Michael Stein: Internet Strategy for the Nonprofit Sector

7 tips for measuring the success of your blog

Beth Kanter offered an excellent blog post on October 8 on measuring the success of your blog, which will be useful to any individual or organization that is blogging today.  Beth writes:

The success of your blog, or any social media effort, depends on your willingness to solicit feedback and take corrective action when necessary. If you want to have a successful blog that supports your organization’s goals and adds value, improvement should be continuous. You need to pick the right hard data points, or metrics, that will help you harvest insights and improve your blog.

Beth's key items on measuring success are:

• Readership growth
• Reader engagement
• Reader bookmarking
• Conversation rate
• Authority
• Page views
• Industry index

I particularly liked her point about the "conversation rate," which refers to the type of comments and discussion that occur on your blog.  For example, is there a conversation happening between people who comment, and what do you do to facilitate it?

Read Beth's full post

Ning for Dummies educates and inspires

Online social networks have had a profound influence on the lives of millions around the world, as people congregate on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter to share snippets about themselves along with photos, videos and music.  The social network platform known as Ning may not be as recognizable a name, but its influence has been profound.  Ning is a free social networking platform that is highly customizable and can be used to develop a private or public online community.  The new book Ning for Dummies by Manny Hernandez is an outstanding contribution to the field of online community.  It stands out in my mind because this is not merely a technical guide for using a very powerful piece of software, but an organizing guide on how to get people engaged with each other online.  In the age of Facebook and Twitter, this book is a treasure trove of wisdom about how to fuel online discussions, how to invite people to join social networks, how to add photos, videos and music files to social networks, how to rate online content, and much more.

Manny Hernandez is a social entrepreneur and a community strategist committed to connecting people touches by diabetes and raising diabetes awareness.  He started out as a community advocacy for Ning, and is now President of the Diabetes Hands Foundation, a nonprofit that runs two social networks for people touched by diabetes: TuDiabetes.com (in English) and EsTuDiabetes.com (in Spanish).  Both social networks run on Ning.

My video on raising money online

I helped produce a training video this Summer for CharityHowTo.com on the subject of raising money online entitled E-mail Fundraising: Best Practices, Strategies, and Pitfalls to Avoid.  CharityHowTo.com publishes content in video format and lets the narrative flow with screencasting tools that do screen grabs and zooms, integrate PowerPoint slides, and include audio narration.  I did not do the narration for this video (as many observant colleagues have dutifully noted), but I can take credit for the online fundraising strategies and most of the examples used in this video.  The video gives away the store on email fundraising benchmarks, multi-part email appeals, online video fundraising, landing pages, email list segmentation, tools for email messaging, and lots more.  The video costs $30 to watch in its entirety, runs 52 minutes (you can watch a 7 minute preview) and can be watched again and again for up to a year.  And I get a commission if you click any of the links in this email and purchase it.

Watch the video preview of E-mail Fundraising: Best Practices, Strategies, and Pitfalls to Avoid

8 ways nonprofits can use blogs

Blogger, consultant and career coach Britt Bravo has an excellent post on her blog on eight ways nonprofits can use blogs:

1. Share your expertise
2. Share breaking news within your field
3. Share the story behind your brand
4. Share your community's opinions
5. Share notes and photos from events
6. Share notes and photos from the field
7. Share organizational news as it happens
8. Use it as your website

The best part about her article is that she annotates each point with examples and links.

Read the full article

Using mobile technology to influence health reform

Mobile Commons reported in mid-August on an article in Mobile Marketer that looked at how mobile technology was being used to help pass health care reform legislation. Labor unions, large national advocacy groups, small local non-profits, and faith-based community organizations are using mobile to reach out to their supporters around the issue of health care reform.

Here's a sampling of how Mobile Commons customers have been using mobile technology around this critical issue:

* NARAL Pro Choice sent messages to thousands of people, urging them to sign an online petition to keep anti-choice extremism out of health care legislation bills
* LIUNA General President Terry O’Sullivan sent a recorded audio message to union members asking for their help passing healthcare reform Bill 3200
* True Majority sent a text message broadcast asking people to call their Senators before they went on summer recess and pass health care reform
* PACT in San Jose used SMS to organize supporters on the ground and get them to a press conference at Congresswoman Lofgren’s office
* Center for Community Change has sent hundreds of thousands of calls to the White House and Congress over immigration issues, including health care reform. They’ve also targeted Congresswoman Pelosi directly, urging her to end the 5 year ban on immigrant health care
* The League of Young Voters in Maine used SMS to organize supporters on the ground, getting people to meet at Monument Square in Portland to fight for health care reform
* PICO National Networks sent SMS invitations, both in English and in Spanish, to a web site where users could listen in on a call between President Obama and the Faith Community. Over 140,000 people joined the call

Read the full Mobile Commons article

Is integrated fundraising for real?

Nick Allen from Donordigital answers this challenging question in this month's online edition of the Mal Warwick Newsletter:

 "Integration of online and direct mail fundraising has been a staple topic of development conferences for at least five years now. So it’s time to separate the results from the hype. Yes, of course you should seek to integrate your mail and online programs, and the larger the programs, the more upside for integration. Of course, you want to enable your supporters to donate by whatever channel they choose for a given gift—the BRE, the donation page on your site, or plain unmarked bills delivered to your door. While online giving has grown significantly over the last five years, most donors still give by mail. Just 9% of donors came in online in the most recent evaluation of 12 national organizations, but they account for 21% of new-donor revenue because of much higher gift levels. The online donors are younger and have higher household income (because they’re working, not retired)."

Read the complete article

Support diabetes awareness initiatives

I made a donation today to support diabetes awareness initiatives, with a gift to the Diabetes Hands Foundation.  DHF fosters a supportive environment where people touched by diabetes can connect with each other, hold informed discussions and share their experiences. As a result, their members find comfort in not feeling alone and together they promote a better understanding of life with diabetes. Since 2007, they've run two social networks: TuDiabetes.com (in English) and EsTuDiabetes.com (in Spanish). Through their online communities, they've developed diabetes awareness initiatives such as Word In Your Hand, Drawing Diabetes, Diabetes Supplies Art, No-Sugar Added Poetry and the 14,000 People With Diabetes Test-in.

Learn more about Diabetes Hands Foundation

Surfrider Foundation maps its online and offline activists

I was interested to read this blog post by Beth Kanter from April 2009 which describes her meeting with Chad Nelson, the Environmental Director at the Surfrider Foundation.  Chad describes the Foundation's efforts to map online and offline activists, and how they strive to move people through the ladder of engagement.  You can watch the video as Chad speaks and also read Beth's reflections on social networks.  This piece made me reflect on how organizations measure the number of engaged supporters.  When I work with organizations and clients, I'm constantly interested in gathering metrics from various sources, and then finding ways to understand how valuable these metrics might be to discern communications and fundraising trends.  I've become very dependent on Google Analytics and email metrics, but this presentation on Surfrider Foundation reminds me that many important metrics come from other real-world sources, and we need to think of ways of reflect those within the context of measuring things online.

Read more about how Surfrider Foundation maps its activists

On the state of mobile advocacy

I liked Matt Wilson's article in the July edition of the NTEN e-newsletter on the State of Mobile Advocacy, having written on this subject myself. Matt works for Mobile Commons, one of the vendors innovating with mobile advocacy.  He writes: "There are now several vendors working in the nonprofit sector who have built target-matching applications for voice calls, similar to the district-matching features in the online advocacy arena. This is allowing organizations to connect their constituents directly  to the phone lines of Congressional offices, skipping the Capitol Switchboard. This leads to longer average call times, as advocates are more likely to abandon the call when they are connected to the switchboard."

Matt mentions several nonprofits that are seeing good results with mobile advocacy, such as American Federation of Teachers, The Humane Society of the United States, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and the National Center for Lesbian Rights.  For example, "NCLR had a lot of success tweeting out messages asking people to text “nclr to 69866” to sign up to get the California Supreme Court's ruling on Prop 8 via SMS the moment it was ruled upon. The advantage of the SMS is that, like your email list, you can then own the data on your list, you can segment your list, and you can start building a relationship with individuals who have opted-in to your list."

Read the full article

10 tools and strategies to market your nonprofit on a shoe-string budget

Allyson Kapin has a great post on Frogloop, Care2's nonprofit online marketing blog on 10 Tools and Strategies to Market Your Nonprofit on a Shoe-String Budget.  She writes: "If your nonprofit is not taking advantage of free tools like Add This, a widget that encourages users to share your organizations articles or web pages on the most popular social networks or branded toolbars like FreeCause, then your nonprofit is missing out on some big marketing opportunities."

Here's her list of ten tools and strategies:

1. RSS Feeds
2. Use the Add This widget
3. Pick Two Social Networks
4. URL Shorteners
5. Care2’s Petition Site
6. Google Grants
7. YouTube Nonprofit Program
8. Listservs
9. Create widgets to share content or actions
10. FreeCause Toolbar

Read the detailed article after the jump