Today’s Tips for NGOs & Small Businesses 030115

You’ve got mail! Actually, a lot of email.

According to The Radicatti Group Inc., more than 100 billion emails were sent and received in every day in the business world in 2013. This incredible number is expected to grow and reach more than 132.1 billion by 2017. On the consumer side, 82.4 billion personal emails were sent and received in 2013 and this total is expected to dip to 74.5 billion by 2017.

That is an astounding total: 182.4 billion emails per day or 2.13 million emails per second.

With this phenomenally large number of emails traversing back and forth in cyberspace, what should you do to ensure that your e-correspondence, outreach or fundraising campaign is read by its intended audience and not relegated to the spam or junk folder?

Jay Wilkinson, a digital marketing guru, noted: “In nonprofit email marketing, there’s not much worse than creating an engaging campaign, building a compelling message, and then ending up in someone’s junk folder. So how do you avoid that? You need to know what triggers spam filters. Here are three ways to get your messages delivered to someone’s inbox and stay out of their spam.”

* Don’t send attachments

* Watch your graphics

* Watch your words

“Some words associated with spam and they may land you in someone’s junk mail, particularly if used in the subject line. Risky words include free, prize, bonus, buy, purchase, promotion and deal. Also, watch your punctuations—exclamation marks are especially risky in subject lines, as are words in ALL CAPS. When you build your next email campaign, focus on delivering the right message to your audience, but be mindful of what sends the wrong message to spam filters. A great campaign that gets labeled as junk mail will be sadly ineffective,” Wilkinson recommended.

Be careful with your email and you’ll achieve winning results in your campaigns.

Social Media 101 – Part 2

Continuation of my return to the basics of launching your social media strategy. If you have already done so, don’t worry, treat this as a helpful review.

·         Take the slow and steady approach. Pick one or two communities, projects, products or industries that are important to you. Determine your key goals and define who will be responsible for keeping activity going day in and day out. This new marketing is far from free. If you are large enough, you may have to assign more than one person to handle this project. But senior management cannot stay apart from this ongoing assignment.

·         Don’t measure success by follower counts. Growing your community is important, but you should be focused on who’s engaging with you and at what levels. In the long run it’s more important to have a devoted enthusiastic community. Organic growth matters.

·         Social media doesn’t equal self-promotion. Two things are important: Need to show who is behind the company (or organization) and need to focus on customers and not the company or organization. Ideas, professionalism, knowledge, education and engagement are important.

·         Search across the web for people looking for similar help or ideas and then begin offering advice and information.

·         Learn from the experts. Just because something worked for one nonprofit or company doesn’t mean it’s going to work for your organization. You’ve got to learn from the work of others, while tailoring their experiences to your own particular needs, goals and customers.

·         Get help without relinquishing your identity. You, president, owner, EVP or GM, simply can’t be an expert in everything. Be in control of establishing the relationship with your community and create networks. Play a large role in defining the message and content for all our communications, as well as engage in every tweet and blog comment directly.

·         Since social media is still an evolving area in society and business, there aren’t any set steps for success. Social media requires and allows experimentation. Take time to experiment. While there are many suggestions and recommendations across the web, many of these pointers are specific to certain types of businesses or industries.

·         One area of social media that can be discussed with relative consensus, though, is how to define a social media team’s role in your organization. While there are varying paths that can be chosen, they all stem from the same considerations: the goal of social media, who should be involved, what the responsibilities include, and how the strategy should be implemented. Furthermore, it is important to note how the social media team will interact with the organization, company, stakeholders, customers and community at large.

To be continued in the next blog.

Statistics

72% of charitable donations in US come from individuals.

6% of charitable donations in US come from corporations.

15% of charitable donations in US come from foundations.

63% of donors want to know how money will be used.

Are you prepared to address these issues in your fundraising campaigns?

Contact me for more ideas and guidance.

For a global view of what NGOs are doing, please visit my Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/BoostingNGOOutreach