Ask yourself these questions:

• What’s the big idea of this year?
• What am I most proud of accomplishing this year?
• How did I stretch myself this year?
• Did I accomplish my goals this year?
• What’s the bottom line of 2011?

Please answer these in the comments, or write your own post and link to it in the comments. I’d love to learn more about what YOU accomplished, and how YOU stretched yourself this year.

What’s the big idea of this year?

The Biggest Idea of 2011: PARTNERSHIP!  

I preach it to nonprofits all the time, and this time I took my own medicine!

Thank you to Pam Slim and Desiree Adaway for their Partnership Playbook (which is available through Pam Slim’s website, and also through Fundraising Rockstars). It taught me so much! 

I am most proud of the partnerships and relationships I have built with fellow nonprofit bloggers and internet entrepreneurs, including Steve Havelka, Pamela Grow, Desiree Adaway, Jessica Journey, Mary McCalalane, Kurt Steiner, Tony Martignetti, Phil Cubeta, Joe Waters, Jules Brown, Alexandra Peters, Mark Schaefer, John Haydon, and others.

And I’m happy that I’ve kept my relationships with my friends in other parts of the country; Irene Konev, Amy Sample Ward, Rebekah Shubin, Sabrina Gogol, Zach Archer, Ealasaid Haas, and others.

How did I stretch myself this year? How did I grow?

Launching!

This year I learned all I could about launching a product, and then I launched Fundraising Rockstars with the help of Steve Havelka, Desiree Adaway, Pamela Grow, Jessica Journey, John Haydon, Sandy Rees, Joe Waters, and others! And it went so well! And it made me reach out to more people than I would have otherwise.

It emboldens me to try this again next year!

Creating Apps for Smartphones!

I stretched myself by creating three android apps to help people in their fundraising offices and I’m about to come out with iPhone versions of them.

Writing!

I stretched myself in the area of copywriting, and read not just blogs but books about this subject, and it has really paid off for me.

I stretched myself in the area of daily writing, and to date I’ve written over 250,000 words and 216 days straight on 750words.com.  I find myself not struggling so much with what to write, because it comes more naturally.

Blogging has actually become easier since I started my private writing every day. I find that I think through writing, and I process through writing, and if I’m not writing, it’s almost like… not thinking as much.

Creative Writing!

I stretched myself by writing poetry more diligently in 2010 and I’m still doing it in 2011! Hoa Nguyen and Larry Fagin have been instrumental in this process, and thanks to their prompts, editing, and feedback I almost have enough for another book. Everyone writes for someone specific to read it, and I confess, when I write poetry, I write to them.

New Encaustic Painting Techniques!

I stretched myself by offering encaustic classes in subjects I had never taught before, subjects such as encaustic and photography, accretion technique, and encaustic glazes. I’m looking forward to offering Encaustic monotype classes in 2012!

I also stretched myself by doing more art blogging, and creating a series of encaustic painting online classes. Crazy!

Calling up radio shows!

Even though I was scared, I called up radio shows and asked to be interviewed about my book, and I actually got quite a few interviews!

Liveblogging a conference!

I was asked to write blog posts for different corporate blogs, including DonorPerfect and CharityHowTo, and asked to liveblog a conference for the first time. Thank you to DonorPerfect to asking me to liveblog for you!

Going Gluten-Free!

We started this in January. This shift has helped me accomplish so much.

1. Saving money. I don’t spend money eating out anymore.
2. Eating well. When I eat, I eat fresh, organic and wholesome foods.
3. Breathing more easily. I don’t feel so out of breath. I can stand and teach a two hour art class without feeling wiped out.
4. Full of energy! I have been biking so much, and I’ve had the energy, I think, because I went gluten free.

If I attempt to eat gluten now, it sits in my stomach like a rock, and makes me feel sluggish, like I can’t think straight, and even depresses my immune system. I cough, and feel gross for a couple days.  So I know this shift has been good for my health. I encourage you to try it, even for a week, and see how you feel.

Did You Accomplish Your Goals?

In 2010 I took a public speaking course from Communispond. It rocked.  I had the goal to start a professional speaking career, and I actually accomplished this goal in 2011.

In 2011 I spoke at the Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Texas Association for Nonprofit Organizations, Board retreats,Young Nonprofit Professionals Network, the Ginac Group, Texas Business Women, The City of Austin, CharityHowTo.com, BigAustin,  BioPharmaInstitute, and I’ve had speaking engagements every month booked from April onwards. It’s looking even more packed for 2012, and I love it!

I learned so much more about appeal letters, about getting sponsorships, about managing volunteers and finding new donors, because I started to teach these subjects. Even though I already knew a bit about them, it REALLY motivated me to learn.

Did you discover something about yourself?

Yes! Being Wild! It’s kind of my thing! You’d think that would have kind of been obvious, but it wasn’t. So I started and stopped a social media business, and started another one.  Treyz Social Media was okay, but it wasn’t really my brand. Wild Social Media is actually my brand, and it makes more sense! And also it works with the title of my new book too. The Wild Woman’s Guide to Social Media.
I like writing more when I can illustrate too. I got featured on Mark Schaefer’s Business Grow Blog, with my little ebook that I wrote and illustrated called Twitter for Monkeys.

Anything else that surprised you?

More Nonprofit Journey!

I got hired to be the part time development director of the Austin Civic Orchestra, and helped them by researching and applying for lots of grants, helped them do two appeal letters, researched where they could find sponsorships, and helped with creating a marketing process for each concert. 

There’s always a way around

Because of the record heat in Central Texas (7 months of 100+ temps and no rain), I biked at midnight a lot from June to October. And I’m still biking, here in December, and I just got in from outside, covered in rain and dirt. After 8 months of practically no rain, this feels perfect. Healthmonth is helping me with this! I highly encourage you to check this out!

Bottom Line on 2011

I stopped trying to get other people to pick me.

I picked myself.

How about you? What did you do in 2011? What are you proud of? What did you learn? Please, leave a comment.

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Will You Look Back With Me on 2011? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on December 28, 2011.

There are lots of secrets. But I don’t have a “how to blog” mastermind program, so… you know… the best thing I can say is that it’s work. It is. It’s a lot of work. You have to stay focused. And learn how to write every day.

How can you blog for your nonprofit, blog consistently, providing value, telling stories, and helping people give to you and connect with your mission?

Tip 1: Read the post out loud. Whether it’s a post about your annual event, your staff transitions, or welcoming a new board member, or even about your programs, you need to read it out loud. Look it over again and again. You’ll be surprised at how many mistakes you had. I always am.

Tip 2: If you can’t think of anything to write about, then go interview program staff. Make a series of posts about your programs. Focus on ONE story. Problem to Solution. Start to Finish. If they have nothing for you, then go interview one of your volunteers. Add a link to start volunteering at the bottom of the post.

Tip 3: Add a picture! If you need to protect your clients or confidentiality, then definitely check out my Free Tips page, where there are three links to get free stock photos!

Tip 4: Are you taking advantage of every opportunity to get people to take action? Make sure the donation button is above the fold on your nonprofit blog. That way, every time you blog, they are reminded that they can also give. If you want a special gold star, you can also add a call to action at the end of the post. First, ask for a donation. If they can’t do that, ask them to sign a petition or take a survey instead. Ask them to tweet about you, or blog about you, and then make it easy for them to do it.

Tip 5: Add a link to getting onto your newsletter at the bottom of your blog post. The more people you have on your newsletter, the better chance you’ll have to engage them to sign your petition, become volunteers, or even give to you!

Like these tips?

Sign up for my e-newsletter. You’ll come for the fundraising advice, and stay for the snark.

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5 Tips for Nonprofit Blogging Success originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on November 30, 2011.

“In its most advanced sectors, a highly concentrated capitalism has begun selling “fully equipped” blocks of time, each of which is a complete commodity combining a variety of other commodities. This is the logic behind the appearance, within an expanding economy of “services” and leisure activities, of the “all-inclusive” purchase of spectacular forms of housing, of collective pseudo-travel, of participation in cultural consumption and even of sociability itself, in the form of “exciting conversations.” “meetings with celebrities” and suchlike. Spectacular commodities of this type could obviously not exist were it not for the increasing impoverishment of the realities they parody. And, not surprisingly, they are also paradigmatic of modern sales techniques in that they may be bought on credit.”

So, have you ever been to Disney world? Have you been to a Disney “timeshare”? Me TOO.

It was a completely artificial experience. It made me want to seek out nature, and the dark, and something more real.

If you have been similarly dissatisfied with Disney and its sanitized backward-looking version of life, perhaps you might enjoy this video.

Guy Debord continues:

“The development of capitalism meant the unification of irreversible time on a world scale. Universal history became a reality because the entire globe was brought under the sway of this times’ progression. But a history that is thus the same everywhere at once has as yet amounted to nothing more than an intrahistorical refusal of history. What appears the world over as the same day is merely the time of economic production -time cut up into equal abstract fragments. Unified irreversible time still belong to the world market-and, by extension, to the world spectacle.

The general time of human non-development also has a complementary aspect, that of a consumable time which on the basis of a determinate form of production, presents itself in the everyday life of society as a pseudo-cyclical time.

Pseudo-cyclical time is in fact merely the consumable disguise of the time as commodity of the production system, and it exhibits the essential traits off that time: homogeneous and exchangeable units, and the suppression of any qualitative dimension. But as a by-product of time-as-commodity intended to to promote and maintain the backwardness of everyday life it necessarily finds itself laden with false attributions of value, and it must manifest itself as a succession of artificially distinct moments.

…modern society’s obsession with saving time, whether by means of faster transport or by means of powdered soup, has the positive result that the average American spends three to six hours daily watching television. The social image of the consumption of time is for its part exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations -moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance, and as desirable by definition. This particular commodity is explicitly presented as a moment of authentic life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. Yet even in such special moments, ostensibly moments of life, the only thing being generated, the only thing to be seen and reproduced, is the spectacle-albeit a ta higher than usual level of intensity. And what has been passed off as authentic life turns out to merely be a life more authentically spectacular.

Our epoch, which presents its time to itself as essentially made up of many frequently recurring festivities, is actually an epoch without festival. Those moments when, under the reign of cyclical time, the community would participate in a luxurious expenditure of life, are strictly unavailable to a society where neither community nor luxury exists. Mass pseudo-festivals, with their travesty of dialogue and their parody of the gift, may incite people to excessive spending, but they produce only a disillusion – which is in turn offset by further false promises. The self-approbation of the time of modern survival can only be reinforced, in the spectacle, b reduction in its use value. The reality of time has been replaced by its publicity.”

From: Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Pages 107, 110, 111-112

Next time you see a vacation package offered, or a ski mountain, or a European tour advertised, know that this is what you’re buying. The “publicity” of “authentic” time.

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Have you ever bought an auction “vacation package”? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on November 9, 2011.

Ever wanted to learn how to start fundraising?

Need some tips on where to start getting more website traffic for your nonprofit?

Read this interview.

Mazarine Treyz writes the Wild Woman’s Fundraising blog and is the author of The Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising. A nonprofit fundraising consultant and trainer, she is also a social media trainer for the City of Austin, Texas. The interview was conducted by Don Akchin, a principal of Nonprofit Marketing 360 and a frequent contributor to the MKCREATIVE blog.

MKC: How long have you been blogging? And which came first: the blogging or the consulting?

MAZARINE: Blogging. I’ve been blogging since 1999. I was in England and I wanted to keep my family apprised of what I was doing and I didn’t want to write the same email ten times, so I thought, I’ll just make a blog! And I love to write, so I kept blogging. In 2005 I made an art blog – I also make encaustic art. In 2006 I got hired by a nonprofit and started managing their web presence for them, and I’ve been doing that for nonprofits ever since. In 2009, I moved from Portland, Oregon down to Texas, where I am now. I started my blog because I was trying to build my platform, so that publishers would look at my Wild Woman’s Guide to Fundraising book. But I felt like I had things to say about fundraising and about the nonprofit world that people weren’t saying. And now my blog has a life of its own. I love it!

MKC: When you started blogging, where did you go for an audience? Or did you care about an audience at first?

MAZARINE: If you have a blog for your nonprofit or yourself, to get an audience I recommend commenting on 10 blogs a night. Where I got this idea was from Yaro Starak’s Entrepreneur’s Journey. One of the things he said was to comment on ten blogs a night. I started doing that and that really, really moved the needle. I can say to anyone who has a blog and wants more traffic, do that. And make it a useful comment, not, ‘ Oh, nice blog post, dude. My link.’

People don’t comment because they don’t realize how powerful it is to connect with other people like this. For me, that’s what it’s all about. It’s about connecting, it’s about finding community. (So hey, comment on this post!)

Twitter was huge. I really saw a spike in my traffic after I started linking sentences from my blog posts on Twitter. I got off of Facebook at the end of 2009 because I didn’t find that it moved the needle for me in any significant way.

MKC: Now that you have all these readers for your blog, do you feel like you know them? Do you have conversations with them?

MAZARINE: I do know some people who come and comment, and you know, people come and go. I think blogs fall in and out of people’s readers. Some people have reached out to me offline. My favorite place to engage with readers is Twitter, there are more people on there, and more conversations too. If you come to my blog from Twitter I can find you, if you come and comment I can find you, but otherwise no. Most people don’t leave comments. My favorite way to interact with people on my blog is to take an email I’m about to send in response to a reader question, and turn it into a blog post that can help everyone. To speak directly to real issues that real nonprofits are facing right now.

Don Akchin asks good questions!

MKC: You bring up the point about social media in general, and I notice you talk about it often on your website. I gather that’s one of the hot topics with nonprofits as well. Are they really that far behind?

MAZARINE: Yes (laughs). I think everybody in the nonprofit world is about 10 years behind people in the corporate world. They’re still trying to figure out, ‘How can a blogger help me?’ or ‘Why would I read a blog when I already have so much else to do?’ Well, let me answer that question. Because a blog post can save you hours of frustration.

Also, I do webinars for nonprofits about social media, and I have done a couple of presentations in the last few months on social media and nonprofits, and people are asking me questions like, ‘Should we be on Twitter?’ I think the answer is yes, no matter what. Smaller nonprofits don’t allocate enough resources to social media. This is really important.

This is how you gather people and engage them and get them to sign your petitions and so forth. I’ve got data from Blackbaud to back this up. I feel like people don’t quite understand what they can do. And social media is not so much fundraising, it’s really more for marketing and stewardship.

MKC: You were a fundraiser before you got into consulting. Why did you go from hands-on fundraising to telling other people how to do it?

MAZARINE: Actually I am still doing it. I am the part-time Development Director for the Austin Civic Orchestra. The reason I got into teaching and consulting was I wanted a way to scale my impact that wasn’t just one organization. I also really love teaching. I think I love teaching more than I love fundraising. I love taking my experience and helping other people learn from my pain.

MKC: What are big challenges for your clients and readers?

MAZARINE: Misconceptions about the best ways to make money are definitely a big challenge. People really like to think that sponsorships are the answer, when actually events are the worst way to make money. Whenever I do a webinar on sponsorships, people jump on it. I’m happy that they want to learn, and I’m happy to tell them what they want to know, and I’m also a little dismayed that people aren’t looking at things like planned giving, or bequests.

The other problem I see is that there’s no longevity and there’s no organizational memory. Fundraisers leave or get fired every 18 to 24 months. That’s pretty much what happens. So people are coming to new jobs, and it’s always an emergency, and they’re always running around asking, ‘Where did the last person put the grants?’ Probably the last person left in such a hurry that she didn’t leave any instructions.

I’ve been fired, and anyone worth their salt in this field’s been fired, because you have to be able to say no, and a lot of times people don’t want to hear that. I feel like I really know the pain of people who come to my site: You don’t know what you’re doing, your boss is screaming at you, you have to raise a million dollars in three weeks, or whatever their unrealistic expectation is. So I just try to help people find their bottom line and correct their assumptions as much as I can.

Nonprofits are measured by donors and funders on the wrong scale. They should be measured by their impact, not their 990 forms. People don’t think to say, ‘How do you know you’re succeeding in your mission? ‘ Isn’t that the most important thing? They’re asking the wrong questions so they get the wrong answers.

MKC: If people wanted to fundraise and they had no resources, how could they start right now?

MAZARINE: If there’s a new nonprofit reading this, I’d say, hire a consultant and get them to help you make a development plan, because you’ll go a lot faster and get more done when you hire someone who knows what they’re doing instead of muddling along by yourself. You can start from scratch with a basic fundraising plan, which could be as simple as appeals, getting your website up, starting your marketing, and grants. Just start there. But don’t finish there.

You should also be looking at getting your volunteers to do things for you. Register on Volunteermatch.org. It’s actually really good. It’s been around forever and you can get so many volunteers from it and people are so friendly and helpful. And if you need to move the needle and you don’t have any money, that’s a way to do it quicker. Also register on Sparked.com, because there are micro-volunteering opportunities on there and people really respond to you, whether you need a new logo or want someone to look at your website and tell you how to make it better, or look over a job description you wrote, anything. We just went to them for Austin Civic Orchestra, and I’m happy to say that they’re both friendly and responsive.

Follow Mazarine on Twitter @wildwomanfund.
Guest blogger Don Akchin writes frequently about marketing and philanthropy at donakchin.com.

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Interview: How can you start fundraising from nothing? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on November 7, 2011.

It was fun to put little organic touches in it, like pretending it was a wooden desk, adding a cup of ice tea, which I was pretty addicted to last summer, adding a pen, adding my book, and my picture too.

It felt like my own desk!

But times change.

For one thing, I stopped drinking iced tea! My family is full of dentists, and they said that the acid in the tea is really bad for your enamel. So I started drinking a lot of water instead. Purity became more important.

Since last summer I’ve started to do more research around social media, and write a lot more. Now I’m about to come out with my second book, The Wild Woman’s Guide to Social Media. This week, I’m giving a workshop for the City of Austin called “Advanced Social Media Tactics for Jedis.” I’m so excited to do this!

In the course of researching my book about social media, I found out about Google Heat Maps, and I thought, “I’d REALLY like to design my website around this idea too.”

And I’ve started to do a lot more webinars too, with CharityHowTo.com. Kurt Steiner and the team at CharityHowTo have been marvelous to me, and I love working with them. In fact, I’m giving lots of webinars with them this month, go to the webinars page and see what’s new! So I wanted my website to reflect all of this teaching, too.

And I wanted to start giving people a mini-e-course as a way to say thank you for signing up for my enewsletter. Now, finally, after much procrastination, if you look in the top right of the page, you’ll see that I’ve done it!

So in short, my concepts of what I want to do with this website needed to reflect my new knowledge and growing sophistication around social media.

It was time to say goodbye to the old, organic design, and go with something slicker, and more professional. Thanks to Aries Labs, it got done! It’s not totally complete yet but it’s getting there.

What do you think of the new look?

Have you ever built a new website?

Do you have before and after pictures that you’d like to share? Horror stories? Tell us!

New Website Design! What do you think? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on October 3, 2011.

Sandcastle picture by Amerune, from Flickr, Creative Commons license

This post is about: Blogging, and writing, and what sort of education aids you in being of use to the world.
Number of words: 846
Readtime: 5 minutes

“The truth was that he’d never decided to do anything. He’d never really made that kind of decision in his whole life. One thing had just gently led to another, and then the press had to be fed. It was waiting there now. You worked hard, you fed it, and it was still just as hungry an hour later, and out in the world all your work was heading for the rubbish bin and that was only the start of its troubles. Suddenly he had a proper job, with working hours, and yet everything he did was only as real as a sand castle, on a beach where the tide forever came in.

(Why are you doing this? asked a printer)

…”I don’t know,” he admitted. “I suppose it’s because I’m no good at anything else. Now I can’t imagine doing anything else. Look, I’m useless. I was educated to be useless. What we’ve always been supposed to do is hang around until there’s a war and do something really stupidly brave and then get killed. What we’ve mainly done is hang on to things. Ideas mostly.” Pg 195, The Truth by Terry Pratchett

Is your blog like a printing press?

Sometimes my life feels like a Terry Pratchett novel. Let me explain. The above passage is from The Truth, a book about the first printing presses. In it, William de Worde, the protaganist, a slumming aristocrat, comes in between big powers in the Engraver’s guild and a plot to depose the leader of the city and he has to print the truth in the first newspaper.

This blog feels like a printing press, because it’s always hungry, and it does feel as real as a sand castle, on a beach where the tide forever comes in. You can blog and blog and blog for years, and it’s fun to do, and there’s no end to it. So you start to get help. Guest posts. And interviews. And you read books and you try to keep your press fed. But there’s always another day where you have to feed it again.

How do you deal with this, whether it’s for your nonprofit newsletter, or your nonprofit blog, or your own personal blog?

Solutions to the content question
Do you read books a lot? Can you work this into your blog? Can you make seasonal posts? Topical posts? Do you read other blogs and work a comment into a blog post?

If you’re blogging for your nonprofit, have you thought about getting guest posts from program staff? This is one of the ways that WildlifeDirect was able to go from 7 blogs to 73 blogs over the course of two years, according to Beth Kanter’s The Networked Nonprofit.

If it’s just you, and your blog is hungry, here’s a link to 100 blog post ideas if you’re getting stuck for how to begin or how to continue.

Speaking of topical posts, looking at the current flurry of 9/11 posts, it would have been easy for me to make that post. But I choose not to. Because there’s another, bigger thing to think about right now, and that is the October 2011 movement. Check it out.

Now, let’s switch gears.

Chances are, you were not educated to be a fundraiser or a blogger as an undergrad. Neither was I.

Maybe you could also relate to the second part of the quote, about being educated to be useless? When you have a degree in poetry and gender studies, you may be able to dissect a sentence with ease and tease three different meanings out of it, but that doesn’t necessarily get the food on the table.

I don’t know if anyone reading this received a “liberal arts” education, but perhaps you’ve got some idea of what it means to be “educated to be useless.” I wish John Taylor Gatto’s “A Different Kind of Teacher and “An Underground History of American Education” was given to every new graduate of teaching college.

Don’t get me wrong. I love gender studies, and I love poetry, and I’ve used both in real life. But I also could have used a class in “How to start a business” and “How to be a consultant” and even, “How to fund a nonprofit” during my 4 years at an elite college on the east coast. According to Gatto, elementary, junior high and high school should be set up into a 5 day schedule of:

• 2 days devoted to the usual subjects,
• 1 day job-shadowing,
• 1 day devoted to a year-long project, and
• 1 day of community service.

What about you? Do you feel like your college education was helpful in a very concrete way, in the job you have now? Do you think that Gatto’s idea of how to structure a school week would be useful now, or would have been useful to you?

Is your blog like a hungry printing press, waiting to be fed? What to do? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on September 12, 2011.

Cause Marketing for Dummies by Joe Waters and Joanna MacDonald

I’ll be honest, before I picked up this book my interest in Cause marketing was pretty much zero. But this book got me excited, thinking about possibilities for some organizations I’m currently doing work for.

I just received this book in the mail last week, and so far, I love it! I have gotten so much out of this book. You can see me here with the cat, who promptly started licking the book when i put it down. I guess that makes two of us who like it!

But good things need to be shared.

If you leave a comment below, I will enter your name in the drawing to win this book.

Here’s why I love this book.

Clear Definitions
Joe puts the difference between Sponsorship, Cause Marketing and Philanthropy as a difference of involvement.
At one end of the spectrum, Sponsorship, nonprofits do all the work and the corporation just shows up.
With Cause marketing, nonprofits and corporations do roughly equal amounts of work.
And with Philanthropy, the corporation does all of the work, and the nonprofit shows up to collect the check.

Three kinds of decision makers
One of my favorite parts is on page 100-102, where Joe shows you the kinds of people you are going to need to deal with as you convince corporations that it’s a good idea to enter a cause marketing partnership with you. The three kinds of people he has dealt with are Thinkers, Feelers, and Deferrers.

Thinkers want a low or no risk model, something where they don’t have to put in a lot of up-front cash.

Feelers will respond to a heartfelt story, but don’t over-do it. They also want to get hope, joy and compassion by being involved with you. They don’t want fear in the story.

Deferrers will wait and see if they want to get involved with you if you have a string of successes before this one. So if you have a celebrity on board, that will be an instant green light for deferrers. Or if you’re vetted by a local elected official, that will lend your proposal some clout as well.

Joe put in this equation that I loved, for Thinkers: Value + Free – Risk = Great Opportunity

You could apply this to sales in general, not just fundraising and not just cause marketing.

A focus on implementation
When you’re implementing your first cause marketing campaign, it can be daunting, and you might think, “How are we going to succeed with this?”

Well, you can start with Pinups. These are not barely dressed ladies from the 1940s, no, these are things that you can ask a local store to hand out and hang up for you. Around Valentine’s day, St. Patrick’s Day, or another holiday, you might see these all around your local starbucks or grocery store. If you’ve ever just seen a wall plastered with these, it can be impressive, and you might look closer to see what they are benefiting.

It doesn’t cost much to print these, and you can start with your local grocery store, asking if you could do a campaign for a couple of weeks to a month to get people engaged with your cause and make them look more like heroes too.

Joe says that people will give at the cash register if the cashier doesn’t just say, “Would you like to make a donation to MDA today?” no, the cashier needs to say something like, “Would you like to make a donation so a hungry family can eat tonight?”

But what if you’re an arts nonprofit? How can you make it compelling? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments.

In short, Cause Marketing for Dummies is a really smart book, and I hope whoever gets it really enjoys it and puts these theories into practice right away for their organization.

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Book Giveaway: Cause Marketing for Dummies originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on August 15, 2011.

Picture it.

Tell me the last time you saw a nonprofit program associate on the cover of a supermarket magazine.

Time Magazine Nonprofit Story

Tell me the last time you saw a nonprofit bus driver portrayed as the center of a news story.

People Magazine Most Beautiful Social Workers

Tell me a story of a nonprofit social worker that brought you to tears from mainstream media.

Right. You can’t. Because these aren’t the stories that are being told.

If you work in nonprofit communications, whether you’re a communications associate or a communications director, your job is incredibly important. Not just because you’re helping your nonprofit get more attention, but because you are fighting a culture war. You can help people have aspirational identification with people who help other people for a living, instead of glamorous airhead movie stars, yeah?

Think about the shows you watch, the people you are told to admire, it encourages us towards aspirational identification with the rich, the powerful, the glamorous, AND, I would argue, makes us devalue our work, our own aspirations, our worldview and our solutions to the issues that really matter.

I mean, look where we put our attention. Wouldn’t it be incredible to just open up a paper and read stories about what different nonprofits are doing, the whole time NOT being sold watches or jewelry or high fashion? And the heroes in these stories all look like you and me, different colors, different sizes, all kinds of hair, maybe some people have acne scars, I mean, imagine it. They are being held up as heroes, and they aren’t trying to make you insecure about how you look or who you are. They have jobs like we do.

I was over at Tiger Beatdown, you know, READING, when I came across this article by Emily Manuel on True Blood and class war.

Even if you don’t watch the show, you might look at women’s magazines while waiting in line at the grocery store and see the latest star crisis. You might even browse Perez Hilton in an off-moment, to partake of a little Schadenfreude at the foibles of celebrities. So this applies to you too. Hear me out. Emily, WHY IS TRUE BLOOD LIKE CLASS WAR?

Emily writes:

“This points to a broader, infrequently noted, problem with popular entertainment–the continual reinforcement of class structures, the way it encourages us towards aspirational identification with the rich, the powerful, the glamorous. We watch the rulers and not the ruled; True Blood is followed on HBO by Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm, two shows about the elite of Hollywood. In a world where the Tea Party protest for the rights of billionaires to receive tax breaks, it’s hard to underestimate the effect of capitalist ideology in convincing working people to identify with the powerful against their own interests. True Blood is just one tiny little data point in a broader pattern, but it’s a telling one.”

You can highlight your program people in your communications. YOU can find the funny things, the unique things and the important things in their stories. Their stories deserve to be told too. You are fighting a culture war for the right to declare what is really important.

With all of this noise, our role of nonprofit communications is even more important. What is the media for, but for us to tell our stories?

Maybe you are not on the front lines, bandaging a sick person, or leading that art class for disadvantaged kids, maybe you’re not cleaning up that estuary or counseling a homeless mom, but what you can do is fight the power, in your own way, by encouraging people, giving them hope, showing the compassion of your agency, and helping them FOCUS ON WHAT’S REALLY IMPORTANT. Which is helping others, however we can.

It reminds me of the lyric by David Byrne of Talking Heads: “When the world crashes into my living room, Television Man tell me who I am.”

The news crashes into our living rooms every day, all of the articles and blog posts we read crash into our heads and the build up of information makes us focus on whatever the news outlet wants us to focus on.

So now with social media and other tools at our fingertips, we can become media outlets. WE can choose what we broadcast, and we CAN gather a large group of people who want to listen to us. Whenever you’re responding to a tweet, or thanking someone on facebook or joining a linkedin group, think about how you are building your media empire, not just for you, but for the donors, the people who need more meaning in their lives, who are looking for stories like yours to get involved with.

Thank you for fighting against the tide of meaningless drivel and thank you for talking about what is really important.

Nonprofit Communicators, I salute you.

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How do you create a media empire for your nonprofit? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on August 9, 2011.

1. Make it over 20 pages, and an extremely hi-resolution pdf. Yep. the longer, the better, really.

2. No graphics on the cover, just a blue field.

3. Make the cover have boring stock art.

4. Make the cover have “unnecessary” “quotation” marks. Because that’s not indicative of the editing quality of the rest of the report, right?

5. Don’t put anyone who actually has been helped by your nonprofit on the cover. God forbid you should be personal or real.

6. Inside, make sure you have lots and lots of text. No call outs. No boxes. No pictures. Just text.

7. Make sure your graphs are as boring as possible. In fact,

8. Don’t even worry about financial transparency. I mean, it’s not like there are tons of nonprofit scandals around, right? It’s not like your nonprofit is getting audited right now, right? People trust you, right?

9. Don’t list all of your donors. Who looks for their name in an annual report, anyway?

10. Make sure there are no pictures of your team. Who wants to see the people who make it happen, anyway? Ditto for quotes from your team.

11. Whatever you do, don’t have links on your website to different parts of your annual report.

12. No humor. This is serious business here. We cannot joke about your cause, EVER.

13. When you get it printed, use someone you’ve never used before, give them absolutely no time to do the job, and don’t bother with proofs. Grainy photos, misspelled words, and run-on sentences all okay! Who has time to edit these days, right?

Follow these tips and you’ll be SURE to get an unreadable report. In fact, it might as well go straight from the printers to the pacific garbage patch!

Any other not-to-dos? I would love to hear your thoughts below! Also, if you want a free ebook I just made with some ways to do it right, sign up right here, and get it!

 

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Want to be an Annual Report JEDI? Free Ebook Download originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on June 30, 2011.

“Hey Twitter, can you help me out? I am looking for small rural clinics and hospitals using social media.”

The response was instant and tremendous, because @TweetSmarter picked up my question and retweeted it to others.

Over fifty people, complete strangers, responded, and some of their answers are below.

People’s responses ranged from retweeting my question to asking me to tell them what I found out, as well as providing some extremely helpful answers.

TweetSmarter ROCKS!

TweetSmarter is so incredible!

I was so touched! Total strangers, helping me out, simply because I asked for help!

What did I get out of this?
I got lots of different links to different hospitals and clinics, I got smarter around how to ask this question, I started to create relationships with new people, and got new followers too!

If you have a question that you’d like answered, and you want to connect with people on Twitter too, I suggest that you ask a question, and ask @TweetSmarter to retweet it. You might work for a nonprofit that cares about domestic violence, for example. And you might want to ask, “How are other domestic violence agencies doing social media? What are some policies I can follow?”

If you work at a hospital, how are you doing social media?

Do you have a facebook page for your hospital?

Do you have a twitter account?

Do you have a blog?

I have so many resources now pertaining to hospitals and social media! Here are some of the first links!
Ed Bennett’s comprehensive list
How doctors use twitter to help people follow a live surgery.
A big hospital social media resource list

Here are some people on Twitter who know more about this!
@Concentrahealth
@MissionAVL
@Doctor_V
@CorvallisClinic
@RMHCFamily
@EdBennett
@MatthewBrowning
@MDelaCalzada
@SimTara

And MORE! More people responded! But there were so many, I don’t have time to write them all.

If you responded, please feel free to write a comment below, or just tell me more about what your hospital is doing, and how it is going for you!

Thank you!

Do you work for a nonprofit hospital? How are you doing social media? originally appeared on Wild Woman Fundraising on April 28, 2011.