May 16, 2013

How to embed a Web page in a Facebook custom tab

Here’s an easy step by step to glossy custom tabs

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, Facebook administrators.

If you’re looking to create a custom tab for your Facebook page that has complex features, like a donation page or petition, watch my 5-minute video above for an approach that’s fairly easy.

All you need to do is:

Create a secure Web page on your website that includes the features you want to render in a custom tab.
Eliminate your website header and navigation menu on that page.
Add the Static HTML iframe tabs app to your Facebook page.
Use the Static HTML iframe tabs application to create an iframe for the page.

Continue reading →

May 15, 2013

Infographics: Not your grandmother’s pie chart

Infographics & data visualization turn data into stories

Guest post by Julia Reich
Principal & Creative Director, Julia Reich Design

Most organizations have important data to present to their clients, members, boards of directors and other constituencies. Yet who has time to read or understand the reports, charts and diagrams created by your overworked staff?

Infographics are a communication trend that’s all about displaying data in an attractive, easily digestible format. With their unique combination of images and words, infographics are a powerful storytelling tool. It’s a way to take all that data you’ve collected about the great things your organization does and use it for social good purposes – to illustrate timelines, histories, relationships, the impact of a program and much more. Continue reading →

May 13, 2013

How to establish thought leadership for your nonprofit

Photo by TEDxMonterey (Creative Commons)

Start with content marketing, activate intellectual capital & go from there

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, general public.

Content marketing has risen to the forefront in recent years as an important tool in the nonprofit communication toolbox. It’s about creating great content: on your blog, through social media messaging, your newsletter, annual reports, case studies, whitepapers, etc.

At its core, content marketing is about communicating with your supporters without selling and asking for a donation at the end. The nonprofit, social enterprise or organization is providing value by creating and sharing information, innovative ideas and insights that makes your supporter smarter and in the know. You become a resource. The result, much of the time, is that you earn the trust and loyalty of your supporters and donors. You no longer interrupt them with “messaging” but invite them into a conversation they find value in, that they deem worthy of sharing, that makes them come back and ultimately invest in you with their minds and wallets. Continue reading →

May 8, 2013

Little Bird: New social tool helps identify potential supporters

kookaburra

Photo by Randi Deuro on Flickr (CC BY)

New social tool helps organizations identify top influencers

Target audience: Businesses, brands, digital marketers, advertising agencies, SEO specialists, entrepreneurs, educators, journalists, Web publishers.

Social media has changed not only marketing but search. Today, you need to know who are the top influencers in your sector before you can engage with them and convert them into becoming supporters or champions.

Marshall Kirkpatrick, CEO/co-founder of Little Bird: “We can deliver you right to the top of the mountain.”

Now along comes a new player in the social influence space whose goal is to provide that missing piece of the puzzle: Little Bird. The brainchild of Marshall Kirkpatrick, an entrepreneur/data journalist/technologist who was co-editor at ReadWriteWeb, Little Bird has been in closed beta since October with an exclusive focus on Twitter. But today the site is spreading its wings (sorry!) by expanding to include Facebook, Google Plus and LinkedIn. It’s still in private beta but the invitation wait time is very short. Continue reading →

May 7, 2013

Understand WordPress tags and categories

A quick, helpful guide for nonprofits using WordPress

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, marketers, WordPress users.

One of the most common questions about writing an effective blog post is the proper use of categories and tags.

What exactly are categories and tags? What purpose should they serve for the reader? Should they each just be one word? How do tags and categories relate to each other? And what does all this mean for optimizing your site for search (SEO)? Continue reading →