Magnolia Web Strategy

A few days ago I sat in on this Care2 webinar “While They’re Hot!.” If you missed it, the good folks at the Frogloop Blog have posted the take-aways, along with a full audio clip of the webinar.

If you work in non-profit fundraising, do yourself a favor and check it out:

Care2’s latest monthly webinar on October 1st was called “While They’re Hot! Converting Fresh Leads Into Donors” and featured Heidi Hess of Children’s Defense Fund and Greg Zelder of the California State Parks Foundation, with Holly Ross of the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (NTEN) moderating. Heidi and Greg presented case studies and discussed effective online engagement of potential donors at that very critical moment – right after they have signed up for a nonprofit’s email list.

Full blog post right here.

A few days back I was looking around for some online auction tools, reviews, feedback, etc., and put the question out to the Progressive Exchange listserve. The fantastic folks at Idealware emailed back with this article.

If you’re looking at holding an auction and aren’t sure where to start, this helped me out a lot.

An online charity auction can be a good way to raise money, rally support for your cause, and, hopefully, have some fun. Like any special event, though, an online auction requires solid planning and a fair amount of staff time. What it won’t require, however, is substantial technical expertise. There are several good online platforms that will host and help you manage your online auction.

What should you be thinking about as you consider an online auction? What tools might work well? We asked five nonprofit professionals with experience in auctions for their advice and their software recommendations.

A few weeks ago I presented at an online training for the national Right To The City coalition. Rob Gitin of At The Crossroads, and brains behind the brilliant I Think I Can campaign was my co-presenter. I spoke about the basics (the very fundamentals, i.e. starting from no plan) of online fundraising, and he discussed what’s possible.

If you’re interested, here’s the slidedeck. It’s also pretty basic, so I’ve included my notes.

I would be remiss if I didn’t pass along my sources, since I’ve learned everything I know a combination of other people and my own trial-and-error/trial-and-success experiences. Putting the presentation together, I relied on Network For Good’s Fundraising 123 articles for best practices and ideas. It’s one of the best libraries of reference materials out there. Also, Madeline Stanionis’s articles are a great reference. I encourage you to check them out.

Do you know why you’re using Twitter? Do you know what kind of returns you’re getting from your account and all those followers?

Avoid the “time-suck” of social media, and learn how to put your accounts to work for you.

Here’s a place to start: the Twitter 101 Guide for Business. Published by the Twitter folks themselves.

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.

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.