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Some of you might have heard of the Young Professionals Network. Well, did you know there is a version for those of us working in the non-profit sector? I belong to the DC chapter of Young Nonprofit Professionals Network (YNPN), a group dedicated to really making as much information as possible available to those in our field through job fairs, seminars and networking happy hours. It’s amazing that there’s a forum out there to focus on younger people that are dedicated to the missions of many unique and important organizations. At these events, it’s great to hear different stories about the struggles and triumphs that all people in the non-profit world experience. Of course, I would be remiss to attend these events and not mention PICnet’s services, so I always have a quick blurb about us in the hopes of spreading the word about who we are and what we do. At the end of the day, even though I don’t make a sale, it’s still great to spread our mission and see how what we do aligns so clearly with what many non-profits need. I think attending the YNPN events are a great way to create a community for non-profit organizations located all over the city. It’s amazing to learn how many non-profits could really use a website revamp, and once they learn PICnet does it for such an affordable price, they are quick to ask more about us. For more information on YNPN and to find your local chapter, click here. As the number of Facebook users climbs by the thousands every month, the college-age group who first supported its growth seem to be losing interest and turning their attention elsewhere. While these users aren’t deleting their Facebook accounts altogether, they do appear to be spending less time on the site and exploring new communities and places to connect with their friends. According to at least one source, a significant portion of them are now revisiting Twitter, the micro-blogging site that limits your updates to 140 characters. So how does this affect your nonprofit’s social media strategy if everyone is competing for Gen Y’s attention? The first thing to note is that Facebook aging is just a side effect as it becomes more mainstream, which may actually be a good thing for your nonprofit. Depending on your target audience, this may mean leveraging Facebook as a way to reach and engage your audience is now more powerful than ever and it could boost support for your cause, and even online donations. For starters, make sure your Facebook page caters to your audience and has clear objectives and action items for users. For more tips, check out this recent NY Times article (aimed at small businesses, but applicable to any organization). Second, if support from Gen Y is crucial for your nonprofit (whether for donations, volunteers or spreading the word), it might be time to explore some other options to make sure you are keeping up with your users. As always, it’s most important to find the right match between your objective, message, medium, and audience to achieve your goals and see successful results. Still need more tips? Let us know! The holidays are fast approaching. In fact, they are close enough that you might just be peering at this post through a ring of yellow stickies on your monitor with notes like “Draft holiday fundraising appeal” and “Update mailing list for big $$$ push” alongside “Figure out what the heck to get mom this year.” Before the holiday stickies completely obscure your monitor, we wanted to toss out an idea for you to consider. How about adding a video appeal to that big $$$ push to set your organization apart from the crowd? You can. It’s free and easy and allows you to leverage the tools the good folks at YouTube provide beyond just embedding videos into your site. Take a moment to learn about YouTube’s Nonprofit Program to see how you can turn video views into donation dollars. Interested in some inspiration? Jump straight to their Video Campaign Tip Sheet for some examples that just might cause some early holiday cheer. Check out our Help Desk for more posts like this. In addition to some of the work we do for clients like site redesigns, upgrades, migrations to Non-Profit Soapbox or Joomla and custom applications, we also like finding cool tools for our clients and partners to use in whatever way works best for them. We’ve written about website, databases, applications, webinars, conferences and more in the past. Today’s cool tool is a combination of many resources – Google. Oh, just Google? you might be thinking. Well, duh, we use Google Docs and Gmail and Google Calendar. But hold on, don’t click away yet. You might use some of Google’s basic features, but have you really looked into what they do for non-profits? Read on a little more and you’ll see some of the great resources at your fingertips – all through Google. You’ve got your website. It’s your organization’s virtual front door. You work hard to lay out the welcome mat, tend the flower boxes, wash the windows, and offer enough content to get people inside for a heart-to-heart coffee table chat about you and your mission. So you’ve got curb appeal. You’ve got substance. But how do you get folks into your neighborhood and knocking on your door in the first place? Great question. Boosting traffic and attracting eyeballs to your site is key to online success. If people aren’t coming and viewing your site, it isn’t doing its job to move your mission forward. Tracking site traffic: Knowing who’s coming to your site The first part of improving is knowing how your site performs now. The easiest and cheapest way for assessing that is a handy tool called Google Analytics. This is free and tracks website traffic. Got some question you want to know about who and how people are visiting your site? How long the average person spends poking around? What search term they typed into Google to come across your little home away from home on the interwebs? How many people living in Burkina Faso visited your site on a Tuesday at 10:23 pm? The Google knows. It knows it all. And it will tell you – provided you’ve signed up for a free account and had us install the tracking code it provides. No Google Analytics yet? Interested? Check out our Tips and Tricks post about tracking traffic. You can also view an informative Google-created video there giving an overview of Analytics. Even the most thoughtfully designed website needs some attention from time to time. Our clients’ needs change and develop, and their websites must change with them. And as we know, technology changes, too, sometimes so quickly that the next new version of something is out before you’ve barely gotten used to the current one. So what happens when a PICnet client needs assistance with their website after it has launched? They contact the PICnet Support Team and we get their issues resolved. At PICnet, we are passionate about supporting our clients. They are more than just accounts to us – they – YOU – are our partners. We care about the issues that our clients stand for, and strive to be an integral part of their success. We have been undergoing a philosophical metamorphosis in the PICnet Support Department over the past couple of months, further articulating what makes us unique, and we are really excited about it! It is a client-forward strategy that we like to call the PICnet Salon Experience. We understand how frustrating technical support can be. We know, because we have to interact with support from dozens of companies ourselves in our daily work. We are constantly frustrated by a lack of responsiveness, unknowledgeable support agents, confusing ticketing systems, and ultimately, unsatisfactory solutions to our problems. PICnet is committed to being the opposite of that.
If your answer to any of these questions is yes, there’s a way to do that while fundraising for your non-profit at the same time. It’s called InsiderPages.com. For each review that someone writes and submits, up to $1.50 can be earned for your organization or cause. Best of all, it requires absolutely no money, just a little time and effort. A member of the Young Non-Profit Professionals San Francisco chapter is using Insider Pages to raise funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society to reach her personal fundraising goal. We think this might be a great place for our clients to put their reviews of vendors out in the open and maybe early a little money for your organization while you’re at it! If you do use Insider Pages and see any great results, let us know! We’d love to hear if it works for you.
As noted last week, the overall project will see a total of five Sister Community sites launch this summer. These sites empower local Communities to craft their own message for their individual audiences while leveraging the common branding and shared experience on the Soapbox platform of the network as a whole. For those organizations and individuals that have taken the online social network plunge, you’ve likely heard of two giants in the social networking world: Twitter and Facebook. While I do my best to keep up with the cool kids on the nptech circuit, I’ve learned a few things along the way that can help you spread the word about your organization through these systems. Think of Twitter like a mini-blog. When you write a “tweet”, your posting is stored for the world to see on your Twitter page. Of course, you’ve only got 140 characters to do it in, so you’ll need to keep it short. These tweets are displayed to others that are connected to your Twitter feed, which is extremely powerful for delivering a message quickly and directly to a large community. For instance, during the recent hurricanes that swept the southeast, Twitter feeds were setup among volunteers to help co-ordinate support efforts. While you can type whatever you’d like within your tweets, I’ve found myself more attracted to using Twitter to read the breaking news and information from within my network rather than to read a friend post “I’m cooking pizza tonight.” Additionally, some of the best morsels from Twitter are actually links shared from others. You can easily do this by ending your tweet with a URL created by TinyURL, or any other link shortener. This provides your own comment along with a link for further reading to your visitor. Amazingly, it seems like everybody is on Facebook now. Unlike Twitter, Facebook is more truly a social networking platform that provides a variety of connection points between you and your network of friends and collegues. Facebook’s status update provides you with the ability to quickly share what you’re doing with your network. While some people are starting to post both to Twitter and Facebook with the same updates, I’m beginning to see a shift in the usage of the two. Facebook seems to be the place where people are focused more on their personal life. This stems from the origianl Facebook requirement of starting all your status updates with “[your name] is…” This lends itself to postings like “Bob is going to pick up the kids”, or “Christina can’t believe the traffic on 101 today.” With different mediums come different messages. In the Twitter and Facebook worlds, I’ve found that the more personal the update, the more likely it belongs on Facebook. In any case, keep those tweets and status updates coming…everyone’s a voyeur in 2008.
I know, I should be using Google Desktop, with all sorts of Web 2.0 gadgets, widgets, thing-a-ma-bobbers, etc. I’ve used Google Desktop for a few years actually, but I was finding that in exchange for the 3GB of disk space that it started taking up, the benefits were a little limiting. I wanted to be able to sort my results in a variety of ways, to search things other than just basic Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook contents. In short, I wanted more control of my desktop search. |
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