Google Trends: getting a handle on topical conversations.

Post by Daniela McVicker

Content creation is a critical part of getting exposure and spreading awareness for your nonprofit’s message. While content creation may sound challenging with a limited staff and resources, it can pay off in a big way if you use the right tools.

Below we outline seven tools and resources you can use for free or minimal cost as part of your organization’s content creation strategy.

Google Trends

1Let’s start with the basics. Google Trends is a tool that helps us find the inspiration we need for writing appealing and interesting content.

Our target audience will want to read about topics they’re interested in. This means we need to do some research to see what are the trending and most searched topics or keywords — and how it may tie to your nonprofit’s mission.

Google Trends is a tool that can help us do just that. You can:

• search for a term or topic
• analyze the interest for that term by region and period of time
• find out which subregions are interested in the term the most
• get the data necessary for choosing the perfect topic

This tool will make the brainstorming phase more guided and results-oriented. It helps you arrive at a decision about which topics to focus on and backs it up with evidence and data.

BuzzSumo

2Similar to Google Trends, BuzzSumo is another tool that can help us understand which topics are trending online. It can also help learn what people are searching for the most.

The tool allows us to:

• explore ideas and get inspired
• track the current situation within our cause or niche
• find influencers and see what they’re doing
• analyze popular articles and posts to get insight

The tool does all the analysis and all that’s left is to draw conclusions and apply them to your content. It’s a valuable tool that provides the right data for your content or marketing team to draw from.

Canva

3When we search the Web, we look for interesting blog posts or social media posts to read. So your content team will want to make sure your posts are accompanied by an appealing visual.

A visually arresting image can make potential readers stop scrolling and pay attention. This is why it’s highly important that you make your content rich in visuals.

The No. 1 tool people from around the globe enjoy using is Canva, a free graphic design tool.

Canva makes it easy to:

• create stunning social media posts
• create attention-grabbing infographics
• make your content visually rich
• add brand identity to your content

The tool is easy to use. It has endless options and features that are simple to master. So it’s a worthy addition to help with executing your content creation strategy.

Grammarly

4If we want people to take us seriously, we need to act like true professionals. That means that the quality of our written content needs to be a top priority.

A tool that analyzes and helps you polish your sentences, Grammarly should be a part of your team’s content workflow.

Here’s what Grammarly does:

• corrects spelling mistakes
• corrects grammar mistakes
• suggest sentence structure corrections
• suggest synonyms
• gives an analysis of the written content

Every nonprofit needs content that is impeccable and highly professional. All we have to do is upload the Word document to Grammarly. Then, we correct the mistakes and download the improved version. While the basic version is free, Grammarly Premium costs $19.98 to $29.95 per month.

You have other options as well, such as the online service Top Writers Review, which can provide professional help for more demanding tasks.

Hemingway

5Another brilliant tool you might consider to make your content more readable and suitable for your target audience is the Hemingway app.

The app lets the users paste the text and then analyzes the following features:

• readability
• number of adverbs
• passive voice usage
• complicated phrases
• sentence structure
• sentences that are hard to read

The tool suggests changes to beef up content to make it leaner, to the point and digestible.

Pixabay

6When we think about content rich in visuals and appealing to the eye, we can’t imagine it without beautiful images. Not every nonprofit can afford to hire a professional photographer who can create images specifically for its needs.

Luckily, there are royalty-free images you can use, and Pixabay offers a wide range of these photos.

All you have to do is:

• visit Pixabay
• type the term you’re looking for
• choose an image you find most suitable to accompany your content

A wide range of royalty-free images is available for you to snag, download and use in your content.

SE Ranking

7SEO (search engine optimization) is one of the key elements of any content creation strategy. When writing articles or blog posts, you’ll want the content to rank high in Google searches. This will bring more organic traffic and expand the number of people who’ll see your post.

That means that we have to pay attention to SEO and how to improve our content to make it perform better.

SE Ranking is a tool that can help improve your SEO efforts and make the content more SEO friendly. Here’s what it does:

• analyzes keywords
• provides insight into search volume and popularity
• suggests other similar keywords
• shows popular keyword ads

By using this tool, you’re gaining valuable insights into the terms that help you gain more visibility for your content.

How about you? What strategies have you used to streamline your content production process?

The post 7 tools to make content creation for your nonprofit easier appeared first on Socialbrite.

As a consultant and trainer in the nonprofit community, I’ve been waiting with bated breath for the Nonprofit Communications Trends Report. And it’s here! Kivi published the first Nonprofit Communications Trends Report back in 2011, surveying 780 nonprofits.

For the most recent report, Kivi surveyed 1,535 nonprofits – mostly in the US.

Highlights from the 2015 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report are presented in an infographic (below), which includes the following eye-openers:

• Nonprofits no longer have new donor acquisition as a primary goal. Instead, retaining current donors and engaging their communities is becoming more important.
• Communications Directors and Development Directors have conflicting goals. Development, of course, wants to retain and acquire donors. Communications wants to focus less on fundraising and more on brand awareness and engagement.
• Nonprofits are planning on sending more email and direct mail appeals in 2015. 45% of the participants said they will send monthly appeals, and 36% said they will send quarterly direct mail appeals.
• Facebook is still the king of social media channels. 96% of participants have a Facebook page.
• Nonprofits still say their website is the most important communications channel, followed by email and social media. This is as it should be.
• Communications Directors are challenged with lack of time to produce quality content.
• Facebook takes up more time than blogging or email marketing.

Check out the full infograph below, and download your copy of the report here.

The post Nonprofit Communications Trends Report for 2015 appeared first on Socialbrite.

Make sure your nonprofit is directly related to the cause you’re promoting

Guest post by Chelsea Whitaker
SankyNet

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, educators, Google AdWords advertisers.

For many nonprofits, search engine marketing is an important part of your online acquisition strategy. By bidding on mission-specific keywords, organizations run a short text ad as a “paid search placement” or “sponsored search result” on the search engines Google, Bing or Yahoo.

This can be a powerful tool, but there is a learning curve that many nonprofits find hard to navigate. Google Grants gives nonprofits a budget of up to $10,000 a month to work with, but it doesn’t come with easy “how-to” manual, leaving many organizations struggling with unfamiliar terminology and intimidating interface.

To further complicate things, search engine marketing is widely used by commercial services, shopping sites and just about anyone selling anything online – and these for-profit companies work with larger budgets as they compete for the coveted top-placed ad.

How Keyword Insertion works

Search for any term, and you get a range of ads, some of them relevant and some of them not. But the key is that they are specific to your search keywords – hitting you with targeted messaging when you are already seeking out that information. Some ads may even look too specific to your query – even replicating the exact language you typed into the search box. This is a technique called “Keyword Insertion.”

Using a snippet of code when setting up a Google Adwords or Microsoft AdCenter ad, the advertiser pulls the user’s actual search terms and replaces part of the ad with the user-generated text. Data shows this is very effective – after all, what is more relevant to your search than the actual term you are looking for?

For nonprofits, it’s essential to maintain integrity and avoid keywords that could be problematic when inserted into an ad. For example, don’t insert keywords into ads when bidding on terms that are related to your cause, but not actually a part of it. An example would be inserting the keyword “sponsor a child” when your organization provides direct aid, not child sponsorship. A misled or confused searcher will likely not be sympathetic to your cause.

Keyword failure: The downside of relevance

But many for-profit companies have no such reservations about inserting as many relevant keywords as possible, often across a wide range of topics. “Local” and “Buy now” kinds of sites, which aggregate products and services across various markets, are notorious for bidding high for thousands of keywords, and using one generic ad with keyword insertion for them all. A nonprofit may want to bid on “Starving children” but a local service aggregator may also bid on “Starving” trying to target hungry shoppers. The result? Something we like to call “Keyword Insertion Failure.”

Take a look at the right at our favorite “fails” for some keywords that fit into many nonprofits’ missions: Words in bold are the search terms appearing in the ads. Then try your own hand at Google and Bing.

How do your search terms stack up in a Google search?

The post The right and wrong way to do Google AdWords appeared first on Socialbrite.

Social media, data & messaging are among the key ingredients

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, social media strategists, educators.

Guest post by Mary Joyce

Whether you run a nonprofit, a social enterprise or a cause organization, it’s likely that at some point you run up against the barrier we’ve all faced: How do I get the word out about this amazing campaign?

Here are seven steps that we’ve found make a good blueprint on how to build visibility and awareness so that you can then move people to take action and create impact.

Identify your targets and supporters

1There are two types of audiences that you most likely need to take action for you to achieve your goal: targets and supporters. Targets are the people who have the direct power to give you what you want. They are often officials who have the authority to make policy changes. The target could be a government minister or the principal of your school. When the target takes action, your goal is achieved.

Supporters are people who help who you achieve your goal by putting pressure on the target. These could be sympathetic politicians, the students in your class, or civic organizations that care about your cause.

Segment your audiences

Photo courtesy of thinkjose (Creative Commons)

2Segmenting means breaking an audience down into smaller groups that share common characteristics. You can segment your audience down even further than just targets versus supporters. In fact, the more you segment, the more you can tailor your message to the specific priorities of a given group. For example, you might separate your “student” audience group into students who care about the environment, members of student government, and students who write for the school paper. You would present a different message to each group.

Segmenting is only limited by time and human resources. Since each segment will need its own messaging arc, and creating 10 of these will be more work than creating only one, you should be sure not to create any more segments than you have the time or resources to create content for and respond to.

Establish a messaging arc

3The message arc is a multimessage narrative that takes your audience from where they are (not knowing or caring about your cause) to where you want them to be (taking action on behalf of your cause). You will need a different message arc for each segment.

• The stronger the support of the audience, the shorter the message arc. For a neutral audience, you’ll need to create more messages.

  The stronger the support of the audience, the shorter the message arc.  For example, if an MP already supports women’s rights you can ask them directly to support your campaign.

• For a neutral audience, you will need to get more messages through to them. You might begin with something short and emotional to get their interest (like a YouTube video), then present some facts in an email so they better understand the problem, then ask them to take a small action, and then a larger one.
• Sometimes you will be able to create a message arc to convince an opponent to become a supporter, but your minimum goal is to turn opponents into neutrals: people who will not to action for or against your cause.

Understand supporter networks

4Though you can use digital technology to send a message to different audiences, these platforms also make it very easy for members of your audience to send your message to their networks of friends, family, and colleagues.

These supporter networks are essential for building your audience. Though you may only have 100 followers on Twitter, if half of those people share your messages with their followers, your audience could quickly reach thousands of people.

Fine-tune your messaging & provide a call to action

5Messaging will look different on different platforms — Twitter, blog, YouTube, etc. — but here are some key elements to remember when developing messages.

• Use emotion — outrage, shock, humor — to grab your audience’s attention.
• Use facts and statistics to make the problem specific and to establish your authority in defining the problem. You will likely need to do research.
• Define a solution. You first want people to care about your problem and understand it. After you’ve achieved this, you need to present a credible solution for how to fix the problem. People will take action only if they believe your solution will fix the problem and that their action will help to achieve that solution.
• Provide a call to action. Explicitly state what action you want your audience to do.

Gather data

6One of the nice things about digital media is that it’s easy to track information about your campaign. Tracking data like site hits, blog comments and retweets can help you know which messages are most popular and which are not. Here are some tools you can use to gather data.

To gather information about how people use your site, Google Analytics offers an array of free metrics. The application Crazy Egg shows you “heat maps” of which areas of your site get the most clicks.

BackTweets allows you to track how many people linked to your website on Twitter. You can track mentions of your cause by subscribing to Google Alerts on keywords related to your cause, which will be delivered periodically to you by e-mail.

You can also subscribe to blog and Google News RSS feeds on keywords related to your cause and then read those feeds on Google Reader.You can also search Twitter for mentions of keywords related to your cause.

In addition to collecting and aggregating data about your cause that is already out there, you can get original data by creating a free survey through one of the top online survey tools or one of the free embeddable polling widgets that you can put on your website. You can also poll people through SMS (“Text Yes to 465757 if you agree”).

In the digital world, there is no shortage of data. The challenge is to know how to collect and analyze it. Once you have successfully done this, you can abandon media tactics that are not working and put more attention into those that are.

Choose your technologies

7Now you’re ready to choose the technologies that you’ll use to get your message out and build up your campaign. Is your audience very wired or do many lack Internet access? How do you identify a target audience of online influencers who will get your message out to their followers?

How does your organization choose its messaging tools when trying to increase awareness for a campaign?

The post How to build awareness for your campaign appeared first on Socialbrite.

Tips for getting the most out of email marketing

This is the second of a two-part series. Also see:
• How to use your Facebook page to build your nonprofit’s email list

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations and advocates, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, marketers.

Guest post by Susannah Vila

Collecting email addresses and using them to mobilize your supporters is one of the simplest but most important tactics for online organizing.

As Ricken Patel, founder of Avaaz, told us, “Someone operating out of their bedroom can do this better than a multimillion-dollar organization with a huge staff.”

Before you get started, though, look over these tips for how best to turn a list of e-mails into a powerful tool for activism.

Understand the needs of your constituency

1You are communicating with people online in order to serve them, not you and your organization, so begin by asking your membership what they care about most. Why do they support your cause? What are their goals and ideas of success regarding the cause?

Don’t send out any e-mails before you understand what your members care about.

Tip! Ask people on social networks, use free survey services like SurveyMonkey, or use mobile phones.

Draft a solid email

2Write your first e-mail. If you’re lucky, people will read the subject line and the first sentence, so put as many important words in this space as you can — lead with a fact or recent news story that will provoke emotion — and make sure that a link is immediately visible.

Tip! The names attached to your e-mails should be authentic and trusted by your membership. Consider having the e-mails come from your executive director rather than the name of your organization.

Include a call to action

3What’s the action you want to get out of the e-mail? Each e-mail sent out should have one clear action associated with it.

Do you want the receiver to click on a link? Then include it two or three times within the e-mail, and make sure each link takes the reader to the same page.

Are you publicizing an event? Remember to include all pertinent information including time, location and directions.

Be concise

4Keep your e-mails short and to the point. Just as you must grab people’s attention with the e-mail subject line, you must be able to clearly share your message in the short amount of time that they have to read your e-mail.

Tip! Switch it up. Don’t always ask people for the same thing.

Create an editorial calendar

Image by Tippingpoint Labs

5Decide when, and how frequently, you’ll be sending e-mails. Try setting up an e-mail calendar with, for example, one message per week, and stick to it. The only exception is if your cause ends up in the news or if a time-sensitive action arises. In this case, you should break your schedule and send e-mails more frequently. People will be more receptive to your e-mails if the issue you are addressing is in the news.

Send e-mails in the morning when people are more likely to be checking their in-boxes. Avoid Fridays!

Tip! It seems obvious, but it should be emphasized: Don’t send too many e-mails!

Monitor your progress

6Poll again (and again, and again) and check analytics to see how you’re doing. Always check back in with your supporters.

Tip! Everyone wants to make a difference. Your job is give them the right story, one that is true and credible, to persuade them that the world can change and that they can change it. Don’t spend too long talking about a problem without offering a solution.

Set goals

7Set goals for your e-mail campaigns, and use analytics to gauge your success with regard to those goals. How many people clicked on the link you put in the e-mail? If you sent one e-mail at 10 a.m. and one at 4 p.m., which one was opened and clicked on more often?

Create ’email relationships’

8Develop relationships between the sender and the receivers. A real live person with a name rather than an organization often does a better job of grabbing people’s attention.

If there are at least a few of you and you have different roles within your group or organization, consider creating “e-mail relationships” with your membership base so that e-mails on a certain topic always come from Joe B. while e-mails on another topic come from Suzy S.

Tip! Make sure that your e-mail reads like a conversation. The e-mail comes from a real person, so make it sound like a real conversation! Don’t be afraid to use a specific voice or personality.

Follow through

9If someone signs up for your e-mail list, it means they are at least somewhat interested in your work. If someone takes the action asked of them in the e-mail, it means they are more interested — don’t waste that opportunity. Ask them immediately to help with something else. For example, ask your supporter to tell a friend about your cause, to follow you on Twitter or to attend an event.

Write out a list of actions that you will ask of your e-mail list. You should identify an action for the first time signups, and action for those who received their first e-mail and took the action asked of them, and so on.

Make conversation simple

10Is there an e-mail address users can reply to when receiving an e-mail blast from your organization? Make sure that they can click “reply” and reach a real person at a functioning e-mail address.

Keep readers updated

11Do you publish a weekly news round-up or a monthly newsletter? Send this information to your e-mail list!

Welcome new subscribers

12When you receive new e-mail signups, don’t just dump them into the regular list. Send them a welcome e-mail describing the campaign/organization and what to expect. Without this context, the regular e-mails that you send them will not be as powerful or compelling.

The post How to successfully harness your email list for your cause appeared first on Socialbrite.

Make donating simple, say thank you & showcase your results to keep donations coming

Target audience: Nonprofits, fundraisers, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises.

Acquiring a new donor is more expensive than keeping a current donor.

Most nonprofits know this, but it seems like most of them spend a larger amount of their resources on acquiring new donors instead of keeping their current donors happy.

Plus, the lifetime dollar value of a happy donor is way more than the value of a donor who only gives once.

And the math just makes sense:

Higher acquisition costs + lower donations = 

Following are seven ways to help you turn this sad face upside down:

Say thanks

1Can you believe that even some huge organizations with ample resources fail to say thank you once a donation is made? Research shows that thanking donors increases the likelihood they’ll continue to give, and increase the amount they’ll give.

Give your supporters better tools

2You know what has made Amazon a billion dollar success? They’ve optimized their purchase down to a single mouse-click.

Same thing goes for your top social fundraisers.

Don’t give your top fundraisiers a clunky platform. Give them something powerfully simple, like Razoo and get rid of the ugly PayPal button on your website.

Plug up the holes in your website

3There are critical pages on your website where you want visitors to complete a specific transaction, such as donating money or joining an email list.

Sadly, these pages are often the reasons why people aren’t donating as much as they would. This free eBook includes 15 ways to improve these landing pages.

Make your supporters’ agendas your agenda

4One way to keep your top supporters interested and committed is to support their agendas! For example, if one of your top supporters publishes a blog about why the cause is personal, you need to be retweeting their blog posts.

Or if one of your top fundraisers owns a local restaurant, you’d better be holding some of your events there.

Constantly report outcomes

5I love what the Animal Rescue League of Boston does on Facebook. Almost every week, I see some kind of success story. As Alexandra mentioned, 53 percent of online donors in one study identified “achieving and communicating measurable results” as prominent in their decision to donate again. You want people to donate more than once? Report outcomes!

Develop one cause marketing partnership

6Cause marketing is a partnership between a nonprofit and a for-profit for mutual profit. And it’s probably one of the most overlooked, underutilized strategies for raising money.

Joe Waters has five tips for creating a cause marketing program for your organization.

Don’t shoot for perfection

7Trying to make everything perfect will only get nothing done. But “done” is what you want — not perfect!

Break your donor retention strategy down into to small chunks that you can do one at a time. Done… next… repeat.

What do you think?

The post 7 ways to increase your nonprofit’s donations appeared first on Socialbrite.

Adopt a new perspective to get past Facebook’s marketing challenges

It seems that most brands and nonprofits are still trying to get their head around what works on Facebook.

Looking at what content works best, what time to publish updates, and how to use sponsored stories are consistent themes being discussed among nonprofit marketers.

Yet these issues are just symptoms of bigger challenges that we all need to better understand.

Following are five reasons why Facebook marketing is presenting new and/or unusual challenges:

You’re still thinking push

1You’d think that social media would have changed the mass-production push mentality that’s been so pervasive since the Industrial Revolution. But it hasn’t.

Facebook, and most social media for that matter, is still viewed as a free email list to be “targeted” and marketed to.

To amp things up on Facebook, you have to flip this mindset 180 degrees and instead think about creating a space for your supporters to share what matters to them.

Start asking:

• What’s their agenda?
• What are they already putting out there that’s in sync with your cause?
• How can you capture that on your Facebook Page?

You need to understand people

2Google tells you what people are searching for in the form of words typed into a little search box. It’s literally spelled out for you. Not so with Facebook.

What makes Facebook users share, comment and like is still very much a mystery.

You need to look for patterns in Facebook Insights and make inferences based on those patterns. You need to actually understand the emotional drivers of your people!

You’re competing with their friends

3Think about the last time you opened up Facebook on your laptop or mobile device. Was it to find out what your favorite brands were sharing? Exactly.

It’s the same thing with your supporters. Every time you publish an update in their news feed, you’re competing with birth announcements, political rants, vacation pictures and recommended bands.

Remember that you’ll never trump someone’s friends, but the more you can come across with a friend-like voice, the better you’ll do.

You’re competing for attention

4Facebook users are constantly distracted. They might have the best intentions to view an update they were notified about by email, but as soon as they open up Facebook, they see more notifications in the menu and in their friends lists. They see a dog dressed up as little red riding hood. They see other ads that are also competing for their attention.

Capturing — and recapturing — people’s attention will always be a challenge on Facebook.

You’re dealing with mobile devices

5Every other challenge mentioned here happens within an even smaller space on mobile devices. Did you know that each image you post on your Facebook Page takes up the entire screen on an iPhone?

Yes, there are fewer elements to distract users, but there’s also less space you’re competing for.

Curiosity and creativity are the keys

Most of the challenges here are not insurmountable, but sometimes they feel that way. The best way forward is to have a solid understanding of how to best use Facebook for your organization.

What challenges have you seen through marketing on Facebook?

The post 5 reasons Facebook marketing seems daunting appeared first on Socialbrite.

Get the most out of social, but don’t forget to go deep

Second of two parts. Also see:
• Why can’t I raise any money with social media?

Guest post by Ehren Foss
Co-founder and CEO, HelpAttack!

Last year I wrote a post for NTEN about four social media fundraising tools. (Socialbrite also ran: Social fundraising tools: Our top 5 picks.)

This year I’m going to take a vertical rather than horizontal approach, and identify several important types of tools you’ll want to consider when raising money online – either through your website or on a social network.

Shareable visual content, like the photo at top, relates to several important facets of social media fundraising: Is it easy to share on social networks? Does it link back to a page with a donation form or other action? Can you track who likes the content in your content relationship management system, if you have one?

The bedrock of online fundraising: Website donation forms

I think humble donation forms are the bedrock of online fundraising: You can steer people to them from elsewhere on your website, from email, from QR codes, and of course from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and other social networks. These forms can be great lead generation tools at the same time they are bringing in necessary revenue. While it seems like donation forms were “solved” years ago when our sector turned its attention to social fundraising and social media, many organizations are still struggling.

Some cause organizations that have invested in building their own forms find them difficult and expensive to maintain. I can see why: Simple forms are harder than they seem. You should:

• Ensure mobile friendliness and easy social network sharing
• Provide flexibility for varying needs of campaigns and programs
• Measure, tweak, and improve conversion rates by altering images, copy, and other attributes of the form
• Maintain a high level of security for PCI compliance

The alternative used to be directing your supporters off-site, to PayPal.com, Authorize.net, or other secure, but not as flexible (or branded), donation flows. My favorite tools these days embrace the best of both worlds.

Let someone else worry about HTML5, standards compliance, scalability, and usability while still enjoying the benefits of hosting the form at your own domain. Embedded forms usually have easy-to-use form building kits, too. Kimbia and FormStack are good examples, and both are starting to integrate with large customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce, Blackbaud, Salsa Labs, Fundly, and other nonprofit tradeshow regulars offer embedded forms, too.

Let’s get geeky: 4 ‘open graph’ tags you should be using

Everything you put on the Web can help – or hurt – your overall results. Does your website CMS (content management system) automatically create the proper meta tags for the big social networks? When someone shares a URL on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, what image, blurb, and text is included automatically? When someone pins a great image from your website, where do clicks on it end up?

If you view the HTML in a socially shareable Web page, you’ll see a set of meta tags. A good CMS (perhaps with a few plug-ins) should allow you to set up defaults for this kind of sharing, while allowing you to override titles, primary images, and other shared attributes as needed.

Your supporters will share the page you want them to, but they will also share pages buried deep in your site that you haven’t thought about in months. When they do, make it easy and effective.

These four “open graph” tags make Facebook and Twitter happy. The “title” tag is very important (it’s what shows up as the tab name in your browser). The “image_src” one helps your image show up in LinkedIn. Along with the description and keywords tags, they all help with search engine optimization too. (If you use these, be sure to insert your own information!)

<meta name=”og:type” content=”cause” /> <meta name=”go:image” content=”http://helpattack.com/images/helpattack_logo_200x121px.png” /> <meta name=”og:url” content=”http://www.helpattack.com” /> <meta name=”og:site_name” content=”HelpAttack!” /> <meta name=”fb:app_id” content=”117175691682196″ /> <meta name=”title” content=”HelpAttack! – Social Media Fundraising” /> <link rel=”image_src” href=”https://helpattack.com/images/helpattack_logo_200x121px.png” />

Adding social data to your supporter database

This is another foundation of online fundraising. Consider adding new fields for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, or other social network URLs that are important in your community of supporters to your CRM system.

This way, social data that you collect can inform your direct mail, email, volunteering, advocacy, and other efforts. You might be surprised to learn that your funders, board members, and partners use social media, too. There’s lots of talk about the return on investment of social media. Adding social data to your supporter database is a very important step in making sure you can increase and sustain the return on your invesment for years to come.

The simplest example to do this is by figuring out which people hate your paper mailings and want to hear more tailored messages from you online instead. Save money on your mailings and have happier supporters, too.

Getting this data out of Facebook and other networks can be a challenge, though. If appropriate, allow your users to share this information with you in other channels or with apps. Consider using apps that allow you to retain ownership over the data. SmallAct provides a lightweight social CRM platform called Thrive, and also allows organizations to mass update their contacts with social data. Blackbaud recently launched a “social score” tool, similar to Klout. Many other data sources are more focused on for-profit data and sales needs, but it’s worth checking out Rapleaf and Rapportive, their competitors.

Platform-specific donation apps

For most organizations, the Facebook tab donation form is still one of the only options out there. Twitter offers advertising, sponsored tweets, and sponsored #hashtags. Few organizations are asking for donations directly through LinkedIn (as it’s a much better place to find skilled volunteers or build your network, in my opinion). Pinterest and Tumblr are great places to share visual content, and a best practice is to make sure that content is linked back to a donation page or another place where supporters can take action.

While quite useful, tabs aren’t what they used to be. Tab engagement dropped more than 50% after the shift to Timeline. Remember, most supporters will interact with your content in their feeds, and won’t visit your page frequently. Expect low numbers from your tab apps, compared with your posts.

I’ve also noticed that lots of organizations still have Causes.com’s tab on their Facebook page. However, Causes has deprecated this tab and simply redirects clicks to causes.com. That said, once your page reaches a certain level of activity, tabs are still a worthwhile investment. It’s easy enough to add a donation form, a mailing list signup form, and perhaps one or two other action oriented tabs, and let them do their thing.

Remove the default Likes tab, since that information is available elsewhere. Assuming you’re sharing great visual content, keep the Photos tab. (You don’t have a choice anyway – that’s Facebook’s way of telling you how important visual content is.)

A caution against building custom native apps

If you are totally kicking butt at all of the above, and you see how your website, your other online communities, and your other channels are all flowing harmoniously together to drive donations and other actions, then good for you!

I caution against building custom native (iPhone, Android, Facebook timeline) apps unless all of the above is aces for your organization and you’ve run the numbers and are really sure your community is large enough or active enough to make a custom app worthwhile.

If you’re still tempted, then I suggest doing a simpler version as a proof of concept, or finding a similar app that you can borrow or customize.

Related

• Social fundraising tools: Our top 5 picks (Socialbrite)

• Social fundraising tools for nonprofits & causes (Socialbrite)

• What social fundraising means for your nonprofit (Socialbrite)

• Fundraising tools and tips (Socialbrite)

The post Tips & tools for effective online fundraising appeared first on Socialbrite.

5 steps to get you soaring on Skype or Google Hangout

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, video producers.

Guest post by Derek Singleton
Software Advice

These days, recording a professional-looking Web video interview is becoming easier and cheaper. However, it’s still easy to get things like lighting, studio set-up and the background wrong.

It’s now easier than ever to conduct video interviews or conversations over Skype or Google Hangout. If you want to interview a thought leader in your sector, or if you want to have your executive director or CEO sit down for an Internet interview, take the right steps to make it look good.

You have a lot of software options. For Skype, the Evaer Skype video recorder and Pamela for Skype both work on PCs and ecamm‘s Call Recorder for Skype is a good option for Macs. VIDBlaster is another solid choice. With Google Hangout, every Hangout On Air is automatically saved to your YouTube account.

At Software Advice we shoot a lot of Web video, and we wanted to share tips we’ve learned from trial and error along the way.

Here are five key areas to focus on to help you create great Web videos.

Getting the studio ready

1For Skype video calling, you’ll be sitting at a computer while engaging a colleague or colleagues. Think about your shooting area as a studio and consider its various components: the camera, microphone, background, and lighting, and how you will account for each. While you’re setting up your studio, it’s important to limit the framing of the video to yourself and a solid background as you don’t want other items in the room entering your shot.

Pick a quality webcam

2While it may be tempting to stick with your computer’s built-in webcam, chances are that your webcam will shoot low-quality video. Since many people out on the Web are starting to expect high-definition video, it’s a good idea to go out and get a webcam that can shoot and record in HD.

If you don’t have a built-in webcam that can shoot in HD, we recommend checking out the Logitech HD Pro Webcam C920 for Windows and Logitech HD Pro Webcam C910 for Mac. One advantage of these webcams is that they also record decent audio.

Get the right sound

3You have several options available for getting a decent sound for your Web videos. The first is to use a good HD webcam (like the Logitech models recommended above) that can record audio. If you want to go with this approach, select one that has dual microphones because it will capture the audio better.

Your second option is to pick a USB microphone (see right) that can connect to your computer to improve the sound. We like Blue Microphone’s Snowball ($68) because it offers great sound for price, or you can upgrade to their Yeti ($106) for even higher quality sound. If that’s not your style, you can always go the route of a headset or lapel mic. One thing to note, however, is that these will likely be visible in your video.

Lighting

4Lighting is a big area of focus when trying to get your video to appear professional. If you don’t have the right lighting, colors will dull and there will be shadows in your face. Neither is desirable.

At Software Advice, we rely on two small desk lamps that cost $23 each and use copy paper diffusers to light our foreground. We also use a three-piece lighting kit to light our backdrop (see figure in step 5). One side note about lighting: Dim your computer screen as much as possible to avoid getting lighting from your monitor into the shot. Below you can see examples of good lighting versus poor lighting.

Studio set-up

5Use Skype to preview your shot (#1) and adjust your lighting as needed. You’re looking to evenly light your face. The main light (#2) is your primary light source, while the fill light (#3) comes from the other direction, generally less intense, to bring down the shadows created by the main light.

Two desk lamps ($23 each) with copy paper taped in front of them to act as diffusers (as shown below) are highly effective at providing additional soft light for your webcam — just keep an eye on heat. You may need up to three back lights (#4) to light your backdrop (#5). Other backgrounds can be used but avoid too much activity as it can negatively impact video quality.

There you have five areas that we focus on to create great, professional-looking Web videos without breaking the bank.

Do you have any tips you’d like to provide? Leave your thoughts in the comments below!

This originally appeared at Lauren’s blog, Major Multimedia.

Related

• Storytelling Tips From the Experts at Pixar (Socialbrite)

• Video & multimedia tutorials (Socialbrite)

The post How to create high-quality Web video interviews appeared first on Socialbrite.

Boost your email marketing power through personalized communication

This is the second of a two-part series. Also see:
• 5 easy ways to integrate email marketing and Facebook

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

Like social media, email marketing is where you nurture constituent relationships. But e-mail is different from social media in a few critical areas:

Privacy and Intimacy: E-mail is not a public channel like Twitter or Facebook. Opting into your list is an agreement to enter a private and intimate relationship with you, by way of their inbox. There is no public audience to your conversations. It’s one-on-one and very private.

Segmentation: The core principle of e-mail marketing is segmentation, adding people to specific lists based on their interests and actions. Segmentation ultimately allows you to create highly receptive messages. You can’t do this with Twitter or Facebook.

Conversion: Social media is relational, not transactional. Studies by Blackbaud, Razoo and others show that Twitter and Facebook have about a 3 to 6 percent conversion rate. E-mail on the other hand has a 33 percent conversion rate. What this means is that social media should be used in conjunction with e-mail in order to do effective online fundraising. Social media creates awareness, likability and connection; e-mail builds on that with personalized messaging and personalized appeals.

8 ways to get more results from email marketing

Given that e-mail plays such a critical role in the fundraising process, why is it that so many nonprofits pay little attention to it? Could it be that they just don’t know what role it plays? Or could it be that they don’t know where to start?

Following are a few strategies and tactics that you can use right now to get more from your e-mail marketing.

Follow up with new subscribers

1When someone joins your general email list to receive updates or news about your organization, they’re highly receptive to hearing from you. They might not be as open in a few hours, so follow up immediately when you’re fresh on their mind. You take advantage of this precious opportunity to establish the tone of the relationship with a sincere message of gratitude.

Encourage sharing

2Depending on why someone joins your email list, it’s a precious opportunity to share the good work you’re doing with their friends. Make it easy with a sharing action in a follow-up email, or on the confirmation page once they subscribe.

The emphasis of the ask should depend on the action the subscriber just took. For example, asking them to share your e-mail list with her friends could come across as pushy since all they did was join your e-mail list.

Touch them consistently

3When someone joins your email, they expect and want you to email them. The worst thing you can do is ask someone to join your e-mail list, but have nothing to send them once they join. Why even have an e-mail list in the first place?

Remember, they gave you permission to enter their inbox, and are seeking more from your relationship with them!

Use rich text instead of HTML templates

4People make decisions related to trust in less than a tenth of a second. And people trust their friends way more than they trust any brand or nonprofit. An email format in rich text shared among friends feels more personal and thus more trustworthy.

In several tests I’ve done with clients, rich text email get a 17% higher average click-through rate over HTML templates. Imagine how awkward you’d feel if your friend sent you personal email in an HTML template format!

Rich text emails are also much easier to read on mobile devices, which more and more people use these days.

Personalize messaging

5A quality email marketing service allows you to personalize the email message for each subscriber. There isn’t a silver bullet answer for how to personalize emails because every organization is different. But what is important is that you seek to personalize emails based on understanding your audience (Personas really help here).

Write in second-person narrative

6Your email messages are not being read by thousands of people. They’re being read by one person at a time in the privacy of their inboxes. Write your emails directly to this person.

Keep it short

7Depending on how strong the supporter’s tie is to your organization, several short emails usually get more results than long emails sent out infrequently.

Segment your list

8All of your subscribers and donors are not the same. So why would you send them the same exact message? Segmentation allows you to create highly receptive messages based on your subscriber’s expressed interests.

For example, donors supporting the protection of sea turtles would be much more receptive to similar messages than they would messages about lowering CO2 levels. To develop a segmentation strategy, start with your personas.

Please don’t torch your email list

Your organization and people are beautifully unique. You stand for something that no other organization stands for. Your people support you for reasons that are uniquely theirs. Because of this, you do not want to start torching your list by testing out ideas you read about on some blog. Test these ideas, yes. But please test them on a small percent of your list, maybe 5 percent.

Test subject lines, copy, rich text vs. HTML templates, etc. Take what works here and leave the rest.

Tell us: How do you do more with your email list?

The post 8 ways to get more from your nonprofit’s email marketing strategy appeared first on Socialbrite.