During the month of November, vanity will take a backseat while I grow a moustache for Movember to raise awareness and and a few bucks to fight prostate cancer. And I’m offering you a once-in-a-lifetime deal.

Donate to my moustachioed campaign and I will write a song for you, and post a video of the performance on your Facebook profile.

Give $50 or more and the song will be all about you (or a topic of your choice). Give $5–$49 and you’ll be included in a song along with other donors. (E.g. a couple giving $25 each will get one song about the two of them, or I’ll lump five $10 donors into a group ditty.) It’s proportional: the more you give, the more the tune is about you.

Click here to donate on my Mo Space page. Just so we’re clear about expectations, my mandolin and singing skills are lousy. (Don’t be misled by the above photo of Freddie Mercury.) But this is an exercise in humility, and you’ll get a good laugh at my expense — and for a good cause. So please give, and I’ll dust off the archtop and my vocal chords.

Having returned from vacation, I’m spending more time digging through data from this year’s Saskatchewan Jazz Festival, and reflecting upon what lessons I can glean from my marketing campaign. Besides the introduction of our iPhone and Android app, one of the most interesting changes this year was the amount of buzz and activity on Twitter.

In past years, I feel that Saskatchewan lacked a critical mass of Twitter users, and our involvement on the social network wasn’t particularly fruitful. This year, however, the festival’s follower count jumped, people were tweeting about the shows, and we successfully used Twitter to engage the public, promote our events, and listen to what people were saying about us.

Looking back on the campaign, there are many takeaways from the festival’s activity on Twitter, but I want to highlight three that I thought would be most helpful for other arts organizations.

1. Your artists are cooler than you, so get them involved

Sure, your audience enjoys tweeting with you, but you know as well as I do that the artist is the main attraction both on and offline. Get them tweeting about your event, and you’ll really drive audience interest. Having artists like Tegan and Sara, De La Soul, and Macy Gray tweet about this year’s festival created buzz, drove ticket sales, and helped build and shape our brand. Find the creative talent behind your organization, whether that’s in-house or not, and engage them.

2. Scheduling tweets frees you to truly engage

With over 150 events in our schedule this year, I originally feared that I’d be too busy tweeting about upcoming shows to actively engage and response to our followers. I learned that by scheduling the bulk of our promotional tweets ahead of time (e.g. “Don’t miss bass virtuoso Christian McBride at the Broadway Theatre tonight at 7pm!”), I was able to focus on engaging festivalgoers, responding to questions, tweeting photos, and doing last-minute ticket giveaways.

3. It’s hard to measure buzz, but Twitter can help

No matter how often people tell you that there’s plenty of buzz about your event, it can be hard to believe them. Unless you have connections with the intelligence community, you simply can’t listen to others’ conversations — at least not the analog ones.

You can, however, get a taste of what your community is saying by listening on Twitter. Make a list of keywords related to your organization or even, and search for them within Twitter. I use Hootsuite to easily monitor a bunch of keywords on a daily basis. While only a fraction of those talking about your organization are doing it on Twitter, it is still a pretty good indicator of how many people are talking about you and what they’re saying.

Photo of the Saskatchewan Jazz Festival by Pete Yee.

Last night in Saskatoon, Tourism Saskatchewan held their annual Awards of Excellence Gala, where the Saskatchewan Jazz Festival was in the running for the Online Marketing Campaign of the Year Award. After consuming the plates of chocolates and ground cherries adorning our table (how I do love ground cherries!), we were pleased to learn that we won.

While it’s certainly nice to have a chunk of pretty glass to keep papers from blowing around the office, I hope that the award is just one more sign that the festival’s brand is connecting with more and more people across the province and region.

Incidentally, at last year’s awards gala we were a finalist for an award handed out to the top event marketing campaign. We ultimately lost to a NASCAR race, in what quite likely will be the only time I find myself in competition with America’s favourite couch potato pastime.

Last week I was fortunate enough to hear a talk by CBC president Hubert Lacroix on the future of the public broadcaster. Unsurprisingly, much of the discussion was focused on digital platforms and social media, and how this has changed how we interact with each other.

To crudely paraphrase Mr. Lacroix, if you sat down beside a stranger at Starbucks and asked to see their baby photos, or questioned what they got up to Friday night, they’re likely to look at you funny and tell you to get lost. But once we hop onto Facebook, that type of behaviour is normalized.

One thing I love about Twitter is that such interaction with people you’ve never met is not only perfectly acceptable, it’s encouraged. For me, engaging those you don’t already know is what makes Twitter fascinating.

But listening to other people and interacting with them — rather than simply broadcasting tweets — is also what makes Twitter a valuable tool to spread your organization’s message and connect with a wider audience.

A few days ago, caught in the blizzard of tweets surrounding the Canadian electoral debate, I retweeted a comment by Norah Fountain, a communications specialist in Ontario that goes by the Twitter handle Muskokahn. Shortly thereafter, the following email landed in my inbox:

“Glad you retweeted one of my tweets because I just discovered your blog. Passed it to the Professor who runs the Cultural Studies and the Arts program at Nipissing University in Muskoka. Keep up the great work.”

This short and sweet email represents at least two people who never would have heard of Art Threat if I was simply tweeting out links to our latest blog posts instead of listening and engaging with those who may be interested in saying hello.

Image: Fred Rogers of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (source).

I was recently invited to participate in an installment of the National Post’s Culture Club. Described as a “Boy George-free effort to bring the water cooler experience online,” the project gathers arts and entertainment critics to discuss topical cultural issues.

In a bid to encourage debate about art and ethics, OCAD recently invited artist Adel Abdessemed to speak to students and exhibit his controversial work. The National Post discussion picked up on this, asking us a simple question without a simple answer: When does art cross the line?

You can read the edited discussion on the Post’s website or in today’s dead-tree version of their newspaper.

Image: Taxidermia by Adel Abdessemed (photo source).

If you’re looking for a creative way to build your email list, you might want to give download cards a try.

A while back I was having a coffee at my neighbourhood corpobucks, where they always have a stack of these iTunes download cards, which offer a free “song of the day.”

After giving it a whirl and downloading a track, I immediately had two thoughts:

1. These cards could be a great opportunity to have people opt-in to an email marketing campaign.
2. I can do so much better than one lonesome song.

So I started contacting reps for every artist performing at this year’s Saskatchewan Jazz Festival. Before long I had nearly 30 artists who freely gave permission for one of their songs to be used on a download card to promote the festival.

As soon as I wrap up the design, I’ll be placing an order with Dropcards, who offer a discount for nonprofit organizations. By next week I’ll have a few thousand cards to hand out at events, leave on shop counters, include with ticket orders, and otherwise distribute in diverse and creative ways. Whoever receives one just has to visit the festival’s website and pop in the unique code to download a meaty mp3 sampler.

The download page will have an option to opt-in to our email updates, and this is where our list building will take place. Now, you could make this obligatory, but I recommend keeping it optional. After all, while I want to build our organization’s email list, I also want as many potential ticket buyers as possible to hear the artists who are performing at this year’s Jazz Festival — even if they don’t want to get any email from me afterwards.

For some extra promotional milage, you could send those who do opt-in a welcome email thanking them for checking out your sampler, and offering a special discount, a bonus download, or something else of value to your audience.

Remember, these cards aren’t limited to distributing music. Filmmakers could distribute short films or trailers, authors could include eBooks, educators could include instructional videos — you’re only limited by your creativity. So figure out what you could offer up that would be valuable to your current and potential audience, and get busy printing and distributing your download cards.

With 4.5 million views and counting, the Pink Glove Dance is the result of a idea simple enough — and fun enough — that even busy hospital staff could take part in the project. And if they can do it, you can do it.

My ambivalence about the Pink Ribbon industry notwithstanding, the video works. It works not because it’s particularly brilliant, or features inspired cinematography. The Pink Glove Dance works because it’s authentic and it makes us smile.

On top of its stated goal of raising breast cancer awareness, the video is a great marketing piece for the hospital, the Providence St. Vincent Medical Center. The video gives us a behind-the-scenes tour of the facility, and the images of cleaning staff, cooks, lab techs and receptionists getting their groove on reminds us that health care relies upon far more than than doctors and nurses.

Now if a serious, bureaucratic hospital can put together a silly video drawing attention to their cause, so can you. Grab a camera, brainstorm an idea or two, and start rolling!

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!