Chris Forbes is the co-author of Guerrilla Marketing for Nonprofits and a certified guerrilla-marketing coach. His varied background in marketing includes experience in the faith sector and work on five continents, and he has pioneered several media initiatives in public relations, television, radio and the Internet. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal […]
#FUNDRAISING: Consider Moving Some Online Donors To Direct Mail Giving
Social networks can be so important for communicating with folks who support (or will support) your cause. The high speed and low cost of such outreach can offer huge dividends, but mostly those dividends are paid in good will and spurring interest. Online donations are certainly growing, but as a report from Blackbaud this year […]
#PR: Astroturfing Politics And Marketing – It Can Be Disasterous For Both
With only a few months to go before the new administration takes office, we examine the notion of ‘grass-roots‘ as associated with popular movements or opinions came into the American lexicon at the turn of the twentieth century. The, er, ‘grass roots’ of the term, according to Answers.com came a generation earlier and specific to […]
#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 […]
#INTERVIEW: Michael Hoffman, CEO of See3 Communications, Discusses Why Nonprofits Need to Embrace Video
Michael Hoffman is co-founder and CEO of See3 Communications and a leading authority on online video for nonprofits and online fundraising and outreach strategies. After turns as a political consultant and developer of Internet startups, he founded See3 to bring together his vision of the web and his passion for nonprofit fundraising. The interview 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: Trickle-Down Lives On at Nonprofits
If you haven’t yet seen Dan Pallotta’s 18-minute TED talk, the viral video of the month (April 2013) with more than 1.2 million views, here’s your chance. Pallotta, who founded AIDS Ride and raised $581 million for AIDS and breast cancer research over nine years, argues that philanthropy is being undermined by our beliefs about […]
#VIDEO: The Knowledge Fountain Promos
The Challenge: The Knowledge Fountain offers not-for-profit organizations a spectrum of short courses online covering fundraising, communications, organizational development, social media, and productivity software. It is a start-up venture co-founded by MKCREATIVE owner, Marco Kathuria and Don Akchin, of Don Akchin Strategic Marketing. The startup was looking for a cost-effective way to tell it’s story […]
#SOCIALMEDIA: It’s OK To Say ‘No’ To Your Social Networks
You know you want to… We are often extolling the virtues of particular social-networking platforms or encouraging specific strategies to reach out to your audience(s) across these platforms. When moving through the ‘tubes’ of our social networks, it is easy to think that each post we prepare is the most important one ever and that […]
#BOOKREVIEW: Permission Marketing – Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers
After “Purple Cow“, “Permission Marketing…“, a marketing-bible in your pocket, is a must-read. It defined a new marketing paradigm (back in 1999) but is still as relevant today as the “right” way to develop a marketing strategy for the world on Web 3.0 if you want your business to be successful. In a world where […]
#VIDEO: Compass Academy Promo Videos
The Challenge: Compass Academy is a community of students, educators, and families dedicated to serving children of average to above average cognitive ability with a wide range of learning challenges including autism spectrum, ADHD, speech, language, and/or motor delays. A lack of funds to plough into marketing the school meant that outreach and engagement has […]
#NEWS: THE KNOWLEDGE FOUNTAIN LAUNCHES ONLINE CLASSES & SOCIAL SITE EXCLUSIVELY FOR NONPROFITS
http://youtu.be/ajF0oSL3qrI
The latest entry in the rapidly-evolving distance learning education market is a new online education service geared exclusively to people who work for nonprofit organizations. The Knowledge Fountain, which launched today, is offering a spectrum of courses online covering fundraising, communications, organizational development, social media, and productivity software. The site pitches its product as “just […]
#FILMFESTIVAL: Green Guerillas Film Festival (2013)
The Challenge: Green Guerillas asked us to act as creative and marketing consultants and be co-producers of an environmental film festival in New York City at the Museum of the Moving Image, We had limited time and resources in which to both market the event and to produce it. Our Solution: MKCREATIVE co-developed a strategic […]
#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 […]
#HOWTO: Use Crowdbooster To Marshall Your Social Media Conversations
Numerous social-networking monitoring sites are out there by now: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Klout, Tinker… As programmers develop new tools, and social platforms like Facebook or (even!) MySpace evolve, the staff at a nonprofit can feel overwhelmed with the changes. What is important to remember in this fast-changing communications environment is that you are looking for […]
#COMMUNICATION: Is Your Nonprofit Staff Conversing With Both Audience & Each Other?
As social networks and social marketing have matured over the last two or three years, a debate continues as to how effective social media is to inspire action (be it making a purchase, donating to a cause, or risking one’s life in a revolution). But it seems to me that the argument is both older […]
#SOCIALMEDIA: Politicians & NonProfits Need Agility With Online Outreach
As the Democratic ‘nominee’ Barack Obama delivered his acceptance speech last night in Charlotte, NC, a record number of tweets on politics were sent out − some 52,756 tweets-per-minute (tpm) being posted as he wound up. By contrast, Mitt Romney inspired 14,289 tpm, which was about half as many as reactions to Michelle Obama’s presentation two […]
#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 […]
#COMMUNICATION: The Best Ways To Encourage Retweets Include…
What could be easier than writing a message in a mere 140 characters? Something grabs your attention, you copy the link, say something pretty relevant about the story/image/file linked, and hit ‘Tweet’. If you’re an occasional dabbler, such a process can be fine and you might indeed occasionally strike a chord with followers who respond […]
#HOWTO: Set Up Your Tumblr Blog’s Settings & Connect To Twitter/Facebook
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1cAxKeSArM[/youtube]
We continue our video series on setting up your nonprofit’s Tumblr blog account with a look at the two Dashboards within your account. We also explore the blog’s settings and what distinguishes them from your account’s preferences. Tumblr is a free platform and one that can give you an up-and-running blog in about 10 minutes − […]
#NONPROFIT: Some Models Of How Charities Use Tumblr
We’ve sung the praises of Tumblr a number of times on this blog, and today we want to present a few examples and ideas of just how nonprofits are using this free platform as a means to spread the word of their great work. One of the many great things about Tumblr is its simplicity […]
#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 […]
#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 […]
#FUNDRAISING: Maximizing Your Organization’s Return on Fundraising Events
We are pleased to welcome back Susan Emfinger of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. For her previous posts on institutional fundraising, please click here. In today’s post, I ask readers to imagine a world in which fundraising staff and programmatic work closely together with a variety of “programmatic” events in order to expose the […]
#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, […]
#HOWTO: Get Guidance From Google On Simple SEO Success
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AmRg3p79pM[/youtube]
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a social media buzzword: gotta have it, gotta work at it, gotta pack it in to your website or blog! And it is true that SEO needs to be a part of your nonprofit’s online and outreach strategies. Why develop a new site or even update your outdated one if […]
#HOWTO: Collaborate & Manage People & Projects Without The Need For An Office
This time last week we talked about the online scheduling convenience of Tungle.me, which offers subscribers the opportunity to block out available times on their calendars within which prospective colleagues or meetings can choose mutually convenient meeting times. This week, as promised, we turn to a web suite of scheduling materials that expands the elegant […]
#SM4NP: Automate Your Google Searches To Follow Important Issues
Searching on Google is perhaps the single experience of the internet we all share. In the fine and flexible tradition of the English language, we turned the noun into a verb: to google (someone or something). The behemoth that is Google Inc. began over a decade ago (hint: Sarah McLachlan and Elton John won big […]
#HOWTO: Time Those Tweets To Test And Build Impact
Earlier this week we introduced and reviewed a few social-media dashboards to help tame your organization’s streams of updates pouring in. Many platforms (like Hootsuite, TweetDeck, and SproutSocial) also offer the ability to schedule a series of tweets to go out over days, weeks, or months. This feature is obviously handy if your charity has […]
#Communication: Six Tips To Expand Readership On Your Nonprofit’s Blog
We thank you for reading our blog, and we hope to provide relevant, timely, and interesting material for you for 2012. Producing a timely and engaging blog (at least we hope so!) requires some effort. But the opportunities and results they can produce are well worth the investment. If your nonprofit organization has a blog, […]