Blogging for People Who Should

The 5 things your nonprofit blog needs

Cassie — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:08:24 +0000

According to Roger Burks and NTEN, our identity- and personality-less nonprofit blogs need less brochure speak and more authentic, engaging stories.

He offers these five element of a successful nonprofit blog:

1. A champion – maybe that’s you, acting as “a conduit between those who want to contribute their voices to the blog and those who want to use those voices for organizational content, such as marketing and social media.”

2. A vision – one that’s “easy to understand – and realistic to achieve.” Roger encapsulates this in the blog’s description, which clearly communicates what this blog is, who is behind it and who it is for. He uses the example of the Mercy Corps blog description: “A daily look into the work, thoughts and ideas of our team around the world.”

3. A sustainability strategy – a plan for providing and soliciting content in the quiet times.

4. Flexibility – to open up the project to other styles and voices than the brand traditionally uses.

5. Storytelling mentors – to build your organization’s non-communications staff into personal storytellers.

Solid advice! Thanks to Roger for sharing your powerful insight.

Looking for blogging support? We’re offering coaching sessions for blogging newbies with our one-on-one version of Blogging for People who Should – get in touch if you’re interested: cassie at collectivestrategy dot ca

Four (more) reasons to start blogging

Cassie — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:08:34 +0000

I stumbled across this research (thanks, Heather @ Diosa and Adam at LEWIS PR) giving you four more business cases to be blogging:

71% have greater visibility in their industry
63% said clients purchased products and services

56% stated their company was now regarded as a thought leader
40% have been asked to speak at conferences

These stats, though a couple of years old, create some of the best support for blogs as marketing, expertise-building and networking tools – so, what are you waiting for?

Is the internet killing the music industry?

Eric — Thu, 26 May 2011 01:52:58 +0000

Apparently, yes. Downloading songs for free is destroying the profits of the traditional recording companies. But that doesn’t mean that musicians can no longer make a living creating music. They just have to go about it in a different way.

This week, my favourite podcast, Planet Money (from NPR) did a profile of a successful singer-songwriter (you’ve never heard of) who makes a very comfortable living giving away his music on his blog.

Here’s the Planet Money episode, ‘Is this man a Snuggie?‘ it’s 20 minutes long, and well worth the listen

Jonathan Coulton, the musician in questions, gives music away, yet he makes a (very good) living as a musician. It’s a bit counterintuitive, but here’s how he explains it:

“I give away music because I want to make music, and I can’t make music unless I make money, and I won’t make any money unless I get heard, and I won’t get heard unless I give away music.”

It’s a prime example of how the internet allows musicians to make a decent living if they focus on engaging with a few passionate fans. The ‘1000 True Fans‘ idea is that the internet allows artists to be found by and stay connected with the relatively small number of enthusiastic fans that it takes to provide them with a reasonable living. It’s a fascinating idea that the future of professional musicians lies in engaging powerfully with a relatively small fan base, as opposed to requiring huge numbers of record sales to survive.

What does this have to do with blogging, you ask? Only that Jonathan started with – and still relies heavily on – his modest blog at jonathancoulton.com to connect with fans. He is so successful that record companies have approached him to learn the ‘trick’ of internet music promotion.

His response:

“I wish I could say there was some trick to it, but it’s like starting a fire without matches. Small things first that burn easily, blow on it a bit, wait for it to get big enough so you can add bigger pieces of wood. Sometimes it doesn’t catch and then you start over, maybe you use different materials, maybe you move to some new spot. It’s not like you can throw a switch… it took me years of various kinds of trying and not trying to get traction like Baby Got Back [his first song that had a lot of downloads].”

[Spoiler alert: if you plan to listen to the Planet Money podcast - and you really should - stop reading now. If you don't plan to listen, read on...] I think the most interesting part of this whole profile is when they ask Jonathan if he could have made a living playing music before the internet. He admits that, 20 years ago, he moved to New York City to do just that, and couldn’t make a go of it. Now he makes a very comfortable living (even by NYC standards) by giving away his music, ‘allowing’ people to pay for it, playing gigs, and even organizing on a Jonathan Coulton themed Carribean cruise each year.

Values + Value: Blogs as storytelling labs

Cassie — Wed, 25 May 2011 20:36:41 +0000

Credit: skycaptaintwo on Flickr

Blogs are great testing grounds for honing our storytelling craft, and should be a place to play with the types of stories we tell and the way they’re delivered. Once you’ve identified the goals of your blog and figured out who your audience is (Session 1), choose and experiment with your stories from a place that makes use of your values and your value. Here are a couple of methods to work with:

Values + Change = Public Narrative. I’m pretty obsessed with Marshall Ganz’s Public Narrative, and it’s likely because the formula is fairly easy to understand (not to mention that we Canucks can be suckers for all-things-associated-with-Obama’08). Geared towards campaigners, this is a 3-step process of weaving together personal, community and campaign stories as a way of communicating shared values and vision.

Think about the ‘values framework’ that you’re operating in by answering a few questions about the campaigning post you’re writing:

Why do I care? From Ganz’s Story of Self, build trust with your audience through a story that tells them who you are and why you care - where you’re from, how you got into your work, and why you’re passionate about this issue. Alternately, share the source of your motivation – tell the story of the person, animal or place that keeps you focused and energized.

Why do we care? Also called the Story of Us, create a link between the values that the above story exemplifies (hard work, protection, equity) to those of your audience – tap into their interests, cares and motivations.

What can I do? This Story of Now creates the opportunity for your reader to connect their vision for the world with a real-world moment. It gives them the chance to be part of the change – as a funder, an advocate or a volunteer.

Connecting these opportunities that we’ve created for our audience together, we begin to create a picture of valuable engagement and hopefully victories – and these engagement and campaign stories need to be captured and shared.

Value + Facts = Impact. We are stepping away from telling people the problems of the world through policy jargon and big, complex numbers and finding ways to show them what’s going on through compelling stories. When we can create value for our audience by making our data and research more accessible and interesting, we can scale up our campaign’s impact. Here are a few questions, whose answers can deepen our effectiveness:

What’s our campaigning niche? Our strengths are visible in our past successes, and these success stories offer a wealth of insight into who we are and what we do best. When we embrace this reputation and align it with the change we are now seeking, we’re more likely to gather the supporters we need.

What does success look like? When we can combine our critical analysis with the more vulnerable act of sharing our vision for the future, these stories can help define the nature of the victories we are seeking. They can rally and motivate those in positions of power willing to support your analysis and vision, and put those blocking progress on notice as to what change will look like.

How are we being heard? Testing the variations of our stories with our key audiences, incorporating their feedback and learning from small failures gives us the

It’s our stories that make us interesting – they demonstrate the value we bring to our work and community, and they help to illustrate our individual, organizational and collective values. But how do we know which stories will best communicate our effectiveness, resonate with our audience and motivate them? It’s an ongoing writing, listening and learning process, and blogging can be your learning lab.

Two ways to deal with ‘Posted in’ links on WordPress.com blogs

Eric — Tue, 10 May 2011 01:27:49 +0000

I think Wordpress.com is by far the best free blogging tool out there, but it has one glaring problem. At the bottom of each post, it puts a link to the categories the post is filed under.
This sounds great, but it’s not. People follow these links, expecting to read more posts on the topic on your blog. But you end up sending people to a random page of vaguely related posts by hundreds of other WordPress.com bloggers.

Blogger does a similar trick with their Next Blog ‘feature’ – I explained how to deal with that glitch here. Here are two ways to avoid this problem on WordPress.com

How to remove or disable the ‘tag’ links on WordPress.com

There are two ways to work around this ‘feature’, a non-technical solution that anyone can do, and a technical (CSS) solution.

Non-technical fix: Use Unique Tags For Your Posts

The trick here is to tag and categorize your posts with labels that are unique to your blog. Since the aggregator page is only displaying posts that have the exact same tag, it is much more likely to only include your posts. This gives readers what they want – more of your posts on the topic – when they click on tags.

How To:
1. Choose a set of tags unique to your blog
Tag and categorize your posts with a tag that no one else on WordPress.com is going to use, but is still somewhat readable. In essence, it’s going to be a bit of gibberish with some readable elements.

For example, if you are writing about blogging, instead of using tags or categories like ‘wordpress‘ when writing about the software, put a unique tag that only you will use, like ‘myblogname-wordpress‘

There are two drawbacks to this method. First is that your readers may be slightly confused by your use of labels for your posts. The second drawback is that you’re not likely to get traffic from those WordPress.com aggregator pages.

Unfortunately, for most free WordPress.com themes, this is the only available option.

Technical fix: Use CSS to hide the categories link

In this fix, you are hiding the category links from your readers, using Cascading Style Sheets. CSS, as it’s known, is a basic script that is used by your WordPress.com blog to determine how each element of your site looks to readers: color, font, background.

We’re going to use CSS to hide the links on the bottom of blog posts. Your blog posts will still be organized under your defined categories, available as a widget on your sidebar. Only those misleading links under your posts – the ones that lead readers to a mega page they didn’t want – will be removed.

Unfortunately, you can’t use this fix with all the free themes on WordPress.com. On top of this, you’ll need a bit of technical understanding of CSS (thankfully, not too much) AND you’ll have to give WordPress.com $15 a year for the privilege of editing the CSS on your blog. If all this sounds reasonable, read on!

How To:

1. Find out if you can use this method with your theme

Of the top ten most popular themes on WordPress.com, only Twenty Ten and Coraline allow you to hide the category links at the end of posts using CSS.

Here are the ten most popular free themes on WordPress.com, and whether they can use this method or not:

NO	YES
Kubrick	Twenty Ten
Misty Look	Coraline
Chaotic Sould
Ocean Mist
Freshy
Black-LetterHead
Greyzed
Motion

2. If you don’t use Twenty Ten or Coraline or a top ten popular them for your blog, find out if your theme can use this method

CSS works by assigning each element on your site a class, and then describing how that element will look. You need to find out how your specific theme ‘classifies’ the category links.

If your theme has a separate CSS class for the category links, you simply edit the relevant CSS class and hide those particular links. If your theme bundles a other page elements – like date published, author, tags – together in the same class as the category links, you’re likely out of luck, unless you want to hide all those page elements along with the categories.

You will have to learn how to find out how your theme classifies your category links. If you are entirely new to CSS, that’s a bit too much to cover in this post, but a great place to start is by installing the free Firebug plugin for Firefox and following this tutorial. WordPress.com also has some good resources for learning how to edit CSS. If you’re familiar with CSS, you likely know how to find the relevant classes to edit.

I found that most themes use the class ‘postmetadata’ for ALL the links describing the post – so this method won’t work unless you want to hide ALL the information describing your posts – author, date, tags, etc.

On the other hand, I found that the themes that allowed you to edit just your category links had a class in the CSS file named “cat-links”. For example, Twenty Ten and Coraline both use this class in their style sheets.

Take note of how your theme classifies the category links (and if you’re feeling helpful, add it in the comments below!)

3. Upgrade (ie. pay!) to edit your blog’s CSS
For $15 a year, WordPress.com enables you to edit your CSS file, meaning that you can make your blog look any way you want. For now, we’ll just make those pesky links disappear.

Swallow the expense and upgrade your account. Go to ‘Upgrades’ in the top left of your Dashboard, then get the ‘Custom CSS’ upgrade.

4. Hide the links in your style sheet using ‘visibility: hidden’

Once you have upgraded your account to allow you to edit your theme’s CSS file, go to Appearance > Edit CSS in your sidebar.
You will end up at http://yourblogname.wordpress.com/wp-admin/themes.php?page=editcss

Then you simple add 3 lines to your stylesheet. If you are using Twenty Ten or Coraline, the line you would add is as follows:

.cat-links {
visibility: hidden;
}

This means the CSS class ‘cat-links’, which determines how your category links appear has it’s visibility set to ‘hidden’. It means those links are now hidden.

IMPORTANT: If you are new to CSS, and even if you are not, you don’t want to edit the entire stylesheet, you simply want to add a few lines. Make sure the option to “Add this to the Notepad theme’s CSS stylesheet” is selected, or you will be erasing your entire stylesheet, meaning your blog will look pretty blank!

Yes, the above is a lot to go through – learning and fiddling with CSS, paying $15 to WordPress.com – simply to get rid of a glitch on your ‘free’ blog that sends readers to another site when they think they are reading more on your blog.

If you find these tutorials helpful, please let me know in the comments below. And if you take the time to do the technical fix on your theme, please share the CSS snippet you used to hide your links and the name of your theme – I am sure other readers will thank you.

Blogging for People Who Should, now online!

Eric — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 14:16:38 +0000

We’ve been running the Blogging for People Who Should workshop for a year now, and have taught a lot of people the basics of spreading the word online about the work they do. Now we’re delivering the first online version of the workshop.We are delivering a blogging workshop for a group working on water issues, with members across the country. We have developed short instructional videos and exercises to explain the main learnings of the course, and follow up with webinars to review and discuss the work.

It’s been a great process so far – it wraps up next week – and we hope to be delivering more of these online workshops in the future.

If you are interested in participating in the Blogging for People Who Should workshop but don’t live near Toronto, drop us a line and we’ll let you know when we run the first online workshop open to the general public.

A great explanation of how Google works

Eric — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 20:18:27 +0000

Ever wondered how Google comes up with their search results? Here’s a great documentary from CBC’s Sunday Edition explaining that mysterious process and much more. Well worth a listen for any blogger who wants their posts to show up in the most popular search engine.

My favourite radio program is “The Sunday Edition”on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). Last weekend they broadcast a really great documentary about how Google dominates web search. From the show description:

“If search rules the web, then Google rules search. And that fact has given the company an enormous amount of economic clout. It has made the Google algorithm, the top-secret computer program that runs the search engine, the most important piece of intellectual property in the world. With so much at stake, it’s no wonder that the clamour for more public scrutiny and even regulatory control is getting louder every day.“

The documentary is called “Engineering Search: The Story of the Algorithm that Changed the World” it’s about 25 minutes of great radio, and it’s available online here (it’s in the “second hour” of the show).

Blogs for jobs: 3 ways to make writing work for you

Cassie — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:50:04 +0000

Whether you’re in the searching, ladder-climbing or sector changing mode, you’ve got a reason to start (or recommit to) your career-focused blog.

A blog is a great way to showcase who you are and what you want to offer. When you begin sharing the story of your work, your unique combination of training, experience and values come together to create a picture of your ideal role and team. Rather than pigeon-holing, this helps focus your job search efforts and helps employers evaluate your fit on their team.

Consider these three career phases, and what blogging offers you along the way:

The Searcher: Right now, you’re working on your 1,000th online application and hoping this is the one. But rather than trying to stand out with a bolder font type or more calls to HR, what if you actually thought like an employer…When Sally gets your application and it intrigues her, she then Googles your name (yes, it’s true) and – instead of your high school track and field times, or that awkward comment you left on a news article – up pops your blog, and the top story is conveniently relevant to the job you just applied to. Once you’re in the interview, this blog that’s forced you to articulate yourself on all things relevant in your field will help you be the confident and clear candidate Sally is looking for.

The Climber: You’ve been waiting for George to retire for, oh, nine years, and you know you’ll be perfect for his role. Show your boss (and his) that you’ve got the succession chops by showing some initiative – take the next few months to begin articulating your vision of the future of your sector. Your interest and inspiration will be infectious, and if the brass don’t respond with a promotion then your leadership-laden blog will be setting you up for recruitment to a more visionary team elsewhere.

The Shifter: You came, you conquered, and now you’re moving on. As you ponder the risks of a mid-stream career change, think about how you can break into the conversations happening around your new field of choice. How does your wealth of experience translate into their world, their jargon and their needs? You’ve got a lifetime of stories that you want to share, and you’ve got lot of learning to do about this new territory – why not take your journey online, and explore those synergies out loud?

Remember to strike a balance between your authentic voice and your professional image. You want this blog to tell your work story in a way that reveals your learnings (read: failures) without embarrassing your colleagues or clients – you’ll want them to be your biggest fans and allies as you build your following, and not your disgruntled critics and commenters.

Wordpress is the iPod of blogs – why choose anything else?

Eric — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 22:22:21 +0000

Have you ever read a review for an MP3 player that’s not an iPod? The reviewer is obliged to mention the king of all MP3 players, and compare the new product to it, usually unfavorably (Zune, anyone?)

This leaves the reader to pose the simple question: If I want an MP3 player, why should I buy anything that’s not an iPod? There are reasons why some MP3 players will make you happier than an iPod, but they are specific and rarely apply.

I feel the same way with choosing blogging software: Why use anything but Wordpress?When I started teaching this course in January, I put together a section comparing the top blogging software, pointing out when you might choose Blogger over Typepad over Wordpress. I felt it was important to showcase a few options. I am not going to do that anymore: I feel like if you are going to take blogging seriously, the proper question to ask is “What are my reasons for not using Wordpress?”

I will mention other platforms, but I won’t put them on the same level as Wordpress, for a few reasons.

Wordpress has lots of developers and designers working on improvements

Wordpress is open source software, meaning anyone can download the code for free and start making improvements. And believe me, many people spend a lot of time making improvements to how Wordpress works, then share that functionality (called widgets) back with the Wordpress community. There are also thousands of designers, creating beautiful (and not so beautiful) blog designs, and sharing or selling their designs online.

Chances are if you want Wordpress to be able to do something specific, or wanted it to look a certain way, there is someone on the web who has made that happen, and is willing to share the results with you (sometimes for a modest fee).

You can host it your blog at wordpress.com or host it yourself

If you host your blog at wordpress.com, you don’t have to worry about managing a server, and you can still have your own blog address and a very powerful, easy to use blogging tool. If you decide you want more control over the design and functionality of your blog, it’s relatively easy to take all your content and host it on your own server. Not all blog platforms offer this.

Wordpress is flexible

A blog hosted on wordpress can be exported in any number of formats, meaning you can move your blog to another platform at any time. Not all blogging platforms allow that.

Who dissed my cheese? The importance of listening online

Eric — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 19:57:14 +0000

One of the unexpected joys of running the weeknight workshop series “Blogging for People Who Should” is getting to sample some fun cheeses. On my way to work on workshop days, I walk through Kensington Market and pick up some snacks for the session: fresh organic veggies, dips, olives, cookies, crackers and best of all, cheese.

If you don’t offer some kind of food at workshops that start right after the workday ends, people have to scramble to grab something quick (and invariably crappy) or go hungry. And it’s fun to try a few new cheeses each week.

I am a fan of Global Cheese, on Kensington Avenue, a big friendly place where the staff behind the counter constantly offer you sample slices to taste. Aside from being a good business tactic, it’s always a lot of fun to shop there.So imagine how surprised I was when I googled “Global Cheese” and found that, on a local Toronto blog, several people were really vociferous about NOT liking Global Cheese.

Pushy service….switching your order to cheese you didn’t want….selling you over-the-hill cheese….poor grades on health inspections…etc.

There seemed to be a bit of a ping-pong of opinions, pro and con back and forth on all things Global Cheese, until I came to this comment from the site’s editors.

It seems that someone had been dissing the cheese (and the service, and the cleanliness) at Global Cheese, while talking up another store on the site. Luckily a vigilant editor at the blog put a stop to this vicious smear campaign, and a good cheese shop won’t lose any customers.

I think this episode illustrates nicely the importance of listening to what people are discussing online. In this case, a simple Google Alert for “Global Cheese Toronto” would have sent an email to alert the staff at Global that they were being talked about, and they could have defended themselves. It’s a clear illustration of the benefit of listening to online conversations, something we cover in the second session of the workshop (Download the notes here)

Do you have any Google alerts running?

Have you found out any useful information from them lately?