The pot of charitable dollars that the U.S. population is willing to contribute annually is rapidly approaching its threshold, which means that either charities need to redefine what a successful year means – where growth from one year to the next might not be possible – or larger organizations may need to begin to consider acquiring or absorbing smaller organizations of similar mission to eliminate the competition for charitable dollars. At the very least small organizations will soon need to band together to leverage the “strength in numbers” approach, in order to manage an ever-increasing cost to market to their donors. If not just for the benefit of the industry, for the good of the donors across the United States who are being flooded with donation requests.  ~Stephen Ferrando, Donor Power Blog, Feb 3, 2010

Once your event is created, the real fun begins. You can leverage social media sites like Facebook and Twitter to promote your event and send emails to prospective attendees. All of these features are available via their easy to use dashboard (screen shot).

You can use PayPal or Google Checkout to process payments, create waiting lists, and even generate name badges and check-in lists.  They even have a feature to reserve a spot for people who would rather pay at the door! It’s an event planner’s dream!

If your nonprofit has used Eventbrite, please tell us about your experience.

We’ll blog about it, forward it to our Nonprofit Boards and Executive Directors and hope that this is the time they listen. Sometimes it takes an outsider with the marketing chops and the publishing pedigree for the top decision makers to listen.

You don’t need to.

There are people with money out there right now – looking to donate that money to charities and non-profit managers who need and deserve it.  These philanthropists are becoming more intelligent and doing a lot of research using the web in recent years.  They are researching via search, looking for local companies that are making the most impact in their own back yard and those who are using resources effectively.

Are you in their search engine results?

Many charities with an online presence don’t realize that having a website isn’t an expense, it’s actually a gateway between donations and you.  It’s an investment.  Did you know that there are over 1,500 searches every month for indy charity, indianapolis charity, or indianapolis charities?

Spending a lot of money on a website without any search analysis and search engine optimization is like buying a beautiful office and putting it in the middle of the desert.  No one knows where you are and no one knows how to find you.

People are looking for companies like you right now to donate money, time and resources.  Developing a beautiful web presence and spending $10k+ on a cool website aren’t going to help you… but spending a modest amount on a standard website or even better – a blog, that’s optimized for keywords that will bring you traffic, will result in an incredible return on investment for your organization.

Don’t invest in a web presence without first checking the credentials of your web design company.  Find out how their other sites are performing when it comes to search engines… not how many awards they’ve won.  Ensure that part of your web marketing package is providing effective keyword research and lays out a web strategy that shoots you to the top of the search engine results page for those terms.

Talk to social media and blogging experts about how they can help you acquire donations through the web.  If you don’t know anyone that can help, please contact me and I’ll send you a free e-book on Search Engine Optimization and Blogging.

Utilize social networks to publicize your efforts – right here in Indiana, we have Smaller Indiana, a wonderful social network of Indiana professionals and creatives who pay a lot of attention to non-profits as well as arts and culture.  Networks like Smaller Indiana can provide you an inexhaustible supply of donors and volunteers – use them! (Disclosure: I’m a co-founder along with Pat Coyle.)

Those kettles continue today, raising more money each year, but in today’s so-called cashless society there are many manners by which people carry and spend their money. In addition to credit cards and checks, people are making financial transactions using the Internet to make direct online payments to merchants. But there exists an even smaller niche with potentially big rewards for nonprofits: online bill pay.

Online bill pay is such the norm for consumers today that we don’t hear much about it anymore. It’s been three years since the New York Times reported that the percentage of bills paid online was nearly equal to the percentage paid by check (May 29, 2006, Pay Bills With a Click? More Americans Are Doing It and Banks Are Loving It). Since then, online bill pay has continued to grow. Fisv Inc. reported in August 2008 that ¾ of Americans pay at least some of their bills online. As the Internet becomes more secure and as the usage of the Internet by our more experienced Americans (defined by age) increases, the percentage of bills paid online is going to grow even more. In fact, at one local high school, the Economics class now teaches students how to safely pay bills online before they teach them how to write out a check!

Why is this important for your nonprofit? Smart fund raisers like Captain McFee and you go where the money is. In this case, your donors are making financial transactions using their online bill pay service, and a donation to your organization is a financial transaction.  I believe that if you put that idea into your donors’ heads and show them generally how to do it, you will see that avenue of payment vehicle grow for your institution. Last year the caging vendor who takes care of our direct mail donations reported to us that they are seeing a steady growth in checks coming from banks in the form of online bill pay checks.

Making a donation using an online bill pay service is quite easy. The donor simply sets up your nonprofit as one of its Payees and makes a donation in exactly the same fashion as they would pay their utility, cell phone or credit card bill.

Stay ahead of the trend and score big by encouraging your donors to use online bill pay to make one-time or even regular recurring donations using their online bill pay service. They will see how easy it is to do so and you may reap great reward.

So here are three easy things to keep in mind when you are planning and designing your next research report.

1. Make your research usable, and re-usable. Choosing a restrictive copyright can discourage readers from sharing or using your information – even for a good cause. An easy way to apply non-restrictive but legitimate copyrights to a document is using Creative Commons.

2. Leave Them Asking for More. The research abstract can be a great way to generate further interest in the entire body of work, but really it should tell a journalist on deadline everything they need to know. So, distill valuable information, make the abstract comprehensive and quotable, but don’t just copy and paste the executive summary.

3. Get the facts out there. Once your report is released, go through it and extract short phrases, quotes, and statistics that can easily be shared online. Micro-blogging (sending brief text updates) has become an increasingly important skill and tool for organizations that wish to keep constituents informed. Lastly, always make sure you include a direct link to your report listing page or .pdf – nothing worse than not finding the source of good information!

By Luise Barnikel, IssueLab

When I was a kid, friends were the other kids you hung out with, playing homerun derby in the street, building forts in the woods, facing off on Nintendo and just chilling during recess. I knew my friends’ faces, physical attributes, and mannerisms because I spent hours with them every week, if not every day.

When I was a kid, I watched some of my classmates who had many followers, those other classmates (and me) who literally followed others around, walking down the hall after them, sitting near them for lunch, playing with them during recess, hanging on their every word as the spouted their knowledge to anyone who would listen.

When I was a kid, having friends and followers (or being a friend and a follower) took time, and presence. Today it is oh so different.

Today, when you say the word “friend,” I would venture that a majority of the under-50 crowd would immediately first think of Facebook where you and I can be linked with hundreds (up to 5,000) “friends” who can follow each other through the computer. For many of these “friends,” the only picture they have of you is not the one they see in your presence, but the photo you’ve displayed on your Facebook page.

And the word, “follower” immediately conjures up Twitter where you must sign up to be a Twitterer’s follower in order to read the daily or hourly machinations of the Twitterer which is many cases is nothing more than the what you would have casually said to each other while playing on the playground or passing each other in the grocery store. Ashton Kutcher is on a race to beat CNN to be the first on Twitter to have one million “followers.”

Why is this good news for you as a nonprofit major gifts officer? Because you no longer have to be physically present with all of your donors and prospects. Certainly, being literally in front of your donors and prospects is likely going to have better returns and should still be your goal as much as is possible. But we no longer define “personal” contact as that contact which happens in person or over the phone. Today, “personal” is as much defined as being a “friend” on Facebook or a “follower” on Twitter. The advantage there is that whatever you do on your own Facebook site or Twitter account, you do for all your connected donors and prospects simultaneously.

Many have bemoaned the new definition of “personal,” but regardless of our concern for such a definition in the course of how we experience and relate to each other from an anthropomorphic or psychological sense, the new definitions could help you in your personal connection to donors and prospects. Imagine the look on your boss’s face when your monthly statistics for “Personal Contacts” with donors go from 66 one month to 512 the next…and it’s only a matter of time when nonprofits will begin tracking friend and follower statistics for their major gifts officers, AND income that comes from those two channels.

While no one can guarantee that using Facebook and Twitter will work for major gift officers, one thing is certain, your donors are alive and well on both platforms. Big business and small business alike are spending a lot of time and energy in doing the Facebook and Twitter thing right. And nonprofits are doing the same. Is yours?

Newspaper model broken. Americans get their news more from blogs and Twitter than they do from this newspaper.

How can you, as a nonprofit marketer and fund raiser take advantage? Read on.

Newsies in the early 1900’s were as much the news sharers as they paper they sold. While we don’t have kids hawking papers on street corners today, we have a similar phenomenon that while we trust our local newspapers to give us the news straight up, we trust more the newsies of the 21^st century: bloggers and Twitterers. Truth be told, bloggers and Twitterers are really “anti-newsies”  because real newsies used their headline yelling to sell more papers. The anti-newsies leave newsstands at the end of the day with dozens of unsold copies.

It is common knowledge over the past 18 months that traditional media outlets—especially newspapers—are struggling mightily to keep their operations above water. With the proliferation of blogs and Twitter, you and I aren’t going to our big local daily newspapers for our news as much as we used to. We each have our own trusted bloggers and Twitterers from whom we soak up the “news” we want. It no longer is the big daily newspapers that are determining for the public what “news” is.

The little secret in the newspaper world today is that these bloggers and Twitterers are not only the source of news for the public now, they’re also the source of story ideas for the journalists at your local dailies. A reporter from one of the local metropolitan dailies spoke recently at my Rotary Club and she told us that she has three main sources for story ideas and information: trusted contacts all over her beat that she talks with on a regular basis; story tips emailed to her from readers; and blogs and Twitter that are talking about the things on her beat. This is groundbreaking in terms of opportunity for nonprofits to get their story heard.

The news gathering paradigm has shifted in a gargantuan way, and as the newspaper industry searches for ways to change their business model, nonprofits have the opportunity today to get ahead of the newspapers in changing their media relations strategies. Traditionally, getting your nonprofit covered by a local daily newspaper was a big deal as the newspaper was a powerful and respected story-sharing outlet. Today, blogs and Twitter may be an even more powerful way of getting your message out.

You need to be doing two things in this new paradigm. One, you must find the respected bloggers and Twitterers who write about the type of work you are doing and get them on your contact list much as you have your local media contacts on a list that you send potential story ideas and press releases out to. The goal is to get those bloggers and Twitterers who have a faithful following to be talking about your organization, event, program, and news. Two, you should be actively employing blogs and Twitter on your own. The key word here is “actively.” Any blog that isn’t updated nearly every day is quickly going to lose the attention of your followers. It used to be that Websites had to be kept up to date and regularly changed so that viewers had a reason to check your Website often, it’s even truer with blogs.

This news paradigm shift is good news for nonprofits as such strategies are very low in cost, and very high in potential return. Nonprofits small and large have the opportunity today to take advantage of the 21^st century newsie—you.

“Through this valuation, we hope to help all nonprofits better understand how to protect and evolve their brands to generate as much revenue as possible. Valuing brands gives organizations a license to demonstrate to companies and other partners that there is an established and justified cost to aligning with nonprofits.”

The report also includes a variety of good information about enhancing your nonprofit brand and a breakdown by sector.  If your organization is not on the list, spend some time studying how the top 10 manage their brand and online presence.

For quite a while, I’ve viewed the newspaper business as dead. Turns out, it was only “mostly dead.” Check out this blog post from Chris Anderson (Author of the Long Tail). Some good food for thought when considering your marketing mix.

“We’re currently reviewing ********’s request for services to ensure we don’t have any business conflicts to be concerned about. Assuming not, we would look forward to the opportunity to meet with you and your Executive Committee to further discuss your needs and how we might best help you get to the next level.”

Why bother sending the package? Why not figure out the answer to that first before writing the letter? Why waste my time if you can’t work with me and why waste the time to write it if you can’t work with the customer? This is the equivalent to landing on a “page under construction” message on somebody’s website.

Sadly, this was from a well known firm and written by a Vice President. Keep this in mind when crafting letters to sponsors, donors, and volunteers.  Respect their time and do your homework first.

The problem started when Yahoo formed an agreement with Rivals.com to place college football and basketball content on Yahoo’s team pages.  It’s an interesting marriage because one company has created a subscriber based business model (Rivals) and the other thrives on providing free content supported by ads and up selling users various services and tools (Yahoo).  Unfortunately, Yahoo chose to rss feed the subscription content to its own pages.

Why does it matter? Imagine reading an interesting headline on your favorite college page on Yahoo. You click the link (which isn’t marked as premium content) and you get two more sentences and a sales pitch to read the rest of the article. Now, your ticked. Yahoo has wasted your time. You’ve been conditioned by Yahoo to expect to read articles for free. And now you’re mad at Yahoo and Rivals.  Do this enough times, and you find one of the many other sports news outlets.

The lesson in this is that Yahoo spent years training visitors to accept a particular model: Read our stories for free, put up with a few ads in the margin. Any partnership that disrupts this model costs readers. For nonprofits, it is a reminder that we can’t force donors to interact with us in a way that’s contrary to their conditioned expectations. They might not come back.

First, let’s look at the pitch. Corporate Rain Founder & CEO Timothy Askew wants to request the opportunity to meet with me (sort of) to discuss his recent successful work with Easter Seals, Lighthouse for the Blind, etc. He then goes on to say that Corporate Rain is “the elite international company specializing in initiating the executive rainmaking process. Specifically, Corporate Rain executes high-level new business campaigns that open doors to new corporate business through substantial appointments with senior level executives.”

He then goes on to say that his company is the “#3 sales outsourcing firm in the world and the #1 boutique sales outsourcer by The Black Book of Outsourcing.” Wow, that’s pretty impressive stuff! Then he tells me that CR “creates a pipeline of new leads and prime prospects in your target market. We bring a bespoke and discreet outsourced executive presence to your new business efforts that will save you time and money.”

Finally, he lists a lot of impressive companies like AT&T, AIG, Wells Fargo, Deloitte & Touche, and others who are clients.  Sounds like a can’t miss prospect?  Corporate Rain will (for a fee) get me connected to that “pipeline of new leads.” Well, I’m a little worried about what that pipeline is connected to…

You see, despite the impressive credentials and the A-list clients (who may disappear after reading this), Mr. Askew lost me from the beginning: the letter was addressed to the wrong person. And that person was addressed by the wrong title. (A big deal when you work for the Salvation Army and the officers have ranks.) The letter had to work its way to me -the real decision maker for this type of service.

So, let’s review:

Corporate Rain claims they get you quality leads to get you in front of the decision makers.

Corporate Rain doesn’t know who the appropriate decision maker is in our organization, or that Salvation Army officers are addressed by rank, or that any of this could have been cleared up by spending less than 5 minutes on our website. And they think I’m going to hire them to qualify leads?

I won’t even go in to the whole “bespoke” thing.