And because her business is a step down from “small” — call it “micro” — this information applies to small and micro nonprofits who exist with just one person, perhaps not even full time, and a handfull of volunteers.

And, yes, getting all of these site registered and ready takes a full day; I chose a Saturday, when I didn’t have my day job. And maintaining them takes time as well, but they don’t have to be built in a single day.

If ever we come off as being something other than what we really are, it’s when we’re trying to impress someone.  That’s true of us as individuals and true of us as organizations.

And when does it seem more important for an organization to try to impress someone than when it’s asking for financial support?

Sadly, the results often reflect this misguided attempt.

One of the most difficult chores of employers today is trying to interpret the truth of resumes that have been “inflated.”  Anyone who has had to do it knows it’s not pleasant work.  If you run a nonprofit organization, or even a part of one, and have had to go through the process of finding a worthy employee, you know what this means.

Why, then, would you assume that anyone out there wants to have to wade through fundraising letter ”inflation,” if that terminology can be transferred.  Your potential donors very likely are going to understand your organization’s mission and effort, and if you’ve been doing your job of communicating with them regularly all along, they’re going to know your accomplishments.

So what’s incumbent upon you is simply to provide what the advertising firm McCann Erickson has had as its slogan for decades: “The Truth Well Told.”  If you believe that persuasive writing is something other than this, read Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” (Even the title is nothing but three-letter words.) Published in 1952 and leading to his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, the novella is the essence of simplicity.

Hemingway doesn’t need elaborate words or structures or “constructs” to make the world of Santiago, the Cuban fisherman, come to life.  And neither do you.  (As an aside, as you’re asking for support, keep in mind the words of Santiago, that “man is not made for defeat.”)

It’s not just your words and tone that are important; Apply simplicity in your message, your fonts, your paper.  If this is truly a “letter” you’re sending (and it should be addressed to the individual, not “dear supporter,” and it should be personally signed by you, even if you’re sending out a thousand of them), it requires only the typewriter font in one size with an occasional underline.

No time for a novel, or even a novella

And it can be relatively short.  They can call or go to your website for more information, but if you’re been communicating all along over the past year (and each communication must offer the opportunity to contribute), they already have all the “facts.”  They just need to be reminded.

The facts may be that this is an annual request; they’ve donated before, and here are the wonderful results of their contribution from last year.  If this is a special request, here’s the reason and here are the wonderful results from the last time you made a special request.  With this statement, transparency and honesty are paramount.  If your recent efforts fell short, admit it and tell your potential donor why and what’s going to be different this time.  Treat them as part of the family, bringing them into the family discussion.

This is not the time to entertain them; save that for your annual event which will provide song and dance, etc. as part of the program.  This is not even the time to educate them; that’s what your regular newsletter and other mailing and events are for.  This is not even the time to thank them for last year’s contribution; that better have been done long ago.

Keep it simple, from the heart

This is time to make your appeal.  Summarize what you’ve told them in newsletters past, that you’ll be able to have more success stories like those of little Johnny and little Annie; that you’re doing everything possible to keep as great a percentage of donations as possible serving your clients (they’ll see this from the plain vanilla letter), or whatever else you think you need to say.  If possible, keep it to the front of one sheet of paper.  Let them know that they can get any further information they need by contacting you.

And ask for the donation.  Ask for the donation.  Politely, of course, but ask for the donation.

If there’s ever a problem in any kind of sales, (yes, this is sales), it’s failure to “close.”

“I’m thanking your in advance for matching your donation of $100 from last year and I give you my personal assurance that it’ll be put to good use.  If you want to add a bit to that figure, it will expand our ability to help in the cause which you have supported so passionately for all these years.”

Write like you would write to your grandmother; treat each donor as if they were a respected member of the family and you value what they provide.  And mean it.  Treat them this way whether they give $5 or $5,000.  You’d never subject Grandma to a slick dog-and-pony show or expect her to read through eight pages of sales pitch.

Simplicity is not just easier on your donors, it’s a lot easier on you, too.  And a lot better for your cause as well.

If you’d like to enjoy The Old Man and the Sea, you might choose to listen to Donald Sutherland read it.

A generation ago, business schools were promoting “competitive advantage,” or “comparative advantage.”  An example was the “Chicago boys,” businessmen trained at the University of Chicago who in the early 1970s helped remold the economy of the nation of Chile.  What Chile had in abundance was copper production owned by the government (after a few expropriations) and a high percentage of the world’s reserves.  In the ensuing almost four decades, the national copper company succeeded in becoming the force in the industry.  Today, its decisions to produce more or to produce less do much to set the market.

A similar term seen today is “unique selling proposition,” so commonly used that it’s often called simply USP, with no further explanation.  That’s more apt for nonprofits, which generally doesn’t have access to a commodity or other tangibles that it can leverage competitively.

One vital question you must ask yourself, as a marketer for a non-profit, is “what is our USP?”  Here’s a seven-step process to help you obtain that information:

1) Gather the leaders of your organization into a room for a one-hour meeting and have them quietly write out precisely what your organization has to offer to its public.  Don’t let anyone speak or everyone will agree with the first person who talks.  That’s the best possible way to lose insights that you desperately need.  Take about 5 minutes.

2) Then have each, in turn, read his ideas and let others brainstorm about them.  Write all these ideas on a flip chart so the pages can be torn off and posted on the wall.  Limit this process to about 20 minutes.

3) Give each person a chance to add to or alter his own contribution.  Take about 2 minutes each.

4) Use a consensus-generating method to narrow down the definition of your USP to two or three items at most.  One would be best, but few organizations seem to be willing to admit to having only one great, unique thing about them.  Take up the rest of your hour in accomplishing this.

Set up another hour-long meeting to accomplish the next steps.  This gives your leadership time to mull over and become more comfortable with your USP.

5) This is a tough one.  Decide if your USP is still relevant in today’s world.  I’m currently working with an organization in our community that has become a respected institution over several decades, but it’s having financial problems.  Those problems probably stem from the fact that the service it offers is no longer viable.  Times changed; it didn’t.  Worse, it didn’t even understand that the world around it was changing.

6) Assuming that your main offering to your community, your USP, is still relevant, determine who your audiences are.  That’s plural, because you will have one audience for fundraising, another for volunteers, another for clients, etc.

7) Integrate your USP into your PR and marketing.  Do it subtly, of course, but make sure that you are reading over your statement of USP before writing a press release, before talking to the local Rotary Club, before asking a new acquaintance to consider volunteering.

This many not be an easy exercise for long-established organizations and may open the doors to more internal debate than you wanted.  But despite this, or because of this, it’s important.  Perhaps Socrates had nonprofit organizations in mind when he said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

If you already have one, you still need to give them consideration, since your website, just as all aspects of your business, needs to be re-evaluated on a regular basis.

Observe that there is no consideration of whether you need a website.  There are few reasons for a nonprofit organization not to have one.  It’s so much a fixture of the present age that its absence is noticeable and disconcerting.

Here are the eight questions to consider:

1) Who is your audience?  If you say everyone, you might just as well say no one.  You can’t be all things to all people.  Now if you refine it to “everyone right here in River City,” you might have a point, assuming that you’re an organization that does want to reach everyone locally.  You need to ask this question of each press release, too, and it’s likely somewhat different for each event or activity or announcement you have.  Perhaps your website is a cumulation of the answers for the various releases.

2) What does your group offer to each audience segment?  If it’s for your “client base,” the website will have a different type of information than if it’s for potential benefactors.  If it’s for both, then each needs a different part of the website as a base.  The same is the case if there are a dozen audiences.

3) Can each audience segment find what it needs?  Organization is critical.  Even though a website is so much more customizable than, say, a book, many fail to make it simple to find what the visitor wants.  Don’t fill the home page with so much junk that nothing can be found.  Make navigation clear and simple.  If you have a web page about donations, have a tab labeled clearly and simply “donations.”  Make the hierarchy logical.  Have someone who doesn’t know your organization critique the website and search for various things that each audience segment might want.

4) What is of supreme importance right now?  If you’re having an event, the home page should clearly direct visitors to all the pertinent information.  Event information should be front and center, whether it’s a link or a reprinting of the press release.  Yes, that means you may have to change it on a regular basis.

5) Is content king?  I will say this over and over, and if I don’t, I certainly mean to.  One the internet, content has to be king.  Make sure that as much information as possible (all well organized, of course) about your organization and its activities, etc., is on your website.  No, this won’t be accomplished on day one and maybe not even during year one.  But have a plan to get onto the website everything you can about the Everytown Dogooders Club.  And follow through with that plan.  And re-evaluate annually what else can fill out the site.  Not only will the search engines love your website, but the visitors will spend more time there and be more apt to pay attention to your group.

6) Is there a clear call to action?  It’s sort of silly to go the extent of building a website and not telling visitors what it’s all about.  Do you want contribution? Do you want volunteers?  Do you want everyone praying for world peace?  Then say so!  Lead visitors to the form or the button or the phone number or whatever.  Make it extremely easy for them.  Make the PayPal “donate” button big and obvious and on several pages.  If you want people to leave their stock portfolio to your organization, tell them everything they need to know about the process.  And ask for the “sale.”

7) Is the contact information clear and complete?  If they want to make a contribution, whom do they contact?  Is it the same person they would call or e-mail if they want to volunteer?  If yes, say so.  If no, say that, too.  Be abundantly clear and complete with your contact information.  This isn’t a secret society, is it?

8) What is your mission?  In simple language, please, as if you were describing the organization to your eight-year-old.  So many organizations leave out their mission or couch it in such nebulous language that it could be either the U.N. or a darts team from the local pub.  If content is king, then clarity is at least crown prince.

Carefully plan your website.  Several perspectives are best during that planning, but have one person ultimately responsible for making it cohesive.  Have outsiders check it out after it’s up, asking them for honesty.  Re-evaluate regularly.  A good website can be a priceless contributor to your organization, but frankly, a poor one can be just as much a detriment.

As the year 2008 was closing out, the research firm comScore Inc. released figures for online video viewing in October.  Almost 150 million internet users in the United States watched an average of 92 videos each that month for a total of 274 minutes.  How many of them were your videos?  How many people read that many pages in a book?  Or that many articles in a newspaper?

Google, which acquired YouTube in 2006, has a 40% market share, accounting for about 5.4 billion of the 13.5 billion videos watched that month.  Almost 100 million viewers watched video on Google sites.

Video watchers account for 77% of U.S. internet users, comScore said.

You don’t have to remake Gone With The Wind.  The average online video was only 3.0 minutes long, the research showed.  And viewers don’t watch a web video for a long duration.  Web video services provider TubeMogul reported that only about two-thirds of the original viewers are still there after 30 seconds and if it goes more than 5 minutes, only 10% are still with you.  So get your hook in fast and your point across even faster, just as you would with the lead of a news story.  This is no place for slow introductions or dramatic buildups.

If you agree that video is going to be good for your organization, here’s a three-step plan:

1.) Get yourself a video camera. Don’t start with HD; its time is not yet here and you probably don’t have enough horsepower in your computer to do it justice.  Plan to spend a minimum of $200 to $300 and get a camera that uses a tape or records on a built-in hard disk.  Great size and expense isn’t really necessary for web work.

2.) Learn how to use a video editing program.  As you get started, Windows Movie Maker or Mac’s iMovie should do the job, and they come free with your computer.  They are rather intuitive and can do many of the things you need to do for basic movies.  Worry more about getting good audio into the camera’s microphone, with as little background noise as possible.

3.) Set up an account on YouTube and get used to uploading videos.  Go ahead a get a YouTube “channel” for your organization and starting linking to the individual movies from your website.

Have fun doing it.  While creating a video is a bit more time-consuming that writing a press release, it also can be more rewarding.  You’ll probably soon discover there are several members of your organization that are quite “comfortable” in front of the camera.  Let them go for it.  You’ll get better as you get experience.  And your group will reap the benefits.

When her daughter was born, the organization made a professional, short video of her testimony.  At the recent banquet, they played that video, then she got up and talked about her two-year-old daughter and the joy she had brought to the woman’s life.  There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

More than 400 people had attended the banquet (which is about 1 percent of the population of the city in which it was held) and opened their wallets to the cause.  Looking at the statistics objectively, I thought they were able to rescue relatively few unborn children.  Yet the outpouring of support was completely disproportionate.  Why?

Because the appeal was very personal.  Care Net was fortunate in being able to find a young woman with a personality that allowed her to speak well and to transcend any social barriers that might have existing in her life just a few years ago.  Everyone in the room believed that this one success story was worth whatever it might cost.  And if they could contribute to two or three or a dozen more like it, they weren’t going to hesitate in paying the price.

Do people in your community care, truly care, about what you’re doing?  Is there a passion that is transferred from you to the public?  Do you feel that passion yourself?

In reaching out to your community for your cause, you need to make it personal.  And the face you put on it must be one that people will want to care about.  Our little community started a couple of years ago to have its own Relay for Life, which raises money for cancer research and support.  Though I was able to see the tremendous amount of work and networking that went on behind the scenes, it seemed to many that the local effort went from zero to ninety miles an hour overnight.

Why?  Because the faces of cancer survivors, those who have benefited from research, are very personal and compelling.  And almost everyone knows someone who has survived or succumbed.  This personal approach, using large groups of participants to reach an even larger audience one at a time, worked well.  This community gave on a per capita scale that no larger city could hope to approach.

Look around your community at successful organizations.  How personal are their appeals?  Whether you’re seeking volunteers, contributions or just recognition, see if you can make your “face” more appealing, more compelling.  Keep it real, to be sure, but make certain that your passion is passed on to those you’re trying to reach.

Basic facts:  Both basic assumptions are about 90 percent wrong.  Remember that watermelon bust the Dogooders had at the park last July 4, with everyone clowning around and acting crazy?  That is how the community looks upon the group — a bunch of party animals that uses the association as an excuse to get together and blow off steam.

It’s a law of our social nature — people remember us at our weakest moments.

The day after Thanksgiving is one of the biggest shopping days of the year.  Do you really think people have anything on their minds the week before that other than the upcoming Christmas sales?  Did I give Ole Joe a can of beans and two bucks for something?

If you have to assume, assume in a way that will be beneficial to the Dogooders and, most importantly, to their cause.

Let’s assume that 50 percent of the community knows all about the group and the food drive.  Great!  We don’t even have to worry about them.

So let’s concentrate on that other half that just moved in from Boondocks City.  With those folks, we have to start at square one.  That’s where your publicity material should begin.  That information can be covered quickly (with lots more stuff available on a website) so that the publicity material can move quickly on to the beneficiaries and to the event and how good it will make everyone feel.

Assumptions quite often are erroneous, so if you insist on making them, err on the side of caution.  No great amount of details may be needed, but simple reminders are important and helpful both to your media contacts and to the general public.

Face it.  When you only prepare for a certain event once a year, you’ll forget a lot of the details in another 12 months.  That’s one reason humans are willing to volunteer for the same tasks year after year:  We forget all the headaches from last time.

So a handbook solves many of those issue.  Ideally, everyone on the “Big Event” committee contributes to an overall handbook, but even if that’s not the case, do so for publicity and marketing.  Here are some of the details it needs to contain:

1)  Goals and objectives.  What, specifically, does the event do for your small nonprofit and for the community it serves?  Add a new page to this section each year, because goals tend to evolve.  That will give you an idea of how marketing also needs to change.

2)  Timetables and deadlines.  With luck, you’ll open the handbook up next year before the first deadline.  We tend to forget just how much time these things tend to take.  If there are changes with the media, the schedule or other attributes of the event, insert a new sheet each year rather than using white-out or the like.  That way you can track your history.

3)  Media contacts.  Who do you deal with at which media?  Get their names spelled right and phone numbers and emails once and you’ll have them.  One of the first things you’ll do each year is make sure this list is up to date.  Note here any particulars about each media: Did they have special needs, were they helpful or not, etc.  If there are personnel changes, pull out your deadline sheet and go over it with the new personnel.

4)  The actual publicity.  Keep copies of the articles you send out, as well as how it appears, and you’ll learn how to improve (at least in the eyes of the medium that has made changes in your work.)  You also won’t have to reinvent the wheel, though there are reasons to be creative each year.  But by not having to redo the basic work, you’ll have more time to do other stuff better.

5)  Results.  When you market, track the results.  Details on how that works require a book to itself, but if you can put your finger on any particular results, note that in detail in the handbook.

6)  Suggestions.  After the event, there’s usually a meeting where everybody has input into what happened, what went wrong and how it can be done better next time.  Even if you’re not planning on using all of those ideas for next year’s marketing, at least keep track of them.  You’ll never know when one of them might be useful.

Make sure there are multiple copies of your PR and marketing handbook around so that it doesn’t get lost.  Put it on a computer somewhere (or better yet, in a non-public part of your website) so it easily can be emailed to your successor or to helpers.  Be sure you update all copies equally.

Then enjoy how much easier next year’s event will be to publicize.

Seek out the professionals.

If you’ve been responsible in your job over the recent months, if you’ve respected deadlines, if you’ve said “thank you” at appropriate times, if you’ve done you best at getting other press releases together well, perhaps you can approach the newspaper editor or radio news manager and get them to pull this one off for you.

We’ve agreed it’s a big event.  That means there’s probably lots of community interest.   And we hope it’s something exciting to write about and photograph.

First, let’s go back a few weeks.  Timing is just as important in PR as it is in stand-up comedy.  Last-minute requests are going to get laughed at or ignored.  But as you’re planning the event, you know the details well in advance and several weeks before it’s going to happen you can go see the local journalism pro (or pros) and enlist their aid.

1)  So the first step is timeliness.  You’ve been doing this a while, or your predecessor left a notebook filled with all the pertinent information, so you’ll know what timely means to the paper or radio or TV station or whoever you’re dealing with.

2)  Be prepared.  Know what you want.  Is it an on-air interview?  Is it just a photo with caption?  Is it an illustrated feature story?  Know who’s available to be interviewed.  And get their acquiescence as well.  In advance of your meeting with the media.  And make sure they’re prepared for being in the spotlight.

3)  Be willing to accept something other than what you think is best.  The newsman might have a better idea or he may have constraints you don’t know about.  Sure, make the best pitch you can, but you may not get exactly what you want.  The better you’ve greased the skids throughout your relationship, the “luckier” you will be.

4)  Don’t stop here.  Use other guerrilla marketing techniques as well.  Send a series of emails to that huge list you’ve built up over the years. Send you members out to talk to other clubs and organizations around town.  Record the radio interview and put it on your website.  Copy the newspaper article, physically or electronically, and send it to everyone who cares about your group.  Maybe it’s even time to spend a little money on advertising.  Do everything you possibly can to make this event successful.

5)  As I always suggest, say thanks to those who helped.  Say it publicly and encourage others in your group to seek them out and say thanks as well.  It’s never too early to prepare for next year’s event.

For many small organizations, the idea of using the internet for promoting themselves seems beyond reach.

Without paid web experts on staff, it’s difficult for a small nonprofit even to develop a plan, much less to carry it out.  There seem to be too many questions, too many choices, too many roadblocks for the average non-geek to think about promotion on the internet.  Simple questions, such as whether to have a Facebook or a MySpace site for social networking, can appear overwhelming.  What’s a small organization to do?

First, analyze your organization.  If you are truly local only, then there may be little need for many of the offerings of the internet.  Yet some web opportunities may have great value, in real dollars and cents.  For example, if you can send out an email newsletter, you can save on printing and postage.  And depending on your choice of layout, you even can make the creation of it a lot easier than with a printed version.

That means you can send them out more frequently, getting messages to your members more quickly.  So that could mean making more money as well as saving it.

Many organizations, however, with a little brainstorming, can see many advantages to a strong web presence.  An organization with which I’ve worked for many years is a small museum with a fabulous Smithsonian-designed exhibit that attracts about 25,000 visitors a year.  It’s in a small city with a rich heritage, making a history museum an integral part of the community.

But it also has a small budget and an ever-aging pool of volunteers to supplement its three-person staff.  So how can it use the web to its advantage?

Take, for example, its oral history program.  It’s one thing to record these histories, but how much more work is it to get them transcribed?  Many former city residents are spread throughout the country and can’t volunteer to come in once a week to help with the work.

But there are types of work that can be done wherever a person lives, such as transcribing or editing transcriptions. It just becomes a matter of finding these people.  That’s where a good website and/or blog and/or email newsletter comes in.

The museum has an impressive library, which thousands of people a year use to piece together family stories.  While volunteers help them find the local parts of family history, the museum almost never gets back the entire biography of these folks.

Imagine how that would change if it had a wiki and directed all the folks who come into the library to that site.  Without any future effort by the museum, many of these families (especially those with web-savvy youngsters) would choose to make contributions to that wiki that include information far beyond what the museum library now contains.

These are just a couple of ideas the Bisbee Mining & Historical Museum is now pondering for its future internet endeavors.  They must be thought of as long-term efforts, starting slowing and growing over the years.

But the sooner your internet initiatives get under way, the sooner they will bear fruit.

Footnote added July 23, 2009:  The Museum also is now making use of a Facebook site that has more than 100 fans.  Feel free to join. ]]> http://marketingandnonprofits.com/?feed=rss2&p=8 0 http://marketingandnonprofits.com/?p=8