Admin eSolutions: Blog

Make it easy for visitors to your non profit website to find information on how they can get involved. There are plenty of people out there who might not have the money to make a donation but are still passionate about what your organization is doing.

Whether you provide detailed information about volunteering directly, steps people can take on their own, or just contact information for your volunteer organizer, make sure you don’t overlook this crucial bit of information.

Providing multiple means of contact makes it easier for volunteers to get in touch, so include an email address, phone number, and a web contact form if you can.

A volunteer friendly non profit website should have the following:

• A calendar showing all the upcoming opportunities to volunteer
• An easy form to fill out so volunteers can sign up
• Have the form pre-qualify volunteers by asking:
• Area of expertise
• Hours available
• Days available
• An online photo album of pictures showing past events and volunteers in action...potential volunteers will relate to that a lot more
• A phone number & a contact, some people still prefer the old fashion phone call rather than filling out a form

With the holiday season fast approaching, take a look at your website and make it easy for people to interact with your non profit organization.

A lot of organizations understand that they should have a blog on their website. I couldn't agree more and most Business Owners & Executive Directors we talk to agree as well. But there is a lot of confusion about how to do it or even what constitute a true Blog. So here are few tips to help you get started with your blog:

Your blog title should be keyword rich
You want to use good keywords, keywords that your typical member or potential member would be searching for. To identify good keywords, you can use Google Keyword Tool to get started.

Short & Sweet
I would recommend to keep it within 300 words, to include bullets, multiple short paragraphs and to bold keywords. Statistics show that most people don't have nearly the attention span you think they do, get to the point and remove all unnecessary words & phrases.

Include some related links to your content
The rule of thumb is to have a link for every 120 words. Could be a link to some interior pages of your website with more in depth information on the subject or better yet, a link to an outside source (i.e. Wiki) to provide additional information or to explain a specific term.

Add one single image to your blog
Most of what we track, show that having one image per blog is good. It makes it more visually appealing and gives people something to relate to than just a whole bunch of words. The image should describe the mood or feeling or describe in some ways what the blog is about. Make sure to add an image description to your image (aka ALT tag)

Make sure to have a RSS & email subscription
Most blogging services include RSS and adding a way for people to easily subscribe to your upcoming blog is a great way to spread your voice and to make your organization relevant. Some organizations have 70-80 percent of their blog readers subscribe by email, the rest will use RSS.

Getting people to comment
Some of the great ways to do that is to ask a question at the end of your blog or be controversial. Also, you can leave part of the subject not covered. If you completely cover a subject, there isn't much room for someone to add anything to it.

How often?
Once or twice a week. Yes, at least once a week, twice would be better. I know what you are thinking: "How on earth am I going to find the time to do this once, let alone twice a week". I think it's important for any organization to engage the whole membership, dumping this on one person's lap is a recipe for it to fail. Try a contest with your members: "best blog submitted will be published and the winner will receive a discount for the annual convention".

Is your schedule packed enough that the idea of adding blogging sounds like a nightmare?

With more than 50% of the U.S. population having Internet access, the Web has become an important channel for providing information and services. As the Web becomes a part of people's everyday lives-booking travel, finding health information, buying products — there is a growing need to help people figure out whether a non profit website is credible or not: Can I trust the information on this site? Can I trust in the services this site describes?

Key Findings
Studies show that when people assessed a real Web site's credibility they did not use rigorous criteria, a contrast to the findings of Consumer Reports WebWatch's earlier national survey, "A Matter of Trust: What Users Want From Websites", released April 16, 2002. In this poll of 1,500 U.S. adult Internet users, people claimed that certain elements were vital to a Web site's credibility (e.g., having a privacy policy). But this most recent Web-based credibility study showed that people rarely used these rigorous criteria when evaluating credibility (e.g., they almost never referred to a site's privacy policy.) We found a mismatch, as in other areas of life, between what people say is important and what they actually do.

The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a site, such as visual cues, than to its content. For example, nearly half of all consumers (or 46.1%) in the study assessed the credibility of sites based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes.
This reliance on a site's overall visual appeal to gauge its credibility occurred more often with some categories of sites then others. Consumer credibility-related comments about visual design issues occurred with more frequency with finance (54.6%), search engines (52.6%), travel (50.5%), and e-commerce sites (46.2%), and with less frequency when assessing health (41.8%), news (39.6%), and nonprofit (39.4%) sites. In comparison, the parallel Sliced Bread Design study revealed that health and finance experts were far less concerned about the surface aspects of these industry-specific types of sites and more concerned about the breadth, depth, and quality of a site's information.

Insights
There seem to be two pieces to the Web credibility evaluation puzzle. Previous research focused on just one piece: the judgments people make about Web site features (e.g., who sponsors the site, the presence of a privacy policy, broken links). The other piece of the puzzle deals with what people notice when they evaluate a site for credibility. Until this study, there was no data about this second piece. For this reason, the current study is special because it is the first to generate findings about what people notice when they evaluate a website for credibility.

The table below presents an overall picture of the content analysis for comments about all 100 sites in this study. This table shows 18 types of comments, from "design look" to "affiliations." The percentages in the table represent how often a comment on that topic appeared in the entire set of comments. For example, participants in our study mentioned something about the "design look" of the site in 46.1% of the 2,440 comments.

How often participants commented on various issues when evaluating the credibility of websites.

How does your non profit website compare to this study?  

As a small business owner, I prefer simple tools. I like having one tool that I can push to the limits over a slew of them that I have to manage. It makes my life a little easier and my processes more streamlined. Which is why I'm a huge fan of using Google Alerts.

Google Alerts lets you set up as many Alerts as you’d like on as many different topics as you’d like. You set what to track, what kinds of content to track (News, Blogs, Video, Groups, or Comprehensive ), how often you want it and they’ll create you a list every day and send it to you via email or RSS.

Google Alerts have always been a super easy way to track conversations, keywords, and your brand but that’s not all they can be used for. I thought I’d break down a few of my favorite ways to use Google Alerts and see if maybe some of them could help you as well.

How Does It Work
Google Alerts sends you an email each time a new page for your chosen term makes it in the top twenty results on Google’s web search. You can also have the alert check Google News and/or Google Groups.

To sign up for a Google Alert, all that you need to do is visit the Google Alerts homepage, enter the search term, type of alert (search Google News, Google Groups, or the web), frequency of emails (daily, as it happens, or weekly), and your email address.

You can set up alerts for as many terms as you like using a Google Account. So why would you want an unlimited amount of alerts? Because as an organization executive or a business owner, you have a lot to keep track of and very limited time to do it.

Here are four ways I use Google Alerts.

1. Tracking Keywords
   This is how most of us use Google Alerts. By creating Alerts based around your most important keywords, you’re able to find new information about topics you’ve told Google you’re interested in. Doing this can help give you food for blog entries, guest articles, newsletters and help you stay better informed overall. Keeping on top of what’s happening in your industry will help you make better decisions in your business and alert you to new products or strategies that can help you do things smarter. Using Google Alerts to track relevant information is great.
   
   The problem with tracking broad keywords is that Google often finds information that’s not as relevant as you’d like. To help cure this a bit, you can use advanced search operators to help you filter out bad results. For example, if you are an Architecture Historians organization interested in what's being said on the topic, you could have set up an alert for [Architecture + Historians]. This would make sure that you only received architecture historians articles, instead of everything being published about the architecture. In the same way, [Architecture -historians] would omit any mention of Architecture where the term [historians] was present, while [Architecture OR historians] would show mentions where at least one term was included. It’s all about making your results more relevant.
2. Track yourself
   It goes without saying, if it’s important to know what people are saying about your competitors and about your industry, it would stand to reason that it’s important to know what people are saying about you.
   
   I have Google Alerts on both my name ("Antoine Dupont") and my businesses name ("Admin eSolutions"). I know that they go hand in hand and if one is getting slandered you better bet it will hurt the other. By receiving alerts, you can be on top of anything negative relating to you or your organization, and hopefully nip any problem in the bud before it grows too large.
   
   On the flip side, there’s nothing better than receiving an alert where someone praises your organization. Those are the types of things that you want to make sure are on the PR page of your website.
3. Track your competition
   Every non profit organization or business has a competitor. More likely, you have several direct competitors and several more indirect competitors. While regularly checking out their websites is an important part of the process, it doesn’t paint the whole picture. A competitor's non profit website is very much crafted to the image that they want to portray to their customers.
   
   This is great if you want to know what their latest event is or their last blog, but it isn’t likely to feature a negative review in last Sunday’s newspaper.
   
   That’s where Google Alerts comes in. By simply setting up a News, Groups, and search alert for each of your competitors, you will know what other people are saying about your competition, both good and bad.
4. Keep Up To Date on Your Industry
   Equally as important as what people are saying about your competition is what people are saying about your industry in general. If there’s a negative PR swing against your industry, and you just happen to run non profit websites in that same industry , you will probably be affected.
   
   By receiving alerts on important key words related to your industry, you can be on top of any sudden changes and react accordingly. By the time your competition realizes what’s happening they will be scrambling to catch up to you.

If you are like me, you watched the recent drama between the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and Planned Parenthood with a mix of horror and morbid curiosity.  Think what you may about either organization, it’s unfortunate to watch such large, successful organizations tarnished. 

This was a great learning opportunity, though, on the dangers of letting your organization get off mission. Without getting mired in the details, I thought it important to highlight some lessons I was reminded of from the kerfuffle and how to avoid them before they happen:

1. Avoid Cognitive Dissonance:
   Your donors have an image of who they think your organization is and that’s why they give you their financial support.  Organizations should be doing everything in their power to not upset that opinion.  Stick to your mission statement. There’s an old saying; “There are two things you don't talk about in mixed company; religion and politics...”  For religious and political organizations, this is obviously a non-issue.  Otherwise though, it’s likely that your donorbase comes from a diverse background and you should do your damnedest not to stir your supporters.
   
   
2. If You Disregard #1, Have a Good Reason:
   And explain it!  Not every move a nonprofit makes is going to make everyone happy at every turn, but it is pretty easy to know in advance when you are making a potentially risky move.  Your donors are naturally pre-wired to agree with you; if your decision making is sound, you should be able to explain your moves in a way that donors will be able to understand.  Be consistent and ACCURATE when explaining it!
   
   
3. Know Your Donor:
   The reasons that people give to your organization are probably wide-ranging, but there are likely some trends regarding who and why people give you their support.  Immerse yourself into their world, so that you are better aware of what potential pitfalls you might face with changing or new initiatives.
   
   
4. Help Your Donors Know You:
   Your financial house should be in clean enough order that donors should have no doubt where their donations are going.  The more explaining you need, the less compelling your offer seems.  This can be taken to various extremes, but it’s always good practice to let donors know where and how their dollars are helping.
   
   
5. Know Yourself:
   This is one of those leadership issues vital for the long term success of any organization.  There are often short term incentives to move a small, monetarily insignificant project to your forefront.  However, it’s very important that these short term pushes don’t trump the long-term goals of the organization. I’ll give an example: An emergency need on the periphery of your organization’s work is gaining media attention, so you shift communications to highlight your work on that issue.  The short term dollars gained are a boon for the organization, but you are also attracting and renewing donors that don’t necessarily support your primary mission.  It’s important that efforts be made to shift back on topic.  Otherwise, you risk cultivating a database of donors that aren’t compelled by the body of your work.

(This is a blog re-post: original source: http://www.newrivercommunications.com/)