In this post, you’ll learn some strategies for creating an effective nonprofit website.

3 Strategies for Creating An Effective Nonprofit Website

/in /by

Nowadays, having a website for your nonprofit is non-negotiable. You need your own internet outpost, a place where both committed supporters and curious website visitors can go to learn about your mission and contribute to your cause. 

Luckily, designing a nonprofit website is easier than you may think. Whether you’re working with a designer or taking a DIY route with a user-friendly website builder, there are hundreds of tools at your fingertips that can help you establish a distinct look and identity for your nonprofit online.

But to make your website a truly effective tool for your community of supporters, you’ll need to make sure you’re doing more than just making your site look good. Your site will need substance, too—educational information and useful resources that make it possible for your supporters to take action and help you move your mission forward. 

Read more

How to Create Enough Good Content
(Case Study)

/in /by

Guest blogger Holly Ross has spent seven+ years at the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), working with community members to identify technology trends that are reshaping the nonprofit sector. Brett Meyer, NTEN Communications Director, co-authored this post.

As nonprofits have flocked to the e-newsletter as an inexpensive and timely way to communicate with stakeholders, the number of newsletter tips has also proliferated. While subject lines, “from” addresses, and your template design are all important, they aren’t the biggest challenge to putting out a quality newsletter.  The most difficult part is creating good content, content your subscribers want to read.

For many organizations, simply getting an e-newsletter out regularly, with enough  content — let alone enough good content — is a win. That was certainly true for NTEN a few years ago. But since then, we’ve developed loftier goals for our e-news NTEN Connect, transforming it from a chore we had to cross off the monthly to-do list to a blockbuster driver of traffic to our blog. And we managed to reinforce our values and culture while doing so. Here’s how:

The chore of creating good content

NTEN is a small organization. With just a handful of staff members, we felt the pain of the e-news challenge intensely.

Writing enough good, timely content to fill a monthly newsletter was simply not an option for our overburdened staff. Instead, in 2007, we started stocking it with articles written by members of our community.

While we selected the topics and the authors for each issue, producing the newsletter itself became a matter of curation rather than creation. This shift also aligned nicely with one of our core values: providing a platform for our community’s views. And we took one step further to publish our newsletter stories on our blog (on our website). Readers of the newsletter received a teaser for the article – usually the first paragraph or two – and a link to read the entire article on our site.

We very quickly saw a jump in the website metrics we track. Traffic started to rise and we got lots of compliments on the new format. At that point, we knew we had something good on our hands, but knew we could do even better.

The content creation experiment

We shook up our e-news format again in November 2008. Rather than hand-picking topics and authors, we invited the community to write about anything they wanted. Submissions flowed in, including quite a few we couldn’t use. While we put out an interesting issue, it didn’t drive traffic quite the way we had hoped it would.

Then we added a twist to the experiment in Fall 2009. We had always used the newsletter to “break” stories, publishing all of the new articles at once on our website, on the day we sent out the newsletter. This time, we posted the articles on our website as they were submitted, letting the authors know that the most successful posts — those that generated the greatest usage as measured by page views, time spent on the site, and comments — would be included in the November newsletter.

By this time, of course, social media had burst upon the scene. Being that the NTEN community is generally pretty tech savvy, we saw them using blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to share news, likes and their own accomplishments. So we tapped the power and reach of the community for the newsletter, leveraging our authors’ social networks to drive traffic to our site and increase newsletter subscriptions.

Our incentive strategy worked! That November, we saw an 80% increase in blog traffic over November 2008. We watched our authors using their social networks to highlight their accomplishment – “Look! I have an article on the NTEN site!” – driving traffic our way. That single month was a huge factor in our 22% increase in blog traffic in 2009.

Unfortunately, blog traffic in every other month (when we curated newsletter content) flatlined.

We continued experimenting with the e-news throughout 2010 to boost site traffic, redesigning the template and removing less-popular features. Nothing helped us reach the boost that the social network November 2009 edition created.

The leap into a new content strategy

So, in September 2010, we moved to our Community Guided Content model. We still ask authors to write about specific topics, but we post new articles to our website almost daily, then use the stats to determine what goes into the actual newsletter. Since this shift, blog traffic is up 37% year-over-year  and shows a fairly steady month-to-month growth rate. Plus time spent on web pages on page is up – a modest but welcome increase of three seconds.

This new strategy means we’re driving a lot of traffic to NTEN.org overall: We’re up 24% year-over-year in 2011. The blog/newsletter strategy drives most of that, as you can see from the increase in blog traffic as a percentage of total site traffic for the last few years:

2008: 17%
2009: 19%
2010: 22%
2011: 25%

Most importantly,  publishing more and more diverse content on the blog gives us a sense of what the NTEN community is most interested in. Then, when we compose NTEN Connect each month, instead of guessing what we should send out to our 30,000 subscribers, we can look at our blog and social media analytics data to learn what our blog readers have already found most engaging.

Looking to the future

We now have a successful newsletter strategy in place — one that aligns our values and goals, and has significantly expanded our visibility and prominence in the sector. This year alone, our newsletter subscriber base has increased 50%.

Next, we’re hoping to match newsletter content even more closely with our audiences’ wants and interests. We’ve begun experimenting more with segmentation: instead of sending out one issue to our full list, we deliver seven different versions based on job function, e.g. Executive Directors receive different content than IT staff members.

Going forward, we’ll be able to tailor newsletter content based on the articles our readers have interacted with over time. Already, we’ve seen the potential for this level of segmentation by including dynamic content based on our subscribers’ membership status and activity levels. And we expect to continue refining our content strategy on an ongoing basis to ensure it meets the needs of the NTEN community. That’s what makes a successful e-newsletter!

What are your strategies for creating content that’s valued by your audiences and advances your organization’s mission — for your e-news, blog, or other channels — when it’s just one of many must-do tasks?

3-Step Communications to Re-engage Volunteers

/in /by

We are delighted to have Colleen Farrell, Senior Director, Marketing and Communications at New York Cares, join us as a recurring guest blogger.

New York Cares is New York City’s leading volunteer organization and runs volunteer programs for 1,000  nonprofits, city agencies and public schools, enabling more than 50,000 volunteers annually to contribute their time, expertise and energy to a wide array of organizations that address critical social needs citywide.

Every fall I feel like a kid going back to school. I don’t have to worry about pop quizzes these days, but there’s a big shift as we transition from the slower summer months into our busiest time of year.  New York Cares’ inventory of volunteer projects increases dramatically -– doubling between August and November.  Volunteer interest also ramps back up after summer, with a spike around Thanksgiving.

Our communication and management challenge is to quickly re-engage volunteers after the summer, and ensure we mobilize the right number of people at the right time as projects expand. Here are three things we consider:

1. Allow volunteers to act now.

We calculate the volunteers we need each month, then create a communications plan synced with our project roll-out schedule.  For example, we scale back new volunteer orientations during the summer.  In late July, we begin asking volunteers to become project leaders for fall (which is critical for starting new projects).  From August onward, email, social media, and orientation schedules accelerate to bring in more volunteers.

There have been times where volunteer demand has outstripped our capacity –- it’s disappointing for volunteers, and something we work hard to avoid.  The volunteers you turn away may never come back.

2. Engage existing volunteers.

The adage, it’s more efficient to get business from existing customers than win new ones, applies to volunteers, too.

We track and analyze volunteers’ histories through our database.  This helps us forecast how many of last year’s volunteers are likely to return (about 50%) and how many new people we need to recruit to fill our available opportunities.  We target communications accordingly.

3. Build a monthly messaging plan.

We create an editorial calendar aligned with our programs, and try to unify messaging across channels.  We pick a lead theme each month or season  – in the fall, we’re all about education.  Messaging is simple and action oriented.  We provide context about the current volunteer needs, paint a picture of the impact they can make, and provide clear direction on how to get involved.

Some of our most experienced volunteers will be too swamped to re-engage: that’s reality. But we stay in touch, and try to offer other, less time intensive ways to help – fundraising, donating, and friendraising, for example.

What are your Fall strategies for re-engaging volunteers and other supporters?

Nonprofits that Keep Their Word Deliver Great Experiences for Supporters, Finds Researcher Scott Deming

/in /by

Ever had a nonprofit customer experience (as a donor, volunteer or whatever) that left you with a smile on your face? On the other hand, have you ever had an encounter with an organization that left you gnashing your teeth and griping about the event for weeks on end to anyone who’d listen? If you’re like most people, you can answer both questions (especially the second one!) with a resounding yes. But did you ever stop to wonder precisely what its was that went so right or, in the second case, so terribly wrong?

Scott Deming, author of The Brand Who Cried Wolf: Deliver on Your Company’s Promise and Create Customers for Life has the surprisingly simple answer: Great customer experiences happen when organizations keep their word. Most critical, pronounces Deming, is that what you say your organization stands for (brand) means next to nothing compared to what your stakeholders experience. That experience is your real brand or, as my mother used to say, actions speak louder than words.

Identifying positive and negative experiences

What’s interesting is that Deming profiles organizations he deems brilliant branders (orgs like Ben & Jerry’s and Saturn who consistently provide an ultimate customer experience) and wolf criers (who claim they do but actually don’t). And guess what nonprofit leads the wolf criers list….none other than the infamous Red Cross.

I find Deming’s perspective a particularly meaningful way to look at the organizations that have really let us down. Others I can name include the United Way and Smithsonian. These are organizations supporters and other audiences trusted to do the right thing; but they didn’t. And they lost our trust and support.

The Red Cross is a glaring example of how trust can be instantaneously eroded. In the hours after terrorists attacked the United States on 9/11, record-breaking pledges poured in from around the world. The Red Cross set up The Liberty Fund as a direct response to the attacks and collected more than $564 million. However, by November 2001, CNN and other news agencies reported that only $154 million of that had been distributed. Dr. Bernadine Healy, who was the outgoing Red Cross president at the time, argued in defense of the charitable organization’s decision to set aside more than half of the money raised for future needs, including possible terrorist attacks. This news angered many donors. They felt like their money was not reaching the intended recipients. Bad customer experience.

“In other words, though donors were not critical of the charity having money for future disasters, the real question was whether the important agency misled donors into thinking donations were going immediately to 9/11 relief,” explains Deming. “I don’t think anyone really believes the Red Cross deceived people for some selfish, greedy end. But in a moment when individuals’ feelings were of raw helplessness and despair, and the only way they had to connect with and help others was through monetary donations, the Red Cross failed to keep its brand trust.”

Tips for positive supporter experiences

Here are a couple of Deming’s most useful suggestions for staying on track to deliver the right kind of experience for your supporters:

  • Be careful what you promise. If you aren’t, and don’t come through, you’ve probably ruined a beautiful relationship. So when you tell prospects how their donations will be used, make sure that allocation is correct? If you can’t get internal operations right, how could they ever count on your organization to make good use of their monies?
  • Get the perspective you need. To really know how things are going at your organization, you’ll have to step out of your own shoes and take a walk in those of your supporters and staff. Make sure you have open channels of communications flowing with each group, 24/7.  “When your perspective widens, so does your concern about what’s important. The benefits you receive from changing your perspective will far exceed those reaped from a narrower, more traditional focus, ” says Deming.
  • Use this insight to separate your organization from the pack. So many nonprofits are squeamish about looking at the world in which they work realistically, and accepting the fact that they are in direct competition with many other orgs for donors, volunteers, program participants and more. You have to find what you can do to differentiate your organization from all the others that offer the same services or products. You have to find what you can do to differentiate your organization from all the others that offer the same services or products.

Your most powerful differentiator must be the level of service, the unique experience you offer each of your stakeholders at their moment of engagement with your organization. When you work hard to engender their loyalty, honestly, they’ll go out of their way to stay involved with your  organization.

Make your organization events more effective with these tools.

Two Don’t-Miss Tools for More Effective Organization Events

/in /by

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the nonprofit industry has seen a shift to more virtual and hybrid events alongside fully online fundraisers. In a time when we’ve become accustomed to virtual interaction, face-to-face gatherings can be more impactful than ever.

Building relationships and community online is crucial for spreading your organization’s reach and expanding your membership. But the value of face-to-face engagement can’t be replaced. In-person gatherings often bring a movement or a campaign to the next level, further engaging your members.

Here are two tools we’ve discovered that will help you take your organization’s events to the next level.

1. Event Management Software

Event management platforms are one of the more crucial components of planning your event. Whether you’re planning, hosting, or evaluating the success of an event, you’ll need event management software to help you along the way.

Fonteva’s Salesforce event management software guide walks through how to utilize association management software for your next event:

  • Create guest lists. Choose who to invite and create separate lists for attendees based on tracks of the event you want them to attend.
  • Track registration. Keep track of registrants during your planning process to ensure your venue and sessions can properly accommodate your members and attendees. This can also help you determine how much you need to continue promoting your event leading up to the date.
  • Create event sessions and guest seating. Divide attendees into groups, create seating charts, and set table numbers to further organize your event data.
  • Ensure simple payment processing. Process registration, eCommerce purchases, and donations all through your event management software. Be sure that your processor is PCI compliant to ensure data security.
  • Generate custom reports. Evaluate your event’s success by running revenue and registration reports on the data collected. You can also analyze which aspects of your event worked the best.
  • Send follow-up communications. Reach out to your attendees following the event to highlight the success of the day, thanking them for their time and participation. You can also inquire with attendees for feedback to improve future events.

When you choose the right event management solution for your organization, you’ll be able to customize the features to help you plan a range of activities from conferences to networking events to virtual panels to fundraisers.

With event management software you can increase the ROI for your event while creating a memorable experience for your members and attendees. Because event management software also stores member data, you can save attendee contact preferences, financial information, and other important information for later use. This data can be used to plan future events.

2. Graphic Design Services

Graphic design should be a part of all of your marketing materials. Skillful visual aesthetics can enhance your brand identity when standardized logos, graphics, and color schemes are implemented across all your marketing materials.

Graphic design requires experience and time. It can be expensive to troubleshoot if you are unsure of what you’re doing. Seasoned graphic design companies and professionals can work with you to provide assets for your organization to enhance your event space, color promotional materials, and engage more registrants.

According to Nonprofit’s Source guide to nonprofit graphic design, here are five types of design that a graphic designer can help you implement into your event marketing strategy:

  • Event Branding. Designers can create an event logo and color scheme that pair well with your organization’s main brand. They may use secondary colors from your main brand to enhance overall awareness and differentiate your event as a new campaign.
  • Event Website. Website designers can create microsites or webpages for your event. Their expertise in page navigation can help create webpages for registrants to easily find schedules, event details, and payment options.
  • Digital Design. Craft digital design materials like infographics, videos, social media graphics, virtual flyers, or email newsletters to promote your event. Digital materials will enable you to widely share information about your event, increase brand awareness, and gain more registrants.
  • Print Materials. Hire designers to create brochures and maps, branded merchandise, and thank you cards for your event. Send attendees home with branded merchandise to help them remember their experience and your organization.
  • Environmental Event Design. To beautify your event, designers can create branded banners, donor/sponsor walls, giving kiosks, and art installations. Designers can transform your event space into a theme or create materials to promote your mission or sponsors.

Events won‘t be nearly as successful if there is no promotion or thought put into the experience. By utilizing the skill of professional graphic design services, your organization can bolster attendee registration and improve the quality of your event.

And don’t waste your time creating one or two graphics that don’t look exactly right. Find an experienced graphic design provider that can work with you to create a set of marketing materials and event decor that fit your vision and the organization’s brand.

Organizing events is time consuming and can take months of planning. Look for scalable plans when searching for event management software and graphic design providers so they leave room for your organization’s growth. Now that you know how to maximize your potential with event management software and graphic design services, you can start planning your next event.

Why Choose Getting Attention?

/in /by
Read more