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John Kenyon, Jennie Anderson, AIDS.gov, and William Neuheisel, DC Central Kitchen

Imagine producing online communications you're proud to share with the world and that garner praise from funders, donors, and other stakeholders.

Each month, I look at dozens of nonprofit websites and hundreds of nonprofit emails. Based on that, I am here to tell you that in general they are actually, um... pitiful. Dreadful. While there are exceptions, most have a lot of room for improvement. Maybe that includes yours?

Prospects and stakeholders who interact with you online have only your online communications to evaluate your organization. Are you credible? Are you acting responsibly with your financial resources? Are you up-to-date on the latest tactics and techniques in your area of focus? Effective Online Communications can help you better engage current stakeholders, raise money, and attract new prospects.

The foundational elements of effective online communications are your website and email communications. Social media and Web 2.0 are great, but if you don't have an effective website and email communications, you are largely wasting your effort trying to engage new audiences online.

Websites

Are you proud of your website and able to keep fresh, interesting content flowing that matches your stakeholders interests? If not, you have work to do.

An effective website starts with a plan that includes clear goals for fundraising and communications. These goals should guide what your priorities are, what content and functionality you will provide online. If your largest fundraiser is an event, do you have online event registration? If your primary communications goal is education, do you have engaging content that's easy for visitors to locate?

In order to maker sure your content matches your stakeholders interests, you must track activity and make changes based on that data. One organization spent 10 hours a month maintaining an online calendar. When we reviewed their website statistics, we found that nobody ever visited that calendar. Wouldn't you like 10 extra hours a month? I know I would.

Keeping in touch with your metrics, for both your website and emails, is essential to providing the content your visitors actually want -- not what you guess they want.

Email

The four cornerstones of effective email communications are Personal, Targeted, Integrated and Trackable:

• Personalized with data (your $75 contribution on May 6th);
  
• Targeted to the audience (activists who have given less than $50);
• Integrated with direct mail, website content, etc.;
• and Trackable (of 60 people who opened the email, 25 clicked to the donate page and 12 donated).

Tracking user trends is vital to understanding if your online communication efforts are succeeding -- or not.

Real-life Examples

Two excellent examples of effective online communications are AIDS.gov and DC Central Kitchen. Jennie Anderson of AIDS.gov and William Neuheisel of DC Central Kitchen, who work on communications at their respective agencies, share some of their tactics and techniques.

AIDS.gov

AIDS.gov is a national HIV initiative of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Office of HIV/AIDS Policy. The AIDS.gov website is a gateway to all Federal domestic HIV testing, prevention, treatment, and research information. The website is the primary channel through which we communicate HIV information to our community, Federal partners, and people living with, or at-risk for, HIV. It also serves as a way to highlight new Federal initiatives.

At AIDS.gov, user feedback is very important to us. We're currently redesigning our site, using the site itself to solicit feedback from our users. We added a feedback form and found it to be a great way to hear about what our users like and do not like about the site. One user said, "[I] would love to see more linkages to services like the HIV test site search." Another told us, "Wow, that video on advances in hope is really good. It beats looking through tons of paragraphs to find information when u can just watch the video and take notes".

We post all the feedback on our site, and are using it to inform the redesign.

In addition to our AIDS.gov website, we also have an AIDS.gov blog. Our blog highlights examples from people in the HIV community using new media tools in response to HIV. We have a team of blog contributors and editors, coming from the fields of public health, government, health communications, and new media. Given our multiple team members, we use a wiki as an easy-to-use online collaborative space, where we keep a calendar of upcoming blog topics and draft blog posts. The wiki helps us avoid version control issues and allows us to keep a history of changes by author.

HIV continues to be an important public health issue and at AIDS.gov, we want to ensure that we use our website and all available communication to their best advantage. We have found that online tools, like our website, internal wiki, and new media spaces, can be an effective way to collaborate and reach people with important and timely HIV information.

DC Central Kitchen

At DC Central Kitchen, we've got no shortage of innovation and success to share with our supporters. We decided to focus on using our email communications to better tell our story and the efforts paid off: In the two years since focusing on improving our email, our online donations grew by more than 1,000 percent, from about $13,000 to $163,000.

How did we do it? We planned our campaigns in advance, coordinated email with direct mail, and targeted our messages to what our supporters wanted to hear about. (Hint: you have to ask before you can know that.) We ask new subscribers at sign-up to indicate which programs they're most interested in, and we tailor our newsletter accordingly. We also ask for feedback on our donation forms and other web communications. We test and track our content to see what generates the most interest, and then give them more of what they want.

In July 2008, rising costs and shortages of food were in the news. We had recently begun to address this issue through a new initiative, so we decided to ask supporters to join the effort by raising enough money to cover our program's summer food costs.

We sent the first email, explaining the problem and our plan to fight it. We set a deadline with a challenge match from our sponsor for up to $10,000. About a week later, we sent another email to everyone who had not responded as a reminder, showing them the progress we'd made so far (about $6,500). Two weeks later we sent a personal appeal from our CEO, reminding them that there were still 48 hours left to reach our goal. This last email raised more than the previous two combined: over $7,000 in two days. We exceeded our goal and raised more in online donations than we had in all of 2006.

Lessons learned?

• Clearly articulate the issue -- and your plan to solve it.
• Be timely and relevant to your supporters.
• Create urgency. Why should people respond now?
• Use emotional content to illustrate how the world will be better, and how I will feel if I give.

For more information on excellent practices for online communications, see the chapter "Effective Online Communications" in Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission.

Jennie Anderson is is a Consultant at John Snow, Inc. and serves as the Communications Director for AIDS.gov,

William Neuheisel is the Communications Manager at DC Central Kitchen,

John Kenyon is a nonprofit technology educator and strategist. His consulting and training practice centers on effective use of technology with a focus on the internet. www.johnkenyon.org