This post was originally published in the Huffington Post. Photo courtesy of Trickle Up.

By: Caroline Avakian

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the world’s targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions. The MDGs target date expires this year, and as we collaboratively build out new goals for the next 15 years, it will be critical that nonprofit communicators in the global development sector build on what we’ve learned as well. So it got me thinking about what some of my lessons learned were after almost five years working at Trickle Up — an international organization that empowers people living on less than $1.25 a day to take the first steps out of poverty, providing them with resources to build sustainable livelihoods for a better quality of life. 

Trickle Up is a small but dynamic organization that serves people at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Founded in 1979, they have a long history of serving the poorest, a population that until recently had been ignored by governments and even many other poverty alleviation organizations. When I came to work for Trickle Up in 2008, as their Director of Communications, like any communications staffer, I was tasked to expand our message, our audiences and media opportunities.

Looking back on what the greatest returns were for our effort, I’ve made a list of the five communications tactics that helped us grow our communications as well as our organization in the almost five years I worked at Trickle Up.

1. Stay on message and repeat, repeat, repeat.

Whether it was at a conference, at the UN, or one-on-one, when anyone asked about Trickle Up, I was always sure to address that we worked exclusively with the ultra poor — people living on less than $1.25 per day. There was something powerful and memorable about the consistency and repetitiveness of, “Are you working with the ultra poor”, “Is this project also targeting the ultra poor?”, “What can we do to make sure that the ultra poor are represented in this conversation?”, that became key to keeping our beneficiaries in the forefront and made our participation more effective.

2. Twitter can help build communications partnerships that can grow a smaller organization’s voice.

Committing ourselves to tweeting more strategically and targeting influencers, policy makers and mainstream media outlets, helped us raise awareness on global poverty and the ultra poor, and led to media partnerships like one with Huffington Post Impact, that helped bring our message into the mainstream.

3. Flashy websites are great but make sure you’re also educating.

Everyone likes a beautifully designed website but make sure you’re also doing your part to educate your audience on the issues your organization tackles. When I launched Trickle Up’s revamped website in 2010, we had added an “Understanding Poverty” section front and center to make sure it was visible and not just secondary to our own programs. One piece of feedback that we heard consistently was that the website not only looked great but was also deeply informative. Educating people on the nuances of poverty was a main communications goal, and our website served as a resource and reference for many looking for information on people living on less than $1.25 per day.

4. Blogging and content sharing is key to growing your audience.

Once we started growing our blog and sharing our content with other organizations looking to publish similar content, we grew our readership exponentially. Sometimes we made the decision not to publish a blog post on our website blog, but rather on a partner site or media site that publishes interesting global development content. It was always worth the extra effort and introduced our organization to many new audiences and other organizations.

5. Growing your peer network is critical to your success.

Some nonprofit organizations view their peers as competitors and don’t engage them as much as they could. When I came to Trickle Up, I knew that I wanted to expand our communications strategy to more actively engage our peers in our work. There are many ways to do that from a communications standpoint and make it interesting — a blogging series with three different poverty alleviation organizations writing from their viewpoints, a tweetathon, or even just attending each other’s events. You are not only growing your organization but taking your supporters on a more interesting, robust journey that ultimately engages them more effectively.

What’s Next: Expanding our Global Communications Strategy

The United Nations Millennium Development Goals are the world’s targets for addressing poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion — while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability. It provides a road map for how all countries could collaborate on the future of development and the ending of extreme poverty. That agreement, however, expires this year. As we build out new goals for the next 15 years, it will be critical that the targets benefit all people living in poverty. Equally important is that we ensure that we continue to improve on policies that enable their success and that keep governments accountable.

With that in mind, global development communications will now have an even greater task of engaging audiences in the important work ahead. Just as the MDG’s are sustained through country partnerships and collaboration, the same could be said for strengthening and revitalizing our communications partnerships in organizations of all sizes and budgets, to ensure clarity, unity and power of messaging.

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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.

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How to maximize and follow through on your communications goals

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

If you’re like most nonprofit communicators, you have a list of specific quarterly or yearly goals. No doubt they include growing your e-mail list, acquiring new donors and increasing engagement on your Facebook updates.

But whatever your goals are, make sure they cover these seven tips below:

Write it down

1A plan is very difficult to follow and measure if it’s not written down. Most nonprofits don’t have content strategy. And based on the limited work I’ve done, they also lack an online marketing strategy that’s written down.

Make a resolution to create written plans for each campaign throughout the year. Your plan should include stated goals, stated messaging, a strategy outline, and finally, tools and tactics. How much detail you include in this document is up to you, but at least include these elements.

Also, check out these three articles on develop a solid online marketing strategy:

Practice split-testing

2If you’re like most nonprofits, your donor retention rates are less than satisfactory. Improving this starts with fixing the places where you’re converting poorly.

• Begin by split testing your fundraising pages, if you haven’t already. Split-testing helps increase conversions by testing out variations in the content. Some typical areas to start with include headlines, images, button location, button text, button colors, and copy. Check out how the Marine Mammal Center split-tested variations of a call-to-action.
• You should also split-test email subject lines and email content. This will eventually point the way to increased open rates, click-through rates, and eventually conversion rates.

Check out this article on how split-testing raised over $100,000 for WWF.

Maximize secondary actions

3Make the most of every interaction people take with your nonprofit. For example, when people sign a petition, immediately email them to ask for a donation (says thanks first). This approach uses recency to create momentum towards a secondary call-to-action – essentially killing two birds with one stone.

In fact, maximize any webpage people see after completing a transaction (signing a petition, joining your email list, making a donation, registering for an event). Carefully consider what secondary actions make sense for each transaction. For example, if someone makes a donation, make sure they can easily share that with their friends.

See beyond the dollars

4All too often, the scope of the supporter relationship is limited to money. But donating money is only one way that they interact with you.

Supporters also share your Facebook updates, sign your petitions and pledges, and re-tweet your blog posts.

Develop a specific plan to encourage these types of actions, remembering that growing a community is like growing a garden. It takes time, care and consideration. Focus on growing your community, both in terms of numbers AND engagement.

Be useful

5It seems like all the social media experts claim that the key to success to being awesome. But what your community really needs is for you to be useful.

Being useful is much easier than trying to be awesome. Being useful is about putting the needs of your community first, like in this Facebook update from the Museum of Fine Arts:

Take risks

6New tactics and strategies for using social media sprout up every week, making “best practices” somewhat limited. In fact, I think we should change the term “best practice” to “most commonly used practice that gets average results.”

The fact is, the web and mobile are changing very fast. Those who play is safe get average results at best, while risk-takers adopt more quickly (test, fail / win, learn, repeat). Fail forward, they say.

Test and measure

7Most nonprofits are not strategically testing or measuring digital media. Yes, data is collected and stored in excel spreadsheets. But the hard questions aren’t being asked: Why are we measuring click-through rates? Why are we measuring our Facebook page fan growth?

Let your strategy dictate what should be measured. This will make your data much more useful. For example, if your goal is to convert more donors via email, then you want to test and measure conversion rates via clicks in those messages. Go back to what I said about split-testing.

Remember to breathe

If you’re like me, you need a fair amount of down time.

You need time to step back, take a breath, and take in the panoramic view of what you’re doing – in work and in life. Pace yourself and be smart about daily habits.

And try to have fun.

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How Big Listening can help your organization improve

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations and advocates, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, educators, journalists, monitoring services.

Guest post by Rachel Weidinger
Upwell

I started Upwell from the premise that it might be possible to do really Big Listening with social media. Listening beyond a brand, a program or a campaign. My curiosity drove me to investigate:

● Can we listen to the tides of Internet conversation on an issue, and learn to predict and ‘surf’ them?

● Can we use the momentum of focused attention to raise an issue above the noise?

Upwell is a pilot project, testing the waters to transform the ocean conversation. Our team sifts through the vast amount of real-time online content about the ocean and amplifies it. The mission of Upwell is to condition the climate for change in marine conservation, and prepare people to take action.

After six months of trying and testing – and learning some hard lessons – Upwell has found a way to do Big Listening online, mostly using Radian6. Even better, we discovered that we can use this practice to both inform and measure campaigns.

“Big Listening is taking all the conversations that are going on online and trying to find pockets; in our case, ocean issues like MPAs (marine protected areas), overfishing, sustainable seafood, whales, bluefin tuna, ocean acidification, sharks and shark finning,” explains Matt Fitzgerald, Upwell’s curator and social metrics manager. “We’re listening for those conversations, and trying to meet those people where they are, rather than going out and saying, ‘This is the exact demographic profile of the person who we want to reach.’”

The core value of Big Listening is that it is important listen to each other at scale, and as individuals. Public opinion polls provide some types of insight, but take time and money. Big Listening is fast and shows changes over time.

Here’s the rundown of why your nonprofit should be a big listener:

Big Listening is the future of issue communications

1As technology costs drop and communications move online, the future of our work lies in Big Listening.

“Big Listening helps you to better identify opportunities,” says Ray Dearborn, Upwell’s senior curator and campaign strategist. “You can see conversations start to bubble up. If you jump in quickly enough, you can have a huge impact on what happens to those conversations.”

When we jump in, we can immediately assess our impact. The team at Upwell expends significant time and energy paying attention to the shifting target of what’s really going on with an issue.

“For the first time, we can really watch conversations develop, and watch the effects of campaigns that are being launched, in real, or close to real, time,” says Matt.

The tools we use to do this work are not immediately obvious. We primarily use Radian6, an enterprise-level social media platform most often used to monitor brands and products. We’re repurposing a commercial tool to monitor an issue, but using it in a very different way.

“Big Listening is actually harder than what major multinational companies are doing with their brand monitoring because conversations around issues and movements are constantly evolving,” explains Matt. “One day you can be talking about ‘hydraulic fracturing,’ the next day you’re talking about ‘fracking,’ and then the next day someone comes up with a new, more punchy word for it. Listening to that is very different than just plugging your organization’s name and the most common misspellings into one of these tools and watching the graphs move. With Big Listening the contours and locations of these conversations are constantly changing, so you have to pay attention.”

Big Listening gives you extra whomp to compete with the big guys

2The Big Listening approach allows you to identify more collaborators. It also helps illustrate that the orgs who you think of as competitors for funding are actually great collaborators on campaigns. For example, redundancy of messaging across many campaigns at many orgs can create a helpful sort of messaging resiliency. The insight gained from Big Listening isn’t a super power exactly, but some days it sure feels like it.

“It makes you more effective,” says Matt. “For nonprofits, and especially advocacy groups, the other side almost always has more resources. Big Listening allows you to work more effectively by identifying ways in which less work can have more impact.”

Big Listening gives you perspective on your impact

3As nonprofit communications professionals, it can feel impossible to measure some of our most vital impacts.  Is there more or less love for the ocean than last week?

Will hunger ever gain Bieber-like prominence? Are people more compassionate to animals, more generous towards the homeless? Campaigning with Big Listening allows you to measure the impacts of your campaigns in real time. You’re able to learn a lot between your morning meeting and the end of the work day, and you’re ready to put what you learned into practice right away.

“In terms of thinking about strategy, it’s really grounding because it gives you an opportunity to see that the front page of The New York Times isn’t the world,” Ray observes. “If you’re doing Big Listening, you can understand that conversations are not just around one hub. They travel, they morph, they move into different platforms. If you forget to do Big Listening, you can really narrow your opportunity lens. Big Listening is grounding in that, if there’s a bad news story, you can see that it’s not as big as you thought it would be. If there is a good news story, you can see that a really motivated group of individuals can make it spread.”

Big Listening helps illustrate the danger of working alone, and the benefit of thinking of your work in a network context. With real-time insight into how a few influential evangelists can push a conversation to prominence, Big Listening helps my team stay hopeful as we work on the crisis the ocean faces.

Big Listening helps you select the right campaign targets

4The first week I started using Radian6 I decided I needed a bigger monitor. A much bigger monitor.  I thought “I need a bigger window into the Internet.  This one is too tiny.”

In the same way, Big Listening has forced us to see when we’re putting big effort into a tiny online conversation. And when modest effort can reshape a comparatively more massive conversation.

“We can compare the size of conversations quantitatively, as opposed to just going on our hunches. We originally started campaigning on marine protected areas, but then we realized that the conversation was really small in comparison to some other issues,” Matt says. “We still monitor the topic, but we realized that for the impact that we’re trying to have [raise the entire online ocean conversation], we need to work on a bigger conversation.”

Big Listening helps you identify which angle has the best ROI

5Ray explains why Upwell chose to focus two weeks of Upwell’s campaigning on Shark Week. “We were able to identify an opportunity there because of the tools we have, and because we were able to compare it, we were able to understand what a huge opportunity it was. We were able to see the scale of it as compared to other things, like marine protected areas. That opportunity could have gotten lost if we didn’t have the tools to understand the scale and the sentiment.”

Big Listening helps you fail faster and learn more quickly

6At Upwell, we’ve all had to learn to campaign a new way.  Each new staffer is challenged to run 8-10 campaigns that are small enough to be completed in a week, but still have big impact.  Campaigning fast and with Big Listening demands new habits, and has big rewards.

“You can stop doing things that don’t work,” Matt says. Traditionally, people will roll out a communications plan, and there is at least a month building it up, and then the plan is for at least three months, and maybe up to a year. Once a campaign is running, resources have already been committed to very specific things.” 

He explains, “Big Listening gives you the freedom to change the plan, and react to developments. We talk about the freedom to fail a lot. Failure can be much more informative if you can then act on what you learn from it. A shorter cycle. If it doesn’t take you six months, or nine months to realize that what you’re doing hasn’t worked, and it takes you a day, or a week, you can be a lot more nimble.”

Why you should be doing it, too

Big Listening has given the ocean a huge competitive advantage. I’m hopeful that more accessible tools will be created so that more people can practice Big Listening, and have the opportunity to powerfully transform the issues we dedicate our work days (and our lives) to. We have the chance to listen to our fellow humans at a new scale. At Upwell, we  use the insight gained from Big Listening to craft measurable impacts on ocean issues, and we’re confident that it’s possible with other issues, too.

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