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

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

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.

I’ve been quiet on the blog front lately. In part, I’ve been waiting for the recordings of the NTEN plenaries to go up, at which point I’ll insist you listen to them. Both Eben Moglen and Clay Shirkey gave very thought-provoking presentations. What else can I tell you? I enjoyed Dean Hollander’s session “I Hate My Website!: Overcoming the emotional and logistical challenges of Web site development and online communications planning.” It wasn’t much different in content than a lot of the high-level online strategy sessions you get at NTEN, but I liked his take and his presentation. Unfortunately, his slides don’t seem to be available online.

In “A Nonprofit’s Guide to Client Data Collection and Privacy” we had a great, focused discussion on privacy issues. Presenters Sarah Tucker and Toby Shulruff made a great number of resources available online — sample policies and release forms, in particular.

I was also jazzed by NPower’s presentation on their tool for Measuring the Impact of Technology Projects, though the actual implementation remains to be done, and it’s huge. Slides for the presentation are linked through the session title, above.

On another NTEN-related subject, yesterday Beth Kanter summarized an NTEN webinar on Facebook: So you want a Facebook Fan Page for Your Nonprofit? Here’s the Scoop!. There’s a great list of linked resources at the end of the post.

The Washington Post’s article yesterday To Nonprofits Seeking Cash, Facebook App Isn’t So Green (subhead – “Though Popular, ‘Causes’ Ineffective for Fundraising”) was sure to raise hackles in the nonprofit tech blogosphere. The bloggers who have been exploring social networking for nonprofits had had this discussion already.

Beth Kanter issued a concise rebuttal: Hello, Washington Post: Dolllars Per Facebook Donor Is Not the Right Metric for Success. Even if you’ve followed some of the discussion in the past, it’s worth reading her post, and the links therefrom, particularly the one to Allison Fine’s blog. Between the two of them, they nicely summarize what you can and can’t expect out of an investment in social networking for your organization.

Allyson Kapin’s post on Frogloop includes a link to the Frogloop Social Networking ROI calculator. The calculator is a nifty tool for looking at the costs vs. funds raised. It doesn’t pretend to calculate the indirect and non-financial benefits that Kanter and others point to, but it does provide the opportunity to decide what those other benefits are likely worth to you before diving into a social networking campaign.

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.

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.

I think we’re all hearing and thinking about what the tough economic environment is meaning for fundraising for social mission organizations – with economic uncertainty for many nonprofits looming.  This post from Bruce Trachtenberg at Communications Network points out a flip side to raising less money is attracting more scrutiny of the money you do raise.  Particularly in light of the Maddoff scandal and the losses to foundations there.  As Trachtenberg puts it,

Seems to me that if you are responsible your foundation’s communications you better become ultra-familiar  — if not already — with your organization’s finances: your balance sheet; how the endowment is invested, including types of asset classes; the returns (and losses); as well as how your foundation selects, monitors, and evaluates its investment managers; the performance benchmarks it uses, etc.

Many if not all nonprofit staff have trouble addressing most of these points, depending on the savvy-ness of their finance and development staff.  And of course the culture of communication within the org.  With fundraising databases and software, you know from both an ethical and a PR- standpoint you should know what you’ve got going on, but social mission orgs often have fundraising data one can politely term … disorganized.

Of course, whipping that data into shape isn’t as sexy as using social networks to raise small sums instantly – yeah, right – but in this climate, knowing your data is rock solid may be the best investment you can make.  Because if your list is right, you can better reach the right people with the right ask.  Whether or not your CFO makes the right investments - and whether you have the right checks and balances in place to know – is up to you.