The Alzheimer’s Association of the US has just published a sobering report on the growing presence of Alzheimer’s among the growing number of retirees and older Baby Boomers. Those who suffer from the disease require, in the early stages, expensive drug therapies and constant care throughout their later lives. The report discusses the economic, social, […]
#INTERVIEW: Rob Wu of Causevox Tells Us About Developments In Online Fundraising (Part I)
http://youtu.be/2VXwEDsMNuU
Rob Wu is co-founder of Causevox, an online social-media and donor-acquisition platform, and he and his team have been working hard over the last number of months moving the online system to 2.0. We had the pleasure of talking with Rob a year or so ago, when Causevox first went live. The focus then was […]
#SOCIALMEDIAMARKETING: Fine Tune Twitter Use To Enrich Outreach
The idea of using Twitter can overwhelm some, and how to use it as a smart tool for strategic engagement seems downright contradictory to many. Yet as the social-networking platform matures – Rather, as the people who use it explore that myriad ways to make it work for them – an ever growing number of […]
#FUNDRAISING: Outreach Tactics & Technologies Need To Adjust To Demographics
With the texts and tweets and the touchscreens and with those crazy(-cool) Google goggles and whatnot, a nonprofit would be daft to send those old-fashioned appeals by mail. The cost of printing and stamps, the hassle of upkeep of a database of address, the imposition of making potential donors find their checkbooks buried ever-farther into […]
#OPINION: Ken Stern’s Book Offers Tough Love To Nonprofit Economy
Ken Stern has served as CEO of National Public Radio, arguably one of the best-known nonprofits in the country. He supports The American Red Cross, and has served on the boards of a number of charities. So when his book, And Charity for All argues that the nonprofit sector is a huge part of the […]
#COMMUNICATIONS: Postal Service Rates To Rise on 27 January
We have managed to put off the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’ for a couple of months, but we can’t avoid the changes in postal rates coming in a couple of weeks. Thanks to our fine business partners at Ecoprint in Silver Spring, Maryland, for the heads-up! The US Postal Service (USPS) has been on hard times […]
#SOCIALNETWORKS: 4th-Annual Social Media Week Will Educate & Inspire Worldwide
The first Social Media Week went live in 2008, as Twitter was just hitting the mainstream and Lehman Brothers announced it was going bankrupt and would take down the economy with it. For better and worse, much has change. And Social Media Week continues to expand. It started to stress connectivity across continents last year, […]
#TECH: Title Tags Can Make Or Break Your Site’s SEO
Oh, the last official weekend of summer, and it’s three-day long one to boot! You might be itching to get out of the office a bit early today and make it a three and a half day weekend. Before you do, please read some salient advice we took from online marketing specialist John Haydon as […]
#SOCIALNETWORKS: Sweat The Details, But Focus On The Big Picture
Ever feel like your nonprofit or small business is doing some pretty interesting stuff online to share the really interesting stuff you are doing in the real world − but no one seems to be hearing you? You are not alone in having those feelings, especially on a Monday − on a week that sees back-to- […]
#TECH: Sometimes A Security Breach Is Just A Phonecall Away
First of all, and oft repeated, use secure and unique passwords for all your accounts, be they banking, social networking, email, or to log on to your computer. Far too many people still use such insanely simple passwords like ‘password’ or ‘qwerty’. And if you think using your anniversary date or your cat’s name with […]
#DESIGN: How To Follow The Branding Guidelines Of Facebook
Corporations, small businesses, nonprofits, and even some individuals brand themselves with a specific set of colors and a type font or two and a logo. Usually those entities want the general public to use their logo, etc, as such use can mean free publicity. And certainly in the world of blogs and social networks we […]
#COMMUNICATIONS: Keep Storytelling In Forefront, Whatever Platforms You Use
Oprah Winfrey likes a book. BOOM! It’s a best-seller and a big movie. Justin Bieber retweets something that catches his eye. POW! It’s trending huge for forty-eight hours! Who wouldn’t want that kind of attention? Well, often nonprofits and charities don’t want that kind of attention. The best/worst case of this kind of virality is […]
#TECH: Apple Backs Down on EPEAT. Welcome Back To EPEAT!
No, MKCREATIVEmedia doesn’t wield that kind of influence over 1 Infinity Loop. Or any influence, really. But about two hours ago we posted a summation of Apple’s withdrawal from the very EPEAT environmental standards the corporation helped establish over a decade ago. Our little contribution to the issue was not technological or particularly environmental, but […]
#FUNDRAISING: The Holiday Season For Donations Begins Now. Ready?
The pools are open and busy. The grill has cooled down since the July-4th Picnic. The MLB All-Star Game is tonight. It’s July. One of the traditional/old-fashioned ways to disrupt the heat is to hold a “Christmas in July” party, and your nonprofit or charity should be having one. Why? To celebrate the good work […]
#SOCIALMEDIA: Facebook & WordPress Join Forces To Connect Blogging With Timeline
For some time one could link one’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, so that if your nonprofit updated its Facebook page, a tweet would automatically be generated − and vice versa. If your organization had a blog running the WordPress platform (as does MKCREATIVEmedia), you could install a plugin that auto-tweets your posts. And if your auto-tweets […]
#SOCIALNETWORKS: Twitter Continues To Expand Through Mobile Devices
The Pew Internet and American Life Project has brought us valuable statistics and reported notable trends in internet use over the years, and a recent report focused on the growing use of Twitter as a means of social networking. Twitter could be described as a social networking platform that punches above its weight class. Twitter […]
#COMMUNICATIONS: The Number One Way To Gain Site Or Blog Readership Is…
If your nonprofit or your charity has any online presence at all, you want readers to engage your content, click through the link(s), visit the site, and get involved with money and/or time. If you are a blog writer, you want pretty much the same, though gifts might also/instead mean advertising dollars because so many […]
#ADVOCACY: When A Clever Concept Just Misses, It Misses By A Lot
Sometimes a nonprofit’s campaign can include a fine idea that, alas, doesn’t quite get it right. Like a long fly ball to the 385-foot alley of a ball park that falls in to be caught at 382 feet, the charity can be excited at what seems to be about to happen, only to trudge back […]
#COMMUNICATIONS: Visualizing The Impact Of Social Media, Especially Email
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jst91gLzRHk[/youtube]
Human beings are wired to pick up visual cues before we pick up textual ones. Social media and the internet love visuals too, because visual communication can travel quickly through networks and beyond the original linguistic group. We did a story on the MKCREATIVEmedia Blog last week about the eBenchmark study of 2012 by NTen and […]
#ADVOCACY: Make Sure Pitch Has Call To Action, Not Just High Concept
What happens when you get corporate assistance to launch a new campaign, or pro bono development from a commercial ad agency? You can get some fabulous ideas and some valuable insights on establishing your brand. You can get your materials into some of the best publication and on some of the most visited sites on […]
#SOCIALMEDIA: Online Communication Is A Team Sport
Difficult not to start this post with a shout-out to the Baltimore Orioles, who beat the Red Sox at Fenway last night after 17 innings. One of the best of the many anomalies of the game is the fact that the O’s Designated Hitter, Chris Davis went 0-for-8, with 5 strikeouts − and was the winning pitcher, […]
#ENVIRO: Spring Is The Time To Build Rain Barrels & Community Gardens
The weather in the mid-Atlantic states has been, well, awkward this spring. April temperatures have been cooler than February temperatures, and drought conditions are already a concern. But with spring comes new buds, rebirth, baseball, and the opportunity to establish that community garden that you and your neighbors have been talking about all winter. The […]
#FUNDRAISING: 2011 Was A Good Year For Email Outreach By Nonprofits
With all the excitement about all the social networks and all the purchases that Facebook has been making lately, it’s worth remembering that not only do more ‘traditional’ media exist but they also can be of greater value than the newest platform that has all the media and investor eyeballs. Such should be especially remembered […]
#Tech: The Net Is Not Quite Dead, But It’s Not Your Mom’s Web Anymore
First of all, an adjustment/correction to yesterday’s story: Facebook pushed back its rollout of Timeline across all accounts until tomorrow, the 31st. Facebook did this rather quietly and did not state why, but you now have about 20 hours to get your Timeline up-and-running, as we outlined yesterday. (Thanks to Cody Damon of Damon Strategic for […]
#Advocacy: ‘This American Life’ Retracts Story Of Abuses At Foxconn
It has been a rough week for social-consciousness movements whose leaders have produced stories a bit too slick to be true. We wrote last week about the doubts surrounding the viral video ‘Kony 2012’ meant to inspire a public campaign against Joseph Kony’s child army in Uganda − if that army still exists and Kony is […]
#TECH: RSS Readers To Help Save Time & Sort Out News & Emails
We continued our series on Tumblr yesterday with some guidance to get your nonprofit’s blog out via an RSS feed that allows people to subscribe to your site. When they subscribe, they get automatic updates and summaries of whatever is going on in your blog. The great aspect of setting an RSS feed for your […]
#PROAGING: Social Tech Rewiring Social Connections For Millennials
Each generation seems predisposed to believe the next generation will be materially better off but intellectually or spiritually weaker. Whether it’s Socrates complaining about writing over memorizing, John of Salisbury lamenting the rise of law schools in twelfth-century England, or Grandpa Simpson opining about how much better everything was in his day, thinkers tends to […]
#FUNDRAISING: Impact Of Mobile Donations To Haiti Two Years On?
Two years ago this month, Haitians endured a 7.1 magnitude earthquake that destroyed much of the infrastructure in the capital, Port-au-Prince, and killed over 300,000 people. The outpouring of support from numerous nations inspired faith that rebuilding after the tragedy would bring notable improvements to the poorest nation in the western hemisphere. Unfortunately, two years […]
#Communications: Postal Rates Raised Last Week – Not For Nonprofits
The United States Postal Service has been struggling financially for the last few years. The Bush Administration saddled the service with pre-paying its future retiree benefits for a decade (2006-2016), a demand uniquely imposed on the USPS. Bush’s policy meant the service went from profits in the $1.4 billion range in 2005 to one that […]
#Communications: ‘Tis The Season For Making Lists & Prepping For 2012
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8IEykapya4[/youtube]
In our last blog posting for 2011 we wanted to encourage some meaningful reminiscence over this past year and what it meant for the nonprofit world and to inspire some thinking about the possibilities for 2012. Making lists and checking them twice is a time-honored way to prepare for the holidays, so we present a […]
#interview: Tom Ahern — Author, Award-Winning Journalist, and Communications Consultant
Tom Ahern is the author of four books on fundraising communications, with a fifth on the way. An award-winning magazine journalist, he has written case statements for numerous campaigns and is a popular communications trainer and consultant. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to […]
#ProAging: GAP Index Highlights Global Challenges Of Care For Aging
http://vimeo.com/18687471
The fact of the aging of the global population is something our readers are likely at least acquainted with. The phenomenon has arisen as life expectancy has lengthened even in developing countries and populations in developed countries often are not having enough children even to replace themselves. The result is that most national populations whose […]