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These tips will help your association make the most of participant data after your conference.

Get More From Conference Participant Data: 3 Top Tips

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As an association leader, you know how critical an annual conference can be to the success of your organization. Your conference might be the event that members look forward to all year as it provides opportunities to network, hear from influential speakers, and engage with exhibitors. Additionally, conferences can help your association build a stronger community and reach prospective members.

While they hold many benefits, organizing a conference is no small feat. They require significant investments of time, money, and effort. That said, your association will need to leverage all of its organizational skills to keep everything running smoothly. Behind every successful event are countless hours spent researching and booking venues, sourcing speakers, promoting and selling tickets, and communicating with exhibitors. So, when the conference ends, you’ll want to make the most of the relationships formed during the event.

Collecting data before and during the conference is the best way to take advantage of attendee participation. In this guide, we’ll explore strategies that will help you gather key pieces of information about attendees so you can personalize communications and improve future events:

As you navigate the event planning and data analysis processes, remember that each of these tasks can be seamlessly completed with association management software (AMS). An AMS will streamline event planning tasks as well as ticket and merchandise sales, and it even offers interactive apps that attendees can use to guide them through the conference. Best of all, you can use your AMS to easily connect and analyze data about members and attendees.

Let’s dive in by exploring the best ways to gather data from your attendees.

Offer multiple ways to engage.

To ensure your association is able to collect useful data from attendees, offer as many ways to engage as possible. This might mean choosing a hybrid conference format so that people can either attend in person or online. Or, you might market the conference through multiple communication channels so they can choose how to engage with promotions.

As Fonteva’s guide to member engagement explains, a strong sense of engagement secures your organization’s relevance, boosts member retention, and encourages community-building. To reap these benefits and ensure attendees are active participants at your conference, consider using these engagement strategies:

  • Organize low-stakes, casual activities. It can be difficult to “break the ice” during conferences, especially when attendees have little downtime between navigating from one session to the next. Leave room in the schedule for a few events designed to foster member-to-member connections. Popular ideas include networking lunches, games, or “unconference” sessions where participants can discuss topics of interest in a more casual setting.
  • Hold interactive workshops. Break up long days of complex presentations with workshops. Allow participants to actively engage with the content or learn a new skill. Not only does this provide a change of pace and opportunities to interact with others, but attendees will become more marketable with new sets of skills and experiences.
  • Set up digital forums. Using your AMS, organize discussion forums for the conference. Consider creating a general forum for the entire conference as well as forums for individual speakers or topics. Provide the forums in a mobile-friendly format. To further motivate attendees to participate, consider offering incentives for contributions from group members.
  • Use live polling and Q&As. Feature these activities during and at the end of presentations to curb meeting fatigue, particularly for virtual attendees. When faced with interactive elements during presentations, listeners will shift into a more active role (rather than being passive observers). To encourage more peer-to-peer interaction, consider asking questions and sending members into breakout sessions to discuss.

Using these strategies, your association can deeply engage attendees and provide more positive experiences. Additionally, you can gather data through these interactions and use it to refine future conferences.

Send out post-conference surveys.

NXUnite’s guide to membership benefits defines them as “perks, services, and access that people receive when they participate in a membership program.” Think of conferences as one of these benefits. You want members to be satisfied with them, particularly if they are paying to attend.

The best way to know whether attendees were satisfied with a conference is to ask them. For organized, honest feedback, send out a post-event survey that asks them what they liked and what could be improved. Make sure to ask for details as needed and for any suggestions they have for the future. Even if they found your conference to be valuable, they might have an interesting topic in mind for next year.

When creating your survey, make sure to include questions about the following areas:

  • Overall experience. Seek out high-level, general feedback by asking attendees to rate their overall experience at the conference on a numbered scale. Then, ask them to highlight the aspects of the conference that stood out positively, as well as any noticeable shortcomings.
  • Sessions and content. Ask your attendees to highlight the sessions they found most engaging, timely, or interesting. Consider asking them to highlight specific speakers they enjoyed, too. When asking about the sessions or speakers they weren’t as engaged by, ask for a detailed response so you’ll know what to improve.
  • Engagement. Get feedback from attendees about the quality of your networking and engagement opportunities. Ask if there were any they found particularly helpful or if they have any ideas about how to enhance them.
  • Logistics. Request that attendees rate the registration process and ease of communication with your association. If the event took place in person, ask them how they felt about the venue and locating sessions and meeting areas in the space. If the event took place online, ask them about their experience navigating links or accessing additional resources.
  • Suggestions. Ask attendees if there are any topics, themes, or activities they would like to see at future conferences. Make sure to ask a very general, open-ended question for any suggestions that don’t fit neatly into one of the previous categories.

Consider creating separate surveys for both staff and volunteers. While these surveys won’t necessarily help you reach more new members or secure additional renewals, they can assist in boosting staff retention and improving your volunteer program.

Use an AMS with data analysis capabilities.

After collecting data from before, during, and after the conference, you’ll need to use your association software’s data analytics tool to get a full picture of the conference. This data will reveal both your strengths and weaknesses, giving you a clear path toward an event that meets and exceeds the expectations of members.

The way associations use data will differ depending on their unique needs and goals. Here are a few specific examples of how conference data might be used to improve communications, future events, and organizational procedures:

  • Using demographic data about a member, you send a personalized message to them promoting events and opportunities taking place in their local area.
  • Before the conference, your association added a question to the registration form asking how registrants found out about the event. Then, you use these responses to understand which communication channels your audience prefers.
  • Responses to your post-event survey show that attendees loved one of your speakers, so you pass the praise along and proactively invite them to next year’s conference.
  • A few attendees recommend scheduling an optional happy hour each evening of the conference for networking purposes. When you implement the happy hour during your next event, participants give higher ratings for the “overall experience” and “engagement” categories.

Because this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to using your data, getting started can be overwhelming. It can help to compare feedback and suggestions against your association’s internal goals and assign each one a priority. Additionally, take into account the urgency of each piece of feedback and the number of people who made a similar suggestion or observation.

To ensure your event attracts new prospects and engaged members, make sure to promote the conference ahead of time and offer numerous engagement opportunities. Then, use your AMS to collect and analyze data from participants. Most importantly, make sure that your association uses the data it worked hard to get to actively learn and improve for the future.

Three people talking as one works on a computer

6 Common Challenges with Marketing and How To Solve Them

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Finding new ways to reach and engage donors is a continual challenge for nonprofit marketing professionals. Effective marketing requires being creative, staying aware of ongoing trends, and navigating obstacles efficiently. Of course, there are still several common challenges that most nonprofits’ marketing strategies will encounter.

Facing challenges is a normal part of the marketing process, and what matters most is how your nonprofit responds to them. Do you first devote more time and resources to the problem? Attempt to minimize its impacts? Hold a meeting to reevaluate your nonprofit’s strategy?

Each of these approaches can be the correct solution depending on the specific challenge and the resources your team has to invest in resolving it at that time. Of course, the first step to overcoming many common challenges is to conduct research and determine if an equally common solution already exists. To help your nonprofit with that research, this article will explore six common marketing challenges:

  1. Lack of a Defined Audience
  2. Unclear Lead Sources
  3. Unready Website
  4. Data Silos
  5. Poor Follow-Up
  6. Attaining Board Buy-In

For most nonprofits, the most common marketing challenges will be related to their digital strategy. This article will explore specific strategies for overcoming these problems, though keep in mind that often the most effective approach to technology-related issues will be reassessing how your nonprofit uses software and potentially investing in a new solution.

1. Lack of Defined Audience

Who is your nonprofit marketing to? While your marketing team may be aiming to attract a wide variety of audiences, creating materials that are too broad can inadvertently limit the number of supporters who will take interest in your nonprofit.

To define your audience, first assess your current supporters. Identify their shared characteristics, such as demographics, engagement trends, and interests. Use this information to divide your audience into several unique groups with similar goals, problems, and motivations. By defining multiple audiences, you will be able to better tailor your messages to each group, increasing the likelihood they will engage with your content.

Additionally, try varying your marketing strategies depending on the group you are targeting. Remember, not every supporter needs to be invited to every event, participate in every fundraiser, or read every article your nonprofit creates. For example, you may hold a gala specifically for your older major donors, as well as a 5K targeting younger, more active supporters.

2. Unclear Lead Sources

A marketing campaign is effective if it earns your nonprofit new leads who later become donors or volunteers. If your nonprofit lacks an established framework for tracking leads, it can be difficult to determine if your marketing campaigns were successful.

Use lead-tracking methods and resources such as:

  • Tracking links
  • Analytics tools
  • Donor survey questions
  • Referrals

Track clickthrough rates and popular landing pages to discover which links are resulting in supporters visiting your website and which of your pages are the most successful at attracting supporters.

Other marketing materials may require taking a more indirect tracking approach. For example, perhaps your nonprofit creates a matching gift video promoting corporate giving opportunities and includes it on your website homepage. Some donors who immediately apply for a matching gift may have been influenced by your video, while others may have done so independently.

To determine the video’s effectiveness, nonprofits could compare the overall volume of matching gift applications before and after posting the video to check if there was a notable increase. Alternatively, the nonprofit could create a follow up survey specifically for completed matching gift applications with a question asking how they learned about the matching gift process.

3. Unready Website

Your website is one of your strongest marketing tools, providing donors with key information about your nonprofit and leading them towards converting. A website that looks unprofessional, is difficult to navigate, or is generally unengaging can negatively impact the extensive work put into your external marketing materials.

If your website has a high bounce rate, session times, or low conversions, you may need to update it. To leverage your website as a marketing tool, ensure that it is:

  • User-friendly. Your website’s navigation should be as intuitive as possible. Improving your website’s interface often requires an outside perspective to understand how new visitors are most likely to interpret your navigation. To create a more user-friendly interface, gather a group of volunteers and run tests such as card-sorting. Ask volunteers to reach a certain page and narrate their thought process aloud, providing insight into the decisions and assumptions a person may make while navigating your website.
  • Optimized for mobile. Optimizing your website for mobile ensures your audience will be able to use your website no matter what device they are using. Most CMSs will automatically create mobile-friendly versions of your webpages. However, it can be worthwhile to take the time to adjust the mobile version of your pages further to reduce load times, streamline navigation, and minimize scrolling.
  • SEO ready. You can increase organic traffic to your website by improving your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. SEO best practices can increase the chances that your content will appear on the search results page for keywords related to your nonprofit. You can improve your SEO by creating content, such as blog articles, that are optimized for keywords your supporters are likely to search. For example, an animal shelter might write an article for their blog that’s optimized for the keyword “local no-kill shelters.”

If your nonprofit is in need of a new website, DNL OmniMedia’s nonprofit website design guide recommends partnering with a consultant.

A nonprofit marketing and website design consulting service can create a new website designed to your nonprofit’s specifications that also makes use of marketing best practices. For example, consultants will have insight into where to strategically place calls to action, what images best inspire action, and how you can create campaign pages that will be shared across social media.

4. Data Silos

Your nonprofit collects data from a variety of sources and sends messages to numerous staff members to take action on that data. However, nonprofits are often slowed down or experience outright interruptions in their work due to data not moving as it should and instead getting siloed in specific databases or systems.

Data silos are a common occurrence and can be particularly challenging if they occur during a marketing campaign. As your outreach efforts require receiving and sending an extensive amount of messages, it is essential that internal feedback, donor messages, and engagement data all flows to your marketing team as quickly as possible.

You can prevent data silos by integrating your various software solutions. This ensures information in one database will be automatically updated in another system, rather than requiring a manual migration. Some platforms, such as Salesforce NPSP, can integrate with a wide variety of native and third-party applications, making it easier to synchronize your software and eliminate data silos.

5. Poor Follow-Up

Once your marketing campaign attracts a new donor, what steps does your nonprofit take afterwards? Nonprofits that only focus on the initial conversion and have limited follow-up are unlikely to significantly grow their donors’ value or make long-term connections necessary for cultivating major gifts.

For each of your marketing strategies, ensure you have a follow-up procedure in place. This can be as straightforward as sending automatic thank you messages to donors who give under a specific amount and flagging donors who give over that threshold for additional follow up, such as a thank you card or phone call.

This applies to fundraisers and events, as well. After participating in an advocacy campaign, peer-to-peer fundraiser, virtual gala, silent auction, or any other activity your nonprofit hosted, reach out to donors to thank them for their participation and provide next steps to continuing their involvement with your nonprofit.

You can improve your follow-up by using an email authoring tool. These tools allow you to construct follow up emails and welcome series for each event or campaign you host. You can also create separate emails for those who didn’t participate, invoking a sense of FOMO that will provide another call to action to attend your next opportunity.

6. Attaining Board Buy-In

When planning a new marketing campaign, ensure that one of your strongest assets, your board, is being leveraged to improve your campaigns rather than acting as an obstacle. When launching a new marketing campaign, include your board in your stakeholders to consider to help attain their buy-in early on.

While planning your marketing campaign, consider strategies for getting your board involved and how you can pitch these strategies to your board members. Some board members will naturally be more ready to help with your fundraising campaigns than others, but there are several steps you can take to make your board more fundraising-friendly overall. These include:

  • Setting expectations. Does your board already think of fundraising as one of their responsibilities? If not, consider how you can reset expectations to get them more involved in your marketing strategy. In your board members’ job descriptions, ensure you include specific details about how you expect them to contribute to fundraising. Then, when presenting a new campaign, write out a description for how you would like board members to get involved and have specific roles in mind that you can delegate to each member.
  • Addressing common concerns. Board members often hesitate to take part in fundraisers due to common concerns and misconceptions about marketing. For example, a board member may express that they wouldn’t know what to say when conducting outreach. You could address this concern by providing board members with fundraising scripts, conducting orientation sessions, and walking them through the details of your marketing plan.
  • Providing resources. Marketing and fundraising are ultimately skills, and you can help your board attain them by providing necessary resources. These can include basic tools all of your board members will likely appreciate, such as message templates and scripts, and more intensive solutions for specific members, such as training courses. NXUnite’s guide to fundraising training suggests looking for workshops tailored specifically to board members, which can help them manage their board responsibilities and fundraising work, as well.

Making your board a part of your outreach strategy can lend your marketing campaigns additional credibility and access to new networks. Work with board members to tailor your marketing approach to specific donors they have a connection with, improving your ability to steward major giving prospects.

Marketing is often resource-intensive, requiring a significant amount of your budget and time to acquire new donors. To ensure your marketing efforts lead to a high return on your investment, have strategies in place to overcome common challenges, from defining your audience and ensuring you have internal buy-in to preparing your software for your next campaign.

Carl Diesing Author Photo

Author: Carl Diesing, Managing Director

Carl co-founded DNL OmniMedia in 2006 and has grown the team to accommodate clients with on-going web development projects. Together DNL OmniMedia has worked with over 100 organizations to assist them with accomplishing their online goals. As Managing Director of DNL OmniMedia, Carl works with nonprofits and their technology to foster fundraising, create awareness, cure disease, and solve social issues. Carl lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife Sarah and their two children Charlie and Evelyn.

In this guide, we'll cover how to start an effective nonprofit blog.

How to Start An Effective Nonprofit Blog

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So, you’ve decided to join the exciting world of nonprofit blogging. Your website’s blog lets you tell your nonprofit’s story in your own words, update audience members about your events and activities, and even engage with a new audience of potential supporters.

But just like any marketing endeavor, you must approach nonprofit blogging strategically. Your posts should be intentional, engaging, and informative. This helps your organization build a professional reputation and ensure your content meets your online engagement goals.

With that in mind, we’ll explore these five steps to starting an effective nonprofit blog:

  1. Set goals for your blog.
  2. Find your storytelling style and voice.
  3. Create a content strategy.
  4. Craft your graphic design strategy.
  5. Promote your blog.

Of course, the very first step of starting a nonprofit blog is ensuring that your CMS supports blogging capabilities. Popular platforms like Drupal and WordPress have built-in blogging features that make it easy to get your new blog up and running. Once you’ve determined a blog is an actual possibility for your organization, you can launch into the following steps.

1. Set goals for your blog.

After deciding to launch a blog for your nonprofit’s website, you might have some lofty ambitions in mind, such as entering the ranks of the best nonprofit blogs and inspiring thousands of new supporters to join your cause. Certainly, it’s good to dream big and aim high.

But when you’re first starting, set specific, achievable goals that you can feasibly reach given your organization’s time and resources. For example, you might identify goals such as:

  • Traffic goals. For instance, you might aim for 700 blog views within your first three months or 1,500 unique visitors in your first year.
  • SEO goals. Create keyword-optimized blog posts to improve organic search-related traffic. Perhaps you’ll aim to have at least three blog posts rank on page one of Google search results for specific keywords.
  • Conversion goals. Adding links to your donation page in blog posts can help boost your online fundraising. Perhaps you want to increase your fundraising revenue resulting from blog posts by 20% within six months.

Your blog can be an effective tool to increase awareness of your mission and encourage more donations and volunteers. By setting specific goals, you can more easily measure progress toward these ambitions.

2. Find your storytelling style and voice.

A blog allows you to be creative and speak directly to your audience. Work on cultivating a unique voice—this is the tone you use to address your audience and the feeling you wish to convey to readers. Having a distinctive, engaging voice can set your blog apart and make your posts more memorable.

As you develop your blog voice, think about your target audience—what tone of voice will they respond to best? For example, younger audiences may prefer a more casual style, while older audiences often appreciate more formal and authoritative writing.

Also, consider your nonprofit’s overall brand—what image or personality are you trying to convey? Would you like to come off as a helpful teacher introducing new concepts to your audience or a friend speaking casually about the activities and programs you have going on?

Here are a few words you might use to define your blog’s tone:

  • Authoritative and reassuring
  • Friendly and casual
  • Playful and upbeat
  • Witty and humorous
  • Emotional and inspiring

For example, according to Kanopi’s guide to healthcare web design, medical-focused websites often take on an authoritative, professional tone to reassure potentially anxious visitors seeking medical help. On the other hand, an organization that seeks to increase voter registrations among young voters might use an upbeat, witty, and playful tone to appeal to young adults.

Create a style guide for your blog that describes your unique tone and storytelling style. Include examples of words and phrases to use and ones to avoid to match the brand personality you’re looking to cultivate.

3. Create a content strategy.

Your content plan will be the bread and butter of your nonprofit blogging strategy. Having a clear blogging plan ensures that your blog roll will stay updated with new, thoughtful, and well-researched content. This shows supporters that your organization is active and continually working on new and exciting projects, initiatives, and events.

Follow these steps to build your blog’s content strategy:

  • Recruit a blogging team. Who will write the posts? Who will take photos and videos at events? Who will draft the posts and publish them online? Decide whether these tasks will be taken on by one or multiple people. Meet with your blog team regularly to assign responsibilities and ensure everyone is on the same page.
  • Define your SEO objectives. Use a tool such as Google Keyword Planner or Moz to identify high-traffic keywords relevant to your nonprofit’s mission. Create clear guidelines for ensuring all posts are SEO optimized, such as using headings to structure posts, including keyword mentions throughout the text, and writing alt text for all images.
  • Create a posting calendar. Create a rough posting calendar that aligns with your blog goals. For instance, to reach your SEO objectives, make sure you’re consistently writing keyword-optimized posts. If you already have certain events on your nonprofit’s calendar, plan to publish wrap-up blog posts the week after the event.
  • Establish a verification process. The facts, statistics, and data in your blog posts should be true and accurate. Including misleading or incorrect information can damage your credibility among supporters. To avoid errors slipping through the cracks, create a process for double-checking facts before pushing your posts live. Make sure at least two people read through your posts before publishing.

Your content strategy doesn’t have to be set in stone—it can be a rough outline that you adjust when necessary. Current events will undoubtedly impact your organization throughout the year, so you can write posts as needed to address recent developments and news stories as they come up. But outlining a plan ahead of time ensures that your blog won’t become stagnant or outdated at any point.

4. Craft your graphic design strategy.

Images can stir emotions, inspire empathy, and ultimately lead to visitors feeling a deeper connection to your cause. Double the Donation’s guide to nonprofit web design says it best: “humans are a visual species, so information that’s conveyed in a visual way is more immediate and visceral.”

Establish your graphic design strategy up front to ensure your blogging team is on the same page when designing graphics and choosing images. Ask yourself the following questions while developing your approach:

  • Will you use infographics? How will you design and format these images?
  • What fonts and brand colors will you use in infographics?
  • Where will you source blog images? Will you use any stock photos or only original photography?
  • What types of images will you use as feature images? For example, do you want all feature images to show people? Do you have any guidelines for choosing stock images for feature photos?

As you build your graphic design strategy, take some time to standardize your blog post layout. Include specific guidelines in your brand style guide for the font styles and sizes, colors, button types, post margins, and other stylistic elements of your blog posts. This ensures consistency, even if multiple team members are uploading posts.

5. Promote your blog.

Once you start creating well-researched, informative blog content, you’ll need a way to drive traffic and increase engagement with your posts. Marketing your blog posts can increase awareness of your blog, boost your website traffic, and introduce more people to your mission.

Promote your blog across platforms such as:

  • Social media. Post links to your new blog posts on any social media sites you use—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc. Pull out interesting quotes or statistics from the posts to include in your captions.
  • Email. Include recent blog posts in your weekly or monthly email newsletters. You might even create exclusive blog content or sneak peeks just for email subscribers.
  • Paid advertising. Promote blog posts using Google Ads to help capture both paid search engine traffic, supplementing your SEO efforts. Consider applying for the Google Ad Grant program to earn $10,000 per month in Google AdWords funds. This can allow you to pursue a paid advertising campaign without spending more of your marketing budget.

You can grow your blog audience quickly by promoting your content regularly across each of these platforms. The more eyes you can get on your blog posts, the wider your audience of potential new donors, volunteers, and other supporters will be.

Adding a blog to your nonprofit’s website can be a great way to revamp your online presence and grow awareness of your mission. By following these steps, you can ensure that your blog is a valuable, trustworthy resource for learning more about your cause and how to get involved.

Allison Manley is the Director of Marketing & Communications for Kanopi.

Author: Allison Manley, Director of Marketing & Communications for Kanopi 

Allison is a recovering (and award-winning) designer who applies her creative and organizational skills to marketing strategy for Kanopi. Her diverse, multi-disciplinary background — which in addition to design includes glassblowing, publishing, podcasting, and figure skating — contributes to strong relationships to which she offers a broad perspective.

Her job is to tell the story of Kanopi by sharing information, writing, working with staff and partners, and keeping the brand cohesive across all channels. When not keeping the Kanopi brand on point, Allison is working on double jumps on an ice rink, chasing small children, or organizing something somewhere.

4 Ways to Listen In to Boost Action

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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 the time that your folks will be most receptive.

Here are four proven methods of harvesting these priceless insights:

1) Launch a Marketing Advisory Group

Begin by identifying your target audiences and prioritize segments of each that share wants, needs and preferences. Then put together a marketing advisory group incorporating as many of these perspectives as possible—that way you’ll have the right person to turn to when you need her. In addition, this group will provide a solid diversity of opinion when you solicit input on a specific campaign or message.

Next, invite prospective team members to participate. If you don’t have people in mind that represent all the perspectives you need, ask program or other colleagues for recommendations.

Make sure to specify your expectations and to keep them modest. I recommend that you ask team members to help at most once or twice a month, asking for no more than 5 to 10 minutes of their time for each ask.

Put your marketing advisors to work in the way it’s most beneficial—that may vary depending on the task at hand. Ask a few of them for input on draft messages for the new advocacy campaign  and a few others for a critique of the draft mini-site for the campaign. Or ask all of them to complete a brief online survey to share their perception of the new program and the gap it will fill. Whatever your decision, make sure you ask with thought and don’t overburden your advisors. Most importantly, thank them frequently and often.

Try it for six months, refining the program over time to be of greatest value for you and least burden for your marketing advisory team. When you do, I promise you’ll know, and connect with, your audiences better than ever before.

2) Listen to Social Conversations

There’s so much being said online—about your organization, causes or issues, campaigns, and organizations you compete with for donations and attention—that you’ll learn a lot by just listening. By monitoring social channels for conversation on relevant topics, you’ll see what resonates and why, enabling you to better engage your people.

Keep in mind that with this kind of social listening, you won’t necessarily know who’s talking and how that person maps (if at all) to your targets. Nonetheless, if there’s a groundswell of conversation on a topic important to your organization, you want to hear it.

Social monitoring options range from free tools like Google Alerts to paid social listening services such as Attentive.ly that illuminate what people in your email file (donors, volunteers, email subscribers and others) are saying on social media and help identify who is influential to improve targeting and increase engagement. This early case study from Attentive.ly really caught my attention:

A few days after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), noticed a significant shift in focus on social media to the hashtag #Ferguson. They could quickly see that terms such as “police” started trending, nationally and among supporters in AFSC’s database (CRM).

AFSC created a saved search to see exactly who in its CRM was talking about Ferguson on Facebook and Twitter. Next, they invited those supporters to a Google Hangout that resulted in record-high participation and 74 donations. That’s incredible targeting!

3) Ask & Listen in Your Social Communities

If your organization has an active community on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or other interactive platforms, you have a focus group ready to roll. Before you just ask, and ask, and ask again, prioritize what you want to know. Also, decide how to filter and weigh what you hear since your social communities may not map exactly to your donors and prospects.

Here are a few ways to use Facebook to get to know more about your people:

  • Since you can easily run your organization’s donor or email list against Facebook subscribers who have liked your page, it’s easier to map responses to your prioritized audiences.
  • Facebook’s Live Video tool is an excellent way to gather quick feedback on a draft logo, design, message, or email format (anything, in fact, easy to view via an online video) IF you have a huge and active following on Facebook.
  • Polling is super easy to set up and respond to.

4) Ask Folks as They’re Leaving a Program or Event

This technique is ages old but works well, as long as you ask just one or two quick questions. If your question is brief, ask verbally. If you want to gather names or have a couple of questions, then have pens and printed mini-surveys or tablets on hand for responses. If the event is online, pop up a quick survey before the finish.

BUT these insights boost actions ONLY when you…
Capture, Analyze, and Share What You Learn, then ACT on it

Keep in mind that what you learn about your audiences is valuable only when you log, share, and analyze it across your organization.

This process will position you to put your findings to work most effectively right now. Then go one step further to extend their value by adding these insights to supporter data. That’s your path to getting closer than ever with your people, and activating them to move your mission forward. Go to it, friends.

P.S. Get more nonprofit engagement tools, tips, templates & case studies delivered to your inbox!
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In this post, you’ll learn some strategies for creating an effective nonprofit website.

3 Strategies for Creating An Effective Nonprofit Website

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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

3-Step Communications to Re-engage Volunteers

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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. Ensure capacity is in place so volunteers can 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. Start with 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?