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Register HERE for 10 Keys to New Media Success

10 Keys to New Media Success in Today’s World from NTC09

A number of themes emerged from the 2009 Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco last month. If you weren’t able to make it — have no fear! We’d like to share with you the top 10 themes that emerged at the conference – keys to success online in 2009 and beyond.

Register TODAY for 10 Keys to New Media Success

We’ll talk about 10 of the most important keys to success that we’re seeing today, as seen and heard at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, including:

• The importance of failing informatively.
• Is “going viral” a realistic requirement for success?
• How does measurement in new media differ from measurement in traditional media such as direct mail?
• And more!

When: Thursday, May 21, 10 am PST / 1 pm EST, 60 minutes or less

Cost: FREE to Masterworks clients

Presented by:

• Dave Raley, Director of New Media, Masterworks
• Jacob Smith, New Media Strategist, Masterworks

Who should attend?

• Those who are responsible for or just plain curious about how to make online marketing work for nonprofits.
• Those who wanted to attend the Nonprofit Technology Conference, but couldn’t make it.

Register for 10 Keys to New Media Success

Please feel free to share this with your peers and colleagues who may be interested.

Megan points us to an interesting article on the NonProfit Times website — Social Networks Are Red Hot, Web Sites Are Diddlysquat. Great article. You should check it out.

Here’s one takeaway….

Beware the siren song of social media.

In NO WAY am I encouraging you to ignore social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and a whole host of others). BUT what I am saying is that there is grave danger in focusing on social media AT THE EXPENSE of your core web presence — i.e. your website.

It’s so easy to be lured by the excitement of social media.

You might ask, “Why should I spend time on my boring website when I can really engage people with Facebook/Twitter/[fill in the blank]?” And that’s just the problem — most organizational websites are boring and un-engaging!

The solution to boring and un-engaging websites is to create interesting and engaging websites. Easier said than done, I know.

Too often we’re tempted to leave that boring website behind and jump into social media as the solution. The problem with this solution is that good use of social media will increasingly drive traffic back to your website. That’s right, your exciting social media tactics will drive traffic to your boring website. Thus you still have the problem of a boring website!

It’s hard work to create an engaging and interesting website. And it’s never done. But it’s worth it.

The mainstreaming of Twitter

It’s official — Twitter is mainstream. While the microblogging service has been around since 2006, it’s just now reaching mass appeal.

Case in point — last week saw a well-publicized “battle” between Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and television network CNN (@cnnbrk) to see who would be the first to one million followers on Twitter.

Ashton spiced up the deal by offering to donate $100,000 dollars to a charity he supports called Malaria No More. In fact, he turned around and challenged other celebrities to join him in making donations, including Oprah (@oprah ), who has now joined the Twitterverse.

You can read more about the story here.

Spoiler alert………………Ashton won the race to 1,000,000 followers.

Twitter fundraising lesson of the day

So what can we learn from this story about fundraising using Twitter?

• Multi-channel integration is key. It was Twitter that got all the attention, but donating via Twitter is still dicey at best (see our recent webinar for more details). Immediately following the conclusion of the contest, the Malaria No More homepage had a huge ad on the homepage thanking Ashton, and challenging the visitor to join him in helping to eradicate malaria.
• Twitter is PRIMARILY about ENGAGEMENT, not fundraising. Although fundraising on Twitter is growing, the service is a far cry from being a tried-and-true ROI and net income generator. In fact, short of Oprah or Ashton Kutcher personally pushing your cause via Twitter, you aren’t going to be generating big dollars anytime soon. But what you can be generating is engagement — engagement with the mainstream media (PR style), engagement with donors, engagement with constituents, and so on.

Don’t know what Twitter is?

Don’t fear if you’re only now exploring what all this hubbub about Twitter is.

What you need to do is check out our recently recorded webinar on Twitter.

By the way, I’m at @daveraley.

This last Friday, Good Friday, Masterworks took the day to serve at one of our clients here locally — Seattle’s Union Gospel Mission. Teams served in tons of different areas, including Hope Place (their new facility for women and children that is just about finished), the Youth Reach Out Center, the kitchen, downtown at the men’s shelter, and more.

We believe in our clients. We’re passionate about their ministries. And it was a blessing to apply that passion by serving them for a day.

Check out the photos below.

As Dave Raley and I are getting ready to go to the 2009 NTC, I’m deciding which sessions to attend. One session that is already on my list is about Website Usability.

In a blog post with the preview of that session, Holly Ross mentions a study by Jakob Nielson on nonprofit websites, usability and donations.

For those unfamiliar with Mr. Nielson, he is considered by some to be the web usability guru and by others to be highly overrated. Such is the life of an Internet celebrity.

The top-line take-away is that, for the most part the donation process wasn’t the issue. The issue was getting donors from the homepage to the place where they could donate and providing them with the information they needed in order to make that decision.

Specifically, how the donations will be used.

As always, clear, conscise writing wins the day here. People generally scan, not read, the web so making clear use of headings is the best way to direct people to the information they need.

We are in the process of a few website re-designs right now and hopefully in the next few months we’ll have some good examples to show, stay tuned!

Check out this innovative take on fundraising from the folks at the agency Ogilvy & Mather Dusseldorf.

So here’s the question.

Is this kitsch or keeper? In other words, is this a viable way to do fundraising, or an overly slick marketing ploy to use cute little model-children to raise money?

Have at it.

Thanks to the Osocio blog for the tip.

We’re all tired of bad news about the recession. Now’s the time to use it as a platform for your ministry. Become a “player” in recovery. City missions feed hungry folks and set them on the path to personal recovery. Relief and development agencies do the same for people around the world. Prison ministries do it for prisoners and their families. Evangelism ministries can seize the moment when fearful folks are more open to hear the hope of the Gospel. Capture the opportunity in both communication and actual ministry.

Thanks to Holly Ross I was tipped off to a new feature on YouTube. They are allowing nonprofits to add a call to action overlay to videos.

Essentially this allows you to add a “Click Here to Donate/Sign Up/Whatever” lower-third over your video. A “lower-third” is exactly what it sound like, a semi-transparent overlay of the lower 1/3 of  your video. Many online video sharing sites use this space for paid advertisements. You can see an example in the video referenced in the blog post.

This is a very good thing. Hosting video is a pain to set up and maintain. YouTube’s ease of use and social aspects have long made it a preferred solution. The only thing lacking was a clickable call to action actually in the video, now that’s gone.

This feature is new so the only real results are what we have from this one video. Charity: water was able to raise $10,000 in a single day on YouTube.  This number by itself sounds impressive. However, that video has 285,511 views or put another way charity: water got about $0.03 of revenue per view.

So while the new technology enables click-to-action, getting that many eyeballs is still the tough nut to crack. In this case YouTube featured this video on their homepage which is good for thousands if not tens of thousands of those views.

Will adding this to all your nonprofit’s videos create a significant ongoing revenue stream? Probably not. However, coupled with the right promotional strategy to drive people to your video it can provide an important way to move a constituents’ relationship from YouTube to your organization and from there cultivate that relationship for long-term value.

A theory for the migration of online donors to direct mail.

A couple days ago, I commented on The Agitator blog in response to a report about Target Analytics’ new Internet Giving Benchmarking Analysis.

The report shows that “significant numbers of online acquired donors switch their giving channel to direct mail in the second year of giving.” [emphasis added]

Here’s an excerpt of the theory I shared for my hunch as to why online donors are migrating their giving to direct mail:

I have a theory about this whole idea that donors are migrating from being acquired online to giving offline. Actually seems to echo Jill’s earlier comment. Goes something like:

Acquire a donor online + Poor/inconsistent/infrequent online cultivation + Good/frequent direct mail cultivation = Online donor migrates to direct mail

We saw this with a client of ours a couple years ago perfectly. We looked at donors acquired online and sure enough by the end of year one they had “migrated” to giving offline. BUT the client had a very young online communications stream at the time. So in my mind, no wonder those first gift online donors “migrated” to direct mail – that was the channel the ministry was best at asking in! We have spent years and years fine-tuning the best direct mail campaigns, but relatively little time in figuring out the best new media campaigns – so of course donors are going to migrate to offline, if only because that is the channel they are being best cultivated in.

Now, I’m willing to admit that perhaps online is really good at influencing gifts, and direct mail is really good at being the channel the donor actually responds in, but still, I think I’ve got a pretty good theory here. . . .

Tom Belford’s response.

Tom, one of The Agitator’s main contributors, thought enough of my comment to feature it in a post yesterday — Too Important for Techies.

Tom agreed with my basic theory, and hypothesized that a major reason for this “migration” is that “Direct mail fundraisers know how to raise money; online ‘fundraising’ is left to techies who don’t.”

I agree with Tom. One of the reasons online fundraising has been stunted is because it has long been considered the realm of IT professionals, not fundraising or development or marketing professionals.

The ensuing commotion.

After that post yesterday, a number of comments poured in, both supporting and arguing my basic premise and Tom’s subsequent thought. So much so, in fact, that Tom posted on the topic again today, in Too Important for Techies – II.

In today’s post, Tom quoted feedback from Ryann Miller. She offered some great thoughts — including the fact that online fundraising typically gets the short end of the budget stick, overburdened staffers, the physicality of direct mail creating a deep experience, and fundraising firstly being about human relationships. She also argued a few of my points well. But I won’t recount her thoughts in detail here, because you can read them for yourself.

But the specific reasons why aside, what I’d like to think we all agree on is that fundraising via new media channels still has a lot of growing up to do (if Tom or Ryann don’t actually agree with this, I’m sure they’ll let me know). And it’s going to take all of us to get there.

And in conclusion . . . this is what it’s all about!

Impassioned debate around these kinds of things will ultimately increase all of our abilities to be effective using new media in the future.

Every nonprofit should have a website that actually furthers its mission — not just describes it.

In an article published today, on the Fundraising Success website, titled “Using the Web More Strategically“, author Abny Santicola quoted a powerful thought from a company called CharityFinders: Every nonprofit should have a Web site that actually furthers its mission — not just describes it.

Think about that.

Way too many of us still think about our website (and broader online presence) as a glorified brochure. As CharityFinders claims rightly, we spend a lot of time online DESCRIBING our nonprofit work. What if we spent more time online actually DOING that work?

This is relatively easy if you are a content-driven ministry (like Focus on the Family, etc.).

But if your nonprofit is focused on feeding children in Africa, you might ask “how can I DO that on my website?” I’d suggest all it takes is broadening your perspective to see the entire, holistic process for just how you accomplish feeding those children in Africa (or whatever your particular ministry does). Sure, the END of that process is that food is actually given to that child and they eat. But that isn’t the entirety of what you do. There is a whole journey that must happen that starts long before the food is shipped or purchased.

I’m working with my church to help them take their web presence to the next level, and this has been THE key insight for leadership and staff — that the website, the emails, the Facebook page, etc. can actually impact people, help them grow in their faith, connect with others, and draw them closer to Jesus. It isn’t just a fancy way to make sure people can find the church address (although that is important!).

Now no church could survive with just an online presence. That’s not what I’m suggesting — in-person connection and fellowship is the lifeblood of a church (just like it was in the 1st century). But what I am suggesting is that when people locally and all over the country can log on, watch a video, listen to a podcast, connect with a small group, etc., ministry happens!