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Our very own Rory Starks recently was published in the Christian Leadership Alliance’s magazine, Outcomes.

You can read the article online here. OR

You can download the full PDF of the print article here.

After my long post yesterday about using mobile, my friend Megan pointed me to a valuable white paper written by the folks at Distributive Networks — “TXT WE CAN,” around some of the key lessons learned from the Obama presidential campaign’s use of mobile, and text messaging in particular.

You can download the full report here (warning — they’ll ask for your contact info), but I’ll give a few highlights . . .

Key lessons include:

1. Seize control of the mobile channel
2. Build the opt-in list aggressively
3. Develop robust participant profiles
4. Optimize message frequency
5. Leverage mobile’s unique strengths

So how do you apply this to your organization? Certainly for everyone that will look a little different, but here’s one way to think about it:

Texting as a means, not an end

There is nothing magical about texting — it’s simply another communications channel (that happens to be one of the most intimate and personal communications channels around today).

But when you’re thinking about using text messaging, think about the total experience, and how text messaging fits within that overall experience. Don’t just focus on getting that constituent to respond via text to your shortcode — what happens after that? How can you use that first text message as a doorway to a relationship?

For example, let’s say you ask constituents to text in to give a $5 donation. Don’t just stop there! When you confirm their $5 gift via text, include something like:

“To show our gratitude, we want to offer you a FREE download of resource XYZ. To receive, text back your email address.”

When you get that email address, send them the free resource — and ask if they would like to opt-in to receive other email communications and resources (an e-newsletter, special announcements, etc.).

And so on. But you get the idea — you have to think through the experience that the constituent will have far beyond that initial text message interaction. And at every step of the way, the constituent is opting in to a deeper relationship with your organization, and providing a little more detail.

Attention (nonprofit) world: mobile isn’t the next frontier. That frontier is already here.

There have been a few key milestones that have brought mobile to the mainstream where it lives today.

President Obama and his Blackberry

Most recently, the world waited with baited breath (*sarcasm*) to see if President Obama would be able to keep his beloved Blackberry. Well we all found out last month that the President of the United States would be allowed to keep his cell phone.

I believe this is the latest in a series of tipping points that have popularized mobile as many now know it today — not simply as a way to have voice and text communication, but a full-featured web device with virtually innumerable number of uses.

The iPhone Tipping Point

And arguably the most major event in recent times was the release and subsequent proliferation of the iPhone (disclaimer: yes, I do own an iPhone, and yes, I do in fact love it as much as you can an inanimate object).

The iPhone didn’t invent anything new. But what it did do was perfectly meld together a lot of technologies that previously were frustrating to use. It made a lot of really incredible tasks completely routine — which is why it’s so amazing.

Among the things I’ve done in the last week or so with this little wonder device:

• Checked in on friend’s latest happenings via Facebook
• Read some of my favorite blogs
• Took a photo and sent it to a few friends
• Watched a video on YouTube
• Got driving directions
• Read from the Book of James
• Found the closest Subway restaurant
• Updated my Facebook status and posted a picture
• Watched a movie trailer and checked the latest box office totals
• Showed a friend some of my favorite photos from vacation in Hawaii this summer
• Read and responded to email
• Checked the ski conditions at my favorite local mountain
• Texted with friends

You may have noticed that you can do ANY of these things with other cell phones available today. But I don’t think anyone would dispute how easy the iPhone (and the app store to be sure) make ALL these things possible.

So the question is, are you prepared to take advantage of mobile in your organization?

Take advantage of what’s happening in the news.

No, really. I’m not kidding. This isn’t a trick post to point out the obvious. It’s just sometimes in our quest for the new and the unique that I think we forget some of the most basic fundamentals.

Fundamentals like taking advantage of what’s happening in our world today to drive traffic, engagement, interaction, etc.

Lessons from CNN

Take the recent inauguration of President Obama for instance. CNN got smart, and partnered with Facebook to provide live streaming of the inauguration at at CNN.com Live. In one day, Mashable reported the following numbers:

• CNN had generated more than 136 million pageviews
• CNN.com served more than 21.3 million live video streams
• 600,000 status updates posted through the CNN.com Live Facebook feed
• At its peak, CNN served 1.3 million concurrent live streams (this occurred immediately before Obama’s speech)

CNN didn’t have a strategy team meeting one day to drum up ideas of how they could manufacture something that would generate nearly 140 million pageviews on their site. No, they recognized that by themselves they could not generate a fraction of the buzz that one of the most important historical events in our country could.

Athletes in Action takes advantage of news media coverage

We had a similar opportunity with Athletes in Action (a ministry of Campus Crusade) in January (albeit on a smaller stage than the inauguration). Athletes in Action had testimonies from Christians on virtually every single team in the BCS National Championship College Football series.

And the big newsworthy item was this: Tim Tebow and Sam Bradford, the two Heismann trophy-winning quarterbacks in the national championship game, are outspoken Christians with tremendous testimonies.

These football players were going to get major press coverage that we could not manufacture even if we wanted to.

So we took advantage. We rode the wave, so to speak. We created an entire online campaign around getting the word out to drive people to www.beyondtheultimate.org to watch testimonies, read stories, and tell others about the site.

We used Facebook pages and groups and posts and video and bumper stickers and pieces of flair. We sent emails. We used YouTube. We did banner ads. We used Google paid search.

In all, there were 27.1 million campaign impressions.

And in all this, the campaign was successful because we were taking advantage of something that had national media attention, and parlayed that attention into something Athletes in Action wanted people to see.

Sure, we created a great campaign — but great work by itself without the key ingredient of a newsworthy topic will never be able to generate as much attention.

So the question is — are you taking advantage of the media to call attention to your mission?

Years ago one of my early marketing mentors, Keith Jespersen, taught me that strategy needs to come before technology.  So often, we get caught up in a new technology and jump at the opportunity to use the technology only to find out that it didn’t produce the results we were after.  I’m guilty of this too.

For example, in 1992, I learned about the Internet from Ted Okada, a colleague of mine when I was at Food for the Hungry.   Ted was (and still is) one of those guys that is always on the cutting edge of innovation.  Ted lived and worked in the D.C. area and on one of my visits he introduced me to this thing called the Internet.  I was blown away at what I saw to be a revolutionary new technology.  I said to Ted, “I want Food for the Hungry on the Internet right away.”  So Ted, being a technology guru at heart, made it happen . . . fast.

I was so excited that Food for the Hungry was one of the first nonprofits on the Internet.  I’m pretty sure we were the first relief and development organization on the Internet.  But, guess how much traffic our website got?  If you answered “none,” you’d be wrong.  Ted and I went to the website all the time!  That was it, however.  No other visitors.  That’s when Keith Jespersen’s admonition crept into my mind . . . “don’t let technology drive strategy.”

Since then we’ve all learned that just because you build it doesn’t mean they’ll come!  You have to drive people to your website which means you have to have a strategy.

Today lots of people are excited about new media, or Web 2.0,  which includes the Internet, social networks like Facebook, viral video, email appeals, widgets and the like.  I’m as excited as the next person, to be honest about it.  However, as marketers, we need to remind ourselves that strategy needs to come before technology.  Let’s take advantage of the Web 2.0 possibilities but only in the context of a broader strategy.

I had a conference call last week with a group of friends who lead marketing and development for many of the largest Christian organizations in the U.S. Here’s a summary of that call:
Read more of How are Large Christian Ministries Responding to Economic Turmoil?

During the past month or two I’ve been asked by a half dozen people from different nonprofits whether they should invest in acquiring new donors through direct mail or new media (by new media I mean Internet, social networks, viral marketing, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc.)

There are several parts to the answer.

First, we have to recognize that while online fundraising is growing rapidly, most people are still not giving online.    I know that acquiring donors using email is attractive because it’s relatively inexpensive.  However,  it is difficult to build a donor file only using online strategies because the number of responses is so low.

Second, the best “trigger” for getting prospects and donors to respond is still direct mail.  I know that direct mail is less effective than it used to be.  But, it’s still working for both acquiring and cultivating donors if you have a strong offer and appropriately targeted rental lists.

The evolving approach to new donor acquisition is integrated multi-channel.  See our other blog posts about why that is the current reality.  I’ll have more to say about that in future posts.

Think Twitter is just for the kids? It can be a powerful way to deliver great donor experience.

If you hang around here long enough you’ll see posts about Pew Internet and American Life studies. The project does some of the best primary research on Internet use in the United States.

A recent study looked at how people in different generations use the different parts of the Internet.

A few observations. Things that aren’t surprising:

• Younger people are over-represented on the internet
• Older people do less on the Internet than younger people
• Email is still the killer app, but it is increasingly becoming something for “old people”

Things that were surprising:

• Less than 50 percent of every generation read blogs
• More than 70 percent of every generation makes travel reservations online
• 30-39 percent of every generation gets religious information online
• Less than 0-9 percent of every generation visits virtual worlds

So for those churches who built virtual buildings in Second Life, right ballpark, wrong bench.

In case you have been under a rock for oh I don’t know, eight months, the economy is not happy.

A recent WSJ article highlights how this is affecting nonprofits.

A down economy shakes loose weak organizations, profit and nonprofit alike. It is easy to talk about that in a the-market-is-doing-its-job way until you realize that the shaking out means real people out of work.

So what is a nonprofit to do? We’ve been talking about creating excellent donor experience for a while now. And now is certainly the time. Idealware has a good post about some aspects of creating exceptional donor experience.

I would add: #4 build a way to measure Y-Axis interactions.

At Masterworks we talk about the Y-Axis as more relational interactions and X-Axis as the more traditional transaction “asks.” The X-Axis is easy to measure, at Masterworks we use net revenue.

The Y-Axis is a tougher issue, but we’re working on it with some psychology types. However you value these interactions you have to have a way to measure them.