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 […]
#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 […]
#SM4NP: Scoop.it! For Information ‘Curation’ & Social Interaction
Last year we explored Pinterest, a social network that puts a premium on visuals and offers ‘pin boards’ of topics collected/bookmarked/’pinned’ by the user. The metrics on the platform show amazing growth over the last few months, and many are still waiting for an invitation to join up. Scoop.it! has, on the surface, a strikingly […]
#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 […]
#HOWTO: Establish A Tumblr Account & Why You Should Do So (VIDEO)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PUXnDZUcQY[/embed]
A while back we talked about the blogging platform Tumblr, and the series got a great deal of response from you our audience, and we really appreciate your interest and feedback! We want to step up that earlier discussion with a series of video how-tos that will show you a Tumblr account, what can be […]
#HOWTO: Setup A (Free) Scoop.it Magazine For Your Community
We introduced Scoop.it and Pinterest recently because we think these information-sharing sites offer a great platform for nonprofits and charities to share their own news as well as related images or stories in their sectors. As promised we have returned to round out this mini-series with a guide to help you setup a Scoop.it e-magazine site. […]
#SOCIALNETWORKS: Is Pinterest Of Value For Nonprofits? You Bet!
Pinterest can seem like an upmarket yard sale at first glance… One of the hottest discussions about social-networking platforms concerns Pinterest, whose membership and engagement have exploded in 2014. From January to February of this year alone, Pinterest drew over 100 million new visitors to its site. The simplicity of setting up ‘boards’ and […]
#HOWTO: Curate Information To Make Sense Of Your Nonprofit’s Ambitions
‘Content Curation’ is one of the essential concepts when it comes to preparing and writing stories for online consumption. The term refers to the activity of collecting, sharing, and responding to information on the internet in a consistent and focused manner. A ‘curator’ is traditionally defined as “a keeper or custodian of a museum or […]
#COMMUNICATIONS: Words That Doom Press Releases to Oblivion
Take it from veteran reporters. Your press release goes directly to the trashcan if the headline includes the words “anniversary,” “award”, “fundraiser,” “benefit,” or “annual,” among others. If you think these types of events are newsworthy, you’re not thinking like a reporter. How about if you’re promoting your own organization’s achievements and successes? Take a lead […]
#SOCIALNETWORKS: What Makes Pinterest So Engaging? It’s So Simple.
Pinterest was released as a private beta in March 2010, which makes it something of a late-comer (or the ‘second generation?) of social networking platforms. Its mission was “to connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting,” and its modus operandi was to encourage people to ‘pin’ whatever they found interesting online […]
#SOCIALNETWORKS: Let Flickr Tell Your Nonprofit’s Story As It Happens
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R_MWGFvDEE[/youtube]
A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words. And with digital social media, images are becoming both more common and more powerful as platforms such as Facebook and Google+ emphasize the photo and graphic qualities of their social-media networks. A kind of ‘visual economy’ is developing, within which social networks are competing and users […]
#MARKETING: NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan Fundraiser
Social Marketing and Media Relations Campaign Working under the aegis of the Nonprofit Marketing 360 collaborative, MKCREATIVE and LCG Communications embarked on an ambitious campaign to promote an online silent auction for a client. We used a combination of PR (LCG Communications) and social marketing (MKC). Our client, NYU Faculty Against the Sexton Plan, sought […]
#HOWTO: Plan A Film Screening/Festival As A Fundraising Opportunity
As the year’s projects and fundraisers and festivals start rolling onto your computer’s calendar, you might be looking for an opportunity to host a one-off event that can bring much-wanted PR, good karma, and even some financial support. How about sponsoring a film screening? (MKCREATIVEmedia co-produced a film festival for one of our clients earlier […]
#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 […]
#MEETUP: Join Us For The inaugural PechaKucha Night In Baltimore On October 24th
Join us at a unique event organized by Sidas Saulynas, Hillel Glazer, and Marco Kathuria in Baltimore later this month. It’s called, “PechaKucha”. You may have heard of it. It’s the art of concise presentations. If not, you may have heard of “Ignite“? They’re similar, but Ignite has a different goal to that of […]
#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 […]
#SOCIALMEDIA: Facebook Quietly Rolls Out ‘Gifts’ & Nonprofits Can Get Them Too
Over this past spring Facebook has been expanding its Gifts service as a way to offer presents to family and friends. The service can be activated by clicking on the bowed gift box that appears on your organization’s News Feed or on the page of the person or nonprofit you want to give the gift […]
#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 […]
#DEVELOPMENT: How Much Cash Is Required To Land A Donation?
How often do nonprofits reach out to donors potential and actual online, yet have no real sense of how successful the outreach was? Did the time and money spent developing a program or launching a campaign prove to be worth the support? Dan Norris, founder of the online-analytics service Informly offers a tool to help […]
#FUNDRAISING: Causevox Improves Online Outreach & Fundraising To 2.0
We have often sung the praises of the online charity-site platform Causevox. And we do so again as the good folks at Causevox have released a significant series of upgrades and integrations in version 2.0. It moved out of beta last week, allowing any charity or nonprofit to take advantage of the expanding toolbox. This […]
#SOCIALNETWORKS: Pew Research Keeps Us Up With Changing Faces of Internet
The latest surveys carried out by the Pew Internet and American Life Project are tracking both the most popular online social-networking platforms and the kinds of people who are using them. We enjoy sharing such findings with our readers because the information the folks at the Pew Internet group can help nonprofits refine their online […]
#SOCIALNETWORKS: Questions & Answers Can Be Shared On Quora
The Latin term ‘quorum’ (pl.pronoun: ‘of whom’) has almost no connection to what the term means in Anglo-American law, namely: “the minimum number of members of an assembly that must be present to make the proceedings of that meeting valid.” Without digging too deeply into the Oxford English Dictionary, the term evolved from Norman circuit […]
#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 […]
#HOWTO: Setup A Pheed Account & Why It Could Prove Valuable For Nonprofits
Alright, I admit that when I first heard about one of the newest social networks out there, Pheed, I was underwhelmed. Are we not overwhelmed with social networks as it is? But both professional engagement and personal curiosity got the better of me, and I signed up. The interface looks rather like Tumblr, whose praises […]
#DEVELOPMENT: Do You Have Big Plans For Your Big Data? Not So Fast…
The latest buzz concept is ‘Big Data.’ Like most buzz concepts/ words, its definition leaves much up to the mouth of the speaker. Big Data, whatever the specifics, refers to the large amount of information that can be collected from online activity and exchange of information (on social networks, for example). The ability to aggregate […]
#SOCIALNETWORKS: Can Niche Online Networks Outperform Your Nonprofit’s Facebook Page?
Our participation in online social networks seems well beyond the status of a ‘fad.’ In some parts of the world, people risk censure − if not their lives − to post important information on such platforms as Facebook and Twitter. These social networks are the current heavy hitters, of course. But what about developing people’s interests in […]
#SOCIALMEDIA: How Can We Efficiently Use Our Time On Social Networks?
A definition of irony: using social media to encourage you to find ways to trim your time on social media. But the real goal is efficiency, and it comes with great financial and emotional rewards. According to a survey done by the enterprise platform Harmon.ie last summer, “45% of employees work only 15 minutes or […]
#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, […]
#DESIGN: How To Follow The Branding Guidelines Of Twitter
When is a bird not a bird? When it’s a trademark that has been manipulated and falls outside of the branding guidelines established by the trademark holder. In this case, Twitter. Birds of a feather? Not for that poor Twitter bird: perhaps no other icon in modern business is both better known and abused well […]