I attended “The Seven Things Everyone Wants: What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We’re Forgetting) about Online Outreach” this morning with two of my favorite big brains in nonprofit marketing: Katya Andresen of Network for Good and Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies.
Here is the PDF of their slides.
A few points that stood out for me:
–Beware of the Gartner cycle of tech hype. This is the path that new tech takes. Inflated expectations. Realize it’s not “the cure. ” Plunges to trough of disillusionment. Many tech tools stay there and die, but some do go up to the slope of enlightenment. In the tech world, we are always on the steep slope, but the reality is that the people we are trying to reach with our nonprofit communications are on the slope. So while nonprofits are all consumed with getting into social media, the people we really want to reach are just now regularly using e-mail, blogs, and video. We are chasing the new thing, but that takes us to a place where our audience isn’t. And bad content through new tech channels is still bad content.
So what do you do? Make your email remarkable before you go down the Twitter hole. Make your blog fabulous, which means well-written , very visual, short, not fact-laden text. Every post should tell a story.
–Convey a humbling vision: “Give profit and gain to others, take the loss upon yourself.” Make your supporters the star of the show. Show them incredible return on the time and money they have given to you. Use stories to take people to a shared place – Marketing 3.0. Keep showing your supporters what you can do together. Make donors feel like proud parents of your org.
–Keep it Simple, Silly. If you throw 20 balls, or 3 balls, at someone, they will probably catch just one – or none. So why not just throw one ball at a time? Same with messaging. If you have three articles or three calls to action in your newsletter, you’ll be lucky if the reader gets just one of them. Don’t bombard people with too many choices.
Katya and Mark shared some other interesting points that I’m mulling over for future blog posts. More from the conference soon!
