Imagine producing online communications you're proud to share with the world and that garner praise from funders, donors, and other stakeholders. Each Prospects and stakeholders who interact with you online have only your online communications to evaluate your organization. Effective Online Communications can help you better engage current stakeholders, raise money, and attract new prospects. The John Kenyon , Jennie Anderson, AIDS.gov , and William Neuheisel, DC Central Kitchen Imagine Each month, I look at dozens of nonprofit websites and hundreds of nonprofit

Let’s get down to my top 10 list of things every nonprofit should know about social media and online communications. Enewsletters Still Work Enewsletters are still a valuable form of communications for most organizations. 8221; , Rob Pierson, Online Communications Director for Congressman Mike Honda and soon to be New Media Director for the House Democratic Caucus, said that sending enewsletters to your online list is the best bang for your Last week I spoke on a couple of great panels at the Politics Online Conference about technology, social media and how Congress is trying to adapt to the ever-changing world wide web aka the “series of tubes” as former Senator Ted Stevens so hilariously described it.

I've been thinking a lot recently about how nonprofits should divide their time spent in online communications. We all in the nonprofit tech space tend to focus on how nonprofits can get rewards by effectively investing more time and energy into specific types of communications - email, social media, or websites, for instance. . But for most nonprofits, especially smaller ones, doing more of one method means doing less of another, meaning that the decision as The idea here is that you should have relative comfort at each step before moving to the next. Until your computers are networked and backed up, for instance, you should concentrate on that before looking at other things.

Tags: Communicatio At Forum One we have thought a lot about RFP processes through the years. In addition to having participated in a several hundred RFPs, we have also helped many clients write RFPs and have also produced RFP guidelines for several large organizations. RFPs, RFPs, if conducted well, are useful in identifying vendors with appropriate skills and are (somewhat) useful in guaranteeing reasonable price and quality.

I've found that understanding some of the mind's cognitive biases can not only help nonprofit campaigners efficiently motivate our audiences into taking action online, but also help us be more effective professionally. For example, people are more willing to take action to stop something from being taken away than if they were to receive the equivalent value (you'll do more to stop from losing a dollar than you will to get a dollar).

Earlier this week, Beth Kanter wrote about how to translate social listening into good twitter conversation that supports your objectives , riffing on David Lipscomb ’s Social Messenger Framework — one of the communications planning tools that he’s made available at RedPed21.com . One document that caught my eye in particular was Lipscomb’s Media Selection Map , designed to help you figure out which communications channels — offline and online — to choose for a particular purpose. It all starts with...( read more ) ...Tags:

Nearly every organization is feeling the pull to communicate more. Quality matters, of course, but the shear quantity and frequency of communications that most organizations seek to produce has increased dramatically -- whether its blogs, tweets, commenting, web site updates, collaborations, cross posting, press releases, or good old print brochures. To stay abreast, your organization needs to maximize its capacity for communication. Tirza Hollenhorst, ifPeople Nearly To

It's hard to imagine living in a time when your options for communication were limited to face-to-face, sllooowww mail, and, perhaps, carrier pigeon. Today, we have the opposite problem: there are so many mediums to choose from that a key communication skill is to gleam the method that the person you want to reach prefers. The internet has opened up a Pandora's box of communication mediums. We've come a long way since the Pony Express . I was taken aback by an Australian ruling that Facebook was an acceptable medium for serving subpoenas, until I read that the defendants

Both email strategies should be a part of any online communications cycle. After studying over 50 international nonprofit organization's email lists and response rates, the 2009 eCampaigning Review Study revealed that 60% of nonprofits present a compelling argument for supporters to take action, yet close to 70% of the organizations did not send a follow up email within one month. 37% of nonprofits did not even bother to send a thank you email.

Could this be a tactic for a non-profit to communicate the energy and passion of its staff to supporters and potential employees… or vice-versa? This is bloody brilliant. A bunch of creative types in New York are hiring and did this video one night after work. You can see by the comments , that they’ve received no shortage of offers.