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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.

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!

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.

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.

Four developers from CITI are attending DrupalCon this week in our home town of Washington, DC.  Just like last year when CITI sent two developers to Boston, DrupalCon is again the best place not only for brushing up and learning new skills, but also for catching up with old friends and making new ones.

As always, when we sit through various sessions, we’re not only trying to learn as much as we can about how our fellow Drupalers are using and improving Drupal, we’re also trying to look at things through the lens of the social mission organizations that we serve. Over the next three days, we’ll be posting what we find in this vein and in our own geeky interest.

1. The GeoSpatial Web and Associated Modules

A number of Drupal modules are available in and production, assisted in large part by Development Seed, for creating mapping stacks that don’t have to rely on the standard Google Map.  After Jeff Miccolis of Development Seed explained the various Drupal tech and resources available (mapnik, mapstraciton, gmap, nicemap, cloudmade, http://www.opengeospatial.org, Open data commons, open street map and NASA to name a few), neogeographer Andrew Turner led a fast-paced primer on all the applications for geographic data beyond points on Google map that developers and organizations can leverage.

We’ve done our share of Google maps, but some of the more advanced applications have us champing at the bit to start playing around.

Video should be up soon, but in the meantime presentations by Andrew Turner can be found on his slideshare.

2. The Importance of Search and Drupal Search with ApacheSolr

In a presentation on Drupal Search, Acquia representatives and others talked about search functionality as the main way for people to find content on your website.  Traditional methods like nav menus or site maps are very structured approaches that tend to fail because: a) new content will inevitably end up not fitting neatly into the categories originally created via the IA process (especially w/ web 2.0 where site visitors are supplying much of the content), and b) it’s unrealistic to assume that site visitors would categorize your content in the same way as you would.  Example: if you wanted to buy hand made paper from Amazon.com which of the main nav categories would you look under?  They suggested that a search engine like Apache Solr could be configured so that site visitors run into fewer dead ends. Acquia is also now offering Apache Solr as a hosted service!

To sum it up: search capability should be robust and front and center on the home page, and not tucked away in the top right corner as an after thought.  It’s a better way to help people find the content they want than IA is.

Video

3. Data Collection Through SMS

With the web moving towards user generated data and the pervasiveness of handset, SMS can be an amazing tool for getting information from users.  A few of us sat in on a presentation by Will White on an SMS Framework module integration with Drupal for a proof of concept political polling operation.Will explained the Drupal module and its compatibility with other modules like user groups and user notifications. A few links:

SMS Framework Documentation
Decentralized Data Collection
Parsing Data from SMS Messages

A brief Q & A afterward offered up a plethora of free SMS campaign solutions including use of Twitter as a free SMS campaign platform, as well as Frontline SMS, gnokii, and dotgo.

Video is still being uploaded… we’ll link when it’s up!

4. Great New Features Coming in Drupal 7

In a great talk on new features for users and developers (about the second half) given by Drupal Documentation lead and release manager, Angie Byron (aka webchick), we learned a lot about improvements that will make our lives (and our clients’ lives) much easier with the next release of Drupal 7.

Video

All right, I’m on twitter, if only because I was intrigued by Glennette’s tale of twittering for info at the inauguration on the fly and finding out where the bottle necks were.  And if Dan Schorr is doing it at 90..  And from all the brouhaha on the Twestival, which was big enough to make its way out into the rest of the media where I picked it up. And because McKinsey – McKinsey! – is a-twittering something they call the McKQuarterly (unintentionally (?) creating images of McKQuarterpounders to me).  A perfect storm of nonprofit marketing guilt or I suppose a lingering suspicion at my own un-hipness.  And I can add movies to Netflix from my phone? Actually, that sounds incredibly useful.

Ok, and because Scott has such an awesome username.

Glennette Clark, our Online Strategist, held her “Six Steps for Online Success” seminar last night at CITI HQ. We had over 30 people come to hear her speak about developing long-term strategies for online technology and message delivery. A wide variety of organization were represented including the Landscape Architecture Foundation, AARP, Sojourners Magazine, and the Social Enterprise Alliance. It was fantastic to see so many of our clients and so many new faces.

Glennette gave a great presentation covering a lot of the fundamental choices that non-profits face when working online. There were some great slides from the seminar that are available here.

Some of the best moments were the discussions that came out of the topics Glennette was presenting. Some really fantastic guests, like Jeffrey Newman, Shyree Mezick, or Miroslava Lutova, had great questions and comments to share with the group –regarding crowd sourcing, micro-donations, and email donation requests. Sharing knowledge and experience is what social media is all about and we were happy to have people trading stories and ideas with us!

Thanks to everyone who came out — we love having you here.

Glennette will be giving another seminar on the same topic soon, so if you missed her this time around you can catch her the next time.

Need help devising a strategy for managing your Web site? Heard about blogs and RSS feeds, but not sure how they apply to your nonprofit? Not sure how to add social media and Web 2.0 technology to your online strategy?

Join us on Tuesday, February 24th from 5:00 to 7:00 PM as we help your organization to turn your online strategy 180 degrees by learning to develop long term strategies for online technology and message delivery.

Bring your questions to this seminar and we will shed light on the sometimes confusing world of websites and online marketing. CITI Online Strategy Consultant Glennette Clark will explore engaging ways to meet your organizational goals for fundraising, communications, and advocacy.

We’ll cover:

• Aligning your offline mission with your online mission
• Connecting your email marketing to your web site
• Increasing your opportunities to get more online donors
• Setting benchmarks and measuring your success

Cost: FREE for current CITI Clients (clients only: please enter discount code CITICLIENTS)
Only $25 for everyone else!

Win a FREE Online Strategy Consultation!

If you attend, you will be entered into a drawing to receive a FREE Online Strategy consultation worth $750.

Happy Hour Afterwards!

After the workshop, mingle with your fellow nonprofit colleagues and CITI staff at Axis Bar and Grill, 1340 U St. NW. You are welcome to join us for the happy hour even if you cannot make the seminar!