This post is a continuation of a previous article about how to start and carry on a conversation with online visitors and communities about your nonprofit entity and it’s mission. Below are 8 more ideas and strategies to add to your list of possible action items to leverage the power of the Internet!
7. Speak to your visitors/users at their level. Let them determine how quickly and at what stage they choose to become involved with your organization
8. Develop a marketing strategy that will win over your website visitors, making them friends, and turning those friends into donors, and grow those donors into loyal donors. This form of marketing is a process; it provides the kind of stability needed within an increasingly cluttered Internet.
9. Develop a fundraising and acknowledgement application that encourages, affirms, and leverages recent and past online donations. Provide an integrated, personalized “story telling” system that describes saved and changed lives. By applying basic database marketing techniques learned in your direct mail program, tell your donors how their dollars are critical to your organization’s success; do the work necessary to grow them into loyal donors.
10. Update your homepage and the general content of your site daily. Blogs are GREAT for writing regular columns on such subjects as donor feedback, advisory board decisions, how lives are being changed and saved, and your future organizational goals. A website can become a gravesite if you do not refresh its content regularly. Give them a reason to return regularly.
11. Consider an appropriate use of bonuses (books, booklets, contests, tapes, CDs, etc.) as gifts for a visitor/user’s response to a survey, donation, or participation in an online focus group. Tailor this strategy to the uniqueness of your mission.
12. Invite interactivity by providing an online calendar that highlights your nonprofit’s events. This calendar could include the promotion of a speakers bureau, Web casting, podcasting, overseas trips, conventions, weekend briefings, internal strategic staff meetings, etc. Ask people for their email address whenever and wherever you can, and use it to update them on changes or additions of new events and activities on your calendar.
13. Create “testimonial” opportunities for your friends, donors and other advocates. Video and audio testimonials are extremely effective as opposed to traditional text. This allows them to give you feedback on how your organization is relevant in their lives in a more personal, from the heart, way. Giving time and resources to help others is important; it is equally important to ask for “stories” from those people who make your mission or cause possible.
14. Create a “wish-list” of gifts or in-
kind items your organization needs to further its mission, such as food, clothing, cars, school supplies, building supplies, etc. Begin implementing this critical involvement content and you will be communicating with your donors more intelligently and effectively.
You will also start seeing results because you have initiated meaningful connections where future donors suddenly give you permission to continue the conversation.
However, you still may ask, how will these people remember the mission of our organization? How can we cut through the Internet clutter and be seen and remembered as unique? How can we make sure our new friends return again and again?Important questions and that’s what an effective brand strategy is all about!
Stay tuned for an INCREDIBLE EXAMPLE of a nonprofit that incorporates much of the strategies we offer in this article that GutZy Women discovered just the other day. The site is incredibly creative, visually appealing and incorporates much of the new Web 2.0 capabilities that sets their organization apart from the crowd!
