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.

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.

If you are an artist interested in learning more about leveraging web technologies such as RSS feeds, Twitter, and traditional web channels, join Senior Developer Phil Jones and the Hamiltonian Artists for an interactive discussion on web and tech challenges relevant to you.

Phil will be speaking Thursday, October 1^st, as part of the Hamiltonian Artist Speaker Series presented by the Hamiltonian Gallery.

The series is “a succession of lectures given by established artists and art professionals to aid in the artistic and entrepreneurial development of our So-Hamiltonian Fellows and other emerging artists… Hamiltonian Artists is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing professional development opportunities for creative artists in their early careers.”

Phil has a passion for the arts and is excited to be sharing his experience in web technology to support the local artists’ community.  The lecture is at 7 PM, at the Hamiltonian Gallery at 1353 U St. NW, Ste. 101 (across the street from the CITI office!). Free and open to the general artist community.  Local blog DCist mentioned the lecture briefly in their weekly round-up of talks around town.

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

With Clay Shirky’s popular opening keynote on the power of online communities and social media organizing (summarized with key quotes here), and dozens of sessions on social media related topics, NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference was atwitter (with blog links and quotes in the twitterverse) with strategies and panels on integrating social media like Twitter and Facebook into effective online organizing and advocacy campaigns.

One session by John Kenyon, however, stood out by emphasizing the basics of successful online communications – the importance of eating your vegetables before you get to the dessert of playing with social media.  Based on a chapter from the NTEN book: Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission and featuring William Neuheisel of DC Central Kitchen and Jennie Anderson of AIDS.gov, this session was packed with useful tips and case studies on how to move your website and email from lackluster to inspiring.

A few takeaways:

• Use metrics (such as Google Analytics) to analyze what people are looking at on your website and what you can spend less time working on
• The 4 C’s of effective websites:
  • Credibility: You have less than 1 minute to establish your credibility as the public face of your organization.
  • Cultivation: Invite visitors to participate and join in your cause, rather than simply stating what you do. Build relationships.
  • Clickability: Clicks are interactions; how can you provide information in different ways and give people lots of opportunities to “interact?”
  • Content: Keep it real, current, and concise.
• Coordinate e-newsletter, fundraising, direct mail and website campaigns for maximum impact.
• Integrate stories and connect emotionally with your audience.

In a live-tweeted session on organizing online for positive change, Ben Rattray summed it up thus: “The killer app is the content.”  While having a sustained organizational presence on social networking sites can help build brand awareness, having an authentic, consistent message that makes a connection with potential supporters remains the key to successful non-profit campaigns.

Whether you need guidance on your website and email campaigns, or feel ready to dive into social media, CITI can help you develop an online strategy action plan to measure and increase the effectiveness of your organization’s online presence.

Check out How Much eMail Is Too Much? over at Frogloop, written by Steve Daigneault of Amnesty International USA. A lot of smaller organizations probably don’t threaten the kind of volume that Steve had to wrangle, but you should print out the latter part of the article about writing compelling copy and paste it over your desk*, regardless of how many email blasts you write.

*Or, uh, tape it on your iPhone?

According to a recent study, the majority of donors want to hear about an organization’s impact, its success stories and other organizations they may partner with. This can go a long way in gaining that all important donor trust and, most importantly, donor dollars.

The Social Media for Social Causes Study, co-authored by Qui Diaz, Beth Kanter, and Geoff Livingston, took a look at social media as an area of growth for donations. The statistics look promising but the demographic breakdown is not surprising.

Across the board, demographically, those who engage in social media fall into the same patterns as those who do not. Those 30 and under are less likely to give more than $1000 while chances for getting a high dollar donation increases after 50.

Don’t Give Up on Email

According to the survey, email is the the preferred method of contact from charitable organizations among those 30 and up. To a smaller degree, 45 percent of 30-49 year-olds prefer social networks and 31 percent of those over 50 also use social networks indicated a growing interest for getting information through social media.

When you are communicating with donors, whatever the medium, be it web site, email or social media, here are a few tips:

1. Show – A picture is worth a thousand words. Show your organization in action.
2. Tell - Share stories about your organization and how it is accomplishing its mission.
3. Remind - Remind them about your mission and what your a trying to accomplishing. Is your organization ending world hunger? Remind them of that.
4. Ask - Don’t forget to ask for their support. Give them the opportunity to help you to achieve your organization’s mission.