You face an uphill battle to recruit volunteers and retain them at ever higher and more effective levels of engagement. For those of you with small or all-volunteer organizations, there’s absolutely nothing more important. And, as time and budgets get tighter, and reliance on volunteers increases, it’s harder than ever.
There’s a proven yet seldom-used method to boost success in both dimensions AND extend your organization’s reach and impact without adding budget or hires: Building your team of passionate volunteer messengers.
The value of launching your volunteer messengers is huge; a real win-win doable with limited time and expense. Take these seven steps to launch your team of passionate volunteer messengers. I’ll follow up with posts on each step, starting with the most productive pilot program I know:
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Nancy Schwartz in All-Org Marketing Team
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Tags:all-org marketing team, Nonprofit Communications, nonprofit marketing, volunteer, volunteer management, volunteer messengers
Do you bring yourself—with your passions, personal history, and personality—to work, or do you check “the real you” at the front door?
Here’s hoping you bring “all of you” to work. It’s the only way to feel fully at ease in your job, to nurture the relationships you need for success and satisfaction (for you and your organization), and to bring the greatest value to your role and responsibilities.
Take James Porter, director of communications at The End Fund. James recently asked me (via email from his personal address) to donate to the END Fund in support of his participation in a marathon this June. He describes the race, and the cause, then links his passion for his work (and participation in the race) with his experience of being marginalized as a gay boy growing up. His story is moving, memorable, and forges a quick and strong connection with readers. For James, the personal is professional:
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Nancy Schwartz in Professional Development
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Tags:James Porter, Nonprofit Communications, nonprofit marketing, personal is professional, Race to See the End, The End Fund
Yes, this has to matter to you. Maybe you dodged the bullet of the most recent global cyber attack. But the next one or the ones after that could wreck your communications impact and a lot more. If or when your organization gets hacked, it’ll bring all activity—including communications and fundraising—to an absolute standstill. Even worse, it will require an enormous investment of time and budget to repair and get back up and going; even with that, critical donor data, program stats, and email lists may be lost or corrupted.
So do something about it, even if your ED or IT staff or consultant is standing still.
My husband, Sean M. Bailey, happens to be an expert on cybersecurity and the recent author of Hack-Proof Your Life Now. What’s great about Sean’s advice is that it’s efficient and doable. He advises you take three steps asap to protect yourself and your organization:
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Nancy Schwartz in Strategy
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Tags:cybersecurity, database, donor database, fundraising, Hack-Proof Your Life, IT, marketing planning, Nonprofit Communications, nonprofit marketing, Sean M. Bailey
There’s a proven way for your organization to start and strengthen vital relationships with the people whose support, loyalty, and actions you want—donors, volunteers, and even staff (too often overlooked here).
This approach is easy to learn and execute. And it’s something you do on a personal level all the time: Getting to know and understand others with whom you want to build a friendship—learning what’s important to them and how their days go. These insights enable you to focus in on what’s important or interesting to both of you, and how best to keep in touch via a commonly-used channel (social, mobile, text, mail) at a receptive time.
Here are four proven methods of harvesting these priceless insights:
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Nancy Schwartz in Audience Research
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Tags:aclu, Audience Research, marketing planning, messages, nonprofit communications jobs, nonprofit marketing, WIIFM
Liz Polay-Wettengel is National Director of Marketing and Communications for InterfaithFamily, a Jewish non-profit based in Newton, MA.
For three years in a row, my colleagues from InterfaithFamily and I have participated in the annual Nonprofit Tech Conference (from NTEN). It is, by far, the conference that we learn the most from. Every year, we have come back with new ideas, fresh perspectives, and tools to do what we do better.
This year was no different. Held in Washington DC, the 3,000 attendees at the 2017 conference brainstormed on topics far beyond the “traditional” definition of technology—nonprofit marketing, development, leadership, and organizational infrastructure.
Key takeaways from my deep-dive into NTC learning include:
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Nancy Schwartz in Trends
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Tags:#17NTC, digital marketing, fundraising, Interfaith Family, Nonprofit Communications, nonprofit marketing, nonprofit marketing trends, nten
The hands-down, most hated and most frequently-avoided marketing task is budgeting. Believe me, I hear it constantly.
Now’s the time to get past this bias and digest the coming series on on budgeting how-tos. You’ll learn the value a budget brings to your work as it translates the actions outlined in your marketing plan into expense. You’ll discover is a completely different way of looking at your marketing work, that works as both a clear framework for your decision-making on wants vs. “nice-to-haves” and a powerful tool for getting the marketing dollars you need to meet agreed-upon goals. READ MORE
Nancy Schwartz in Budgeting
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Tags:marketing budget, nonprofit marketing, planning
Guest blogger Karen Petersen is Director of Annual and Planned Giving at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Ala.
In my previous life, I was a TV reporter. My favorite part of the job was interviewing people and weaving their words together with mine to construct a compelling story. Little has changed since I changed careers.
In fundraising, we are all storytellers!
To tell the best stories, we need to find convincing characters who can provide passionate and powerful quotes. As Nancy has said in previous posts, “testimonials provide credibility.”
You may automatically reach out to external donors for your organization’s testimonials. However, you may be surprised by the storytellers you can find in the cube, office or even lab next door.
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Guest Blogger in Branding and Messages
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Tags:all-org messengers, Nonprofit Communications, nonprofit marketing, testimonial
Flickr: Chip Griffin
The pressure is on to connect and mobilize your people as the world in which we work grows increasingly complex, crowded, and uncertain. Why not recruit folks already connected with your organization to help as marketing and fundraising ambassadors?
Your colleagues, board members, volunteers, and loyal donors have tremendous potential to strengthen relationships, drive participation, and raise money IF you launch this six-step training program:
1) Share a clear call to action
Get super-specific when you ask people to step up as organizational messengers. Break your request down into small, doable steps. For example, request they “email your five closest friends or family members to ask them to support our organization during this first-time matching gift campaign” or to “discuss your passion for our organization with friends next time you go on a walk or out for dinner, sharing email addresses for those wanting to know more with me at me@ourorganization.org.”
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Nancy Schwartz in All-Org Marketing Team
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This practical, doable marketing plan template takes you from goals to benchmarks, work plan, action, and impact!
Eeesh! Those New Year’s resolutions—including the ones we set for marketing and fundraising work—are so hard to keep.
That’s because most resolutions are action items, rather than goals (the real “what we want to get to”). When things in our work worlds change—making those actions irrelevant or too difficult, or throwing them into question or making them too difficult— there’s no clear framework for assessment and adaptation. So the resolutions fade out, leaving you disappointed.
INSTEAD…
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Nancy Schwartz in Planning and Evaluation
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Tags:goals, Nonprofit Communications, nonprofit marketing, planning, Zig Ziglar
Remember when you were a teen and your mom told you to clean up your room, call your grandmother, and set the table all within the same five minutes.