Do You Have a Blog Policy?
Or, do all organizations with a blog need a policy?
How do you determine when a nonprofit blogging policy is needed?
How do organizations create policies?
Here’s a story from behind the firewall of a large nonprofit organization - the names and particulars have been changed - but here’s how the blogging process unfolded:
As the organization’s blogger, I facilitated creating the policy. There was/is a lot of fear about encouraging the use of social media in our ranks, so it seemed like a doable first step. Laying down rules makes everyone think they have more control and it helped everyone to feel better. My ulterior motive was to send the message that using social media is ok and even good for our institution. The more we tell our story, the more the public can understand our mission.
In truth, the policy (a term I’m discouraged from using since we can’t really create a policy about what employees do or say on their own time - we use “guidelines”) is quite vague. It goes on for a while but really just says, “Use common sense and please don’t say stupid stuff. In fact, we’d love it if you told your personal institutional story in a constructive way.”
To my knowledge, no one had ever told employees that they were allowed to talk about their job before. I think many were even scared to do it. Since we often operate in sensitive areas, most rules prohibit discussing specific client relations, etc. This opened the door for more transparency and handed more control of the message over to the employees and volunteers the organization belongs to.
I draft the policy and then it got handed around to pretty much all our many employees for edits and approval. It was about a 6 month process to getting it approved and distributed.
So, is a blogging or social networking/media policy just a matter of cut and paste and edit similar web site policies, accepted use policies, and other types of technology related internal policies? Or is there a value in having the discussion?
Social Media for Social Causes
Several weeks ago we wrote about a special Purim Solidarity Rally for Israel. What was unique about this event was your ability to participate from wherever you were; in other words it was going to occur on-line.
Now that the rally has passed, we asked Eli Feldblum (one of the event architects to tell us about the specific results and provide us with some background into using social media for philanthropy.
“Word of mouth” has long been recognized at the most effective way of marketing a product. One person telling a friend about a product or service is as organic as advertising gets. Absent the usual skepticism that comes along with traditional advertising, word of mouth marketing imparts its message to the listener with an inherent trust. An ad might lead you astray; a friend would not.
On the web, WOM takes on a new form in the shape of social media marketing (SMM). The social internet, often called Web 2.0, has brought WOM and relationships online. Instead of asking a friend for a great video, you go to YouTube and trust what their audience has selected for the day. Looking for great sites to pass time or in a specific category? You’d likely visit a social bookmarking site like Digg, Reddit or Del.icio.us before calling a colleague. Even your communication with friends and relatives may take place via a social network like Facebook instead of over the phone or even by email.
Social media sites not only make WOM communication easier, but also more effective and more far-reaching. If the average person can reach 400 people via traditional word of mouth, he can reach 40,000 or more online.
All this makes social media a great outlet for promoting social or philanthropic causes. People generally seek the advice of friends, family and coworkers when donating to charity, and are often recruited to join causes by people they know. Online, those numbers can be staggering.
I recently had the opportunity to promote an online rally for solidarity with Sderot. We aimed to make it the largest online rally ever—and we aimed to do so in only two weeks. Harnessing the power of the social internet, we were able to do so in that short time frame. We reached out to more than a million potential viewers, and got more than 125,000 people to log on simultaneously to a site built two weeks prior to host the rally. Together4Israel.org made history, breaking internet and philanthropic records. And it was achieved primarily through the power of social media.
Video
One of the best ways to get the word out online is through video. Streaming video, and the sites like YouTube that support it, has become the backbone of the new internet. Those sites are among the most visited online and, according to a recent study, the amount of video streamed online in 2007 was greater in size than everything accessed on the internet in the ten years preceding 2007. No matter what your cause or event is, you can create a video to promote.
For Together4Israel, we created a promo video with scenes from Sderot that explained to viewers that all they had to do to make a difference was visit the site to watch the rally and thus stand, virtually, in solidarity with victims of terror. We released the video on YouTube and garnered nearly 300,000 views, many of whom attended the live rally.
Creating a successful video—and benefitting from that video—is actually a pretty easy task, as long as you follow a few basic rules. First, you have to make a video. Notice that I didn’t say “you have to make a good video.” Content is no longer King online, as long as your packaging and presentation are done well. Still, you need a video. The video should clearly explain who or what your cause benefits, how the viewer can help and—most importantly—where they can help. Make sure your video is branded through and through. Begin with a title screen, keep a watermark on the video through the duration of the video and end with a splash screen containing instructions. If you are trying to lead people to a website, all three elements should contain the URL.
Once you have a video made, you need to promote it. This is a time sensitive campaign, so make sure you are ready before you upload or push your video anywhere.
The following steps are for YouTube, as they handle the majority of videos online, but they will work for any video sharing site. First, set up a profile. Don’t make it generic; use the available space to explain who you are and what you do, include images and make sure to take advantage of every opportunity to link back to your site.
Second, optimize your video. Pick a title that will appear to the viewer and leave them wanting more. Words like “exclusive” and “leaked” help. Pick an interesting thumbnail from the ones offered by YouTube—but bear in mind that the thumbnail will be 130×100 pixels, so make sure you pick a clear one. If no thumbnails look good, add a few seconds to the splash screen at the end of your video to get a new set of thumbnails.
Comments—good and bad—will help your video become more popular, so fight the urge to remove negative comments. If your video can spark controversy and conversation, that’s better for your popularity within YouTube and for converting viewers to sympathizers; nothing will get someone onto your side than boisterous idiots on the other side.
Lastly, you need to push the video. Your goal is to get to one of YouTube’s lists, primarily to the Most Viewed for the Day list. YouTube gives you 48 hours to acquire honors, like getting on that list, but you should aim to get on a list within 24 hours, so that you have some time to enjoy your honor. The trick to honors is remembering that not every view of your video will happen on YouTube. Most, in fact, will happen on other sites that embed your video. You can encourage this behavior. Before you upload your video, seek out blogs and websites that agree with your cause and ask them to embed and feature your video on their sites. Find places to embed your video—via blogs, sites and the social sites described below—and your video will rise to the top.
Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking sites are the heart of WOM marketing, as they work only on pure reputation. If members of a social bookmarking community like a site, they vote it up (generally known as upmodding). The more people bookmark or vote for a site—or a video or image—the higher it rises on the bookmarking site’s Most Popular list. Like YouTube, your goal here is to make your site as popular as possible as quickly as possible. And like YouTube, preparation is key. Do you know people sympathetic to your cause? Do you have email lists of donors? Ask them to help you out without having to contribute any cash. They can vote up your stories and leave comments to start a discussion. They can also rate and favorite your YouTube video. If you mobilize this group of sympathizers before you post your story to Digg, Reddit or Del.icio.us, they can help you quickly rise to the top of those sites.
You can also use social bookmarking sites to help push your video by submitting to these sites right after you upload it to YouTube.
Social Networks
Social networks are what most people think about when they hear about social media marketing, and rightly so. Networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Hi5 are more popular than ever before—and they are perfectly positioned to help promote your cause.
Focus on Facebook, which is primed to soon be the largest social network and boasts the most diverse audience. Create a page for your cause and invite your friends to join. Do the same with a group, and add your cause to the Facebook Cause application. Facebook is naturally viral; if you invite all your friends to something and ask them to invite their friends, it won’t be long before your cause is in front of thousands. Unlike the above sites, there are no time restrictions to become popular. Quite the opposite. It may take time for your group, event or page to become really widespread and popular. Make sure to begin pushing via Facebook as early as possible.
Promoting your social or charitable cause via social method is an easy, inexpensive and effective way of getting the word out in large, but organic, fashion. As advertising on the internet becomes more and more prevalent, more people tend to ignore it. Reach out to those same people via these methods and ensure the success of your cause.
Eli Feldblum, a a recognized SEO and SEM expert, is CEO of RankAbove - Search & Social Marketing.
Web 2.0 is Cool, But…
Whoa, Nelly! Web 2.0 is Cool, But …
By Peter Deitz
At last month’s Nonprofit Technology Conference in New Orleans, nonprofit techies and professional fundraisers met up to discuss the emerging best practices for fundraising using social networks and social media. Their conversations were overwhelmed by one small detail. Few nonprofits have succeeded in raising large amounts of money using blogs, widgets and fundraising applications for social networks.
Nine months since the high-profile launch of Facebook Causes and well over a year since the first articles on Web 2.0 fundraising started to appear, members of the nonprofit tech community seemed to be turning against the new-fangled tools for online fundraising. The traditional staples of online fundraising — a well-cultivated e-mail list, the ubiquitous “donate now” button and a coherent well-designed Web site — appeared to be making a full-fledged comeback.
Continue reading here.
Do You Blog?
10 Questions Every Blogger Should Ask Themselves Before Posting
To help you in these crucial editing stages, we thought we would lay down some important questions bloggers can ask themselves so they can make an honest, constructive and critical appraisal of their work before posting it up for the world to see. Asking these simple questions could mean the difference between a hastily written blog article that remains obscure and a well-written, influential and accessible blog that courts a loyal audience with ease.
- How quickly can my readers understand what my post is about?
- Does my blog offer something novel or unexpected?
- How helpful is my content?
- Why should my readers trust me?
- Does my content speak to people on a human level?
- Is my post easy to read and scroll through?
- Does my content cover what needs to be discussed or answered?
- Am I revealing enough information about my topic?
- Am I fulfilling my readers’ expectations?
- Am I reaching out for support?
for the complete post by web strategist and blogger Damien Van Vroenhoven click here
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The Power of Search
10 Steps to Being Found on Search Engines
by Laura Quinn, Director, Idealware
Does your organization show up on the first page of results in search engines like Google or Yahoo? The content and structure of your website can have a dramatic effect on how easily potential constituents can find you via search engines. This article explains how.
Let’s do an experiment. Go to Google and type in the most commonly used version of your organization’s name. Do you show up first in the resulting list of sites? What if you type in a short phrase describing the type of work you’d like to be known for? Do you show up in the top page of those search results, too?
Your placement on search engines like Google or Yahoo Search is important. At a minimum, it should be easy for your current constituents to find your site using your organization’s name. Showing up on the first page of search results for key terms — for instance, something like “Cincinnati women’s shelter,” if that describes your organization — can also make a huge difference in your site traffic, not to mention in potential donors, volunteers, and clients’ ability to find and connect with you.
continue reading here
For additional articles you may find of interest check out our Resources section; new links are regularly added.
Pesach Cleaning
It’s that time of the year again. Among other things, you should take this opportunity to clean out your inbox and various folders.
We’ve received a number of links in the past few weeks we’d like to pass on and will be doing this over the next few days. We also have some new resource information from the recent Association of Fundraising Professionals Conference coming your way.
Stay tuned and have a great week!
Comparing Open Rates
As some of you know, we have been in the process of redesigning and testing our daily updates. Comparisons are difficult; partly because Feedburner analytics (our original provider of choice) are not the best; even for evaluating their own emails!
Keep in mind, you must always test; we have discussed testing in the past and will continue to in the future. We cannot say it enough.
Whether it is the message, the subject line, the time of day, whatever, you must test. And test some more.
One of our goals is to improve the look and readability of our communications; another to provide you, our readers, with additional information on a regular basis.
In trying to evaluate the results, we have been speaking with many professionals across the global non-profit landscape on their experiences. I post two responses, one brief and the second with extremely useful information you should consider in a redesign (the authors information is not posted to protect the privacy of a list-serv).
The question relates to a change in open rates with a new design.
1. My Counter-rant - I have experienced numerous instances of perfectly innocent plain text emails being blocked either from me or to me by rogue spam assassins.
2. Actually, I disagree with the people who say that a redesign won’t affect open rates. Spam scoring takes into account the amount and complexity of HTML code in your email. If you went from a fairly simple design with minimal amounts of code in your email into something very ‘designed’, you can expect to get blocked by some ISPs (especially smaller and indy ones like small businesses and academic institutions).
Its really pretty obvious — is there ANY email out there that has lots of complex HTML in it that isn’t some sort of commercial/advocacy/fundraising email? Does anybody on this list get actual real, personal, individual email that isn’t basically plain text (or maybe has minimal inline HTML)? Spam scoring heuristics are completely aware of this.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding that so many people just don’t get — highly-designed email just doesn’t get the open and click-through rates that something that really looks like a personal email — such as what your grandmother might send you — will get.
Direct marketers in the snail mail world know it quite well — that’s why so much paper junk mail you get looks like a bill, or a hand-typed personal appeal — its what works.
In the same vein — if your new design is now much more image-dependent, not only will your message look lousy in Outlook and in web-based clients that suppress images by default (many of them), but because your message looks lousy you are more likely to manually be flagged as spam to the ISP.
If your message is flagged as spam, the ISP is then going to take that into account in its heuristics as, later in the day, other people get the same message from you — and may send you straight to the spam folder.
Even more fun — the ISPs talk to each other! So if you are getting several spam reports from several ISPs, it is quite possible that you’ll get thrown onto a blacklist that other ISPs will then see, so they’ll block your messages even before they get any reports from their own customers. Again, this is primarily going to be your small businesses and academic institutions.
The main things you (and everybody on this list that is serious about raising money or awareness through email) should do are (in ascending order of technical complexity):
1. Make simple emails. People don’t click through your messages because you micromanaged the font colors and did a complex layout, they click through because of a clear and compelling call to action.
Usually, the only ‘graphic design’ that has _any_ ROI in an email is a call-to-action image prominently displayed near the top of the email, anything else is a distraction from getting people to perform the action you want them to take.
2. Before you send an email, send a test of it through spamassassin or something similar. Fix what it complains about. If it complains that you are mentioning pharmaceuticals, sex, the stockmarket, or whatever in the body of your email, re-write the email if at all possible.
Yes, sure, some of the more ‘enlightened’ ISPs use ‘reputation’ more than content to determine the spamminess of a message, but there are tons of little ISPs that _don’t_, and plenty of individuals that have anti-spam software installed, and you gain very little by flouting them.
3. If you know the IP address of the server that you are sending email from, track it at http://www.senderbase.org/ . That way you’ll see what blacklists you’re on. If your email service provider lets other orgs/companies send email from that IP address, and that other org/company is getting flagged as spam, SO ARE YOU — and you should complain!
4. Keep track of your open and bounce rates on a per-domain basis. If you had an extremely low open rate for email addresses from yahoo.com (or some other domain) compared to all of your other domains, then you need to contact the ‘postmaster’ there and find out why they’re blocking your email (to find the postmaster at an ISP, google for ‘postmaster’ and the name of the ISP).
5. Timeliness of delivery is important, but in a different way than most people realize. Blacklists generally take about 2-4 hours to kick in, and they generally reset 36-48 hours after the last spam report. If you send out a bunch of email in the morning as a ‘test’, then take more than an hour or so to make a decision, you may find yourself getting auto-junked by blacklists while you’re in the middle of sending your main mailing.
If you send out email to a big list two days in a row, you’re likely to get pretty poor opens the second day; but if you hold off on hitting send until any time-based blacklists have reset, you’ll get much better delivery. If you click through the block lists you are on at senderbase, you can see what the status is.
Finally, about content — I won’t go into subject line testing — I’ve seen minor, but statistically significant, differences in open rates based on subject line and sender in A/B tests (say, going from 28% to 31% in an extreme case). A well-written email on a timely topic signed by a compelling national figure can make a HUGE difference in click-through, though.
Food for thought.
If you found this post of interest, be sure to check out an earlier post, Why You Need An Email Service Provider.
Free Corporate Grants Info
The NonProfit Times announced the launch of an online portal that gives free access to corporate donation data for fundraising research to nonprofit grant writers and others researchers.
The address is www.nptgrantsearch.com.
The research portal was launched with more than 4,300 searchable records of corporate donations valued at $1 million or more to U.S. charities.
The only free service of its kind, users can search, view and save information about the corporate donor, recipient organization, size of gift, and year of donation.
It’s already live at www.nptgrantsearch.com or from NPT’s home page, www.nptimes.com.
First the Queen; Now the P.M.O.
As we wrote about on December 23rd in, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II Takes Up YouTube, today we find a very different use for this video channel as governments are learning to leverage the Internet and control their own message. The Office of the Prime Minister (here in Israel), has now followed suit.
According to Haartez,
“The government recently posted three videos showing images from the terror attack at Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav Yeshiva earlier this month in which eight students were killed.”
The paper continues, “TheMarker has learned that the Prime Minister’s Office was actually behind the uploads to the popular video site.
This is the first time that a government body has used the site in response to a terror attack.
The first film features graphic and bloody footage shot inside the yeshiva in the wake of the attack, as English subtitles document an emergency call made by a yeshiva student during the attack.”
Read the complete Haaretz article here. All three videos can be found through the link. Please note the footage contains images of a graphic nature.
In the past, the Israeli government has responded to terror attacks with official statements to the press, radio and television stations. A source connected to this current measure has indicated that Jerusalem will upload videos to YouTube in the event of any future terror attacks.
High Tech High Touch
Times have changed.
The new donors of today and the donors of tomorrow are far different than the donors many nonprofits have become accustomed to. These up and coming donors are tech savvy. They grew up with video games and the World Wide Web.
They are comfortable completing entire conversations and interactions via e-mail or text message. They instant message and talk on their mobile phone while browsing the Internet and reading up on the latest news.
According to Darryl Gordon, a vice president at Kintera in San Diego, this is a lifestyle not imagined or experienced by the typical baby boomer donor. But the baby boomer donors of today are going away.
Taking their place is the always connected and always accessible younger generation that has come of age in a fast-paced society. Nonprofits need to adapt their mentality to transform fundraising and communications strategies to high-touch strategies that incorporate high-tech.
Not only will society force this change, but the more commonplace technology becomes, the cheaper it becomes. Many organizations have already experienced the cost-effectiveness of e-mail campaigns and appeals.
The ability to accept and process donations online has saved many organizations administrative time. But as technology continues to evolve and alter the way constituents interact, nonprofits will be forced to more frequently utilize new and upcoming technology to communicate and engage their audience.
With the plethora of high-tech choices available today, nonprofits no longer have to worry about the costs associated with a high-tech, high-touch campaign or the fear of bombarding their constituents’ inboxes. Organizations can send a newsletter via e-mail, send a text, post updates on its social networking site, post a blog, send a podcast, and call the cell phone. These choices enable nonprofit communicators to more frequently communicate with constituents, communicate via multiple mediums, and communicate in a manner that is accepted by recipients.
Technology has given nonprofits the ability to communicate and cultivate relationships with constituents in accordance with the way constituents communicate and cultivate their personal relationships — making technology an effective tool to build donor affinity and deepen donor relationships.
reposted from the NPT Newletter; you can sign-up here for your own weekly copy