

I've been participating in a conversation on Tactical Philanthropy that's being moderated by Sean Stannard-Stockton regarding how to measure success in the non-profit sector. It's a fascinating conversation and I encourage all of you to add to the thread if you have a chance.

The basic question is this: what common measurements should we use in the non-profit world and why? People from all over the sector have chimed in - with widely ranging viewpoints. Some have insisted that metrics have no place in philanthropic work, others have insisted that philanthropy is worthless without some way to measure its effectiveness.

The impetus for this conversation is the addition of non-profit organization data to the pool of information available via Google finance - something that investors regularly use to evaluate their options, and something that could eventually serve a similar purpose for donors. Take a moment to search for organization's data and see what information comes up. Is it an accurate reflection of your work? Does it tell potential donors what you do and why they should become a part of your efforts? What additional or different information would you add if you could?

I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Leave your comments on this blog, or on Sean's, and let the world know what you think!

Saying Thank You

2008-01-03T19:16:00.000-08:00

Saying thank you after receiving a donation is one of the key elements of any fund raising campaign. It's also a kep element of any communications plan. Communicating your gratitude to your donors in an effective manner is as important as communicating any other message your organization has. In fact, the messages you convey to your donor audience might be some of the most important of all.

This month, Mal Warwick's newsletter includes this great list from Sandy Rees of ways to make sure your thank you's are hitting the mark. It's worth a read.

Enjoy -
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10 ways to energize your thank-you letters

By Sandy Rees

The thank-you letter often is created and sent without much thought. It may seem to be the last step in getting a gift from a donor and a routine task that warrants little merit. But it's actually the first step in securing the next gift!

Purposeful and well-thought-out thank-you letters can help you steward your donors, not to mention provide you with another way to communicate with them. Make sure you are getting the most from your thank-you letter efforts with these ideas.

1. Get the letter out quickly!
Everyone has probably heard that the faster you get your thank-you letters out the door, the better. That's absolutely true. A donor wants to be sure you received her gift, and a thank-you letter is the best way to let her know it arrived safely. Experts say to let no more than 48 hours go by from the time you receive a gift until the time you send out a thank-you letter. If it takes you a little longer and that's the best you can do, work with it. Figure out what will work for your organization and put a priority on getting the letters out the door.

2. Relate your thank-you letter to the Ask.
Instead of sending out a generic letter, customize your thank-you letter to the specific Ask that was used to generate the gift. If a gift comes to you from an appeal you sent out, then make sure your thank-you letter refers to the story or the text in the appeal. You may need to write several different letters that can be used for whatever you have going on. For instance, you may want to write one letter for a special event you're working on, another one for monthly givers, and another one for donors who respond to your newsletter. Relating the thank-you letter to the Ask is a way to let your donors know you are paying attention.

3. Tell the donor what you will do with their money.
This is critical. Make sure the donor knows how you plan to use the donation he or she just sent you. Text like "Your gift will ensure that 15 children will go to summer camp for one week" makes the process of donating tangible to the donor. He can envision 15 kids going to camp for a week, and it helps create a bigger feeling of satisfaction for him.

4. Use a real signature.
Digital signatures are easy and eliminate hand-signing a stack of letters. But technologically savvy donors know the difference between a digital signature and a live one. Have your President or Executive Director sign the letters, or ask a volunteer to sign them on his or her behalf. And use a blue pen so that donors can clearly tell it is a real signature.

5. Have the ED or President go through the letters and add personal notes.
This can bring big rewards in terms of stewarding donors! Taking a few minutes of a busy day to go through a stack of letters may seem like a chore to your boss, but donors who get a thank-you letter with a personal note will be thrilled that the ED took time to personally acknowledge his or her gift.

6. Add a reply envelope.
Don't be afraid to include a reply envelope in a thank-you letter. Many donors will hang onto these and use them for their next gift. You may receive some negative feedback, but you will likely receive a large number of gifts as well. It's not uncommon to receive thousands of dollars in gifts from these "bounce-back" envelopes. You may want to code these envelopes so that you can track the number, size, and amount of donations received using this technique. [Editor's note: Not all of us in the field advocate including a reply envelope in thank-yous. But it's a common practice and represents a matter of judgment.]

7. Include year-to-date or lifetime giving data.
For donors who have been giving for several years, this information can be very enlightening to them. A donor who gives a $10 gift regularly to your organization will immediately see how her gifts add up over time. Sometimes donors forget when they last gave. Including year-to-date information can be a gentle reminder for them if they have pledges or commitments to make.

8. Make it clear that the letter is also a receipt.
Don't you hate getting boring thank-you letters that drone on and never clearly spell out the gift you made? If you have to, draw a line on the page below the thank-you text and print "Gift Receipt" along with the actual gift information.

9. Include an offer to tour your facility or program site.
Always include in your letter an offer for a guided tour of your facility or program site. You may never have anyone take you up on this, but they will remember that you offered. You will probably get a few people who want to visit you. Seeing firsthand the work that you do may make all the difference in the world to a particular donor. It can also mean the difference in an average size gift and a major gift.

10. Include the name and contact info of someone the donor can call with questions. Make sure that person is available.
Donors want to be able to call and talk to a real, live, knowledgeable person when they have questions. So be sure to include the name and phone number in your thank-you letters of someone who can answer questions for them.

From the blog Step-by-Step Fundraising. Sandy Rees can be reached by phone at (865) 216-0083, at her Web site www.sandyrees.com, or by e-mail at sandy@sandyrees.com.

Communications Planning for your Non-Profit

2008-01-02T12:04:00.000-08:00

If your organization has never taken the time to create a formal communications plan - now is a great time to do so. Set aside a day if you can, half-a-day if that's all you have, and work through the details of your organization's plan.

Start with a situation analysis - what's happening in your organization? In your sector? In your industry? Be honest and take the time to analyze what has recently changed, and what lessons have been learned.
Next move into objectives - what are your communications objectives for the year? What objectives did you achieve last year? What objectives are still outstanding?
Examine your target audience(s) - who do you normally reach? What new audiences should you look to reach going forward? Where do your target audiences get their information? How do they pass information amongst themselves?
What research is available to you? When needed, do you have ready access to facts to facts and figures that support your claims. Have you made that information available to others? Does your organization do research it can share? Do you need to commission research to show progress from year to year?
What are your key messages? Can your staff, volunteers, donors, board members and funders repeat them easily? Do you need to adjust your key messages to be more relevant to new audiences you've targeted? Do your key messages have supporting stories, photos, videos or sound? Are those easily available to press contacts? Do you have a plan to keep those elements updated and fresh?
What's your press strategy? How are you going to get the word out about your organization's work this year? Will you focus on generating coverage related to calendar events and milestones? Will you establish press coverage goals by quarter? Do you have an online strategy that extends beyond your website? Is your website set up to help members of the press easily find what they need? Have you identified individuals that are ready to work with the pres on short notice? Do additional people need media training? Are there organizations or groups with whom your organization should look to partner for increased exposure?
How will you monitor and evaluate your work? What metrics should you track? How often? What thresholds differentiate between success and failure? Who should have access to the data?

Take the time now to tackle these tough questions with your organization's core team, and set up a session now to revisit your progress in six months. You'll be glad you did.

Getting ready for 2008

2007-12-31T18:46:00.000-08:00

I've already written one post suggesting that those of you for those of you in the non-profit world focus on polishing your organization's storytelling as you head in to the New Year, but I've since run across a list of 5 suggested resolutions posted by Tiffany Myer of Numa Marketing and they're well worth repeating on this, the last day of 2007. May your organization take them to heart, and benefit from them in the coming year.

I've pulled select bits from her article below - but please click here to read it in its entirety if you have the chance.

Resolution #1: Make your Web copy relevant [My readers will recognize this as "storytelling" - something I talk about a great deal in my own posts] ...create market-specific content (copy, images, and/or interactive graphics) for each of your target markets. At a minimum, add this content to the top-tier pages of your Web site this year (those pages that have the highest number of hits such as your homepage). Even if you do nothing else to drive more traffic to your site, the visitors you DO receive will now be much more likely to connect with your organization.
Resolution #2: Boost your online social savvy [My readers will recognize this as "social networking" - something I also talk about a great deal] ...To stay competitive, nonprofits must stay up to speed on the latest tools of social marketing, and understand how these tools may (or may not) grab the attention of their target markets.
Resolution #3: Ask for permission
... Adding such a "lead capture tool" to your Web site is now easier than ever. In fact, most email distribution services (such as aWeber, CoolerEmail) can help you add a lead capture tool to your site in a manner of minutes, even if you are not technically savvy. Remember - the best lead capture tools offer something of value in exchange for gathering the user's contact information. For instance, a subscription to a valuable e-Newsletter, a relevant white paper download, or a resource guide.
Resolution #4: Get noticed
[I would add here that a great public relations plan - something we specialize in at Cause+Effect - is one great way to be sure your organization gets noticed] ...With the right positioning on the Web..., nonprofits can cost-effectively find new customers, donors, members, volunteers or advocates. And in turn, they can also boost their market share, revenue, funds, membership lists, and even amplify their success with national outreach campaigns.
Resolution #5: Track, track, track
... Focus on analyzing basic traffic data every quarter or so, such as: hits per month; average page views per visitor, conversion rates (ratio of hits per how many people took the action you wanted them to take, like make donation, purchase a product, or sign up for your e-newsletter); and referring sites or keywords (these tell you how people are finding you).

Happy New Year everyone!!

Thoughts on Benazir Bhutto's assassination

2007-12-27T16:30:00.000-08:00

I generally don't cover politics on this blog, but it somehow doesn't feel right to let this day go by without commenting on the loss of Benazir Bhutto.

In 1988, Bhutto was the first woman ever elected to govern a Muslim country. And while Islam has a long tradition of honoring the contributions of women, I agree with Medea Benjamin when she says in this Huffington Post article that Bhutto's death is "a blow to people all over Pakistan, and the world, who hold life sacred and believe in the basics precepts of democracy. It is also a blow to women worldwide who took strength from seeing such a courageous, articulate and charismatic woman playing a leadership role in a powerful Muslim country."

Benjamin goes on to quote from an essay Bhutto wrote for Benjamin's upcoming book. Bhutto's words - powerful on any day - are even more powerful today:

"The neglect of rising poverty against the background of religious extremism can only complicate an already difficult world situation," she said. "The war against terrorism is primarily perceived as a war based on the use of force. However, economics has its own force, as does the desperation of families who cannot feed themselves.

"Militancy and greed cannot become the defining images of a new century that began with much hope. We must refocus our energy on promoting the values of democracy, accountability, broad-based government, and institutions that can respond to people's very real and very urgent needs."

Those of us in the non-profit sector, and frankly all people as global citizens, have no choice but to rise to this challenge. The alternative is untenable.

Benjamin closes her article with these words. I hope they help all of us continue to move forward, despite this horrific setback.

Whether in Pakistan or in our home countries, we can dedicate ourselves to building a world based on tolerance, cooperation and fulfilling the urgent needs of the human family--which are the pillars of a more peaceful world.

Party with a Purpose

2007-12-27T12:33:00.000-08:00

For a lot of us, the holidays bring with them a hectic social calendar. Company parties, holiday parties hosted by friends and other types of gatherings fill our schedules.

Your organization might be able to take advantage of this idea by partnering with board members, volunteers, or other supporters to turn an existing event into a fund raising party for you.

Author Morrie Warshawski contacted me recently about about his book "The Fund Raising Houseparty" (now in its 2nd edition) on this topic. It's certainly not a new idea (I've been to several parties like this myself), but it's good to know there's a straightforward how-to available as a reference for organizations looking to raise funds this way. Events can be tricky things, and one can never be too prepared. (For those of you in the Bay Area, he's also doing a workshop through CompassPoint on February 29th).

The book outlines five basic steps for a successful party:

people receive an invitation to come to a private home.
the invitation makes it clear that the evening will be a fundraising event for a specific nonprofit organization.
participants arrive and are served some refreshments.
participants sit through a brief presentation.
a peer--someone articulate, respected and enthusiastic--steps up and asks everyone present to make a contribution.

Both large and small organizations can benefit from a successful event because it serves as both a fund raising, as well as a branding, opportunity. Not only does the organization have the opportunity to walk away with funds it probably would have missed, it also has a chance to tell its story to a captive, and pre-screened, audience. Better still, it's a relatively painless way to get Board Members to participate in the organization's fund raising efforts.

If your organization is considering a house party, I would add these ideas to the book's suggestions:

Start with storytelling. Your stories are your main assets - if there's a way to have them displayed around the space so attendees can absorb them throughout the evening, do so. Incorporate them into your live presentation. Create small take-away items that attendees can share with others after the event.
Discourage anonymity. Peer pressure is a powerful tool in these types of settings. If each donation is publicly visible (donors might get a sticker on their lapel, or may be asked to stand for applause), those who have not yet committed to donate will feel pressure to do so.
Identify new donors. The room will likely be filled with some who are familiar with your organization and some who are not. Create a visual way to distinguish between these two groups so newcomers know who to ask if they have questions, and staff can easily engage new prospects.

Have other suggestions, ideas or success stories on this topic? Add a comment to this post to share your ideas with other readers.

New Year's Resolutions

2007-12-26T13:25:00.000-08:00

Now that Christmas is over, organizations can begin to look forward to 2008. Just like people, organizations should take this time to reflect on the past year, think through lessons learned, and focus on opportunities for the upcoming year.

One key resolution I'd suggest any organization consider, is to re-focus on telling their story in a way that really engages their audience - whoever that might be. Storytelling is the one thing that the non-profit world has going for it. For-profit companies pay public relations agencies top dollar to find new ways to tell compelling stories about the products they sell - most non-profit organizations have truly incredible stories just laying around the office.

Use storytelling to your advantage (read more posts about storytelling here) in 2008 by taking the time to create a visually engaging presentation that captures the heart and soul of your organization. Focus on the humanity, vitality, and impact of your organization. Pull the viewer in with images, music, color, voices, and anything else you can think of. Try it out on friends and neighbors - anyone who doesn't work with you - and see how they react. Keep the parts that provoke emotion. Ditch the parts that don't.

Above all - don't be boring. A quote and image from an excellent post by Trista Harris at New Voices for Philanthropy are worth re-posting here:

My biggest pet peeve is boring nonprofit and foundation staff. Terrible PowerPoint presentations from someone from the social sector make me want to scream out “you have the most powerful and emotionally wrenching material out there and all you could come up with is this dry, picture-less, graph-filled PowerPoint about your 10 year strategic plan?!” People make award winning movies about the work that we do everyday, Al Gore’s PowerPoint won him the Nobel Peace Prize, and you can’t keep your staff and board members awake for a ten minute presentation?

January is generally a slow month for most non-profit organizations. Take the time now to do the work of polishing, reworking and adding emotion to your organization's story. It's a great way to start off the new year.

Getting great reviews

2007-12-22T12:54:00.001-08:00

One way to get your organization's donors, volunteers and service recipients involved in generating publicity for your organization is to ask them to write a review. It's a great way to get your organization's name out into the public sphere, and it's also a great way to get direct feedback that you may not have otherwise heard.

The idea of reviewing products has been around for years now. Sites like Amazon, Yelp, Citysearch, and others provide a way for a community of users to share their experiences with others. Similar services for non-profits are springing up now as well. The first of these, Great Nonprofits, allow organizations to set up a page with information about themselves, and then easily allow others to add to the conversation.

The site is still in beta, so it might be worth waiting for a few months before joining in, but it certainly opens up a new avenue for publicity and donor engagement.

January is National Mentoring Month

2007-12-21T14:57:00.000-08:00

Most calendar months have several social causes associated with them. By integrating a nationally celebrated month into your annual communications plan, you might be able to create publicity for your organization that you may not have otherwise gotten. (For a great list of commemorative dates, try this page on wikipedia.)

Since January is right around the corner, and since there are so many organizations out there that focus on kids, I thought it might be nice to highlight National Mentoring Month.

National Mentoring Month is a project of the National Mentoring Partnership and will mark its seventh year in 2008. It is designed to focus national attention on the need for mentors as well as how each of us—individuals, businesses, government agencies, schools, faith communities, and nonprofits—can work together to increase the number of mentors.

Any organization that works with kids could:

generate a press release calling for new volunteers that could serve as mentors,
could include stories and photos on their website or in their newsletter highlighting mentor/mentee relationships that already exist in their organization, or
could schedule an event honoring key volunteers that have served as mentors within the organization for a long time.

Any of these ideas, among many others, could generate great coverage in local press. Of course, if you have other ideas, please feel free to comment below to share them with other readers.

Messaging strategies for non-profits from the SPIN project

2007-12-19T16:28:00.000-08:00

The SPIN Project (Strategic Press Information Network) provides media technical assistance to nonprofit public-interest organizations across the nation. It's an excellent resource for organizations that have enough in-house resources to execute a strategic communications plan once it's been established.

The SPIN Project announced the publication of a new resource today called "Words that Work: Messaging for Community Benefits Agreements," which was produced in collaboration with The Partnership for Working Families.

The 36-page toolkit lays out excellent advice on framing and message creation, case studies of successful campaigns, and sample communications documents to help organizations plan their own strategic communications campaign.

The toolkit is available for download here.

10 Tips for Year-End Fundraising

2007-12-19T16:20:00.000-08:00

This article is taken from this week's Groundspring email newsletter. For some reason, they don't appear to publish the newsletter online, so I've copied it below for your reference.

Enjoy!

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Millions of Americans will be thinking about last-minute tax deductions from December 26-31, which makes this the single best week of the year to email your prospects and ask for a donation. Last December 27, Network for Good sent a one-sentence reminder to donors which returned an average $50 donation for every email sent. With December half over, it's now or never for planning these year-end fundraising emails. Here's how:

1. Construct your message: As you write your year-end appeal, remember that there are four components to a great message: connecting with your audience based on their values, rewarding your audience, asking for a specific action to get that reward, and making it memorable. Remember this with the mnemonic device CRAM, and these four easy steps. More details here.

2. Frame your call-to-action to answer four questions: To grow your donor base and total donations, your year-end appeals need to have an appropriate "Call to Action." As you craft your call to action, make sure you answer these four questions. More details here.

3. Ask people who have not given recently to make a year-end donation. Ask those who have to consider making a gift in somebody’s name or to make another contribution for tax benefits or specific year-end programs.

4. Have your supporters get their friends and family involved. Your biggest supporters care about your cause and want to further it. Additionally, people heed the advice and examples of somebody they know and trust. Ask them to ask for support on your behalf, through programs like America’s Giving Challenge. More details here.

5. Clearly show how a donation will make a difference; if you’re a homeless shelter include pictures from the previous year’s holiday meal that donations enabled.

6. Add some cheer to your emails with these holiday themed "Donate Now" buttons. More details here.

7. Format your emails appropriately to ensure everyone receives, opens and reads them. Here are 18 ideas to improve your delivery, open, and response rates. More details here.

8. Finally, always thank your donors. Multiple times. The most common reason a person stops giving to a charity is how they were treated by that carity. Thank your supporters, show them how they made a difference and cultivate them for the future.

9. Don't have a fundraising page? We can create a Custom DonateNow fundraising page that looks like your website in as little as 48 hours for only $29.95/month. More details here. No budget? To create your organization’s free Basic DonateNow page, simply add your organization's EIN to the end of the following URL:

https://www.networkforgood.org/donation/ExpressDonation.aspx?ORGID2=yourEINgoesHERE
(Example: https://www.networkforgood.org/donation/ExpressDonation.aspx?ORGID2=680480736)

10. Need an example of a fundraising email? Here's an email we received this week from The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. More details here.

Distributed funding - a new model for philanthropy

2007-12-17T17:20:00.000-08:00

An article in the Washington Post today underscores one of the key recent trends in philanthropy -- distributed funding.

While foundation-based and major-donor funding are certainly as important as they've ever been, social networking has introduced the idea of generating small dollar amounts from a very large base of supporters as an alternative to more standard practices.

The company featured in the Post article is called Razoo, but there are many others vying for space in this emerging market - including Steve Case's foundation on Facebook (which i talked about in an earlier post), JustGive.org, DonorsChoose.org, Network for Good, SixDegrees, Changing the Present, and many, many others.

Razoo represents an offshoot of the basic concept because it focuses attention on how technology and philanthropy are intersecting with the start-up, for-profit culture of the Internet.

Razoo is a company that has built a Web site to connect people with one another, much like social networking giants MySpace and Facebook, but in support of humanitarian objectives such as preventing homelessness in the United States and helping families who live in a Nicaragua trash dump. Users and causes each have their own pages.
"YouTube is transforming TV. Google has transformed advertising," said Razoo founder J. Sebastian Traeger. "The Web will do the same thing for philanthropy."

The point here is that non-profits have tended to spend a great deal of time cultivating larger donors, and have tended to invest less time cultivating the smaller ones. Given the changing technology landscape, organizations will need to rethink that strategy very, very soon. Tapping in to the deep ocean of donors on the internet is likely to spell financial success for those organizations who reach them sooner, rather than later.

Why storytelling matters

2007-12-15T14:23:00.000-08:00

An excellent post on storytelling from Shoestring Creative Group reinforces once again why organizations need to focus on effective storytelling.

When it comes to communicating through storytelling, nonprofit organizations have a huge advantage over corporations and businesses. They WISH they had the stories you have. ... Marketing is crucial to your organization’s mission, not an extra thing that you have to do when everything else is already done. By approaching marketing communications as an integral part of reaching your mission, you can literally use marketing as a way to increase the capacity of your organization. If your marketing activities are not doing this, than you need to completely rethink what you are doing to get out your organization’s story.

The post highlights the biggest mistakes nonprofits make when trying to tell their organizations’ stories.

They look at their organizations from their point of view rather than the view of the audience.
They don’t get their story straight.
They tell the wrong story to the wrong audience.
They don’t answer the question , “SO WHAT?"

I would add one item to this list:

5. They don't include a way for the person hearing the story to get involved.

As part of your 2008 planning, your organization should take inventory of its own storytelling - and take the time to iron out any wrinkles that may have found their way into this critical part of its communications efforts. If your staff, donors, volunteers and recipients can't easily - and clearly - tell your story when asked, take the time to help them do so.

It's worth the effort.

An opportunity for a little extra publicity

2007-12-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

After October 15th's Blog Action Day mainstream media began to notice that an organized group of bloggers could focus the attention of the online world onto a single topic for a single day. While the jury is still out on its effectiveness, the idea has certainly caught on.

Bloggers Unite is a different new take on the same idea. Rather than asking all bloggers to write on a single topic, its asking all bloggers to write about a social cause of their choice.

When online events like these are announced, non-profits can use them as a novel way to reach out to their supporters for extra publicity. It can be used as an article in a newsletter, as a sidebar on your website, or as part of an online social networking strategy. If just 1% of your audience chooses to blog about your organization, you could easily generate several hundred new mentions of your cause online. The multiplier effect from these mentions can benefit your organization by attracting new members, donors, and press interest. It's a win-win.

The official description Bloggers Unite program is below:
"The Acts of Kindness theme aims at putting a human face on the bloggers responsible for so much good in the world. The goal is to expose their kindness and generosity as well as serve as an example to non-bloggers that volunteering for a charity, donating to a cause, or simply doing something kind for another person has a ripple effect around the world."

Start 2008 with $50,000 for your nonprofit

2007-12-12T17:04:00.000-08:00

The Case Foundation and Parade Magazine are sponsoring America’s Giving Challenge and awarding $500,000 to charities whose supporters have attracted the most unique donors to their cause using new and innovative online tools.

Who can participate:

Anyone with access to the Internet, a willingness to try something new, and the passion and commitment to advocate on behalf of a cause they care about. The entire Challenge is designed to take place online, involving the use of such everyday activities as e-mailing, blogging, and social networking.

To “champion a cause” you must be a legal U.S. resident aged 13 years or older. Anyone can donate to a cause using a valid credit card or other form of payment accepted by our donation processing partners Network for Good and GlobalGiving.

How it works:

There are two ways to get involved:

Champion a Cause and have the chance to get $50,000 for the charity of your choice. The eight individuals whose charity badges attract the most unique donors through the America’s Giving Challenge will get $50,000 for their cause.

Give to a Cause and help the charity you care about get $1,000. The 100 nonprofits with the greatest number of unique donations made to them through America’s Giving Challenge will each get $1,000.

The Challenge begins December 13 at 3pm EST and will close January 31 at 3pm EST. For more information, go to www.parade.com.

Why your staff should read, and comment on, blogs

2007-12-12T16:41:00.000-08:00

One of the more influential bloggers in the field of philanthropy, Sean Stannard-Stockton, makes a great point today in his post Blogs as Public Commons on the site Tactical Philanthropy - the comments you post to other people's blogs may in fact be quoted and used in the media. It's public commentary that never expires.

This can be a great thing for cash strapped non-profits. Staff members, especially those that interact with the media regularly, should be reading blogs that focus on relevant topics daily. News often breaks on blogs before traditional media, and conversations between bloggers and their readers often bring insights that wouldn't otherwise surface.

When reading blog posts, staff should be encouraged to leave comments that are well within clear organization guidelines using appropriate, media-ready, talking points that reflect well on the organization.

These comments may get picked up by larger media outlets and get your organization a mention in a story that would have otherwise passed you by. Or, the comments may lead to a call from a journalist that may have otherwise gone to a different organization.

The key is to get involved, get active, and get noticed. It's a free an easy way to open up your organization's publicity options.

Why social networking is important for non-profits

2007-12-12T15:13:00.000-08:00

One of my clients asked me to come up with a bulleted list of why social networking matters to non-profits. The list is in response to a reporter's query for a fairly specific article, but I thought the bullets were important to share nonetheless. I've edited some words for confidentiality, but the general ideas remain:

We're very enthusiastic about social networking and we've invested in making it one of our outreach efforts for '08. It will allow us to reach out to audiences that haven't traditionally been involved with [our organization] - like younger people, and people who are new to [our area] - in very exciting ways.
Social networking is a fantastic tool for non-profits because it's relatively inexpensive, it allows for an ongoing, two-way dialog between the organization and the people it serves, and gives passionate people a platform to talk about causes and organizations that are important to them.
[Our organization] truly began as a social network - a network of people who cared about [our state]'s at-risk youth and who wanted to work together to make sure they had access to the best possible opportunities. We've always valued grassroots efforts and we're pleased to see this online phenomenon of social networking reinforce these fundamental values.
Social networking is still taking form as a communication mechanism, which is why it's important for non-profits to begin exploring it as a tool now, rather than waiting until later. Non-profits can actually help influence the development of the social networking space if we join the conversation early.
Social networking allows everyone at [our organization], from the Executive Director to the kids who receive our help, to take part in the conversation. No one voice is more important than any other, and some of the more interesting conversations begin in unlikely places. We would be missing out on that rich exchange without these new technologies.