In The Lab | Minds On Design Lab Blog

Using Zapier to Automate and Inspire Internal Social Media Advocacy

2014-01-16T17:18:02Z

Until now, we manually let everyone know when a new blog is posted and we didn’t really have a systemic way to let them know when there’s a new tweet. To engage our team around our social media activity, we took the advice of Joe Moran, Communications and Technology Director of the True Colors Fund shared in his recent #501TechNYC presentation on automation to use one of our favorite tools, Zapier, to automate some social media inspired notifications.

Diving In for an Organization’s First P2P Campaign

2014-01-07T21:50:06Z

A look at specific planning and implementation decisions spanning strategy, design, and technology for an organization’s first experience with P2P online fundraising.

Exploring Craft CMS

2013-11-20T17:48:02Z

Craft is a relatively new CMS that is created by Pixel and Tonic; the dev shop behind some of our favorite and go to ExpressionEngine add-ons. Craft has been out for around a year and we as a team have been following its growth very closely. I was excited to have the opportunity to spend some time with the platform recently and find it to be both liberating and wonderfully empowering.

Peer-to-Peer Fundraising Guide

2013-11-19T16:03:34Z

To help empower your supporters we have put together a Peer-to-Peer fundraising guide with some quick tips and strategy suggestions that you can share. View the post to download it and let us know what you think.

Streamlining the Donation Checkout Experience for the Arts for Autism Campaign

2013-11-15T13:00:41Z

For this year’s Arts for Autism fundraiser, we worked with the Autism Society of Northern Virginia on a number of enhancements to their microsite including improving the Champion Fundraiser page creation process, increasing the use Google Analytics for KPI related data collection, and notably enhancing the donation checkout experience.

Influencer Plan: Tips to Amplify Your Online Reach

2013-11-12T13:22:24Z

Fostering engagement in social spaces can be challenging, especially if your nonprofit is still in the process of building your online community. The old “if you post it they will come” approach is slow and often produces less than impressive results. Tapping into the power of influencers can be an effective way to quickly amplify your efforts.

ExpressionEngine Conference 2013 Recap

2013-10-23T22:16:52Z

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the ExpressionEngine Conference in Portland, OR. It was a great chance to learn, hear about some exciting ways the platform is being used around the world and in general connect with the community behind our CMS of choice. Many of the themes were representative of our team’s approach to technology and projects in general.

The Art and Science of Social Media Fundraising

2013-09-30T22:23:12Z

Fundraising through social media continues to have a mixed reputation. There are plenty of folks who will say out loud, or at least in internal meetings, that it is a waste of time and efforts are better spent elsewhere. Yet there are numerous examples of how it can have great success…when done well.

This month I had the pleasure of co-presenting on The Art and Science of Social Media Fundraising with Noland Hoshino of BCause Media where we talked about some of the elements that go into successful campaigns. Here are a few of the highlights.

3 Nonprofit Storytelling Tips from The Scarecrow

2013-09-25T15:25:35Z

I recently saw an example of storytelling that was so well crafted I didn’t even care when I found out it was actually an ad for a mobile game and Chipotle Mexican Grill. In fact, I immediately downloaded the game and made a commitment to give them more of my burrito funds in the near future.

Setting aside any personal feelings about this video or the brand behind it, there are three things nonprofits can learn from this storytelling example to improve their ability to connect and drive action.

RSS to Email: Blog Post Automation to the Inbox

2013-08-27T12:43:39Z

Have you ever wished that email marketing materials would simply write themselves? Better yet, that once they were written they would schedule and send themselves? We have as well and over the past year have been exploring, experimenting and implementing a few solutions to make this dream come true utilizing RSS and our bulk email tool.

Early Lessons From A Google+ Experiment

2013-08-15T12:28:18Z

As a small and distributed “lean” team we place a lot of value in our ability to communicate effectively internally as well as with our clients. Like many other small companies and nonprofits we have yet to find an affordable “silver bullet” solution that meets all of our internal communication needs and so are constantly evaluating our current tools and if new solutions might be better.

The following are some early lessons learned from our current experiment with Google+ as the primary tool for internal communications.

3 Tips to Avoid Getting Googled In The Inbox

2013-08-05T21:21:46Z

That’s right, Google has made changes to their inbox and it has nonprofits scrambling to figure out what this means for their communication efforts with their communities.

There has been a lot of conversation in the social spaces about how nonprofits can get their newsletters to show up in the “Priority” tab rather than Updates or Promotions. Most seem to focus on how to force Google to do this (like anyone can make Google do something) or how to game the system.

NYC 501 Tech Club Recap

2013-05-16T16:24:55Z

Last night our own Seth Giammanco presented and participated on a panel with representatives from The Partnership at Drugfree.org and JWT New York at the NYC 501 Tech Club. They walked through the “Anatomy of an Engagement Campaign” using The Hope Share campaign as a case study.

There was lively discussion and some great points shared both at the presentation and in social spaces. Here is a Storify recap of some of the highlights from the Twitter discussion.

Visual Storytelling Guide

2013-05-09T05:45:49Z

We have all heard and understand that the most important thing a nonprofit organization can do is tell a meaningful story. We also know images can be a powerful part of that story. However, have you considered how the increasing role of images within our daily lives is affecting that relationship. The Visual Storytelling Guide from Resource Media help put it into perspective for me.