This post is not much of a much, just another rousing endorsement of one of our fellow non-profit bloggers- Kivi Miller.  Kivi is an excellent writer and an expert in non-profit marketing development and management.  She teaches workshops, keeps an extremely informative blog and is generally  badass in the industry.  She is also, I must add, a master of self-promotion; her blog is rife with opportunities to sign up to attend her teaching engagements, subscribe to her blog, enroll in her e-courses and engage with the variety of social media outlets she uses to promote her blog and her business.  Any organization looking to punch up their website can not only read her informative and well-researched posts, but also take note of the easy navigability of her website and the constant opportunities the site provides to engage with her or purchase her services.

Of particular interest to me is Kivi’s emphasis on non-profit writing.  Copywriting is an oft-ignored facet of building a successful website, business or organization and she’s doing her best to share her A game with the clueless masses (kidding), on this very topic.  She’s accepting enrollees for her latest workshops now; take a look and see any of these might be a good fit for the budding copywriter in your organization.

Here’s an interview with Kivi on content creation for busy non-profits:

Kivi, we salute you!

-A.J.

Try not to let the office dullard cramp your style, as you create your newsletter

So it’s an exciting day in the office for us nerds, as Glee is returning tonight after a terribly long hiatus- our squeeees! can be heard for miles.   I will try, however, to focus on the business at hand, which is Part 2 of this weeks email marketing tutorial.  Here goes. . .

Part 2:

1. Check It, Y’all

So you’ve written and designed a fabulous html email marketing newsletter or fundraising manifesto (or whatever it is you crazy kids are working on these days) and you think you’re ready to send it out.  Well, bad news: you’re not.  You have to test this thing before you send it out, so you don’t flood your entire list’s inbox with incorrect usages of their, there and they’re, dead links, inappropriate exclamation points and spellings of the word ‘definitely’ that somehow use an ‘a’.

As you are checking your email, make sure:

-your spelling, grammar and flow are impeccable and in keeping with the tone you will use in future emails.

-the content of your email matches the subject line.

-your organizations contact info is in two (2) different places in the email, but usually not more.  A link at the top and a link at the bottom of the page will do just fine.

- An opt-out message is included at the bottom of the page.   With a good, content-rich, engaging e-newsletter you won’t lose many subscribers, so don’t sweat it; an unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page is just good form and also a lot of services you might use for this project actually require it.

- you’ve checked EVERY link in your email and made sure it goes where it needs to go, not to anywhere inappropriate, of course, and not to a ‘Page Not Found’ purgatory.

- your email is written as if it is to one person only.  No ‘all of you’ or ‘you guys’- just ‘you’ and ‘your’ and other singular statements.  If you’ve written your email as you would address a speech to a crowd, please change it now to address the individual reader.  I’ll wait.

2.) Test It

Now that you’ve checked your email for errors in tone, grammar and content, it’s time to test it out.

-check the look of your email in as many different email and browser platforms as you can.  Create test email addresses at all the free sites (gmail, hotmail, yahoo etc.), so you can test every newsletter in this way.  You want to be sure that all your images work, the layout of your page is not radically altered, and that every relevant piece of information is visible.

-Spam-check.  Send copies out to ten people you know personally and find out if the email went to their spam folders.

-get notes on the effectiveness of the message, the aesthetic and the content of the email, maybe from your spam-test folks.

3.) Send It Out

This part should be extremely self-explanatory, especially if you’re using a service that makes this step even easier.  However, timing is important here: consider the demographic of your audience.  If you’re sending out a volunteer recruitment newsletter aimed mostly at high school kids, avoid sending it during school hours.  If most of your readers will be working standard hours (Monday-Friday, 9-5), don’t send it on Monday morning, when it will blend in with the beginning-of-the-week spam influx.  Best practice for a normal, working adult demographic is to send marketing emails on Tuesday or no later than Wednesday morning.

Tomorrow: tracking and follow up in Part 3!

Have a great Tuesday, everyone.

-A.J.

Get Suited Up For An Email Marketing Extravaganza!!

This week, I’ll be doing a three part tutorial about how, exactly, to launch a successful email marketing campaign.  I know that this method of direct marketing can be frustrating and expensive, but a well-calibrated e-fundraising letter can really rake in the dough or drum up serious interest in your non-profit’s website.  There are plenty of services out there- like Constant Contact and Emma (we prefer the latter)- who can help you get set up with a minimum of fuss; their whole business is making email marketing easier for you.  There is also software you can buy, consultants you can hire and ways you can do this a little more on the cheap.  For this how-to, I’m going to assume that your organization has a little money to spend and has someone reasonably web-savvy on staff.

How to Launch Your Successful Email Marketing Campaign, Part 1:

1.)  Strategize

To begin your campaign, have a strategy meeting with everyone on staff who will be involved in the project.  Talk about what message you want to send with your newsletter- is it a hardcore fundraising email or are you going to start with a soft-sell email trying to solicit traffic to your site or blog?  With a monthly service, you can advance your message every time: maybe start with a ‘Welcome’-ish letter, detailing the resources and info available on your site and a brief description of the undoubtedly amazing work your organization is doing.  You can move forward with specific fundraising drives more easily with an email list that’s already quite familiar with your organization.  In any case, get everyone working on this thing on the same page in your initial strategy meeting.

Also to think about while strategizing:

What is your budget and how will your money be best spent?

-What service should you use?  We recommend Emma, but there are dozens out there that could fit the bill for what you need.

2.) Design Your Email Template

Emma and similar services all offer free html email templates for your organization to use while setting up your online campaign.  These are easy to use and can be customized to fit your non-profits’ aesthetic identity.  When you’re designing the email, just remember that all best design practices and principles apply: keep it consistent with your site, your branding and ambiguous enough to be used for the variety of e-newsletters you will want to send.  Use your template for every email you send; your recipients will associate the visual design of your template with your organization, so make something you like enough to not switch it up for awhile.

3.) Write Your First Email Newsletter

When you sit down to write your letter, first consider the tone.  The tonal content of your newsletters should remain consistent, every month or week or however often you choose to send it out (btw, we recommend not more than twice monthly).  You don’t necessarily need a professional copywriter, just someone familiar with your organization and who can create engaging, concise content.  No matter what, keep the tone consistent.  If you use serious, corporate language the first time around, be prepared to keep it that way.  If you want your emails to be hee-larious more than you want them to be informative, than be prepared to sustain the funny.  A good tenet for most organizations is to follow the same rules that apply to blogging, but in a slightly more formal medium: keep it light, short, personable (but not too personal) and direct.  If you’re doing a fundraising drive, devote your letter to asking for money, telling your readers why you need it and what it will be used for.  Period.  If you want people to visit your site or blog, include excerpts or examples of the materials available.  Don’t muddy the waters with too much content or send out an email without enough content to be compelling.  A definitive call-to-action is essential.  The idea is to develop a distinctive, immediately-identifiable voice, that your readers respond to and don’t send directly to their trash box.

4.) What’s Up with Your Email List?

There are 3 above-board ways to acquire an email list: buy one, rent one or cultivate one yourself.  The best way, of course, is to develop a list yourself.  A list can be culled from blog subscribers, donors, site visitors, contacts out here in the real world, and dozens of other sources that all your non-profit worker bees out there are already pretty familiar with.  That being said, though, if you are a mid-size non-profit, it can still be pretty hard to come up with ten thousand email addresses that you’re vaguely sure will open your emails and not instantly trash them.  Even if you start out with a purchased list, which is frowned upon, make it a major priority to be building up your own marketing index.  This article about building up your email marketing list has some helpful tips and also a very persuasive passage about why NOT to buy pre-made email marketing lists.  The author’s most salient point, as far as I’m concerned, is this: if you could have an email go out to 100 people who care about your organization or 1000 people who couldn’t pick it out of a lineup of one, which would you pick?  That’s what I thought.

All right, folks, that’s it for now.  Stay tuned for the sequel and threequel to this post, arriving at a laptop/desktop near you later this week.

-A.J.

Hey there, moneybags

More on Non-Profit Marketing

It’s easy to make presumptions about how much money you think your organization should be raising, or how much you think others of a similar variety might be making from their donor base.  As it turns out, even in these recession years, there is an upward trend in giving online, to non-profit organizations.  This is good news, and you should be rightfully concerned if your organization is not moving forward with some new, improved online or practical fundraising options.

Convio has recently released their Online Marketing Non-Profit Benchmark Index, a survey and synthesis of online marketing data from 500 non-profits from 15 sectors.  The information is free at their site, though you have to put in your own information (email, etc.).  The survey was made of non-profits who use Convio’s services and software, so full disclaimer, but the information they gathered is actually very useful for any NPO starting to build up their contributors.  From the data in the report, it looks as if this report was taken from many already-quite-established non-profits, not so much of ones just beginning to cultivate their online donor base.

Alison Kapin from Frogloop (one of our favorite non-profit blogs, btw) has written a fairly extensive article on this subject, with an excellent, far less dry (and less shamelessly promotional) summary than the one at Convio.

It’s so hard to get an accurate idea of what should be happening with your online fundraising.  Sometimes even when you use the tools available and are doing everything right, you still can’t seem to squeeze a penny from the folks visiting your website.  And sometimes (much less often, I’ll add), you can be making errors right and left and taking your donors to a decision page before the donation form and not properly displaying your donation button and all these other basically heinous mistakes and still, STILL be making money for your organization.  But, those two examples aside, the best ways to truly build an online donor base that you can tap into again and again is to use all the best practices, make use of every tip you can find, and try, try again until you get it right.

Shake The Money Tree

Fundraisers Galore

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . for fundraising.  But seriously folks, all terrible, obvious literary references aside, fundraising in a recession can be incredibly difficult and incredibly rewarding.  Giving means more when there’s less to go around.  I’ve written at length in previous posts about how fabulously the Interwebs can convey your marketing messages and how useful a tool basic SEO is, but have left the direct, out-there-in-the-community side of things without much comment.

Grass-roots fundraising can be so much fun.  Observe:

Pie throwing, HA!

Some of the most satisfying experiences in my adult life have been coming together with my friends, family and community to do some grass-roots fundraising.  It’s spring, we’ve got good weather coming (though in the Northwest it will, admittedly, be a bit of a wait), and the time is right to get out there and raise some cash for a worthy cause.  This type of fundraising doesn’t need the power and structure of an organization to make things happen, it just needs a motivated adult or savvy teenager to get things started.  With two recent major natural disasters and all the non-profits we all know about that ALWAYS need money, why not add a fundraiser to your list of things to do for spring cleaning?

Five Community Fundraising Ideas

1.) Throw a Secret Cafe

I did this with friends in college on several occasions, for various causes that floated our boats at the time.  It helped us build our activist community and taught us some extremely valuable lessons about marketing, the many perils and joys of restaurant management and, weirdly, how to properly cook a turkey.

The idea is this: Your home is a restaurant for one night.  Put up some flyers at your local grocery store or neighborhood bulletin board (and don’t forget to tell all your friends), advertising the date and time of your Secret Cafe and a number people can call for reservations (I’d recommend 2 seatings- for dinner, one at 6 pm and one at 8), though of course walk-in guests are welcome.  Decide on a donation amount that people will pay at the front door (usually between $5 and $20, for a low-key SC).  A Secret Cafe works best in a house with indoor/outdoor space.  Set up a bunch of tables and enlist your pals to be the servers for the night.  You can either decide to buy the ingredients for your Secret Cafe Meal (here is a sample menu) or go and ask local restaurants to contribute ingredients or dishes.  In my  experience, some restaurants/co-ops/farms/where ever are willing to at least donate a side dish, a crucial ingredient or maybe a keg of beer (if it’s that kind of party), especially if you display news of their generous sponsorship on your flyers.  The easiest meals to prepare for Secret Cafes are ones that lend themselves to family style eating: roast a couple of large turkeys,  multiple racks of ribs or large casseroles of pasta or veggies.  Make cupcakes for desert or something similarly easy to serve.

For a busy SC, you’ll need to consider your ‘staff’ for the night and plan accordingly: maybe 3 people in the kitchen, 1 or 2 shifts of dishwashing (if you’re not using disposable plates), 3 servers and a host at the door to seat people with reservations and without.

The food takes some working out, but this is a great project for a group that’s already enthusiastic about entertaining.  I’ve had some of the most delicious meals of my life at various Secret Cafe’s and been a harried waitress, cook-in-a-pinch and bartender at a few, as well.  This is a great way, slightly more formal than a barbeque, to have a fabulous meal with your neighbors, not to mention raising that moola.

2.) Car Wash.

Total cliche, yes, but it’s spring, dammit, and you shouldn’t tamper with this tried and true formula for hustling up some quick cash.  This is a great one for teenagers to plan and have fun with- turn up the tunes (like this one), put out that money jar, and be sure to have a large cache of dry towels at the ready.

3.)  50\50 Community Garage Sale

As an avid garage saler, there is almost nothing that delights me more than running across a whole block that has pooled their used-goods resources and organized a multi-family garage sale.  Extra awesomeness at these events is often generated by a baked goods or cold drink table.  The next time you’re planning one of these extravaganzas (and, c’mon, spring cleaners, you know you want to!), consider giving 50 percent of your proceeds to a designated cause, or making an agreement with your neighbors that everyone will give half to the charity of their choice.  This can not only help you get rid of those old bar stools, VHS tapes and Star Wars posters, it could also, say, do a lot toward the rebuilding efforts in Haiti or go to your favorite local arts organization that is suffering in these trying times.  Or, for us stalwart Commie liberals, there’s always, always, an NPR pledge drive.

4.) Fun Run. Just don’t eat a big plate of Fettucini Alfredo (a la Michael Scott) beforehand and you’ll already be ahead of the game.  I’ll let EHow tell you how to get this thing rolling, as it is a complicated process.    This event will take a lot of planning, but is an incredibly fun and healthful way to join a community in a single purpose.

5.) Rent a Karaoke Machine.  This is not so much an idea for a specific fundraiser as a general tip: go out, rent one, invite 30 or so friends, neighbors and strangers, mix up a couple (or six) big jugs of hard tea or blended margaritas, put out that donation jar (a buck per song you sing, five bucks so you don’t have to sing, 5 bucks donation per drink etc.) and just see where the funnest night of your life takes you.  This is another fundraiser that could be held in a friendly bar, willing to yield their mic and karaoke system to some folks trying to raise some money and have a good time.  You can also use a rented karaoke machine to have a kid-friendly fundraiser, but that’s not really my area of expertise.

And now onto online fundraising: here are some sweet basic adjustments you can make to your site to take in more money for your organization.  Tinkering with your website in the middle of a beautiful spring day is, yes, slightly less fun than having a backyard barbeque or making bracelets for a cause, but suck it up, and you’ll be glad you did.

5 Easy Tips for Increased Donations Online

1.) Keep your Donate Button visible and above the fold.  If you’re a non-profit and one of your websites objectives is to raise money (and, somehow, I have a feeling it is), don’t be scared to place it prominently on your site.  ’Above the fold,’ in this case, means placed in the top half of your website, so no one has to scroll up or down to see it.  It needs to be immediately visible when your visitors land on your index page, or you’re looking at countless missed opportunities for donations.  This seems basic, but you’d be surprised how many people resist, or somehow, crazily, believe that online fundraising isn’t a big enough deal to warrant coveted space in the most visible areas of their site.  It IS a big deal and you WILL regret it if you don’t let your fundraising flag fly, in the most prominent place possible on your website.

2.) Make Your Goals Clear.  Keep a running tally of how much money you’ve raised and how much you need to raise to meet your fundraising goals- donors like to see the progress and are more inclined to donate if there’s a target amount specified.  I’ve already praised The Uniform Project for their use of this exact fundraising technique, and it’s still going smashingly for them, as they round the corner into this last couple weeks of their project.

3.) Provide Volunteer Opportunities. It’s counter-intuitive to be offering people ways to not contribute their cold hard cash, as a way to increase fundraising efforts, but the fact of the matter is that most organizations need from their donors both time and money and the two usually go hand in hand.   If you offer non-monetary options for people to contribute to your organization, this will also help you build up your donor base.  People who care enough to volunteer their time will almost always end up giving money to your organization.  When you do rope some folks into volunteering for you, here’s how to keep them happy.

4.) Timing is Everything.  If you use a service like Constant Contact or Emma to send newsletters or fundraising outreach emails (or if you don’t), there are some best practice tips to take into account: for the love of Pete, send your fundraising emails out early in the week (by Tuesday morning).  You want your email to be waiting in your potential donors inboxes when they get to work in the morning, so the smart thing to do is to send out any mass-mailings (repeat after me: it’s not spam!) late on Monday night or early in business hours on Tuesday.  Disobey me and regret it, dear readers.

Also, parenthetically, here are some things to ponder as you’re assembling those definitely-not-spam newsletters:

-keep the tone personable, but professional.

-keep it short.

-send consistently or don’t send at all.

-don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.

-if you’re not seeing any return, change it up and see what happens.

5.) Get Your Narrative Straight. People love a good story. Donors in particular love to be told exactly how their money is being put to use.  We all know the why, the who and the what we’re giving to; what we want to know is the how. How does it work, who does this money go to, how does it get there?  These are questions all your potential donors will have in their minds as they’re deciding whether to add that extra 50 bucks to their bills this month.  Explain it to them, in a relatable, specific way, with a minimum of overly-salesy language and you’ll increase your donation volume almost instantly.

All right, those are my dueling lists for the day.  Those you already enjoying shorts-weather, get on out there to your car washes and secret cafe’s and outdoor karaoke fundraisers- enjoy that sunshine, raise some cash and get to know a neighbor you’ve never met before.  The rest of us cold-weather nerds will still be inside, hiding from the drizzle and bluster of  long winter, making some slight adjustments to our websites that will yield some big cash.

-A.J.

Beth Kanter Freaking RULES

So, I feel I’ve been quite explicit about this matter: social networking is good, very good, for non-profits.  The Twittering, the Facebooking, the what-have-you. . . all these activities can be incredibly fortuitous for your organization, I think you should get on it, like, yesterday, blah blah blah.  You’ve heard this from me too many times already in the short life of this blog. . . however, today I thought I’d share my favorite resource for ideas on how to actually accomplish fundraising and mission-spreading goals using these tools: Beth Kanter’s blog.

Beth has worked in the non-profit sector for 30 years and she has a nearly endless knowledge base to draw from.  She is also a savvy user of newish social networking technology to further her own personal and professional goals and is a preeminent scholar of the social networking medium as a vehicle for change.  Her blog is incredibly comprehensive, compassionate, whip-smart, funny, and has a big heart proudly beating with social conscience.  She offers practical information on how to use technology in positive, communicative ways (which is what we’re all about), like here, here and here.  In short, we at DonationPay think Ms. Kanter keeps a pretty perfect blog and we can’t recommend her highly enough.

Observe how she spent her 53rd birthday this month, for instance.