YouTube is chock full of spoof ads, most of them awful. This morning I watched one that was surprisingly well made, if not particularly clever. The ad was a Toronto Maple Leafs-themed spoof on another Hogtown creation, the award-winning Dove Evolution video that drew attention to the deceptive beauty of the fashion industry.

Around the same time I was catching up on the Ralph Lauren photoshop scandal — what a sick yet well-deserved mess that has become. My morning browsing eventually got me thinking: how am I lying to my audience?

Now, I don’t believe I’ve pumped plus-sized shams out of my MacBook. But let’s not deceive ourselves. Even in the nonprofit world, we are susceptible to acts of exaggeration.

So join me and take this opportunity to review your marketing materials and see what information might be a tad doctored, touched up, or based on truthiness. I hope you’re not telling any whoppers, but don’t be surprised to discover inflated statistics, overstated challenges, or a touch of hyperbole.

Even the most innocent fibs can leave you exposed and vulnerable to criticism, and may jeopardize the trust of your supporters. The work you do is impressive enough without the need to embellish, so focus on communicating with fairness and accuracy. Your audience will thank you for it.

For your entertainment, here’s the slapshot spoof of the Dove Evolution video.

And here’s the original, award-winning spot.

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, they say. We’ve all heard this advice before. But should we listen?

Flickr photo by robertpaulyoung.

The problem is, the Small Stuff can make or break your organization. Paying attention to the Small Stuff shows that you take your cause seriously. The Small Stuff shows that you care. And if you don’t care deeply enough about your cause to Sweat the Small Stuff, why should anyone else?

In an age when the public attention span is short—and their purse strings even shorter—you can’t afford to neglect any detail, no matter how small it may seem. Each touchpoint with your audience needs to reflect your brand and communicate your passion to your cause.

Is your copy ever sloppy? Do you always respond to comments on your Facebook page? Is it hard to unsubscribe from your newsletter? Have you tweaked your landing pages?

These rough edges that can distract from your message and represent a lost opportunity to strengthen your relationship with your audience. We can’t always be perfect, but we should strive for consistency.

What Small Stuff can you find to improve upon?

Facebook may have made Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire, but email is still king. Despite the rapid growth of online social networking, email has three times the reach, according to a new Forrester survey.

Even a space monkey could build beautiful newsletters using a service like Mad Mimi.

An email newsletter should hold a prominent role in every nonprofit’s communications strategy. The tools you use to create and send your message have a huge impact on whether it ever ends up in your recipients’ inboxes and how likely they are to read and act on it.

If you’re sending newsletters from your regular email account, the odds of being blacklisted are uncomfortably high. And if you’re building your own HTML newsletters from scratch, you’re probably wasting your time.

Hosted email marketing services are your best bet for quickly producing newsletters that are both pretty and powerful. There are a whack of great features common to many of these services that will help you:

Save time: most hosted services are so easy to use that a space monkey could put together an attractive, easy-to-read newsletter in minutes. Schedule your messages to send in the future, or even set up a drip campaign.

Track your emails: you’ll benefit from stats on open, bounce and unsubscribe rates, and can easily compare your campaigns to gauge effectiveness. Most services often useful charts, easy data exports, and integration with Google Analytics.

Manage your lists: easily add and remove individual subscribers or quickly import entire contact lists. They’ll handle your bounces and unsubscribe requests for you, and offer cut-and-paste forms for your website. Running split tests is a dream.

Be responsible: ensure your messages comply with spam legislation with features like confirmed opt-in, one-click unsubscribe, and removal of duplicate entries.

Have fun: many of these services have a playful interface and are a pleasure to use. You’ll look forward to crafting your messages and tracking the results once they’re sent.

Who’s who in email marketing

Now that you see a hosted service is the way to go, you’ve got a handful of good options. My personal pick is Mad Mimi. Along with a surprisingly intuitive interface and pricing that can’t be beat, they have the greatest customer service of any company I’ve ever done business with. (Thanks Dean and Gary!)

If Mimi ever croaked, I’d hook up with Emma. Her services are bit steeper, but she plants five trees for every new customer she receives, makes microloans to entrepreneurs in the developing world, and gives away twenty five accounts to deserving charities each year.

There’s also MailChimp, who offers a free library of email marketing guides to anyone who’s interested. When it comes to solid marketing advice, these guys don’t monkey around. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Now if you’re looking for oodles of features and full-service support — or your company frowns upon suppliers with funky, unique names — you might want to take a look at the pricier plans offered by Constant Contact and Bronto.

Many of these services offer free basic accounts to get you started, so sign up and start playing around. Once you see how fun and easy email marketing can be you’ll never send a hand coded email from Outlook again!

Disclaimer: I take part in the Mad Mimi affiliate program — but my love for her is true, I swear!

It seems that everyone and their monkey are on Facebook these days. Recent stats show that Facebook is growing at a rate of 600,000 new users each day, swelling the network to over 140 million active users.

Photo by LarimdaMD.

For nonprofits, these numbers represent an increasingly huge opportunity to get the word out about your cause. If your organization doesn’t already have a Facebook presence, you can’t afford not to. Go and create a Facebook page, which will be your organization’s home on the popular social network. (The Wild Apricot blog has a handy guide that will get you started.)

Once you have a Facebook page, people won’t come knocking on your door without a little work. Here are thirteen tips to promote your page, help you increase your number of “fans”, and use Facebook to get the word out about your work.

1. Invite your posse
   You’ve got your own friends on Facebook, and odds are some of them are interested in the work you do. Send them a personal message inviting them to check out your page. Don’t ask everyone. Just your pals who may truly be interested.
2. Keep your page fresh and tasty
   Once your page is up, don’t make the mistake of neglecting it.  Keep the content fresh. Don’t forget the viral nature of Facebook. When someone interacts on your page it may appear on that person’s Facebook feed, promoting your page to their friends.
3. Suck in content from other social media
   Add Facebook applications that draw your content from sites like Flickr, YouTube and Twitter. This will bring new content on your page without needing to add it manually, while promoting your presence on other sites at the same time.
4. Create an incentive to join
   There are a lot of Facebook pages out there, so give people a reason to become a fan of yours. Have a monthly prize draw just for your fans, offer a discount to an upcoming event, or make special announcements on your page before you do elsewhere.
5. Bribe your mailing list
   Email folks on your mailing list and invite them to check out your Facebook page. Again, offering an incentive of some sort can help. Don’t shy away from adding a few words to your newsletter about what is happening on your Facebook page. And if you don’t already have a email newsletter, get one. There are many free or cheap services that make newsletters quick, simple and fun. (I highly recommend Mad Mimi.)
6. Pop a button on your website
   This might seem obvious, but most organizations don’t do it. Grab a button and flaunt it on your website, your blog, or anywhere else you have available pixels.
7. Use Facebook ads
   Facebook’s advertising program allows you to promote your page to a very targeted audience. (21- to 24-year-old hairless cat lovers in Idaho? Check!) And since you only pay when someone clicks on your ad, it’s actually quite inexpensive. Create different ads targeting different chunks of your target audience — or several for the same audience — and track them to see which ones are most effective.
8. Play with your fans
   Don’t leave your fans hanging. Respond to comments on your page. Ask them questions in the discussion board.  When someone new becomes a fan of your page, sent them a message to say hello. Do they use Twitter? Follow them, or send a direct message. Remind them that there are flesh and blood people behind the organization’s page, and that you’re interested in them, not just your stats.
9. Rock your own domain name
   URL’s for Facebook pages are long and ugly.  Register a separate domain name for your page and forward it to your Facebook page. If you already have a website for your organization, you can use a subdomain instead (ex. facebook.mynonprofit.com).
10. Pimp out your business card
    Include the shortened address of your Facebook page on your business card. If you don’t have one, get one. If you don’t like the idea of a traditional business card, get a funky personal calling card, like Moo’s MiniCards, to promote your page.
11. Delegate and spread the love
    If you have other staff, volunteers, or trusted community members who are on Facebook, consider adding them as an admin. You’ll spread out the responsibility of keeping the page fresh, and will hopefully create passionate pilgrims who will promote your page, and your organization, to their friends.
12. Send updates (just not boring ones)
    Facebook allows you to send updates to your fans, and by all means you should.  Just make sure they’re interesting to your fans, not just to yourself. You can even target your update to fans in a certain city, region, or age range. But whatever you do…
13. Don’t spam
    Sure, this is actually one way not to promote your Facebook page, but just don’t do it.  No one likes to receive Facebook updates every other day from anyone, so don’t abuse the privilege. I’ve ditched many pages and groups because they sent out too many updates, so unless you want your numbers to shrink, treat your updates like you drink your scotch — in moderation.