Magnolia Web Strategy

I sat in on this informative session at NTEN ’09. All their take-away’s exemplify one of the first tenets of individual donor development, whether online or offline. You’ve got to get to know YOUR audience.

Check it out:

It’s not often that four professional online fundraisers give you a notebook’s worth of great ideas from their own programs, then repeatedly instruct you to ignore them. But as we shared our recipes for success at the NTC session Join! Renew! Give! Get!, they shared a common ingredient: a grain of salt.

All those tried-and-true strategies you read about in case studies, blogs and, yes, this venerable online publication? They may not work for your organization. You’ve gotta test things for yourself.

LeVar Burton, Fundraising Guru? (or Join! Renew! Give! Get!)

Really great pointers from ImpactMax

So, how do nonprofits start thinking about and planning for this new paradigm? Not surprisingly, the world of social media offers some important clues. These rapidly evolving tools are creating a global conversation that’s fueling the paradigm shift, and in the process they’re modeling some of the behaviors that point to future success. After all, the title of this year’s U.S. Web 2.0 Expo is “The Power of Less.”

1. Be nimble but think long-term

Using social media, people can put things out there and start to communicate very quickly, seizing the moment.  But often, ultimate success depends on their strategy to build participation and support over time. (You don’t start out with 25,000 Twitter followers.) The sustainability paradigm is about long-term survival. For nonprofits, that means balancing the ability to turn on a dime with a steady eye on the future. Resist fear-based crisis thinking and strive for focused clarity. Respond quickly when it’s advantageous or necessary, but make sure even your quickest actions are in the long-term best interest of your organization.

Read the full article over at ImpactMax

This is a great little article about important considerations re: planning an email fundraising program. It focuses on organizational culture rather than a “how-to 1, 2, 3.”

The whole point of an email communication program is to build stronger customer relationships; which in turn will hopefully lead to an increase in donors and donations. With email you can reach more people than you could with a similar offline budget.

It’s important however not to oversell expectations while underselling the hard work it takes. Wherever Internet giving is growing – and it’s growing at a huge rate all over the place – there are people working at it and willing it to be successful.

Read the full article over at Network for Good’s Fundraising 123 site.

I’d say this applies to direct mail, email, and all asks in general. Read on:

The answer for your organization is: Unless you’re already in the 30+ ballpark, you can probably mail more.

Just be aware that sudden, radical increases in frequency are counter-productive — you’ll see a surge of complaints, and not the corresponding increase in response. It works better to grow your revenue by increasing slightly each year until you reach your right frequency.

If you’re mailing quarterly now, add one or two impacts. If you’re mailing, monthly add two or three impacts during high-response seasons of the year. That’s how you maximize revenue through frequency.

Read the full post at the Donor Power blog.

Kivi over at the Non-Profit Marketing Guide has some really great points to consider when analyzing your website landing page.

Do yourself a favor, head on over and give it a read:

56% said that their website didn’t allow visitors to sign-up for email communication at all. Only 11% said their email newsletter sign-up form appeared either within their site template (and thus on every page) or at least on all of the major pages of the site.

Getting people to your website is the hard part. Don’t let them just disappear back into cyberspace. Encourage visitors to stay in touch with you by signing up for an email newsletter, action alerts, or whatever you’d like to call your email correspondence. The point is to capture those email addresses so you can start a conversation with those website visitors.

In contrast, only 27% said they didn’t offer visitors a way to donate online. Hmmm . . . What’s the reasoning here? You’ll take their money, but not their email address? Maybe because following through with producing the e-communication is more work and throwing a donate button on the site is easy? You need to do both — email communication and online fundraising — and I’m willing to bet that the orgs with donate links with no e-newsletter aren’t raising much online.

For all those non-profit questions about whether to get a Facebook profile or a page, and how to use both really well, here’s a trough of answers and resources:

Profiles VS Pages
Profiles are for individuals, Pages for Organizations
Recently redesigned pages to be more like profiles
Pages are optimized for mass communication
Profiles are optimized for individual communication

Note that their TOS says you can’t create for an individual who doesn’t exist.  If you do, they will delete it. (Some of you may remember the flap about Ranger Rick from 2007)

A question that everyone asks – “When should my group set up a Fan Page versus a Facebook Group?
Best Answer yet:   Set up a Facebook FanPage as your main presence or outpost and use a group for more adhoc, smaller organizing.

Read: So You Want A Facebook Fan Page?

The dreaded “It Depends” answer is the bane of existence for a lot of corporate communicators trying to get involved in social media.

We want shortcuts. We want a kit of parts, turn-key, that we can plug and play. (We did love the Chia Pet after all. Just add water.)

We’re accustomed to standards and rules of engagement and largely accepted practices that someone has captured in a textbook somewhere. We look to “best practices” and the road that someone has safely paved before us. It’s reassurance for us that we’re “doing it right”.

Read the full article over at the Altitude Branding blog.