Your Brand: A Valuable Asset

Today, most nonprofits know that maintaining strong, positive brand positioning is as important to their health and well-being as are their activities aimed at keeping donors informed and engaged or their staff members motivated. Yet, like so many things we have to worry about, understanding what it takes to maintain brand excellence is markedly different than it was just a few years ago. Today, with so much of a brand’s identity is channeled through informal social networking and other web 2.0 user-directed interactivity rather than paid advertising and traditional media coverage, how do you protect and nurture your brand? What and who do you measure to understand brand impact? And, does it make any sense to try to measure brand impact in traditional ways when influence and brand value have been... Continue Reading

Gaining a Positive Marketing Perspective

I guess it is human nature to constantly look for and examine our flaws and shortcomings. What is unfortunate is how much energy we put into analyzing our weaknesses and so little taking note of the things we do that are good and effective. As nonprofit marketers, we spend a good deal of time searching for the right way to communicate information that will positively move people and strengthen their support of our organizations. We all know that uplifting messages and statements of positive results are more effective than messages of despair. Yet paradoxically, we spend very little time looking at and examining the things we do that are good and effective. With so much emphasis on what is wrong, what needs improving, what missed the mark, we are failing to see and fully utilize those things we routinely... Continue Reading

The Top Ten Skills You Want in Your MarCom Professional Now

With increasing frequency, nonprofit CEOs ask me what skills they should look for in hiring a marketing and communications (MarCom) professional today. CEOs understand that while certain skills and experience are a constant, the advent of the technology revolution requires mastery of an entirely new skill set and the facility to quickly adopt and smartly apply the next important emerging digital applications. Determining which skills your nonprofit will benefit from most, depends to some degree on your organization’s primary function (fundraising; relief work; education; etc.), on its size and organizational structure (management reporting ladder; key functional areas; etc.) and a clear understanding of what you want to accomplish with your marketing and communications efforts. There are, however... Continue Reading

Is Your E-Mail Awe-Inspiring?

The New York Times February 9th article by John Tierney, titled “Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome” offered some fascinating insights from a recent University of Pennsylvania research study. The researchers, Jonah Berger and Katherine A. Milkman intensively studied The New York Times list of most-e-mailed articles, checking it every 15 minutes for six months in the period between August 2008 and February 2009. They determined that people preferred emailing articles that a) had positive as opposed to negative themes and b) were lengthy and on intellectually challenging topics. But more revealing was their analytic conclusion that “readers want to share articles that inspire awe..” Based on prior research the Penn researchers had conducted, they determined... Continue Reading

Rethinking Your Video Marketing

I have produced a lot of nonprofit videos over the years. Their primary purpose was to motivate potential donors to give. Some were received very well; others not so much. A well-known Hollywood producer I once met told me that making a hit is a hit-and-miss experience… sometimes you strike gold and sometimes tin. His words of wisdom have stuck with me. Today, creating a hit video is really not the point. It is all about being in the moment and in front of your audience frequently and in powerful, real ways. The rules of engagement have changed. It no longer makes sense to invest heavily in one single, high production values video and hope it resonates with your potential donors sufficiently to warrant the time, money and talent put to the task. While centerpiece videos have a place in your marketing... Continue Reading

Tell Me a Story

Last Sunday evening I happened to watch a CBS 60 Minutes tribute to the creator of this groundbreaking news magazine, Don Hewitt who passed away late this past year. In clips from his 40 year career at CBS, Hewitt repeated one simple truth he held onto that redefined broadcast news for generations of viewers. “Tell me a story,” was the mantra Hewitt repeated over and over again when asked the key to the program’s success. Hewitt understood there was no complicated formula, just the understanding that people respond to a good story told well. As I look at how we communicate news today, the heart of Hewitt’s message still rings true even as the information comes in a relentless flow and seeps into our minds through a multitude of channels. The noisy flood of news and information... Continue Reading

GreenSpeak 2: Effective Green Messaging

How you communicate your environmentally-green program is as important as how many cans your organization recycles, kilowatts hours you save, or automatic faucet shut-offs you install. If people don’t respond to your hard work, greening frustration can be one unanticipated outcome of your worthy efforts. What to do to get your greening messages heard and your green works supported? Here are a few good ideas learned from nonprofits all across the country. Walk the Talk. Marti Michaels at the Riverdale (New York) YMHA says they achieved their best results when they put real programs into action. Simply talking about their environmental efforts didn’t change behavior. But doing things that demonstrated action did. Their well-publicized environmental, family fair, where participants could drop-off... Continue Reading

Green Speak 1: The Value of Values Communication

I have been speaking with lots of nonprofit leaders about what they are doing to make their organizations “greener” and how they are building support for their efforts through smart communications. What I have discovered is that deciding to undertake an environmentally-sustainable program requires leadership, planning and a well-conceived communications strategy to get everyone on-board and keep them there. Since there is so much good work worth knowing about I have decided to make this a two-part blog. Part 1 focuses on the value of communicating green through your core values. Part 2 (next week) will focus on how to build momentum for your green program using smart communications tactics. When you talk to an organizational leader invested in his/her organization’s green program... Continue Reading

Marketing Predictions 2010

With 2009 happily over, we can now focus on a new decade – hopefully one that brings us healthily back from the brink of economic implosion fueled by greed, avarice and very poor judgment. So with a modestly optimistic eye gazing out at the year ahead, here are my marketing predictions for 2010. We will see more nonprofits leveraging social media to capture more donors and their (at least initial) smaller gifts. Smart nonprofits will recognize that social media is not a solution for the stagnant or slipping major gifts category but that it should grow alongside and with traditional fundraising aimed at donors with greater capacity. The old adage to plant a lot of seeds makes good sense in this still-difficult fundraising climate. You never know which little shoot will grow into a big, sturdy... Continue Reading

2010: The Tipping Point for Jewish Newspapers?

It has been an especially grueling year for anyone who works in the news industry – maybe even more so for those who work for Jewish newspapers in communities all across the country. As Gary Rosenblatt, editor and publisher of The Jewish Week, put it in his column this past summer, “The combination of the national economic meltdown, the trend among younger people away from print journalism and the ‘original sin’ of news organizations making content available free online, where more and more people go for information, has created a perfect storm for the news industry in general.” The quandary for Jewish weeklies is whether they can create a business model that offers a viable scenario for their continued investment in building a robust online presence (that has yet to deliver... Continue Reading

Next Page »