Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, businesses, digital marketers, educators, Web publishers, Pinterest users.

Guest post by Annie Lynsen
SmallAct

Earlier this year, I wrote about 13 nonprofit Pinterest board ideas. If you have a Pinterest account for your organization, you’ll find some inspiration below. If you don’t have a Pinterest account, take a look at how these nonprofits are leveraging this powerful visual medium.

Here are 11 more!

Photos and brief stories of heroes to your cause

1AARP does a great job of this, showcasing celebrities over 50 and other influential people. Who in your movement has made a difference over the years? This is a great place to show them off and briefly tell their stories.

Great online resources related to your cause

2For example, the National Wildlife Federation has a board aggregating live wildlife cams from around the world.

Recipes people can use for your nonprofit’s events and fundraisers

3The Northeastern Ohio Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has a board with church potluck recipes.

Photos and stories from your organization’s history

4The American Red Cross has a board about the early days of the organization’s existence, showcasing key members and events.

Recommended books and other media related to your cause

5Oceana has an interesting board of art and books related to ocean conservation — take a look above!

Research and discoveries

6The University of Minnesota shares recent scientific discoveries made at the university — I like the sensor gloves.

How-to content

7Ontario Parks teaches people how to camp with this Pinterest board. Another of their boards features recommended camping equipment – a great resource for people just starting out.

Tips from members and spokespeople

8The CDC has tips from former smokers, which serves not only as a valuable resource for people checking out their pins, but also is a great way to shine a spotlight on the people their organization serves – letting them tell their own stories.

Why you fight

9KaBOOM!, a national organization that builds playgrounds and advocates for more unstructured playtime for kids, has a cleverly titled “Board of Outrage” to highlight “absurd, bizarre, and depressing stories about the state of play.”

Fundraising ideas through Pinterest

10Do your members do any P2P fundraising? Give them ideas how to come up with the money they need to participate in your walkathon or other events with a Pinterest board. Girl Scout Troop 50170 has this helpful board of fundraising tips and ideas.

Spotlight your CEO

11Not only is this interesting content for members and donors, it’s a handy resource for media relations. Planned Parenthood has a board with the latest photos and quotes from their CEO, Cecile Richards.

Related

• 10 ways to optimize your website for Pinterest (Socialbrite)

• 3 steps to add your nonprofit’s url to Pinterest (Socialbrite)

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Attract more visitors, encourage sharing through Pinterest

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

By now you’ve heard about Pinterest, the social site that allows people to share images and videos, follow boards and people, and re-pin stuff they find interesting.

But have you optimized your website for Pinterest?

Why should you care about Pinterest?

First of all, why should you give a hoot about Pinterest? There are a few reasons, including how it’s one of the few social networks where women are the predominant user group. Plus, it’s also the fastest growing social networking site on the planet – ever.

And finally, Pinterest helps you reach your website objectives:

• Getting new visitors
• Getting visitors to stick around longer
• Getting visitors to share your goods with their friends

If you take a look at these these goals, you’ll notice that they all have one thing in common: shareable content on your website.

How people use Pinterest

When Pinterest users visit a website, they have the ability to pin photos or videos from your website by using a browser plug-in, saving an image from your website and uploading it (as shown below), or entering a URL from your website into Pinterest.

After they upload or import an image, they add a short description and select a board for the pin (shown below). They can add it to a board they’ve created or a board they’ve been invited to curate pins for.

They can also edit the description and link URL for the pin (shown below). I love doing this with photos that have the highest virality on my Facebook Page.

Repins dominate Pinterest

Keep in mind that people can also repin content from your site once it’s added to a board. In fact, most of the activity on Pinterest is repinning. What this means for you is more exposure (more inbound links) to pages on your site that have amazing images!

10 ways to optimize your website for Pinterest

Because people might be visiting your website at this moment looking for something to share on Pinterest, it makes sense to make sure your site accommodates them. Here are 10 ideas:

1. Test your website. Do this now: Copy the URLs of your most visited pages and copy them into Pinterest by clicking on Add at the top of Pinterest and then into the URL field you’ll see after you click Add A Pin in the pop-up window. (Note: You need to have a Pinterest account to do this.)
2. Fix your website. If you’re having problems getting Pinterest to pull in images, talk to your web master or head of IT (if you have one of those).
3. Use the Open Graph Meta plug-in, if you’re using WordPress, to sniff out the problems (pulling the right photo from a post or page).
4. Add featured images. Make sure each page or post has a featured image. This is one of the main image sources Pinterest will use.
5. Use infographics. Infographics take up much more vertical real estate on Pinterest than any other type of image, enabling your pin to stand apart from the crowd.
6. Get the Digg Digg plug-in. The folks over at Buffer own this plug-in, so you can bet that it’s very reliable. If you don’t use WordPress for your website, check out the Buffer Button. There’s also the Pinterest plugin I use.
7. Play nicely. Follow the five points of Pinterest etiquette, which are pretty much common sense.
8. Make sure your content is pin-worthy. Start thinking about how to make your website content (particularly images and video) remarkable, emotional and interesting.
9. Add text to images. When someone pins an image from your site, all that’s taken with them is the image. For some images on your site, it might be a good idea to add text or a URL to the image (like this one). This way, your branding and/or URL go along for the ride as people re-pin the image.
10. Verify your website. Help Pinterest users trust your website by verifying it with Pinterest.

These are a few ideas to make your website ready for Pinterest.

What else would you add?

The post 10 ways to optimize your website for Pinterest appeared first on Socialbrite.

Verify your site to add credibility & authority

Target audience: Nonprofits, cause organizations, foundations, NGOs, social enterprises, Web publishers — anyone with a Pinterest account and a website.

You may have missed the announcement Thursday that Pinterest is now giving website operators a way to verify your website on your Pinterest profile page. If you manage your nonprofit’s Pinterest account and want to associate it with your nonprofit’s website, follow the steps below.

The idea is that by attaching your online identity to your Pinterest account, it bring a little more authority and credibility to your pages on there. It’s a good idea to go ahead and do that, since the pinboard-style image sharing website is now the third most popular social networking site, behind only Facebook and Twitter. (We’re at http://pinterest.com/socialbrite, come say hi and show off your own boards.)

3 steps to verify, but you need access to your site

1To begin, log in to your Pinterest account and select Settings in the dropdown under your icon at the top right. Scroll down and click the Verify Website button next to your site’s url. Note that Pinterest only supports verification for top-level domains, like www.yournonprofit.org (or .com, .biz, .net, etc.).

2Pinterest will then take you to https://pinterest.com/domain/verify/, a page that should look like this:

You’ll notice the top line of the instructions includes a link for you to download a small html file. Download it. Then upload it to the root level of your website. It’s simplest to use a ftp client to upload it; make sure it’s at the root level (that is, /) so that Pinterest can find it. (If ftp scares you, find the office techie and she can do this in seconds.) Here’s ours: http://www.socialbrite.org/pinterest-70859.html

3Return to the same page as in step 2 to complete the process. Click the link that says, “Click here to complete the process.” That’s it!

When you do, and if you uploaded the file to its proper place, Pinterest will be happy and will confirm that you’ve been verified. Readers will then see a checkmark next to your domain in search results. They will also see the full website URL and checkmark on your profile page. See the image at the top of this article. Pinterest only allows one verified domain per account.

As TheNextWeb reports: “The new features comes just a week after Pinterest launched user blocking and reporting. It’s clear the service is looking to step up its image in the area of security and privacy, which is particularly important given all the hacking and spamming that’s happening on the site.”

Any questions?

The post 3 steps to add your nonprofit’s url to Pinterest appeared first on Socialbrite.

A look at Repinly, PinMe, Pinpuff, PinReach & Pinerly

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

Guest post by Beth Kanter
bethkanter.org

Back in January, I wrote a post about Pinterest as a curation tool to organize and share visual content I’ve collected in a visually pleasing visual way. As the platform has evolved over the past few months, I’ve been facilitating a few introductory workshops and briefings about Pinterest for nonprofits with a goal of explaining it, what it does, benefits, and examples of how nonprofits and others are using it.

Chris Sietsama has a great piece, Abandonment Issues: What To Do With Content Archipelagos, in which he asks you to take a bird’s eye view of your content and figure out if there is a content area that is “standing alone” and not integrated into your overall strategy. If you’re just starting to think about adding Pinterest to your content strategy or if you jumped in before you had a strategy, you can do this type of questioning on the front end, perhaps coming up with a small experiment that supports an overall goal and a measurement strategy.

You might also want to spend some time doing a little research and browse some of the Pinterest stat sites. This will help you get a sense of the users and whether or not Pinterest is a good fit for your content.

Here are five that I came across:

Repinly: Evaluate the top Pinterst users & boards

1Repinly is a site that analyzes Pinterest users and content. You can discover the most popular categories for pins and boards, how users spend their time, and most followed users. Checking out top pinners is a good way to learn best practices.

PinMe: Have you been pinned by others?

2You will also want to take a look at what and how other nonprofits are using Pinterest. There are several Pinterest boards that showcase nonprofit users like these: Nonprofit Organizations, Nonprofit Pinterest Ideas, and Nonprofits on Pinterest. For more ideas, see this list of 50 nonprofits on Pinterest. It also might be worth doing a little research on PinMe and see if any your existing content has already been pinned by other users. I was surprised to find so much of my blog content pinned by others.

Pinpuff: Measure your ‘pininfluence’

3There are many tools that can help you measure your Pinterest use. Pinpuff is a sort of Klout for Pinterest that gives you a number from 1-100 that indicates your “pinfluence.” The site gives you suggestions of other users collecting similar content. And while there is some bogus stats that attempts to give you a dollar amount per pin,  the site does generate some useful data for you. For example, you can a list of the followers, repins, and likes for all your boards.

 

PinReach: Trending pins, topics and users

4A similar site is PinReach, which gives you an number from 1-100 and suggests influential followers. It also shows trending pins, topics and users, although I found it too general to be of value.

Pinerly: Market your visual content

5Probably the best of the Pinterest measurement tools is Pinerly — I’m on the waiting list. Based on this analysis from the Poynter blog, it looks like it generates useful metrics.

How is your organization using pinterest strategically?  What type of pilot test are you doing?   Have you explored any of the measurement tools or other management tools? Please share in the comments.

Related

• 12 ways to use Pinterest for your nonprofit

• What to pin, and what not to pin, on Pinterest

• 5 ways to use Pinterest to promote your cause or fundraiser

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