studio 501c

live TV becoming more affordable for nonprofits

PR pro Kami Huyse asks her blog's readers to consider putting live TV into their PR plans, with the help of some relatively inexpensive technology. She mentions a recommendation by Shel Holtz, who is a highly respected online PR strategist, and someone whose recommendation I would take very seriously. For those nonprofits that can afford it right now (I supposed that the cost will decline over time), live TV could be a great tool for training staff and volunteers and for helping donors and members to participate in events remotely. If you have ideas for how nonprofits can use live TV, please share them in the comments section below.

fake newspaper: a fun, fast way to honor nonprofit volunteers, donors, staff

I discovered fodey.com's newspaper snippet generator via popular blogger Steve Rubel, who always has interesting and instructive posts on marketing and PR.

As the image below shows, this free and easy tool provides a fun way to recognize staff members, volunteers, and donors.  Some ideas:

• Use your nonprofit's name in the name of the newspaper, e.g., "YMCA Times." If it's too long a name, use "Great News" or "Hope Times." (Play around with the text -- long titles get cut off.  You'll also have to play around with the body of the story, as spacing between words can get funky.)
• Use your town's name in the "dateline," as in the example below.
• Include quotes from leaders of your nonprofit, and, with permission, from kids and adults who have benefitted from the work of the person you're honoring.
• Use the story images on your Web site, in email newsletters, and in flyers.
• Create and save your story in a Word or a text editor before generating the image with the snippet generator. You can then re-use parts of it or revise it. (Once you save the story in the snippet generator, you can't edit it.)

Please share your ideas for using the newspaper snippet generator in the comments section below.

Technorati tags: net2 rubel fake newspaper nonprofit nptech fundraising email volunteer staff donor recognition web2.0

flip the funnel, but flip it feasibly

Thanks to Michael Gilbert's Nonprofit Online News, I learned about the latest publication of prolific marketing writer Seth Godin: his nonprofit edition of Flipping the Funnel (free PDF download) shows how nonprofits can gain new supporters by asking current supporters to use free Web tools such as blogs, Flickr, del.icio.us, and his own Squidoo. (As Seth says, "A Squidoo page contains links—links to products for sale, to reviews, to pictures, to videos, to RSS feeds, and to blogs. A Squidoo page, which is called a lens, is one person’s take on one topic.")

As much as I respect Seth's marketing expertise, I disagree with a couple of points in this paper.  It's silly to claim that, because it gets more traffic, Squidoo.com will attract more attention to a nonprofit than will a traditional nonprofit Web site such as diabetes.org. (Seth refers to a chart showing their comparative stats, but it wasn't in the version that I downloaded today.)  Squidoo as a whole has a very different purpose and audience from diabetes.org.  A more apt comparison would be diabetes.org vs. a Squidoo page on diabetes.

And while I agree that nonprofits could use Squidoo pages to promote themselves and engage supporters, the idea, on page 14, of the New York Philharmonic asking 3,000 of its supporters to each create a Squidoo page about dressing kids for winter (and for the 3,000 to raise money for the orchestra by getting friends to buy clothing featured on their pages) is so odd that I can't help but wonder if something wasn't lost in the editing.

Can you imagine being the one at the Philharmonic to tell the CEO (or board chair, or development director) that one of your fundraising strategies is to get 3,000 donors each to create a Web page about kids' winter clothing and for them to get their friends to buy clothing from their pages, with a small percentage of the profits going to the orchestra? Not only would that convey a very confusing message about the Philharmonic brand to supporters, it's unrealistic to expect 30 donors, much less 3,000, to want to publish a Web page on that particular topic.  (And how many people will actually be motivated to support the orchestra by purchasing clothing through the Squidoo pages?  Though I am loyal to my son's school, I've never bought anything through the Web sites that give a percentage to the school -- it's just one too many things for me to think about during my busy day.)

Much better are the ideas found on page 15 of the paper, for example, for a nonprofit to create a Squidoo page to supplement its Web site or for a nonprofit to ask supporters to create pages about topics that naturally interest them, with proceeds from sales on the pages going to the nonprofit.  Even so, the second strategy would probably not work unless the supporters were savvy about the Web (if not already publishing on the Web) and unless they had a strong bond with the organization or with each other.

If you know of any nonprofits currently using Squidoo to build relationships, I'd be grateful if you'd let me know via the comments below.  I do think it could be effective given the right conditions, and I'm eager to see how it pans out.

Technorati tags: net2 nonprofit NGO nptech nonprofit blogging del.icio.us flickr blogger tools web2.0 Godin

cluetrain squidoo

welcome to studio 501c

This is a resource for ordinary people doing extraordinary things -- social entrepreneurs and nonprofit staff and volunteers, i.e., those who work hard every day to make positive change.  I'm a nonprofit professional, too, and I'm interested in the ways that the Internet, personal technology, and other tools can help advance the goals of those in the social sector (which, by my definition, encompasses the nonprofit sector, but also goes beyond it to include those in the private and public sectors who are pursuing social innovation). 

As a result of my interests in personal tech and communications, I often find myself telling friends and colleagues about a Web site for tracking down the address of a prospective donor, or an easy way they can keep up with the issues their nonprofit addresses or a free Web-based calendar, task, and contact management application that can help individuals and teams be more productive.   I hope to do the same thing with this blog -- to share information and tips from time to time that will help people accomplish their social-change goals more effectively.

I won't pretend to be definitive or even authoritative.  In fact, much of the advice here will be pretty basic, as I find that even many brilliant leaders in the social sector know little about RSS, blogs as communications tools for nonprofits, or all that Google can do for them!  (Watch for more info on these tools in future posts.)

I'll just share what has worked for me, as well as what others with far more knowledge and experience are recommending.  I plan to review what experts in personal tech, life hacks, productivity, cool tools, and nonprofit tech are publishing, and then share the best of it here, adding ideas for how nontechies in in the social sector can apply the tips to their particular concerns. In that sense, I hope studio 501c will be a time-saving filter blog.

I also hope that it will offer a practical perspective to current discussions on how nonprofits can use the Internet and technology to further their missions.  These discussions, though well intended, sometimes become unrealistic, especially when they involve nonprofit techies talking with other nonprofit techies.  With studio 501c, I'll aim to address the everyday concerns of nontechies in nonprofits and other social-sector organizations.

I hope that you can help with this effort.  Please post your ideas, advice, and experience in the comments section of this blog so that we can all learn from each other.

Cheers,
Celeste W

Technorati tags: net2 blogging nonprofit NGO nonprofit blogging marketing nptech fundraising social sector social entrepreneur AirSet ZabaSearch small business studio 501c nontechie nontechie