Magnolia Web Strategy

Nancy Schwartz over at Getting Attention just posted a great article about the importance of fundraising and marketing working together.

It starts with four strategies:

Put these four strategies to work to strengthen the marketing-fundraising collaboration in your organization:

1. Start at the top. It’s the only hope for a strong marketing-fundraising partnership
2. Articulate shared priorities to serve as the core of a common agenda
3. Identify what’s working—from each “side”—and do more of it
4. Build on real, compelling success stories, well-honed and widely shared and discussed as the glue of your fundraising and marketing conversations

If you’re in LA, and are interested in wading into the world of online fundraising, I’m facilitating a NetSquared Meetup this coming Wednesday:

Getting Started With Online Fundraising

It’s more than just a “donate” button

Host: Eastside Los Angeles Netsquared Group
Date: Wednesday, 27 January 2010
Time: 18:30 – 21:00
Location: Asian Pacific American Legal Center
Street: 1145 Wilshire Blvd
Town/City: Los Angeles, CA

Visit the MeetUp page for more info.

This is a brilliant membership ask.

It’s cheerful, it’s whimsical, it makes me really WANT to be a part of CICLE. They’ve left the gloom and doom (you know what I mean: “we’re having such a hard time paying the rent, but we’re a great organization”) behind and focused on their strengths.

I love how they use the parts of the bike as a metaphor for the components of the organization, and they’ve done a GREAT job of reinforcing how all the components fit together and make a strong machine (and organization). Their graphics are impeccable, their writing is strong, and even when stickers are your only membership benefit, they make you feel like you’re getting so much more.

They’ve done an outstanding job of doing more with less.

I don’t know whether this is part of a long-term campaign, or what their goal is, but I’m still going to donate.

“Nobody cares about your website,” Gerry McGovern tells business folks: “Your customers couldn’t care less about your new look, your new design or whether your dog has just had kittens.”

So never mind the navel-gazing and self-congratulation, the personal stories, the excuses for a lack of recent updates, or the announcement of your new blog design… The primary job of your website is to meet the needs of your “customers,” not to blow your own horn.

Focus on your audience: That’s the single most important piece of advice you’ll ever get about publishing a successful website or blog.

Does this advice apply equally to non-profits?

Yes, and no.

Read the full article at Wild Apricot

From Katya’s Non-Profit Marketing Blog:

I read this line from the seventh Harry Potter book to my daughter just last week: “It’s the wizard that makes the wand, not the other way around.”

And of course, I thought of marketing.  Dumbledore (who I think said this) knows nonprofit marketing.

We tend to think of marketing as a magic wand.  Or we imagine the latest and greatest tools are magic wands.  But no amount of direct mail, re-branding, online outreach functionality, DonateNow buttons, social media or other supposed magic wand is going to work without YOU.

You have to be the wizard.  The one who injects the tools with feeling and story, an appeal to human nature, and resonance with audience values.  If you don’t do that, the wand won’t work.  Nothing will.

If you fed a million fundraising letters into a text-analyzing computer, I bet you’d get back a message of: MAKE IT STOP!

Well, someone pretty much did that — the text-analyzing, not the making it stop.

Frank Dickerson of Claremont Graduate University, in a study called “The Way We Write Is All Wrong,” says he subjected 1.5 million words of fundraising communication to a “linguistic MRI” and discovered that those words were, well, not so great. Among other problems, he found that the fundraising copy:

1. Lacks linguistic features that create an interpersonal, emotional connection with readers (e.g. personal verbs like I feel and I think and contractions.
2. Lacks linguistic features that produce narrative (e.g. past tense verbs and quoted speech). In fact, their texts contain less narrative than academic prose, and even less than official documents!

Head on over to the Donor Power Blog and read the whole thing. It’s GREAT.

I love WOMM (word-of-mouth-marketing) and I love the Frogloop Blog, so naturally I really love this post. If you’re not taking advantage of most of these simple tools, spend a little time getting acquainted with them. They can really give your organization some oomph.

WOMM (word of mouth marketing) and earned media should be key components of any communications plan to market your nonprofit’s website. If your nonprofit is not taking advantage of free tools like Add This, a widget that encourages users to share your organizations articles or webpages on the most popular social networks or branded toolbars like FreeCause, then your nonprofit is missing out on some big marketing opportunities.

Check out these 10 tools and strategies to market your nonprofit on the web, connect with your members and reach new supporters. I have also ranked them from easy to moderate to time consuming.

Visit the Frogloop Blog for full article.