Effective Communication with Donors

The Internet is a very busy place. So how does a nonprofit stand out from the Internet crowd and make a splash?  By effectively communicating with donors and potential donors 24/7.

Let’s take an example. Car donation. There are a gazillion car donation programs out there. How do you get the potential car donor to donate specifically to YOUR car donation program, let’s say Kars For Kids. The answer is to use every means possible to reach and engage individuals that share the aims of this nonprofit which is all about educating and mentoring children.

The vehicles used by a nonprofit for communication with potential donors is important but probably not as important as the message conveyed. By all means, make use of snail mail, email, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, but make sure you say what it is that grabs attention in this crowded competitive public sphere.  A simple way to grab attention is to put yourself inside the donor’s head, and then read or view your materials from that perspective. You want to make sure you answer the following donor-specific questions:

1.       Why me?

2.       What for?

3.       Why now?

4.       Who says?

Review all materials with these four questions in mind before you send them out into the world. Watch for shortcomings. Address them.

And do it for all materials you send out, using the same reviews process. Getting into the donor’s head is easy if you know the demographic who share your goals and you ask all the right questions.  Knowing the demographic, of course, is a crucial element in crafting your message.

People with the potential to become donors or volunteers in your nonprofit:

·         Share your mission

·         Believe that your nonprofit is a stable one

·         Feel included, and have a sense they are valued by your organization

·         Respect the leaders and founders of your nonprofit

 It’s important to note that donors don’t give out of a sense of guilt or obligation or because they’ve received from you some glossy promotional materials. They also do not give solely to get a tax deduction. None of these factors favor your nonprofit over the competition. It’s the extra bit of oomph you put into communicating and engaging with your public that woos them to give to you instead of to the other guy.

It’s about making them feel a part of what you do: making them feel important. And let’s face it—you couldn’t do it without them. Now go forth and make them feel it. 

Woodie Cars

Most of us just love cars. Shiny new cars and old vintage cars are just some of the cars that tug at our hearts and keep people looking at the Kars for Kids garage page in hopes of seeing some rare find. Perhaps one of the most pleasurable and exotic cars we can still occasionally see on the road is the woodie, a beloved American car with wood incorporated into its body.

The very earliest cars were made of wood. So it was not exactly a surprise when a car incorporating wood into its design became a runaway hit. That would be the Ford Mercury woodie station wagon.

Bragging Rights

Produced during the 1930’s and 1940’s, the woodie came with prestige and bragging rights. It was one of the most, if not the most expensive model in the Ford line from year to year. The funny thing was, the car was high maintenance and had all sorts of foibles but everyone still wanted one, still coveted that woodie above all other cars.

Ford was the industry leader for sales of cars with wooden bodies. But the manufacturer kept production of these beauties to a very limited number, owing to the smaller demand for this gorgeous but impractical vehicle. The demand was mostly among the higher echelons of society: movie studio moguls, resorts, country squires. Of course, in those days, no one called these cars “woodies.”

Woodies being made of wood swell and shrink with the weather. As a result, the cars make a lot of noise as the glue and screws holding the body together shift during contraction and expansion of the wood. Also, think of the wooden hull of a boat and how much maintenance it needs and you begin to get an idea of how much effort a woodie owner must put into cosseting his moving acquisition. The owner’s manuals always included a recommendation for annual stripping and refinishing.

The Woodie Narrative

Of course, that makes no difference to a country squire or a movie mogul. They can afford to hire people to do that sort of thing for them. The annual refinishing was all a part of what made the woodie and the narrative that went with it, something special.

Henry Ford had a thing about making his enterprises totally self-sufficient. To that end he purchased rubber plantations and ore mines to produce materials for his cars. In deciding to create the woodie, he bought huge tracts of forest reserves in 1920, on Iron Mountain in the Upper Michigan Peninsula, located around 500 miles northwest of Detroit. There he grew stands of maple, gum, birch, and basswood, all for the purpose of building Model T floorboards and body frames. In addition to growing the trees, he had his own people cutting timber, ran his own sawmill, and cut and created wooden body parts on location.

Ford didn’t like waste and could always find a purpose for everything. The leftover wood pieces and even the sawdust from the mill were not disposed of but were used to create Ford Charcoal Briquettes. There’s a lot you could say about Ford, who was a known anti-Semite, for instance, but one thing for sure: he had the green ethos down pat, way before anyone else was concerned with recycling and making good use of all resources. He might not have cared much about the environment, but he appreciated that everything had a purpose.

6 Tips on Blogging For Your Nonprofit

Blogging is a great marketing tool and should definitely be a part of your online nonprofit marketing strategy. Blogs are appealing because the type of content offered is informal and generally trendy and fresh. For nonprofits, blogging comes with several benefits: a nonprofit blog will drive traffic to the nonprofit website, offer a new venue for engaging potential donors, and allow a nonprofit to position itself as a player in its particular sector.

Here are 6 tips on effective nonprofit blogging:

1. Brevity is the soul of discretion. Readers have short attention spans. A blog could be a few lines to preface an appealing image or video, or it could be an informal article. In generating an outside word limit, it’s best not to go beyond 800 words. If it must be longer, make it into a two-part series and link the two parts to each other for the readers’ convenience. Break up texts with subheadings, pull quotes, images, and videos. In general, you should break up the text with one of these devices every 3-4 paragraphs. 
2.  A picture’s worth a thousand words. It cannot be said too often for those marketing ANYTHING online: people are visual. Images are essential to the well-crafted blog. They keep the reader engaged and draw him to the next section of the text. Take your own photos or use royalty-free images. Some sources are free to use as long as you include a photo credit, for instance, the photo gallery at the White House website. 
3. It’s the name of the game. Don’t stint when it comes to creating a catchy title. No matter how much effort you put into the body of your blog, if it’s got a boring title, no one will read it. Consider the difference between: How I taught my dog to beg and Begging will get you everywhere. The first is ho-hum, the second piques the interest. You can’t help but want to read the rest. Car donation program Kars4Kids showed it was title savvy with this blog entry from March: Do our customer service reps rock? Or do they really really rock?! You just know you want to read that. 
4.  Don’t be listless. Lists are good because they tell readers that they don’t have to read every word of your blog but can scan the contents for effective tips. The numbering or bullets also help to break up the text in much the same way as images, videos, or subheadings. 
5.  Do your share. More than anything, you want people to share your content. Don’t make it hard for them to do so. Add share buttons and situate them in a section of the page where they will be seen. You can put them in more than one place, for instance at the top and bottom of blog posts. Include lots of choices for sharing venues but definitely include the main players: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. 
6.  Keep an eye on things. From behind the scenes (back end of the blog), you can monitor traffic to your blog and from your blog to your nonprofit’s website. You can check these stats according to the day, week, and month and often, you can see the referring website. Other things you can see: the keywords that brought people to the blog, and what type of content drove the most traffic. There are free tools you can sign up for to help you generate and interpret your blog traffic, such as Google Analytics. Use the data to help you plan future content that will be appealing to your target audience. The data will also tell you the ideal time to post new content.