The crisis continues – Funding the “gap” and redeploying
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008
Especially if you are a small nonprofit ($ ½ million or less) or you have barely 3 FTEs to run your organization, you are feeling horrible right now. If your budget hovers around $1 million -$3 million, you probably feel like a small nonprofit, no matter how the Dow Jones is doing today.
Get organized to push ahead - Hopefully your fund sources have been diverse so you’re not suffering from the downfall of Merrill Lynch. In the crisis is opportunity, as a wise person said several millennia ago.
This is when having a good database of emails for your constituents – especially donor prospects or civic-minded leaders in your community – comes in handy. If you don’t have one now, create it. Put people to work on this. Name-address-phone-affiliation-email and a column for “notes.”
Email push – Most people will be generous even in this terrible time. People want to do something positive and feel good about a charitable step toward a cause or an individual. A well-written email push to prospects could yield $25 to $100 each. If this audience is mainly middle class ($250,000 and above), you may be successful beyond your dreams.
Example: In your pitch, please tell them about the gap you’re experience, how the money would be used, how much money is needed and when you need it by. Assure them they will get an immediate receipt and thank-you and that their help during this time will help your organization continue to operate reliably and continue to provide services to your constituency groups.
Ask the email recipient to kindly forward to three friends or colleagues. Provide a “back-end” (as mentioned last time) to accept credit card purchases online. Be clear about where checks can be sent and, again, your deadline. Include a form to complete if the person wants more information or wants an occasional or periodic update. Evan Shapiro, Meerkat Technology, in Massachusetts, has an excellent tried-and-true back-end for nonprofits, especially theaters and other types of arts organizations.
A premium? Offer a prize for giving that may delight your recipient – perhaps a coupon for $20 for take-out for two from your local favorite chicken-dinner place. Offer this for donations, say @$100 or above. The plus about any premium is that it signals the seriousness of your intent, and gets people’s attention.
Redeploy? – Even if you have 3 FTEs (or fewer) you have to be smart and strategic about how you prioritize and focus your daily activity.
Example: If you have been doing a newsletter in-house – consider getting pro bono help from the outside (e.g., a graphic designer) for a shortened newsletter, but punchier and with a simple, clean look. Pour whatever talent you have into creative fund raising. Give morale boosting small potluck dinners for your program directors, coordinators and caseworkers. Hang together. Be specific about what you can do together to keep your nonprofit viable and lay groundwork for a healthier future.
BasecampTM – This affordable tool will help you through a time of workforce assessment. You may have staffed a lot of board committees or task forces. You’re agonizing over how to keep these going. Basecamp is a platform that organizes conversations, sharing of documents and even writing together. There is a live chat function; Basecamp is always adding and improving.
Basecamp is intuitive and fun. Feel free to write me with questions about how it can be applied or how it works. Basecamp (run by 37signals) has very good short tutorials.
Economic crisis is a social media opportunity for smart nonprofits
Tuesday, September 30th, 2008
Hi to all. I’m sending you this quick post during this time of extreme economic crisis in our country and around the world as a result of greed on Wall Street.
Sad economic state of affairs – Doing the hard work of keeping people together this next year and next will be very difficult. See this special report by the Philanthropy Journal.
Keep learning – Assess whether your professional association or even your grant makers are employing smart communications strategies. By this I mean, many senior staff are not tuned in to social media. Many managers will say they don’t have time. All directors can give this some thought and spend some time reading some of the nonprofit thought leaders like Beth Kanter. Google and you will find her and her information-packed blog. Consider joining clearinghouses, one example is the Center of Nonprofit Excellence in Charlottesville. These groups can be mined for helpful resources, webinars, and locally-based seminars and workshops.
Just Do It – All is not lost. Keep in mind that social media can boost your fund-raising, help reach new audiences and regular email and listservs can still help you reach hundreds of people and get new ideas.
Your communications build-up—More important than the special event itself
Monday, September 15th, 2008
Hi all. I want to refer back to a point made in my previous post (Nonprofits-Begin to learn about the social media) about the “build-up” required when implementing a strategic marketing plan for your nonprofit. This post will explain how to get started when thinking about a build-up.
Myths: When using social media, e.g., blog, creating an excellent Web site, doing an email blast to notify people about an upcoming event, many communicators think that one email blast is sufficient. Or, there is a belief if you build a Web site, they will come. Or, if we just make the blog long and meaningful, it will draw an audience.
Build-up is more important than the event itself: Let’s say you want to raise crucially needed funds by staging an event. The build-up is actually more important than the event itself. This phase of creating excitement about your organization presents huge opportunities to:
(1) Clarify the mission of your organization
(2) Communicate energy and commitment, and
(3) Get people prepared to read, absorb and use the crucially important request or announcement you are planning to distribute in the future.
Build-up components: The build-up phase includes two aspects. (Plan ahead because it will take some time.)
(1) Creation of substantive, irresistibly engaging information
Develop brief and well-written content about your nonprofit’s work. (Borrow generously from previous writing.) For example, post on your Web site a lively, engaging article profiling a young person who you identified for services. (Look at MercyCorps for an excellent example of compelling profiles spotlighted on the home page.)
Develop a bibliography of relevant, informative articles or an index of occasions when your nonprofit organization has been in the news. Create a brief photo gallery of your kids, your families, your staff at work, or of your facilities.
(2) Development of a strategic approach. Here are the rudiments:
- With every communication (electronic or print), encourage the recipient to forward the information to interested colleagues and friends.
- Give the recipient the option to opt-out with each email blast.
- Use brief, punchy text-only messages – include no images. Avoid using a Constant Contact™ newsletter platform unless you have a graphic artist and IT specialist who can devote a lot of upfront time to this.
- When ready, prepare a communication to your current database of constituents advising that you will be emailing important information to them occasionally.
- Think about how often you can refresh your engaging information for your audience, e.g., perhaps a new, uniquely important communication every 4-6 weeks. The literature about blogging effectively is growing. See Beth Kanter as creative contributor to this discussion. One piece of advice I can give: Once you have done your research and planning, if you establish a blog, prepare to write daily posts.
Nonprofits—Begin to learn about the social media
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
In this post, I want to repeat what I mentioned in my first post: Set aside time every week to learn more about the social media. Nonprofit communicators have a unique opportunity to employ an array of social media tools – these are low-cost (often downloadable for free) and very often effective. Here are some suggestions:
Combat your biases: Shel Holtz, marketer and observer of social media, warns in a recent podcast about communicators who have a “visceral” reaction to social media and therefore don’t explore it. The bottom line is: learn what you can about it. Start with Shel’s blog, which includes cases of lessons learned, and his weekly audio program.
New resource: Every Dot Connects is a group originating in Austin, which has opened a store online (via Facebook) to help you with social media: Every Dot Connects.
FIR produced by Shel Holtz – Go to the latest podcast and see what you can learn about social media applications: FIR.
Start with “Go:” When you identify a tool or platform that might have an application to your campaign, it’s important to do research, thinking and planning. Example: A small development team could take these steps:
(1) Define your audiences and their preferences,
(2) Identify all the media to be used and sketch out some deadlines, and
(3) Set your financial goal. Be sure to include a build-up in your marketing plan.
Example: Think about how to build loyalty with your audiences. Entice donor prospects with real-time, compelling reports about the issues you are working on. Building loyalty is a step-by-step process. Incorporate thinking about how to ask and what medium to use.
Nonprofit marketing – Using a plan, considering social media
Tuesday, August 19th, 2008
Hello nonprofit marketers. This short article will review the benefits of a plan, encourage you to engage in planning and help you understand where social media may fit in.
A red flag goes up for me when an executive director puts off the idea of communications planning. Or she says, “Strategyis my communications manager’s responsibility.” Communications planning is by its very nature an organization-wide, integrated enterprise, concerned with constituencies inside as well as outside your organization.
A marketing plan is not a “ho-hum” one-time event. It is a dynamic way to track your progress toward defined outcomes (quantifiable or qualitative) and it can be self-sustaining with contributions from staff when there are the inevitable additional demands on your time. The aim is to be proactive – not reactive as most communications managers find themselves. A “living” plan is a means to accomplishing all these things.
Nonprofits sometimes fail to realize there are economies to be realized in a strategic multi-layered plan. As an example, one can leverage existing materials to support different marketing needs. Planning helps you identify these cost-saving, smart opportunities.
Example of using what you’ve got: A national mental health organization was funded for some years by one large federal grant, a risky prospect for a nonprofit. As the grant was about to end, the urgent need to generate new and diverse sources of income put the senior staff in crisis mode.
Staff had initiated a few webinars as a customer relations-education effort. In a strategic planning meeting, their attention turned to webinars as a marketing tool for cultivating other audiences such as clinicians and educators. As one example, staff realized there was a strong match between the professional development needs of busy direct care providers and the expertise of the organization.
Thus, recruiting and enrolling clinicians in webinars (at a minimal cost to participants) provided the basis for generating a council of allies, who could in turn champion, e.g., training kits published by the nonprofit for use in a wide variety of settings. These allies can also serve as informal ambassadors for the agency’s mission. Later, social media can be employed, in conjunction with the webinars, to bring together people with similar questions or concerns, consolidating their relationship to each other and to the organization.
Recognition of these potential, interlocking opportunities and the leveraged use of available tools and resources requires strategic thinking. A plan puts boundaries around your strategic thinking and gives you a road map. Here are a few ways to take steps toward developing your marketing plan.
Become a trusted channel – Like any for-profit, your agency will gain from a disciplined marketing effort. A recent webinar offered by Forrester Research and Umbria refers to being a “trusted channel,” meaning this: Make your organization a trusted communication channel for your audiences. If you gain their trust, you can better guide their thinking and even their actions.
Optimize by using the Internet and social media - In your agency, a marketing or communications budget per se may not exist. You can optimize your scarce resources by using social media. As most people know, we have gone past the Web 2.0 world. The social media (Facebook, Basecamp, iTunes, blogging, etc.), and the avriety of ways to optimize their use, is rapidly transforming business, politics, medicine, public health and all the human services. Many of these platforms are free or low-cost. Here are a few key things to think about and execute.
• Know your audience. Conduct a brief survey or a few focus groups to clarify and confirm your constituencies’ needs and, importantly, how they receive and use information.
• Second, create an informative Web site and have a strategy to tell people about it. Include ways to bring your customer closer (something basic like a sign-up for an e-newsletter). Resolve to measure traffic, buy a platform that will do this for you, and think hard about ways to increase traffic to your web site.
• Third, reconsider your direct mail. If you are as well resourced as The Nature Conservancy or the Mayo Clinic, print mailings may make sense. Perhaps you are so local (or Internet is unavailable in your area) so that distributing regular mail is a sensible approach.
A low-cost, really effective way to encourage discussion, co-writing, and communication is Basecamp. This means no matter where one is – or what time zone – it’s possible to look in on the activity and provide ideas or opinion.
Social media – yes! There is growing evidence that Web-based communications can launch a pervasive word-of-mouth, ultimately encouraging the transmission of information in the old-fashioned way – face-to-face.
How does this happen? When you get an open invitation to a local fundraising event, you might forward this to a dozen or more friends and colleagues. This quickly builds interest in the event or the cause. Recipients can click on the agency’s Web address for more information. This sort of “fast-forwarding” can produce new inquiries for a nonprofit. It can lay a foundation for a conference call to discussions issues in greater depth, or an important breakfast meeting with new donor-prospects.
Rather than print, which is so costly, revert to online communication. Try a brief, focused electronic newsletter, archived and indexed on your Web site. Minimize the graphic art so that it downloads easily, especially by someone without a color printer. Consider offering the option of a text-only file
Think before you leap – The Web may be wonderful for some, but a small nonprofit may solely focus on strong relationships with the local news media because newspaper coverage generates just the type of publicity it seeks. Avoid the pressures to blog or to incorporate any other social media unless these tools can be embedded in a well-thought out communications strategy. At the same time, compelling narratives about your services or advocacy effort are likely to stimulate people to sign up for more information. See www.imcworldwide.org as a good example of this.
So, put your toe in the water - You are not behind the curve – yet. It’s safe to say that we in the nonprofit sector are still sorting out the best social media tools to use. Facebook master Chris Hughes said, keep it real and keep it local, mirroring the offline world. Think of the Internet as simply the connective tissue. Internet aside, meaningful one-to-one relationships with donors and clients, the quality of care, and your nonprofit’s unique qualities and relevance are some of the determinants of a healthy nonprofit.
A final thought – If you push marketing to the bottom of the priority list, you will always feel like you’re not doing enough or that you’re constantly playing “catch up.” If you have this nagging feeling, your communications manager or your board’s publicity committee may not be the culprit—the absence of careful planning is.
Consider the biggest hurdle to marketing success in the nonprofit sector: organization-wide commitment to setting strategic goals, developing a marketing strategy to support those goals, and identifying the funds to support the marketing effort. Jump this hurdle and you are well on your way to reporting to your board that your goals have been met.
Nonprofit marketing….Really?
Monday, July 21st, 2008
Is there such a thing as nonprofit marketing? Of course there is!
In this first post, I hope to interest you new ways to think about nonprofit marketing that will help you achieve your programmatic goals and provide an opportunity for dialogue. Marketing is alive and well in the nonprofit sector. It is used to:
• Enroll people in a significant program or initiative
• Increase awareness about an agency’s mission, its services, or the response to a crisis in your community, and/or
• Raise the visibility of an organization as a basis for successful fundraising or “buy-in” (acceptance) by your constituencies.
Using one marketing tool – a conference – can set the stage and create momentum for other objectives.
Using a meeting to accomplish several objectives – An interfaculty initiative at a large university – and required to raise its own funds – planned a small invitation-only international conference on improving coordination of a summit meeting of special developments in the field. The conference was designed to accomplish several things at once.
• Draw in several different important audiences
• Increase knowledge and excitement about the efficacy and challenges of practices in the field
• Assemble a broad spectrum of potential funders, e.g., corporate, individual, nongovernmental organizations (NGO).
For all these audiences, the meeting agenda supplied information about critical issues in the field that need both intellectual and financial support. The meeting provided a forum for the initiation of a future leaders program. Its intent is to (1) bring younger, talented workers into these discussions and into new relationships with senior leaders as mentors, and (2) demonstrate to potential funders that the effort is relevant and being responsive to changing times. Any new initiative also provides an opportunity to talk about and remind about goals and accomplishments.
A marketing plan may be narrowly defined or multi-layered and integrated.
Focusing on local visibility to ensure enrollment – A child welfare agency offers residential programs, outpatient services, family stabilization programs and foster care. The children served by this nonprofit organization are referred by the state’s child welfare services agency. The organization’s business model relies upon payment per services provided, so success requires a continuing stream of appropriate referrals.
Thus, the leadership of the organization decided on a relatively narrow marketing effort to enhance reputation and keep the programs at capacity. The marketing plan currently has three main thrusts: focus groups to assess service quality; a persuasive campaign video on its Web site; and relationship building with local leaders via special events, breakfast meetings, facility tours, etc.
Creating the time to learn more – Joanne Edgar, a consultant and former head of strategic communications at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, writes about reasons to communicate. Her “Using Strategic Communications to Support Families” published by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, is an excellent brief guide to planning. She says: The reasons to communicate will be familiar to those of you who have devoted your lives to social change: to get attention,to create a buzz, to inform, to inspire, to build trust, to organize, to change public perception, to disseminate information, and many more.
To get your creative juices going, dedicate a half hour several times each week to review some of the current nonprofit marketing literature; most of this can be found online. Think of yourself as an emerging expert – ultimately, you will have to pick the sensible approach or set of tools that works for your agency. Painfully, many of us have learned that a communications effort scattered over disparate audiences, without integration into a well-thought out plan, is probably less effective and to some extent wastes financial and human resources.
Find a marketer who has a blog whose perspective you respect: I like Shel Holtz’s blog: Consult organizations like the Society for New Communications Research; its portal is rich with information and opportunities. One of the great things about learning about social media is that examples suggested by experts like Shel are always discussed in the context of the organization, the initiative and its aspirations. So you can know and feel immediately howthe “lesson learned” might be useful to your agency – or file it away in your memory bank for future use.
How many times have we heard a nonprofit CEO express frustration that a valuable program does not have sufficient enrollment? Ironically, some nonprofits fail to engage in or implement a viable marketing plan due to a worry that there isn’t enough staff or money to handle the response. So some of the best nonprofit work continues to be a well-kept secret, just the opposite of what we really need or want.
