Communicate!

Helping you win loyal friends through your communications

Making It Personal: How To Inspire Passion In Your Donors

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(A guest post by Brad Wayland)

passion to change the worldYou want to change the world with your charitable organization – and the best way to do that is to inspire your donors. Only when they’re as passionate about your cause as you are can you truly succeed.

Here’s how to get them there. 

You’re passionate about changing the world – it’s why you’ve organized your own charity. You found a cause that you support wholeheartedly, something you care deeply and unequivocally about. Your next step is to find people who share those feelings.

Why? To inspire people to feel the same way about your cause as you do.

The first thing you’re going to want to do is market your charity effectively. Show people that their donations have a real impact on the world – that the money and time they give to your organization is being put to good use. Demonstrate the human side of your charitable pursuits.

How? Create videos that profile the men, women, and children helped by your organization. Share photos and other media on social that show the progress their donations have made. Create content that inspires people to give by asking them an open-ended question about your cause or making them rethink something in their lives.

But perhaps most importantly, provide your donors and volunteers with the opportunity to get involved through social outreach. Click To Tweet

See, in recent years we’ve seen a shift in how people engage with businesses, charities or no. People are looking for organizations that interact with them on a deeper level. Charities that encourage them to take a sense of pride in their accomplishments, and discuss their donation efforts online.

Your organization needs to tap into this trend if it’s to truly inspire more donations. There are a few ways you can do so:

  • Leverage volunteers to help spread your message. People are far more willing to listen to friends and family than they are to someone they don’t know especially well, even if that person represents a business they wholeheartedly support. For that reason, asking volunteers to talk about your charity via social media – and to encourage their close relations to get involved – is a great way to inspire more people to give.
  • Encourage deeper donor participation. Don’t just collect a donor’s money and call it a day. Give them other ways they can engage with your brand. Challenge people with some healthy competition, offering incentives for your best donors. Let them create a page that tracks their donation.
  • Encourage deeper donor participation. Most of the people who support your charity have some sort of personal connection to your cause. Leverage that. Give people an opportunity to share exactly what your cause means to them, and share the best ones on your social feed.

Passion is the cornerstone of what you do – and if you can inspire even a fraction of the passion you feel for your cause in your donors, you’re on the right track. Follow the advice we’ve outlined here, and you’ll have a good start. The rest, however, is up to you.

About the Author:

guest blogger Brad WaylandBrad Wayland is the Chief Strategy Officer at BlueCotton, a site with high-quality, easy-to-design custom t-shirts. Brad is committed to using custom t-shirts as a way to raise funds and spread awareness for causes such as Texas storm relief and local Kentucky food pantries.

Interpreting Business Advice into Nonprofit Language

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ImagePerhaps you’ve already noticed: most articles about communication are written for businesses.  They use a business vocabulary.  The writers assume you’re looking to make a profit.

A nonprofit professional reading these articles can feel like a deaf person attending an event with no interpreters.

Good new: with a little practice, you can do your own interpreting.

How You Say that in Nonprofit

For practice, let’s take a look at an article that American Express recently published.  It’s entitled “5 Common Brand Messaging Mistakes Marketers Make.”  That  title may be a puzzle already.

  • What’s a nonprofit’s “brand”?  Your brand is not your logo: it’s the overall impression people have of your organization before and after they’ve met you.  Think “reputation, public awareness, visibility.”
  • “Messaging” is not just anything you say.  It’s your deliberate attempt to shape your reputation.
  • “Marketers”: that means you!  Marketing really just means communications with a purpose.  If you put out a newsletter, send an email, or give a talk and you’re trying to win support for your agency, you’re marketing!

So, for a nonprofit audience, the title of this article could be “5 Ways of Communicating that Don’t Work (and What You Can Do Instead).”  Now, doesn’t that make you more likely to read it?

Please do read the article and comment about it below.

Click on that link. When you get beyond the title of the article: what makes sense from a nonprofit perspective? What needs interpreting?  We can puzzle it out together. You start!

 

Nonprofits DO Marketing and PR! 6 Ways to Do Them Well

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marketing, ads, PR

Your nonprofit’s good work won’t speak for itself.

Maybe you take a quiet satisfaction in a job well done.  Good for you!  But if you’re the only one who knows what a great job your organization did, you’re cheating yourself.

  • Who will volunteer for your organization if they don’t know what it does?
  • Who will donate if they don’t know what a difference it makes?
  • Who will help you change the world if they don’t know how?
  • Who will speak up for you if they’ve never heard from you?

Beyond “Outreach”

Most of us know that we have to market ourselves.  We just don’t like the label.  “Marketing” sounds too commercial.  Its cousin, “public relations,” sounds too slick.  So we talk about “outreach” instead, or “visibility.”

And that’s getting in our way.

“Outreach” is just too broad.  It lets us keep on thinking as if there’s some general public out there waiting to hear from us.  That’s a waste of a nonprofit’s time and resources.

We need our communications to reach specific groups of people, with clearly defined messages that they want to hear.  Better yet, we want those constituencies to seek us out, to be glad to hear from us, to let us know what’s on their minds, and to ask, “How can I help?”

Marketing and Public Relations for a Good Cause

Marketing and public relations don’t mean what we think they mean.  I want to quote a great article by Heidi Cohen:

Marketing is everything a brand, business or organization does to sell its goods, services and values.

Public Relations…builds honest, open and transparent bridges of communication between a brand, business or organization and its constituent communities. Deborah Weinstein )

You “sell” your services to two sets of “customers”: the clients who benefit from them and the donors, funders, and volunteers who contribute to them.  You “sell” them when you talk or write about them, when you answer the phone, sign your email, post to Twitter and Facebook.  But you also sell them in every interaction “because if your customer service sucks, nothing else that you say matters.”  (B.L. Ochman)

You build bridges and win the trust of your constituent communities “by community-building and tapping the power of positive third party, word-of-mouth, endorsement/ testimony/ tribute to create affiliation, loyalty and advocacy for your goods, services and/ or ideas,” as Deborah Weinstein says.

Ways to Do Better

You’re in the marketing and public relations business.  Isn’t it worth doing them well?

Here are six ways you can improve your nonprofit’s marketing and PR.

  1. It’s Not About You. Get to know and love your audience and give them what they need.
  2. Have a Strategy.  Understand what you hope each audience will give you in return and how you will move them toward doing so.
  3. Everybody In.  Market to yourselves first.  Make sure staff, Board, and volunteers get it about your organization and represent it well.
  4. Change the Way People Behave.  Social marketing works better than a new program sometimes.
  5. Attract (instead of reaching out).  Content marketing builds your reputation and makes people come to you.
  6. Take Care of Your Friends.  Build loyalty among your donors, volunteers, and supporters.

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