Ah, summer movie season, when studios try to cover up bad movies with even worse taglines. In the running for worst of the year so far (and this works better if you think in gravelly movie trailer announcer voice):
- Terminator Salvation: The End Begins
- The Crypt: Some Things Are Better Left Buried
- Life Is Hot in Cracktown: Be cool. Life is cool. You're so cool in Cracktown.
Yes, that last one is a real movie. But none of them rival Crank: High Voltage: "He was dead... but he got better."
And these are taglines from companies with millions of marketing dollars. Clearly, writing a good tagline is hard. How can nonprofits compete?
Pretty well, according to Nancy Schwartz. Last year, she found that 72% of nonprofit organizations don't even have a tagline or rate theirs as performing poorly. But she's trying to change that with her annual Nonprofit Tagline Awards.
You should take just a few minutes to enter your nonprofit's tagline today. (The deadline is July 31st.) Come on -- it's gotta be better than Crank's.
If you've been following the fundraising and marketing trends over the last few years, you're probably hip to idea that the best strategies for maximizing engagement and fundraising for your organization involve integrating online and offline communications and campaign efforts.
Wouldn't it be great for all you fundraising and marketing professionals if there were a conference specifically for learning how to integrate that stuff? If experts from both the fundraising and marketing communities got together to present actual sessions and resources for maximizing campaign efforts, you'd probably want to be part of that, right?
You're in luck! The 2009 Bridge to Marketing and Fundraising Conference takes place July 21-23 in Washington, DC.
We just released the 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study with our fantastic friends at M+R Strategic Services. The report is chock full of amazing and interesting information you can use to make better decisions about your online campaigns.
To help folks get started, we hosted a release party. Get the recording to see how Children's Defense Fund and HRC use benchmarks to increase the performance of their online campaigns.
Or, for those of you who can't be bothered to open another link -- that's how I roll, so I feel you -- here are some highlights from this year's report:
There's one expression I never want to hear again: "If you build it, they will come." I love Kevin Costner as much as the next lady of a certain age, and I love baseball, but I think we need to give that phrase a rest.
It doesn't mean it isn't true, though. Just HOW to drive traffic to your site remains a bit of a mystery. I know that I, for one, am in a rut. When we have something on our site we want folks to find, I do the same three things to drive folks there.
If you're in the same place, we should probably head over to Allan's session at the 2009 NTC, "25 Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Web Site". Allan, who runs CharityFinders, shared some insight from his session with me:
Michael Weiss, imagistic
It used to be that marketing on the web involved simply pushing content to your audience, hoping they would read it, consider, select, purchase, use, and recommend. Now, online marketing has literally become a conversation between you and your audiences. In fact, with blogs and the ability to post comments, sometimes you're not even involved in some of your best or worst marketing efforts.
User generated content, regardless if you like it or not, is now part of your content strategy. And with that, comes the responsibility to manage it.
Nancy Schwartz, Getting Attention
As the nonprofit landscape gets increasingly complex, money and attention are tougher than ever to get. And, because your org is discussed on infinite communications channels, it's more important than ever to brand your organization, programs, and campaigns.
When you do so -- conveying credibility and value in a way that's easy to remember and repeat -- you'll build long-lasting relationships with donors, volunteers, members, the media, clients, and more. But it's more challenging than ever in our 2.0 world.
Here are seven keys to effective branding in a social media world:
Matt Wilson, Mobile Commons
We spent a lot of time at the end of 2008 working with one of our clients, the Humane Society of the United States, and our friends at the Watershed Company to come up with a nice mobile test for end of year fundraising.
Our strategy was simple: send HSUS' mobile subscribers a text message on December 30th asking them to reply to call or directly call a 1-800 number to make their year-end gift.
To be great, sometimes you can't be afraid to fail. And in terms of the original intent of this program, we definitely failed! But there was a very significant and important silver lining.
Tad Druart, Convio
While online fundraising continues to be a growth engine for many nonprofit organizations, the data -- real and anecdotal -- shows that engaging constituents through an integrated, multi-channel approach provides the greatest return over the life of most supporters.
Integrating the latest technology and applications can also help you empower your most ardent supporters to share your story in ways that reach, inspire, and motivate others to join your cause.
The first steps are not as hard as they might seem.
Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer, SocialFish, LLC
In a word, no.
If the goal is to integrate social media marketing into your traditional marketing, you're setting yourself up for failure. After all, traditional marketing is based on pushing out and controlling the message, targeting, and running insular campaigns. By comparison, social media marketing is based on relinquishing control, two-way communication, building community, and breaking out of campaign-thinking to build trust over time.
For many nonprofits, traditional marketing still works. Now is not the time to drop the tried and true when social media marketing is still so unproven for your organization.
So here are some social media marketing tactics that can coexist with your older tactics:
