Clairity Click-it: Online Social Fundraising; Culture of Philanthropy; Events + Free Stuff

Hope you enjoy these links, free resources and training opportunities. Again, I’ve organized according to two of the top 5 areas I’m hoping you’re working on improving this year.  This week it’s:

1. Online Social Fundraising
2. Culture of Philanthropy

I’ve also got some “food for thought” articles on special events, plus links to free resources and upcoming training opportunities. I hope you find at least one useful nugget!

Online Social

Click-it: This Is The Social Media Posting Schedule That Will Boost Your Traffic By 192% Here’s what you get in this article: Enticing social media messages + a game plan for promoting new posts + best daily social sharing frequency + sharing your best content again = A lot more traffic from social media! There’s also some great advice for writing headlines.  It’s a lengthy article, but a nice meaty one – complete with how-to video and a free, downloadable social media posting schedule kit.

Click-it: An Easy Way to Build Your Email List. This article by Scott Paley, on Joan Garry’s excellent blog, does just what it says it does.  If you need a bigger email list, read this now.

Click-it: How To Use Hashtags The Best Way On Every Social Network. The folks at Co-Schedule have put together a useful step-by-step primer to help you give wings to your social media marketing by making the best use of hashtags using different channels. It’s a great “cheat sheet” to help you make the most of your wonderful content!

Click-it: 13 Instagram Marketing Tips From the Experts. This is not a new article, but it’s a great A to Z primer from Social Media Examiner, via Cindy King, for getting started with Instagram. The platform is growing by leaps and bounds, and is something to consider if (1) you have lots of visuals to share, and (2) you have lots of millennials involved with you.

Culture of Philanthropy

Click-it: How Customer Relationship Management Can Make or Break a Nonprofit. This article, from nonprofitabout.com, cites a number of studies of consumer behavior finding that customers have high expectations for engagement. This means all customers.  The article notes that customer relationship management is just as important for nonprofits as for-profit businesses. Online and offline. How do you measure up?

Food for Thought: Events

Click-it: 7 Steps to Turning Event Attendees into Donors. Many of you are in the process of hosting spring events. Make sure they aren’t ‘stand-alone’ affairs. Take some simple steps to maximize your investment. In case you missed this article I was honored to write earlier this year for Network for Good, I hope you’ll check it out now.

Click-it: Podcast: Breaking Gala Traditions With Boards On-Board. Is it time to re-evaluate your special event?  Sometimes you get to the point where folks love your traditional event, but it’s too much work and isn’t worth the results it yields. So what do you do?  Listen to this podcast with Tony Martingetti of Nonprofit Radio and Ruth Browne of the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health.

FREE RESOURCES + EXAMPLES TO LEARN FROM

Click-it: Smart Tips to Identify, Screen, Rate and Qualify Major Gift Prospects [FREE WEBINAR] Please join me and 4GOOD this Wednesday, May 18, at 1:00 p.m. EDT. Building a good major gift prospect portfolio will account for 80% of your major gift fundraising success, yet too few nonprofits give this important step the attention it deserves.  Learn how in this free webinar! Attend for free.

Click-it: In advance of their Corporate Social Media Summit, the Incite Group is sharing their top three webinar recordings, which you can access for free (no forms to fill in):

1. Turning Social Data into Actionable Intelligence with Intuit, Tracx and Dell
2. One-to-One Social Media Engagement with Intel, Farmers Insurance and Wilson Sports
3. Generating Seamless Customer Experience through Social with Wells Fargo, Humana and Microsoft

I always believe we’ve a lot to learn from our for-profit counterparts. Feel free to share these recordings with your teams! Hope they’re of use!

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: The Case Writers are here!!!. There’s an awesome new creative/writing team in town! They are: Tom Ahern, Maggie Cohn, Andrea Hopkins, John Lepp and Jen Love. They’ve banded together to write and design donor-centered, unusual cases for capital campaigns and “gratitude” (annual) reports. That’s all they do. And they do it with great aplomb. You can check out some amazing examples of their work here. If you want to see how to tell great stories and make your donor the hero, this is a great place to learn.  And if you’re in the market … click on the link and contact them!

The #ClairityClick-it is a bi-monthly publication linking to useful resources and insights I find across the web.  This year I’m also selecting articles that highlight the “Dive the Five” 2016 fundraising fundamentals we’re collectively digging into in depth over the course of this year. For more on this, read Want to Guarantee Fundraising Success? Dive These 5 Fundamentals on NonProfit Pro.

For more on these subject areas, check out:

Your No-Nonsense Donor Retention Bible

 

Donor Retention and Gratitude Playbook (you’ll learn about both donor retention and developing a philanthropy culture that channels an attitude of gratitude in this 6-volume set). This is your road map to keeping and upgrading more donors — the key to sustainable fundraising.

Discover How a Blog Can Drive Donor Acquisition, Retention and Support

 

Nonprofit Blogging that Drives Engagement Playbook (you’ll learn about both content marketing and online social fundraising in this 4-volume set). This is about much more that creating a blog. It’s about how to go about meeting folks where they are, getting them interested because you’ve got something they really want, and engaging them in a way that’s meaningful — for you and for them.  Win/Win!

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