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

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.)

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

“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.