Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

Idealware updated one of its most popular articles in answer to the question: What are some broadcast email tools that do work well?

Email newsletters, action alerts, and/or fundraising emails are a cost effective way to communicate with constituents or members. However, it requires a coordinated plan and an organized communications calendar to manage the effort and analyze the effect of sending and tracking thousands of emails. Find out the thoughts of several technology experts on this topic and see what set of broadcast email tools might work for you.

The article includes details about:

• Inexpensive and straightforward emailing tools — Free and straightforward emailing tools that let you send plain text emails to an unlimited number of addresses.
• Online mass emailing tools — Hosted email tools, which typically allow you to manage your lists, create emails and view reports through a Web-based interface.
• Taking a more integrated internet strategies approach — For organizations that are also tracking their constituents’ actions, donations, and their activities on the website, you may need to think through how you track and integrate all this data. This includes considering software that can manage all of your constituent data and activities rather than using a separate broadcast tool. A number of online integrated tools handle a broad swath of internet features.
• Guidance on how to decide — What the important considerations are to keep in mind as you weigh your choices.

Idealware is a nonprofit organization which provides thoroughly researched, impartial and accessible resources about software to help nonprofits make smart decisions about solutions for their business needs. Idealware is aided by a community of experts, including Community IT Innovators’ Dan Shenk-Evans, who is one of their contributing authors.

We’re starting a new series of informal gatherings to discuss topics important to nonprofits. The idea is to bring people together to talk about your ideas, successes, failures, needs, and best practices.

Our goal is to create closer community ties, connecting you with other nonprofit professionals. We want to create an atmosphere where you can feel empowered to talk openly about your challenges at work and what we, as a community, can do to address them.

CITI will be hosting these events, but we’ll be learning as much from these events as anyone there. We hope you’ll join us for an evening of exploration and sharing.

Register now for the first forum on January 20 to discuss Social Media.  Many of you are likely already familiar with and using tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to spread your message and gain supporters.  Come share your story and learn more about how other organizations are using social media.

Save the dates! The CITIzens Forums will be on the first and third Wednesday evening of every month, each one discussing a different specific topic of interest.

• Jan 20 – Social Media
• Feb 3 – The Value of a CIO Perspective
• Feb 17 – Salesforce
• March 3 – Nonprofit Capital Markets
• Mar 17 – Raiser’s Edge
• Apr 21 – Post NTEN Conference Wrap-up
• May 19 – Data Management, Cleansing, & Conversion

There’s nothing earthshaking in the new Alertbox posting on social media and RSS. Still, it’s nice to see things we think we know reinforced by credible research. And reinforcement of the fundamentals is always helpful.

Here are a few of the things that caught my eye:

• This strikes me as particularly well put — “[B]usiness messages appear in a context that’s permeated by personal messages. This context sets the stage for use. Businesses that post too often crowd out the user’s real friends and become unpopular (and thus risk being unfollowed). Users listed too-frequent postings as their top annoyance with following companies and organizations on social networks.”
• I love that the BBC is the counter-example “Users prefer a more casual style for business messages on social networks than what’s appropriate for most corporate communications. At the same time, they expect RSS feeds to be more business-like and to cut the chit-chat. Also, for some services — such as the BBC — people preferred a highly professional tone, even on social networks.”
• Here’s the most fundamental fundamental of them all, and the reason why any social networking effort needs to be part of an overall organizational strategy, with support beyond a single enthusiast. — “In some cases, companies had established a presence that they didn’t bother to update. These graveyard sites gave users a very negative impression when they were looking into companies’ social features. Even more irksome were cases in which friend requests weren’t promptly answered. Start using a social networking service only if you have the budget to support reasonably frequent postings.”
• Neilsen also points out that users rarely seek out an organization on social networks — they react to the social networking opportunity being pushed to the from the organization or from friends. Because it can be frustrating to search out an organization’s presence on social networks, the links to those pages need to be easy to find on an organization’s own site.
• The average usefulness of corporate/organizational messages was low. “The messages that received the highest scores had three things in common: they contained something of substance, were timely, and provided the kind of information that users expected from the source company or organization.” One user commented that she valued social networking messages that made her feel like she was “the first to know.”

Read the rest of the summary, and if that’s not enough, the full report has 107 usability guidelines. The link is at the bottom; the full report costs $198.

Like a lot of organizations, CITI probably talks more about practicing what we preach than actually doing it. So it was a pleasure to take action on our online strategy.  I sat down with our Online Strategist, Glennette Clark, a few months back and was the client for a change.  I’m sure it will resonate with many of you web managers when I let you know our website isn’t as perfect as we’d want it.  When you work on websites it seems you always see the stuff you need to fix and never the stuff that works right.  And a website – even a small one – can be such a huge project there is a real tendency to want to load up the content and let it be, despite knowing an integrated website is the best way to deliver content.  That is, a website where the content is not an after-thought but fully integrated in a marketing strategy that includes social media, press, and community, where all the parts reinforce the whole.

As a consulting firm, CITI knows our clients need to know what we do and how to get in touch with us, and our website has reflected that and not much more.  But as we advocate for our clients to do better at integrating their online presence with their long term community, fundraising, and mission goals, it has become clear that CITI needs to do a better job at that, ourselves.

Glennette’s consulting sessions started out with some standard questions and a questionnaire.  She briefed us on her obsession with measurements – explaining that even if you know where you want to go, if you don’t know how you are doing along the way then you’re going to end up somewhere else.  For every goal we thought of, Glennette challenged us to come up with a metric.  For several items, she helped us see that the metric that we were looking for wasn’t a web metric at all, and that we would have to delve into our internal sales database instead.  It was one of those exercises where you feel so righteous after the workout that you wonder why you put it off for so long.

I admit, one reason I delayed starting this project was nerves about everything we weren’t doing – either because I didn’t quite know what we needed, or just hadn’t ever got around to it.  Glennette was reassuring that everyone starts somewhere – the thing is to just start.  She didn’t assume I knew anything about analytics but didn’t baby talk it either. I’d been looking at our web stats online from time to time but not in any organized way.  It was a revelation to start pulling our web statistics into a usable report format we could share internally.

One interesting fact is the number of you who come to the CITI site searching for “online strategies” – welcome!  So you know you should be more organized in this discipline too.  After our initial meeting with Glennette we went off on our own for a month and worked on next steps from the action plan we’d created – immediate, short term, and longer term tasks to help organize our efforts.  We decided to focus initially on creating the monthly metrics report, and updating our keywords and metatags in the interim.  Next steps: social media strategies and converting the knowledge from our stats into content and findability.

If you’d like to catch up with Glennette yourself, she’ll be presenting on Wednesday the 19th at a webinar from 1-2pm:  The 10 Second Rule: Optimizing Your Website for Donations

You’ve probably realized that having a “Donate” button on your website is not enough to improve your online fundraising. But do you know what else you need on your site to encourage donations?

You only have 10 seconds to prove yourself. According to Nielsen Online, the average website visitor spends less than 60 seconds on a web page. As if that wasn’t enough, you want to do even more – convert the visitors to donors. Can you start that process in 10 seconds?

Join Glennette Clark, CITI Online Strategies Consultant, for a webinar on Optimizing Your Website for Donations, Wednesday, August 19th from 1 PM to 2 PM, in partnership with Kivi Leroux Miller and Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com.

Donors are looking for specific information to help them make the decision about whether or not to give to your organization or another.  Recently, two studies on nonprofit websites independently concluded that technology is not the problem when it comes to increasing donations online.  Instead, web visitors cited that nonprofits are not providing the information they need to make donation decisions.

Whether you are a novice or pro, this webinar is for you if you want to strengthen your online fundraising efforts by giving donors the information they want.

During this webinar, you will learn:

• What donors want to see
• What donors want to read
• How to avoid the donation killers
• How to optimize your website for donors
• How to use social media to your advantage

Register and get full details here!

Last week, Glennette Clark presented a seminar on social media, covering key social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter and how to design and implement a social media strategy.  You can find the slides from the seminar here.

Attendees expanded the discussion, generating conversation around how to engage different demographic groups using social media, such as senior citizens, and the effectiveness of social media advertising.  With anecdotal examples, many agreed that social media was better for listening to and connecting with people on a personal level and building relationships than for targeted advertisements. All agreed that being deliberate about entering the social media realm and having clear goals for what you what to accomplish through social media was key.

Here’s a good read from our friend Kivi Leroux Miller, at her nonprofit communications blog — Does Your E-Newsletter Need a Makeover? She’s got a webinar coming up on the subject, which you might want to check out.

CITI’s online strategist Glennette Clark will be joining Kivi on July 15 to discuss optimizing your website for donations.

As I was looking through the piles of information I gathered from last month’s NTEN Conference, I came across some information about Amazon Payments for Nonprofits. I decided to do a bit of research and compare the Amazon Payments to Google Checkout and Paypal.

Across the board, the fee structures were the same for transactions over $100,000 (1.9% + $.30 per transaction); however, if you are not collecting quite that much, here is the fee breakdown per transaction.

There are a few things that are different about the three, if you are a Google Grants awardee, all of your transactions are free and Amazon Payments charges fees based on the dollar amount of the transaction. If the transaction is less than $10 you are charged 5.0% + $0.05 regardless of the transaction total.

With that in mind, it would appear that PayPal offers nonprofits the better deal allowing you to keep more of your money. Also, with PayPal all you need to start collecting money online is an email address and a bank account. As will all of the other companies, in order to get the nonprofit discount, you will have to provide proof of your status.

M&R Strategic Services and NTEN work together on the annual Nonprofit eBenchmarks Study (you’ll need to register to see it), which allows you to look at your key metrics against a number aggregated from other organizations. Everyone’s mileage is going to be different, of course, but knowing how everyone else is doing gives you something against which to evaluate your results. The numbers are broken down by sector, so you can compare against your direct competitors, and know if it’s time to up your efforts or ask for help.

I particularly like the chart on page 7, which gives statistics for both advocacy and fundraising on open rate, click-through rate, and page completion rate, with a final response rate (being the click-through rate times the page completion rate — page completion is a percentage of the number of people reaching that page, not of the original sample.) This is a good yardstick to see where you’re weakest. If your click-throughs are competitive, but your page completion is falling short, you should work on your landing pages first. If your open rates don’t seem to measure up, work on your subject lines. (Though, as they spend a lot of type explaining, open rates are an unreliable metric. They also vary across the year — which is another chart on another page.)

Email is still the killer app, according to the study, at least for fundraising and advocacy. Not that anyone is really disputing that, particularly for short-term results. The study does give some quick case-studies on using text messages to boost email response and social networking to boost list growth. I was tickled to read in the social media case study (about a National Wildlife Federation program) that they had “no budget for list building,” which was followed by a pile of outreach they did to boost their list, which must have taken a lot of hours of staff time. Not to pick on NWF — I know of plenty of organizations that don’t really account for staff time invested in various projects, be they online or off, like special events.