The Duck Call

The Art of the High-Five

Sonny Mui — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 15:57:59 +0000

Sonny Mui

I'm giving complete and total credit for this post to our resident Brit, strategist Madeleine Milan. A couple months ago, I had the opportunity to deliver a high-five to Maddy. I was actually more of a recipient of it. It was loud. And it hurt. Really hurt. But I appreciated it, because it was done with such fervor and authority, that one can't help but feel that whatever the reason for the high-five, I deserved it.

I was apparently late to the party, having been told that Maddy is famous for her high-fives. But I've appreciated them so much, that I've gotten my wife to adopt the "Milan Maneuver." But I think more people should embrace this. Why should nonprofiteers care about their high-fives? Because everyone needs to celebrate their victories, however large or small. Made your year end fundraising goals? High-five. Launched a new website? High-five. Rescued the last chocolate donut from the coffee place? HIGH-friggin-FIVE.

To make sure that everyone is doing the high-five correctly, I'd drafted Maddy and Dan to help demonstrate the signature Madeleine Milan high-five.

Step 1: Acknowledge a victory. Preferably with a compatriot.

Step 2: Demand a high-five. As in, "high-five!"

Step 3: Line up the hand and arm, so that they're almost vertical.

Step 4: The wind-up. Pull back a little, and begin your forward momentum. Put a lot of weight into it.

Step 5: Connect. Do not slow down. Make sure you meet palms with your partner. Get as much surface area as possible.

The test that you've done this correctly is if the decibel level goes way up (it should sound like a whack) and that your palms should be red with hurt.

Repeat as necessary.

How many toes does your cat have? | Weekly Roundup

Elizabeth Ricca — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 21:05:13 +0000

Elizabeth Ricca

Allison Borrough of Grizzard shares a fun example of an integrated campaign that used Daniel—a 26-toed cat—as its fundraising hook. How can you help your next ask come alive for your audiences?
Before you hit "send," read this post from FirstGiving about how to make your emails relevant, readable, and effective.
Hang on tight, Facebook fans—Timeline is coming to a Page near you. Read on to learn more about what it might mean for your nonprofit.
If you're looking to build better relationships with your donors, start by saying thank-you. Check out Kivi's Nonprofit Communications Blog for an example of how valuable a sincere, timely thank-you can be.
Considering getting your nonprofit started on Pinterest? Make sure it plays nice with your website with these tips from John Haydon on Inspiring Generosity.

Visit the Duck Call every Monday for our weekly roundup of interesting reads from the online world of nonprofit communications. Liz (@elizabethricca) and Maddy (@maddymilan) take turns sharing useful links and other nonprofit fun.

$#*! Your Audiences Say

Elizabeth Ricca — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 22:52:26 +0000

Elizabeth Ricca

A few weeks ago, I could hardly glance at my Facebook stream without seeing a new "$#*! people say" video. If you missed the meme, do a little Google searching—there's a video out there for pretty much any group you'd care to name: parents, kids, lawyers, marketers, pet-owners, people in major cities. Here's the New York one (pretty fair, I must say):

It's a silly meme, but it's also a good reminder for nonprofit marketers to think about the language that your audience speaks. These videos get laughs and shares because they tap into a common language and shared experience—anyone who lives in Brooklyn knows what it's like to argue with a reluctant cab driver who's not keen on crossing the bridge.

So where can your nonprofit find opportunities to tailor your communications to your audiences' experiences and vocabulary? Perhaps you've created a list segment for the college students in your audience—try sending an email with a subject line that's tailored to reflect what's on their mind at this point in the school year. Or maybe you can adapt your next advocacy campaign to use a slightly different message or theme in each of the major cities that you're targeting. Put yourself in their shoes and think about what appeals to them, and you'll have relevant, share-worthy content in no time.

Got a great example of audience-centric language in action? Please share in the comments.

Are You Listening? | Weekly Roundup

Madeleine Milan — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 21:55:15 +0000

Madeleine Milan

We’ve all heard that listening online (no pun intended) is the first step to developing a social media strategy. But what the heck does it mean and how do you go about doing it? The ever-prolific Beth Kanter has some useful thoughts and tools for you.
Pay attention! Ron Ashkenas has three tips to help you grab people’s attention in less than 30 seconds.
Once you’ve grabbed people’s attention, how do you keep it and convert it into action? Carolyn Kopprasch has some ideas for converting email subscribers’ attention to clicks to action on the Emma blog.
We love consistency here at the Duck (especially the consistency of chocolate pudding), but keeping your communications consistent can be hard work. To make it a little easier, check out HubSpot’s useful template for developing an online communications style guide for your organization.
As we keep mentioning on the roundup, nonprofit storytelling is so hot right now. But storytelling doesn’t have to be all words, as Amber Bonner points out in her post about telling powerful stories through photographs.

Getting Downton with Nonprofit Communications

Madeleine Milan — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:04:23 +0000

Madeleine Milan

As a Brit in America, people frequently ask me if I watch Downton Abbey, to which I answer, “Of course I do. The Queen would behead me if I didn’t.”

Seriously though, I do watch Downton Abbey—not because the Queen makes me, but because it’s fun escapist nonsense in a world full of too much seriousness and bad news.

The best part about Downton Abbey isn’t just that it’s trashy fun with a British accent and funny hats, it’s that it’s educational trashy fun with a British accent and funny hats.

A typical nonprofit communications team from the early 1900s

Clearly I don’t mean it’s educational in terms of social history—the rosy picture it paints of a time when kind-hearted landed gentry got along happily with a cheerfully downtrodden army of servants is completely fictional.

No, I mean it’s educational in terms of nonprofit communications (yes, I’m really going there). Here’s how:

Upstairs at Downton, everything appears to run smoothly. The footmen are impeccably silent, tea is ready whenever people need it (which is all the time, apparently), and there’s always someone on hand to get you dressed for dinner. Below the stairs, on the other hand, an awful lot of hard work and shouting goes into creating that external appearance of calm and control.

Good nonprofit communications are a lot like the house in Downton Abbey: smooth and consistent on the outside, with a huge amount of work going on behind the scenes.

If you don’t have a multitude of staff at your beck and call to do all the hard work, it can feel impossible to stay calm, consistent, and clear in your external communications. Thankfully, though, there are some lessons you can borrow from Downton that’ll help make the job of presenting a collected and professional public face for your organization much easier.

1. Make sure everyone knows the rules
Part of the reason everything runs so smoothly at Downton is because (almost) all of the staff knows the rules about what to say and do in front of the Crawley family. Similarly, a big part of communicating consistently and clearly is giving everyone in your nonprofit guidelines on what to say and how to communicate about the organization.

A style guide (or as we here at Big Duck call it, a brandraising guide) that lays out all the details of your organization’s visual identity and messaging platform—that is, how your organization’s communications should look and sound——is a great way to help everyone understand, appreciate, and follow the guidelines for your communications. Which in turn leads to wonderfully coherent and together communications.

2. Have a butler
Carson, the Crawley’s butler, keeps the Downton staff in line and makes sure everything works like a well-oiled machine—even during a crisis.

Another big part of keeping your nonprofit’s communications running smoothly is having someone in charge of overseeing and coordinating it all. Even today, when everyone at a nonprofit is a de facto communicator, having one person who manages a communications calendar and “polices” the brand (even if only as part of their job) makes a big difference to how consistent, professional, and compelling your communications are.

And, of course, if you can find the time for it, a refreshing cup of tea with cucumber sandwiches and petits fours at 3 o’clock every afternoon can’t hurt either.

Go Big Blue | Weekly Roundup

Elizabeth Ricca — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 22:45:21 +0000

Elizabeth Ricca

Facebook is going public! So...what now? Dave Copeland talks through some of the implications for customers on ReadWriteWeb.
Could social media help you motivate and connect your program participants and volunteers? Alex Fitzpatrick explains how the National Peace Corps Association uses online networks to build their community.
Want to raise more money and drive action online? Say the magic word: "you." On 101Fundraising, Rebecca Davies shares some email tests demonstrating the importance and value of donor-centered messaging.
Here's a little spice for your Monday: interesting and "totally random" online resources for nonprofits from Nonprofit Tech 2.0.
Great Superbowl, huh? I'm a Jets fan myself, but I'm very pleased to see a fellow New York team win in such dramatic fashion. I spotted a few nonprofit-connected ads—one from the Kauffman Foundation and Bud Light's commercial kickstarting a fundraising campaign for shelter dogs. Any that I'm missing? Share in the comments.

Pink Ribbons, Pro-Choice, and Pinterest

Sarah Durham — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 16:16:32 +0000

Sarah Durham

Earlier this week, Susan G. Komen for the Cure announced that it will no longer fund $700,000 annually to Planned Parenthood. This funding gap translates into 170,000 mammograms for low-income women– nothing to sneeze at– so donors stepped up to fill the void (Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg, for your $250,000 matching gift!), and other organizations released statements sharing their points of view. As Kivi Leroux Miller, aptly puts it in her blog on the topic, “Komen for the Cure, it seems, is no longer a breast cancer charity, but a pro-life breast cancer charity.” According to Mother Jones, Kivi might be right.

This decision became a massive multi-media story overnight, and everyone’s fingers are in this messy communications pie. While Nancy Brinker’s video makes the case for their decision, she fails to address the political undercurrent that many people feel is implicit in this decision. By not tackling head-on the issue on most people’s minds, she’s missing the point of the protests and arguably making matters worse for her organization.

Perhaps the most innovative form of protesting I’ve seen this week is happening on Pinterest, the new social media darling of the nonprofit sector. Beth Kanter started a “Komen Can Kiss My Mammogram” group board, an aggregate of images related to this protest with comments by the 650+ contributors adding to it daily. It’s grassroots activism in pictures; Beth calls it “PinActivism”. Good stuff.

From a positioning point of view, I’m interested to see how this debacle will impact perceptions of the pink ribbon as the icon for the breast cancer movement? Komen has played a key role in making the pink ribbon (originally created by Evelyn Lauder) popular. If the ribbon can transcend politics it should weather the storm. If not, many organizations in the breast cancer movement may have some work to do.

Engaging your supporters with online actions

Rachel Hope Allison — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:51:32 +0000

Rachel Hope Allison

It’s a maxim that nonprofit professionals have heard more and more in recent years: “Thou shalt not treat your supporters like ATMs.”

By this, communications experts typically mean that nonprofits should do more than just ask their supporters for money, and that when they DO ask for money, they should ask for it in a warmer, more personal way.

Sounds reasonable, right? But here’s what makes the maxim even more urgent: Recent studies indicate that nonprofit supporters who take an advocacy action are seven more times likely to give.

For the lucky nonprofits that have a robust advocacy network in place then, it’s a no-brainer that they engage their supporters with actions on a regular basis.

But what about nonprofits who don’t have the staff or time to run a comprehensive advocacy program? (And what about organizations who don’t have a legislative agenda?)

Worry not. With a little creativity, some elbow grease, and the (relatively low-cost) magic of online tools, you can use even the simplest and most low-tech actions to strengthen your supporters’ engagement with your organization.

Here is a range of possible online actions you might use to engage your supporters:

Help them reach out to decision makers. Even if you don’t have a staff person on the hill, you can use simple tools like SignOn, The Petition Site, and Causes to allow your supporters to write their legislators. Is legislative advocacy not an option for you? Consider letter writing campaigns to CEOs or other corporate decision makers, or letter-to-the-editor campaigns to local newspapers. (Check out this great roundup of e-advocacy tools from Idealware for some more good ideas.)

Give them opportunities to learn and spread knowledge. Don’t have a legislative agenda? Don’t worry. You have a mission, and helping people learn about your issue and why it matters is also a worthwhile action. Encourage people to test their knowledge or learn something new by launching a quiz or poll with simple tools like Survey Gizmo or Survey Monkey. Sound too involved? Consider asking your community to share important reports, news stories or photos related to your issue through Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or even just a simple email forward.

Ask them to offer their two cents. As a nonprofit, you make decisions every day—why not bring your community in on them with periodic voting or polls? Possibilities range from asking them to choose the art you’ll feature in a publication (my favorite example is Easter Seals’ vote on the next year’s children’s art calendar), to asking them what issues they most want to see your nonprofit tackle in the upcoming year (Working America’s priorities vote is a good example). Either way, you’ll be giving your community a voice in your story.

Encourage them to use their own creativity. While simple, easy-to-complete actions will probably get the most people engaged, you might also offer the occasional action that asks supporters to share a bit more. Consider a photo contest like Ocean Conservancy’s Marine Wildlife and Seascape contest, or story-sharing campaigns like NTEN’s recent member appreciation month. You’ll not only give supporters an opportunity to use their own creativity, you’ll also gather some great images and stories to share with the rest of your community.

…And those few ideas are just the tip of the iceberg. What easy or creative ways have you been engaging your supporters these days? We’d love to hear your thoughts—please share them in the comments!

Don't Trust the Messenger | Weekly Roundup

Madeleine Milan — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:37:33 +0000

Madeleine Milan

Public Relations firm Edelman released its 2012 Trust Barometer last week, with some interesting findings for nonprofits. Among them, as Katya Andresen points out, people now trust regular employees of an organization and “people like myself” more than they trust nonprofit representatives. Time to start thinking about ways to help your clients, supporters, and employees tell your story for you.
Just in case you hadn’t heard all the hullabaloo, Google announced it’s about to update the privacy policy for all of its products. The change won’t just affect you individually—together with Google’s recent “search plus you world” update, it could also change how people find your organization by affecting what they see in Google ads and search results.
Looking for inspiration for your next fundraising campaign? SOFII’s put together a list of 23 (yes, 23—who doesn’t love a prime number?) all-time great campaigns that should kick-start your thinking.
Wouldn’t it be great if there was a cheap way to test your fundraising messages before you sent them? Well, Karen Zapp has two such cost-effective testing mechanisms for you to check out.
Now that Facebook’s rolling out its timeline all over the place, Beth Kanter's pulled together some great advice on how to use timeline apps to engage your supporters.

Screen-filling Visual Goodness

Scott Moe — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 22:58:10 +0000

Scott Moe

For a while now I've been looking to employ a nifty little trick in web design: the use of browser-filling imagery to impress. I'm talking about screen-filling visual goodness taking over your browser window. Why would anyone do such a thing?

The more we share photos and watch TV and movies online, the more we get used to having immersive visual experiences on the web. Users are coming to expect not just information but an experience from the websites they visit.

Take the website for the Call of Duty video game for example. (Don't judge me for loving this). See how juicy and rich that image is? Feel like you're in battle yet? Pretty great right? We should totally play video games right now. The large image mimics the experience of playing the game. It's a large-scale promotion for a very large scale, experience-rich product.

It used to be that we'd have to fit our designs into a fairly small space so that folks like my dear mother could view it on an outmoded computer with a small monitor and an old browser. (Hi Mom!) With newer, larger monitors the restrictions are loosening. And now that my mom actually has a nicer computer than I do, it's safer than ever to start pushing those larger designs!

Another example of large imagery setting the stage for a website.

Websites with bigger, bolder images are becoming more common and the best ones still pay attention to that hallowed web ground: the "web safe area" where content can be seen by most people.

Let's get back to that Call of Duty site. Open it up. Notice as you stretch the browser wider and wider the image fills the browser but the login button, logo, and content modules all fall within that 960 pixel wide sweet spot, the current-day, generally accepted web safe area. You get the cinema feel of a large image but you can still access all the important content.

So we can do big images now, but do we need to? The short answer is no. What is the goal of your website? Is it about capturing an experience you want your audience to have, like volunteering overseas? A large, inspiring image could be good for that. But if your site needs to get of lot of detailed information to a viewer as quickly and clearly as possible, maybe you don't want to distract them with a huge picture.

The good news is that designers have more room to work with. Whether that larger space is used for the clear organization of lots of information, or a single, large and inspiring photo, web users are having more in-depth experiences online. If you haven't already, maybe it's time you bought your mom a nice new computer?