January 26, 2010

January 10, 2010

Marketing for nonprofits with zero ad dollars

Filed under: Online Marketing,social networking — Tags: marketing, nonprofits — Whitney @ 8:23 pm | | Comments (0)

Having worked for a number of non-profits over the years, I’m no longer surprised when there is no budget for advertising. It’s a blessing when leadership understands the importance of branding, design and the value of outreach. But even when you have great leadership, there is still little room in a non-profit budget for advertising. So what steps can eager professionals take who have the awesome responsibility of marketing a brand with no money?

I’ve been blessed to work with amazing colleagues who have energy and ingenuity, so I won’t take credit for all of the ideas I might share, I’m merely passing on my assessment of what worked and what didn’t work.

Ideas that worked:

Free advertising exchanges. Several groups I have worked with publish academic policy journals, or publications of one form or another. Generally, these publications are distributed at events once completed or subscribers are sought for recurring publications and the like. Since these publications are being printed and marketed, they contain valuable advertising space throughout, for groups interested in reaching your readership. Think about who those groups might be, and whether there is a similar publication or advertising opportunity that someone can give you in exchange for ads placed in your journal or publication. This is a little unconventional, and while some people that you solicit may be wary of this new approach, I’ve built great partnerships with this strategy.

Event fliers. Especially if you work in a busy metropolitan area like Washington, DC, there are plenty of opportunities to take fliers to events advertising your latest book, event, publication, policy memo, et cetera. This only takes a little time to find the events willing to let you put out materials at their event. If organizers might say no, you can always go mingle with people before or after events and hand them materials as part of a short conversation. If there are large conventions outside your metropolitan area, think about asking the organizers to include one of your publications as part of an introductory packet, or with meeting materials, and offer to provide free copies.

Online Social Networking Activities. There are a number of free online social networking strategies that non profits can explore, including building Facebook communities, LinkedIn groups, starting an AdWords campaign with an AdWords grant, starting a blog, and/or commenting and writing for other blogs. There are so many free tools available to help nonprofits market themselves on the web, it’s sometime overwhelming to pick and choose the ones that give you the most return on your time investment. Establishing a Twitter following might take you 20 hours a week, but is that worth it if your target audience doesn’t use Twitter?

Email newsletters. This is a great way to build an email contact list. You can use a number of low-cost programs like iContact (the cheapest), to more robust e-mail newsletter services like Bronto or ConstantContact. But before you decide to send out a weekly or monthly e-newsletter, think carefully about what services the newsletter will provide and why people might want to subscribe to it. Think about how to make a niche for your newsletter that isn’t already offered by other competitors.

Write Press Releases and build a media list. This relates to my point below under “what doesn’t work”… The best free advertising is from news stories that other people write. Try to think from a reporter’s perspective and tell them what your group is doing that’s newsworthy.

Create RSS Feeds. If you’re using a content management system (CMS) to power your website, chances are you can easily create RSS feeds with your content. RSS feeds allow your content to be easily syndicated to other website, so people can re-use and re-post your content easily. RSS feeds allow people to subscribe to your website, so when you post something new, they are alerted to come back. If your website doesn’t generate feeds, you need to start!

What didn’t work:

Radio underwriting. I know radio advertising isn’t free, but I have tried it. The problem with doing this on a non-profit budget is that you really need a pretty substantial amount of money to make an impact with radio advertising. You CAN get heard on the radio for free though, and this CAN be a great strategy. If your target audience listens to your local NPR station, you need to think about how to pitch the topics you work on to the appropriate radio reporters who cover your issue and make your experts and staff available to speak with them. This is great free exposure and is much more meaningful than a 15-second spot that you purchase.

Do you have some free marketing ideas that have worked for your nonprofit for little to no money? I’d love to hear them!

December 7, 2009

An Introduction to Promoting Your Non-Profit on the Web

Filed under: Online Marketing,Podcasting,SEO,iTunes U,social networking — Tags: adwords, iTunes U, linkedin, page rank, Podcasting, SEO, social networking, URLs — Whitney @ 4:15 pm | | Comments (0)

When consulting with a new nonprofit client on their online marketing efforts, I usually list a few very simple steps they can take that will go a long way toward improving their strategy. Here’s some guidance I recently gave to a major university undergoing a website and online marketing overhaul:

1. Apply for a Google AdWords Grant

Google Adwords Grants are available to nonprofit 501(c)3 organizations in the amount of $10,000/month for in-kind keyword text-based ads on the search engine network. The grants are ongoing and do not have expirations. The process takes a couple of months to get up and running after submitting the one-page online application form, which is available here: http://www.google.com/grants/. It’s a pretty intuitive interface, but there’s some skill and marketing know-how that goes a long way to getting the most out of the grant. With $10,000 you have the potential to increase your website traffic a minimum of 10,000 hits per month, and a maximum of about 30,000 hits per month. I’ve helped several organizations launch AdWords Grant programs with great results for each – increasing traffic by over 400% on several sites.

2. Get on Board with iTunes Podcasting or iTunes University

The equipment investment can be minimal – a good audio recorder can run a couple hundred dollars, but after that, creating a podcast is free! There’s lots of resources out there to help you think about what type of podcast you want to create, but once you do, you can use a free service like blip.tv to stream your videos and podcasts directly to iTunes, Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook and more. It’s a great way to increase name recognition and visibility of your research or advocacy message.

3. Implement Basic Search Engine Optimization Techniques

It’s more than just adding “meta tags” to your html pages. All images should use “alt tags” which should be used to strategic place keywords into your site.

You should also ensure that your URLs are search-engine-friendly. One of the many things that helps increase page visibility on Google is to include keywords in your URL, rather than number strings that are created by content management systems.

An unfriendly URL: http://www1.maxwell.syr.edu/news.aspx?id=36507226416

a friendly URL:
http://www.cnas.org/people/staff.

In addition, having question marks in your URL (which denotes a search query) causes a lower ranking in Google (source). If your CMS has the option to turn on SEO-friendly URLs, you should do so (you may also have the option of changing the “?” to a “/” which would be better).

When most people talk about search engine optimization, however, what they really want to know is how to move up higher on Google’s search results for particular keywords.

Although Google’s algorithm is more sophisticated, it boils down to something like this: Search Ranking = Relevance * PageRank.

Having relevant content for particular searches should be the easy part, so your main focus should be on increasing your website’s “PageRank.” The biggest factor in determining your page rank is the number of reputable sites linking back to yours, so the name of the game is get big reputable websites like New York Times, Washington Post, U.S. State Department, etc., linking back to your website often. (You can check your page rank here, Read more about Google search rankings here). There are lots of ways to do that, including:

4. Jump on — Even the Defense Department is on the Social Networking Bandwagon!

One way to increase the number of websites linking back to your own is to utilize social networking tools that make it painless for people to E-mail and re-syndicate your content on their own websites. Every item you post news or events, you should be doing so in a way that generates RSS Feed content (Check out the list of CFR’s RSS Feeds for an example). Feeds make it easy to syndicate your content directly on to another website, allowing easy linking relationships to be built.

“AddThis” is a tool that many websites use to allow users to Email, Print, Post to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, etc. +100 other sites in just one click. You can customize the look of this button to match your website. It’s free. Your CMS may have a similar function built in, but small groups who don’t use a CMS can deploy this type of social networking without much difficulty.

It goes without saying that you should also have account on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and other sites that make sense for your group.

***

These are just a few thoughts that helped to get this particular group thinking about their online marketing strategies. Feel free to comment and suggest others that are relevant to the low-budget nonprofit community!

November 22, 2009

Wikipedia: the next social networking tool for advocacy groups?

Filed under: social networking,wikipedia — Tags: linkedin — Whitney @ 11:07 am | | Comments (0)

I had an interesting conversation with two representatives from Wikimedia today to discuss how to improve content quality and rigor within the public policy sections of Wikipedia. Recently, a UBC professor decided to have his students write Wikipedia articles instead of doing a term paper. If their articles met the high standards of the Wiki editor community and were promoted to “Good” or “Featured” content, the students received an ‘A’. I thought it was a unique way to get students to take more stock in their work, since it would be made public, and also to learn more about how Wikipedia works (for good or otherwise). Obviously writing in an encyclopedic tone is different than many other styles of writing, but I think its useful to have students conversant in communicating with many types of audiences, regardless of the subjects they study.

Since I work for a university think tank, it’s easy to see how our faculty members might think about collaboratively using Wiki projects to both teach and improve educational resources. However, as someone who’s only used Wikipedia as a tool for branding the respective organizations I’ve worked for (yes, I realize that it’s against Wikipedia’s contribution guidelines to do this, but everyone does!), I began to think that Wikipedia might have a role in the think tank and policy community in years to come.

Research think tanks host a number of scholars and experts who could contribute a great deal of knowledge to the Wikipedia commons; the problem is that there’s no incentive (monetarily, professionally or institutionally) to do so. If, however, defining a particular field is part of an organization’s mission (say “natural security“), then it would make sense.

Would foundations be willing to support think tanks seeking to distribute their content through Wiki articles and Wiki projects as part of their overall outreach strategy? I think so! It’s a fun way to involve interns and younger research staff in research dissemination, and improves the quality and rigor of articles on Wikipedia.