Giving Members and Donors Value

by Bunnie Riedel, Host of Nonprofit Conversation

The latest news is that the economy has “bottomed out.” But as I recently said, nonprofit fiscal health will lag some twelve to eighteen months behind the for-profit sector. So even if tons of new jobs were created tomorrow and the economy had a complete turn-around in the next twelve months, nonprofits will still be feeling the pain for at least the next two years.

What does that mean for you? It means you have to be as sharp and entrepreneurial as you can be because you are in hot competition for membership and donor money. You must make sure that you provide value to your members and donors and if you’re already providing value, you must make sure you communicate that value.

Take a long, hard look at your organization. What are your members and donors getting out of giving you money?

Everywhere I look there are lots of sales. Business understands that shoppers are seeking the greatest value return on their purchases. What I might have spent $10 on a year ago, I now want that same product for $7 (or even less), I am seeking bargains. Is your organization a “bargain”? Will I, as a member or donor, feel like I am really getting my money’s worth?

Let’s look at overhead. What percentage of your budget is spent on creating products or services or programs that meet the needs of the members/donors? Have you looked at your rating on Charity Navigator recently? Is your organization listed on Guidestar or with the Better Business Bureau? And if so, what information is available on those websites? Is it good or is it less than stellar? If your organization is too top heavy, meaning too much of your income is being spent on non-programmatic expenses, it’s time to do some trimming.

People are very savvy these days and certainly electronically connected, and they are looking for value. I would even urge you to hire a consultant to assess your organization with fresh eyes. And if you haven’t Googled your organization lately, I urge you to do so; you should always see how your organization comes up and who is saying what about you and your organization. Googling every week or so can save you a lot of aggravation and certainly make sure your members/donors (and potential members/donors) have a good impression of the organization.

What do your members/donors want in exchange for their money? Networking? Training? Discounts? Good will? To help others? To build something? A cause they believe in? If you think of your members/donors as shoppers and your services as products you are selling, it will be easier to look at your services and assign value to them. And if you can’t, if there is no value, then perhaps it’s time to get rid of those valueless services. When is the last time you surveyed your members/donors and asked them what they want? It’s called “market research” when for- profits do it, maybe it’s time for you to do some market research. I recommend you consider conducting in-person focus groups with your members/donors so you can really get a feel for what they think is important.

So let’s say that your non-programmatic expenses are in line and you know exactly what your member/donors want and you have created the ultimate value and your services are really a bargain. Now what? It does no good to have fabulous services and programs if nobody knows about it. For-profits advertise constantly “We are the best! You have to shop here! You can’t miss out on this terrific product! You can’t get this kind of value anywhere else!” However, one of the line items most ignored by nonprofits is the marketing budget. These days you can do so much marketing for free on the internet, and you certainly can be constantly marketing how fabulous you are to members/donors. Here’s a few tips:

• Facebook (get your members/donors to become your fans)



• Twitter (get your members/donors to follow you)



• Blogs (yes, have a blog and spend some time getting others to blog about you)



• Digg (write articles and Digg them)



• Pitchengine (I love those guys! Free social media releases!)



• Ezine articles (put your blog out there as an expert article)



• Your story (write about your organization)



• Constant Contact (go green, save trees and deliver newsletters)



• Direct Mail



• Public Service Announcements and videos (spend a couple of bucks on a quick video to post on your website and Youtube, etc.)
  

Wait! Did she say “direct mail?” Yes. While it’s great to go green and do everything electronically, there’s still nothing like that direct mail appeal. As I said in a previous post on writing membership renewal letters, the beauty is that your members/donors can add your appeal to their bill box, so it gets paid just like every other obligation.

Everything in the above paragraphs is really dependent on your members/donors, their demographics and their technical savvy. If you have a constituency that is not “wired” you will still need to employ the old fashioned methods, which is perfectly fine although may cost you more.

At the next Board meeting have this discussion: How do we give value to our members/donors? By constantly striving to give value you can beat out your competition for dollars and make sure that when the economy does finally recover, your organization will still be standing.


Calling Nonprofit Executives, Board Members and Consultants! Want to write for Nonprofit Conversation? Email Bunnie at info at riedelcommunications dot com. Pitch your idea! I'm all ears!

Contact Bunnie at info at riedelcommunications dot com

Creating a Newsletter with Constant Contact – Tips and Tricks

I love how-to's! Practical information that gives me the best way to do something or de-mystifies a process. Jerri Barret, of the Anita Borg Institute, takes us through how to use Constant Contact to create a newsletter, step-by-step, and gives us practical work-arounds to potential glitches. Thanks Jerri! Bunnie

Creating a Newsletter with Constant Contact – Tips and Tricks

by Jerri Barrett, Director of Marketing

Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology

I’m writing this as I am concluding the creation of the first of two newsletters the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology (ABI) will publish in February 2009. To quickly summarize our process prior to layout, each week we have a staff meeting. In each staff meeting I poll our team on what items should be going into the two newsletters. The first one each month is very program focused, the second is more article and column rich – though we do give shorter relevant plugs for the programs. The staff contributes topics and commit to writing articles, and I usually write a few myself. When the articles are submitted I edit them in Microsoft Word. Lengthy articles are posted on our website (http://www.anitaborg.org/) and the first two paragraphs will appear in the newsletter with a link to the rest of the article.

Constant Contact is very intuitive. To get started each month I copy the previous month’s newsletter. This enables me to have a consistent look and feel to the newsletter. Other templates are available and you can customize them so no two newsletters look exactly the same. Then, I simply go through and delete the previous month’s articles, unless they are program related and need to simply be modified or updated. Once the newsletter is scrubbed, I begin to add the articles.

Adding articles is probably the one area that is the most troublesome in Constant Contact. If you cut and paste articles out of Microsoft Word, the article frequently loses its formatting. It is best to take your word article and cut and paste it into Notepad then copy from there into Constant Contact. It’s an extra step but can save a lot of formatting time. You also need to go in and manually enter each link in an article which can be time consuming. Be sure to frequently save your work as you continue, Constant Contact will log you out automatically if there is no activity and your work will be lost.

Once the articles are laid out and the formatting is set, I go back and review the articles to see if an image would be appropriate. Images have to be small in size and in .jpg format – you upload an image into Constant Contact, determine what size it should be and insert it into the article.

The final stop is the arrangement of the articles on the page. You simply drag and drop the articles on the page until you the flow and order you want. In Constant Contact what you see is what you get. Then you create the table of contents. The table of contents does not automatically populate – you need to click on it and manually type in the title of each article. This is helpful if you have a lot of long titles – you can truncate them as needed. You always have to remember to update the table of contents before distribution – changes in the order of the articles changes the TOC and you want to be sure to double check it each time.

Once I’m satisfied the newsletter is “done”, I preview it and send preview copies to all of my contributing writers. It’s important for them to provide further proofreading and make sure the articles are accurate and the links are pointing where they should.

I make all the changes and once we’re done it’s time to schedule the newsletter distribution. First who does the newsletter go to? We are continuously updating our distribution lists for the newsletter from multiple sources – our newsletter registration site, our event registrations, and emails. Those are uploaded to constant contact from an excel spreadsheet – a quick process that takes about 5 minutes. ABI has a strict no spamming policy so we only add names of people who have agreed to receive our newsletter.

The final step is scheduling – I pick the date and time for the newsletter to go out and schedule it. The newsletter will be sent automatically without further intervention. The email out of office notices all come to my mailbox while bounce backs are recorded by Constant Contact’s reporting function.

Once the newsletter is out I wait 3-4 days then I go online to check the reports on that newsletter. I see how many newsletters were sent, how many were opened and which articles were clicked on. This is part of our monthly tracking and provides insight into what types of articles and programs are of interest to our readers. So what’s our number 1 click through month after month? Our column, Ask Jo, which is written by a professional coach – Jo Miller, the CEO of Women’s Leadership Coaching (http://www.womensleadershipcoaching.com/).

The advantages of Constant Contact overall is it is relatively inexpensive, easy to update and easy to use. A newsletter (excluding article writing) can be created in less than a day (including editing rounds). The primary disadvantages are the occasional glitches in the software – you may find yourself challenged in formatting for no apparent reason. The best work around – save and log out and log back in. And when push comes to shove delete an article and reload it into the software.

One final comment, in my last guest post I mentioned the Communities Manager for the Anita Borg Institute. I wanted to acknowledge the excellent work done by BJ Wishinsky in this role. As I write this BJ is working on new strategies to create new communities for the Anita Borg Institute.

Contact Jerri at jerrib@anitaborg.org