Photo credit: kevulike/flickr under CC license

As many who follow this blog know, I retired from my professional life as a marketing and strategy executive to care for my now 95-year-old father and have used the hiatus to support nonprofits. That’s a long way of saying that most of the work I do by choice is pro bono, for causes I care about. I use this blog to share what I’m doing in the hopes it may support other nonprofits as they strive to fulfill their missions. In this post, I’ll share an agenda that I used last fall and describe the results.

In my first post in this series, I suggested that nonprofits have a greater need for real strategy than larger organizations. But, up against the press of reality, it may make more sense for a nonprofit to focus on action planning rather than strategic planning, and call it that.

Most nonprofit organizations also don’t have the resources to do what large corporations do: either task a staff department to draft a new strategy, or hire a smart consulting firm to develop a strategy under the supervision of management. One takes six months to a year, and the other, many thousands of dollars.

Last fall, I worked with a nonprofit to figure out: did it really need to focus on operational planning, or strategic planning? This particular organization is recovering from a crisis, making it very difficult to think beyond day-to-day challenges. But with operations normalizing, the Board felt ready to start talking about the organization’s future direction.

Below, I’ve pasted in a copy of the agenda for the 6 hour discussion I facilitated last fall. You’re looking at two paths the Board could have gone down. The left hand (blue) approach implies, “Hey, we’re doing important work. We just need to stay focused on doing what we’re doing well. Let’s stay the course.” The right hand column, which was the one the Board chose, meant, “Now that we have our heads above water, let’s take a fresh look. Let’s think about need and imagine if we were designing this nonprofit from the outset. What’s needed today?”

The group didn’t have that conversation with some grounding in reality. The agenda included a review of the environment, which included an inventory of local organizations addressing the same need. I developed a high level environmental assessment with categories that made sense: charitable giving trends, underlying issues having to do with need of the population served, trends in poverty/unemployment/economy, related trends in the retail/service environment, trends affecting the government’s role in addressing the problem, nonprofit trends including administrative cost pressures, and social/political/cultural trends. (For some organizations, it may also be important to consider technological trends – and, of course, changing demographics are a biggie.)

Given the constraints of volunteer Board members’ time (a Harris Poll found that Americans lost an average of 20 percent of their available leisure time from 2007-2008, as reported in Grassroots Fundraising Journal), I thought the group might want to divide and conquer by chartering some mini-teams to explore several new/different overall approaches to fulfilling the mission and reporting back to the full group. Instead, they established a series of full-group mini-retreats — extended 3 hour meetings — at which they will identify and explore options as a group. The first of those meetings is next month.

At that meeting, the group will attempt to achieve these outcomes:

1) Discuss/establish one or more long term goals as a stretch target or direction.  Long term goals will have a longer horizon such as something we would hope to achieve in 5-10 years.

2) Brainstorm ideas for alternatives or initiatives.  A limited number (1-3) will be selected for further exploration.

3)  Assign teams to develop concept proposals based on guidelines established by the Board.  Teams might be asked to gather data or input from community experts or leaders, draft a refined concept, estimate costs to develop, identify risks, and identify potential benefits and funding sources.

Stay tuned!

Photo credit: dbaron/flickr under CC license

First in a series

A friend recently showed me a document that was purported to be the strategic plan for a nonprofit association. What it was, actually, was output from a brainstorming session at which the organization’s board picked a bunch of initiatives and actions, titled, “Strategic Plan.”

Discussions, brainstorms and lists of initiatives are useful exercises for nonprofit boards, but they are no substitute for a strategy.

Let me make two flat statements:

• Very few nonprofits — at least small, local ones — have a plan that rises to the level of being “strategic”
• Not every nonprofit needs to invest in strategic planning – at least, not right now

What’s wrong with most nonprofit strategic plans?

1) They usually aren’t grounded in an understanding of the changing environment and competition; by competition, I mean anything that addresses the need the nonprofit is concerned about. The “anything” would certainly include other nonprofits but it would also include government and grassroots responses to the need.

2) They rarely drive toward a clear goal and target. Many nonprofits are focused on activity, for example, clients served. Though important and useful, activity measures aren’t adequate to provide direction. If you helped 10,000 people last year, is attempting to serve 15,000 people the following year an adequate goal? This isn’t McDonald’s, and numbers served isn’t an outcome. Most things that pass for goals represent too broad of a focus to help an organization decide how to deploy its resources. If it can’t guide decisions about where to invest staff and resources, then it isn’t adequate as a goal. In other cases, the goal seems to be based on bean-counting: the goal may be to achieve a certain level of revenue, or to produce a certain number of programs, but what’s to say those are the right numbers? That’s the role of a target. Targets should be based on an understanding of what would be good performance for that nonprofit as it chooses what problem it will attack; it can be very helpful to consider what other high-performing nonprofits have been able to achieve in their communities. The right targets can be transformative to an organization.

Some reading this may be thinking, “That’s all well and good for corporations, but nonprofits don’t need real strategic plans.”

I would argue that nonprofits need strategic plans more than for-profit enterprises because their resources are so constrained.

Strategic plans are about choice, thoughtful choice. When you can’t do everything, you have to decide what’s the best thing you can do. That takes understanding your organizational capabilities — both assets and limitations — as well as something about what needs are unfilled. It’s not about the quest for the next new thing.

Why strategic planning isn’t for every nonprofit – at least not right now

As a group of McKinsey authors said in a paper last year, “Strategy is a way of thinking…” (Bradley, Hirt and Smit, “Have you tested your strategy lately?” McKinsey Quarterly, Jan. 2011)

If an organization is in the midst of a crisis, or stretched to the limit, it may be better served by action planning than by strategic planning. Action plans identify the basic steps that have to take place to meet the immediate need. What has to happen to support client services? What block-and-tackling marketing and fundraising activities have to be completed within critical timeframes? What infrastructure has to get fixed or put in place?

It’s a little like farming. Action planning lets a nonprofit subsist off the land, but it may not maximize its productivity. Creating a thriving farming enterprise requires understanding the market for crops, analyzing the soil/climate and what the farm could produce best, perhaps learning and implementing new approaches, and figuring out how to switch from doing things the old way to the new way. It might also involve creating new alliances or partnerships.

But with the annual strategic planning retreat coming up, what’s a nonprofit to do?

To use the time of the Board wisely, think long and hard about what the outcome of the retreat needs to be. Does the nonprofit need to prioritize the most important actions that need to be taken to stay afloat (which includes de-prioritizing some programs or activities that may be sacred cows to some Board members)? If so, then an action planning retreat would serve it best — and call it that, not a strategic planning retreat. Or are operations under control enough to look toward the horizon? Then focus the conversation on how the Board wants to approach the process of strategic planning.

I think there’s a moral imperative for nonprofits to periodically re-examine their direction, even their missions. What can the nonprofit focus upon that really meets a need and is within its potential capabilities? That’s what the strategy should answer.

Next: kicking the tires of the existing strategy/direction

Sacramento’s Give Local Now campaign is trying to cajole locals  into giving more of the donations locally, having learned that a higher percentage of our residents donate to global issues rather than local causes compared to other communities. I’ve heard radio ads and seen digital billboards.

I’m watching Twitter this morning to see how Washington D.C.’s Give to the Max Day is unfolding.  It’s a 24-hour fundraising blitz for 1,300 participating nonprofits.

Although most of the day is ahead (and people may actually be working), almost 4,000 people have given at this moment to raise over $400,000 so far.  They even had one minute where $7,000 came in.  Communities within the target area are competing, as are nonprofits on the leader board (scroll down).  Click here to see a local TV news story featuring spokespersons from Razoo and United Way.  Razoo’s Lesley Manford reported that a similar campaign in the Midwest raised $14 million, so she threw down the gauntlet to the local area, “It’s like the Super Bowl of nonprofits.”

At its meeting tonight, instead of collecting fees to support its own operations, Social Media Club of Sacramento took up a free will donation to benefit two important local food banks: River City Food Bank and Sacramento Food Bank Services.  CGI, an information technology and outsourcing company, was on hand to match those donations and contribute another $250 to each organization.

The panel discussion, moderated by Clay Nutting of 3Fold Communications (and Concerts 4 Charity), had lively, rapid fire input from four panelists: Misty Avila, eAdvocacy Coordinator, Aspiration Tech; Chris Brune, Director of Creative Services at Macer Media and consultant for Sacramento Food Bank Services; Julie Boernhoeft, Director of Development and Community Relations, WEAVE; and Kate Towson, AmeriCorps volunteer with Sacramento Steps Forward.

The group talked about:

• the ubiquitousness of Facebook as a “go to” tool
• the importance of a range of communications tools as ways to have shorter and longer conversations
• what outcomes they care about achieving through social media, and their view of social media policies
• social media as fun, and as a conversation (rather than a tool for talking to your audience)
• the karma loop of social conversation
• the importance of having an understanding about how social media is used when working with volunteers or staff members involved in a charity
• use of social media for fundraising, and increasing online donations
• time management

CSUS professor Gwen Amos’ “Visual Image” students have a tough assignment:  research and understand the scope of poverty in Sacramento, and develop a print piece, poster and campaign to assist a worthy nonprofit.  Today I met with four students — Biz Lemma, Charmian Mendoza, Jessica Ripley and Kevin Swaim — to discuss their preliminary ideas to benefit Women’s Empowerment, an organization that they see has having a vital mission and approach to helping homeless women. (Note: their work is not sponsored by Women’s Empowerment but they selected the organization and are busily working on ideas to advance its cause.)

They also came with a laundry list of questions – 20, to be exact!  More than a dozen were of general interest so I’ll do my best to answer them here.  Readers, do you disagree with me? Please comment.  I know the students would appreciate the input.

How can we, as designers, use social marketing strategies to influence the behaviors of the public?

How can’t you?  I know that’s not what you asked. Social marketing literally means influencing attitudes and behaviors to accomplish a public good. All causes have to “map” how they will get people from point “A” to point “B.”  They may have to create awareness first before getting people to take steps that will accomplish the good they envision. Or it may be that people are already aware of the issue and just need to know how they can get involved, usually starting with low-risk baby steps and progressing to higher involvement. Social media, which we discussed today, offers an important set of tools to get people to engage.

What methods have been used in “call to action” campaigns that would work on a local scale?

We discussed a variety of examples when we met, but I’ll share one here.  Some of the most successful campaigns address a problem that people immediately grasp, make it easy to support the effort, and have a short-term sense of urgency.  ”Give to the Max Day” in Minnesota is an effort by that state’s nonprofits to come together and get people to give locally.  Last year, the effort raised more than $10 million from 42,000 donors in 24 hours.

What levels of interactivity do we need to reach in order to make an impact? How important is it for the audience to be able to interact with an advertisement as opposed to simply read information on a flyer?

I know from our conversation that you’re wondering whether a poster or flyer (which requires no interaction) is better or worse that some kind of communications tool that makes you take an action (like a tear-off pad).  Old school direct mail advertising used to favor pieces where you had to apply a sticker and send in for the free offer.  Asking people to do something yielded higher returns than just a plain old mail appeal.  But today, it’s important to remember that people have short attention spans.  Something tactile might work if it’s clever enough and makes sense, or it might get ignored.  Spend time thinking about where people are now in their decision process about involvement.  Do you need to spend time raising awareness as a “drip irrigation” method: delivering a steady stream of short messages through passive media like billboards?  Or do people already ‘get it’ and just need an easy way to act – like click a button on a website?  When it comes to interactivity, I’d think less about print, which has a substantial up front cost and may be risky in terms of return. Think more about online tactics.

For a cause like helping to alleviate poverty, is a magazine the right way to present the information we have?

It could be a way to present it.  First you have to reach an audience that wants to know more. Magazines have the luxury of multiple pages to tell the story, and the ability to present compelling visuals.  They might be a great tool for major donor prospects.  Another approach might be a video.

Do you think that social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) is more successful currently than traditional billboards, print ads, mailers, etc.?

The metric for success here is return on investment.  For every dollar you spend, what do you get back?  Because social media are cheap or free, it’s hard to beat the return.  Plus you can experiment rapidly.  On the other hand, the jury is out in terms of social media’s ability to generate substantial donations.  As pointed out recently by John Kenyon at the Nonprofit Resource Center conference, email and even “snail mail” still play an important role in generating donations.  (Here’s an old presentation of his that explains the role of email in fundraising.)  Online donors frequently become snail mail donors.

Is there any gain in having volunteer organizations on Yelp?

Yelp is definitely a social medium, but people tend to go there for reviews.  It can be a good place to create events to attract new friends and followers.

Do you feel that QR codes are a fad?  Are these marketable to older crowds as well?  Are people more likely o get involved with an organization, or at least visit their websites, if there is a QR in the ad?

Old like me ? I think they’ll be useful eventually but right now they’re mostly sizzle and no steak for nonprofits.  On the other hand, there is a small set of people who love new tech toys, and those people might follow a QR to a website.  If you’re trying to recruit programmers to work with disadvantaged kids near Silicon Valley, a QR code on ads might work well.  Think about your target audience first.  Do they have smart phones and use a QR reader app?

What is a good way to advertise for volunteers as opposed to donations?

Volunteering and donating are both behaviors.  As we talked about today, friends are a more influential source of information than paid advertising.  Think about how you can mobilize people to bring their friends into a cause, whether it’s as a volunteer or donor.  You might think of those as alternative paths for giving.  Some people might have more time or talent, while others have more financial resources.  Nonprofits need both.

What is a good length for a YouTube video campaign?  Would these be effective for groups such as Women’s Empowerment so that the target audience can put a face to the cause?

Watch TV news and you’ll get a pretty good idea about the optimal length of a video.  Keep remembering: we all have short attention spans!  I haven’t seen data about optimal length but I’d guess 2-3 minutes would be the maximum before you start to lose people.  Videos do need a story arc: something that engages you, depicts a struggle or a challenge, and releases tension by providing information about what you can do.  Video is ideal for organizations like Women’s Empowerment, much harder for organizations that have “colorless” visuals – e.g. free tax preparation assistance. [Update:  The Give Minnesota folks are also running a nonprofit video contest called "Does this make my heart look big?" The second flash image that comes up once you land on the site asks for votes on the most compelling video.  Check them out and see what you think about length and impact.]

What sort of information would an organization trying to raise community involvement need to include on a Facebook page?  In trying to up the number of volunteers, would Facebook be more successful than traditional print ads or flyers?

What works best – always – is an integrated media campaign across multiple channels, but nonprofits rarely have the money for that.  Websites and Facebook are very cost effective channels for engaging people.  The beauty of Facebook is engagement and interaction; it’s a conversation rather than a one-way channel.  Spend time looking around on Facebook fan pages to see what kind of content (and messages) seem to be working for nonprofits that have similar appeals.  Draft a one-page “message and voice” guideline with your ideas about what the nonprofit needs to convey (prioritized) and what its personality should be.  The idea is to get other people to post on your page and on their own page.  Above is an example from today on River City Food Bank‘s Facebook page – 2 people who cared enough to post.

How many campaigns should an organization have per year?

Whatever number is effective!  It would depend on the organization and what it’s asking through the campaigns.  The big thing is that the organization should map out a strategy for the year.  For example, it might start the year with a personal outreach campaign to major donors, then promote an event, then focus on a membership drive, then do a holiday push and “it’s not too late” New Year’s reminder.

Parting words

Start with the end in mind (outcome).  What is the problem the client — in this case, the nonprofit — is struggling with that marketing and design can help solve?

Conceptualize a strategy that goes from awareness of a problem or cause through the behavior that the nonprofit wants to encourage.  You will undoubtedly have a limited budget so pick just one step on the long ladder from awareness to behavior as a place to begin.

Test it on your mother.  Can you explain what you want your Mom to do in 140 characters or less so that she gets it and wants to help?

Think in terms of a short campaign – or at least a fairly short experiment.  So many of the “old reliable” marketing techniques have fallen by the wayside with splintered audiences.  Now everything is test and learn, keep building on what works and stop doing what doesn’t.  What can you do that’s not too expensive and gets a response in 6 weeks or less?

Good luck.  And thanks.  The nonprofit world needs young people like you who care, and have talent to share.

Before – 1,200 friends:

Before: 1,200 friends

After – ~3,500 friends*:

*Approximately 300 of the new likes were from outside the local area

Background:  After renovating its Campus Commons senior independent living community outdoor environment in Sacramento – including planting 106 new trees – Sacramento-based Ray Stone Seniors approached the Sacramento Tree Foundation about a cross-promotional campaign.  Active in the local community since 1968, the company saw a connection between their renovation effort and STF’s campaign to preserve and protect Sacramento’s legacy of trees.  What if local companies got behind the community goal of planting 5 million trees? The company offered to make a donation for every new Facebook friend that liked the STF Facebook page in a 30 day period – an adaptation of a matching donation fundraising program.  In return, STF would expose its audience of 12,000 newsletter subscribers and 1,000+ Facebook friends to Ray Stone senior independent living communities.

Disclosure:  “Philanthrophile” is not a bystander in this one.  I was a matchmaker.  As an owner/family member and sometimes-consultant for Ray Stone Seniors, I stumbled across the fact the Campus Commons senior independent living community had made a dramatic investment in trees and landscaping as part of its vision of having a high quality indoor/outdoor living experience.  It occurred to me that there might be an opportunity for a new kind of business collaboration that supported both organizations’ goals. “Philanthrophile’s” personal goal is to help local nonprofits find effective and affordable ways to further their missions.

Q & A with Colleen Cadwallader

What happened?  Did engagement and interaction increase, decrease or stay about the same?

Engagement and interaction increased ten-fold; however, that was in large part because we made an extra effort to post fun and interesting things that enticed fans to participate more.  The promotion really motivated our staff to use Facebook more.

What did STF do to promote and add legs to the campaign?

We used a number of different tactics to get the word out:

• Email taglines about the campaign were added to every staff member’s signature
• Two single-message Constant Contact email blasts were emailed out to our 12,000 contacts
• We advertised through Facebook
• We participated in a radio interview with KFBK
• We asked our partners to put the campaign on their pages (see example below)
• We asked our Board members and staff to put the request on their own personal Facebook pages
• We asked people to like us while we had them at tree-planting events

DO’s:

1.  Right now, make sure that your Facebook “like” button is prominent on your website. Not a small share button somewhere at the bottom of the page but sizable and somewhere “above the fold.”  In the example below, the Child Abuse Prevention Center does a nice job of putting it in the context of “how you can help.”

2.  Ask people to help you reach the next milestone in friends by posting the request on their wall, which will distribute it to their friends’ walls.

Research suggests that direct requests to “like” you work.  I noticed two nonprofits that have done this recently.  WIND Youth Services posted an “ask” on August 12 to help them hit 300 friends; they hit that number on August 16 and were at 366 friends as of last week.  I’m not sure Effie Yeaw’s “ask” is going to work because it’s not direct enough and too distant from where they are: at 621 friends, they say they are “slowly inching their way to 1,000 likes.”

3.  Cross promote.  Although there is some evidence of audience interest decline (and despite SPAM filters that are making life ever-more difficult to reach people), your e-newsletter should link back to your website and promote your Facebook page… any printed materials should include the Facebook like button logo and your URL… if sales are a part of your business model you should distribute flyers at the cash register and/or put a message on the bottom of the sales receipt (as Nordstrom does).  And so on.  (Though not discussed in this post, Twitter has a powerful cross-promotional effect across platforms; it’s time to consider it as part of the mix – but do it right!)

4.  Don’t forget the basics: Make sure you have customized your Facebook URL to make your page easy to find, and take advantage of landing pages so that you convert those who check you out.  Try this test: have friends use the Facebook’s search function to find your organization’s page.  Did it come up in the list of options?  If you don’t have many friends and you’re not easily found via FB search, consider renaming or starting over.

5.  Now more than ever: customize your landing page (use a free tool like Pagemodo).  I checked out one nonprofit Facebook page last week that had me land on a flat-out request to donate.  Hey, we’re not even dating yet and you’re asking me to get married!  On the other hand, WEAVE has the perfect handshake:

6.  Post more photos!  If you really chart which of your posts get the most impressions and engagement using Facebook’s administrative Insights tool, you’ll probably find that photos are among your top performers.  But now when your cursor hovers over any of the Ticker features at the right of the page, you’ll see that photos really pop. Instead of a thumbnail, the photos are several inches wide.  They have a “wow” effect that they didn’t before… and photos are a great way for most nonprofits to tell their stories. (The same hovering action also shows you comments related to the photo, so you really feel like you’re interacting in a community.)

7.  If you post a link to an article, make sure you include at least a sentence of introduction.  Your recommendation is valuable to your followers, and if you include some keywords, it will improve the search position of the item – which, on an organization page, is public.

8.  You may need to reassure people about how much of their private information is public when they “like” you.  In an op-ed titled “Facebook Murders Privacy” on Mashable, Ben Parr comments, Everything can, and eventually will, get posted. Facebook has done something nobody has ever been able to do at scale: It has enabled passive sharing.

Not long after the Children’s Receiving Home created its Independent Living Program page in April, it felt it needed to post the following message.  I thought it was a little crazy and that it might have raised more questions than it answered.  In the new context of everything-is-public, however, people may have questions about how much of their content becomes public when they “like” your page (a person’s profile operates differently than an organization’s page):

I just want to remind you all that “liking” this page will NOT make your profile visible to the world. Only the administrators can see who has “liked” the page, unless you post a comment or “like” a someone else’s post. Even then,( unless your privacy settings are set to “public”), they will only see your name and picture. Also, if you are “friends” with other people who have “liked” the page, they will see you. :0)

DON’T's

1.  Resist the temptation to splinter your audience with more than one FB page. 

In my small survey this week, I found three nonprofits who had started additional pages.  If an event has a following, for example, should it have its own page separate from an event page that you create?  Or if a nonprofit has a retail location, should that location have its own page?  None of the three examples I found were accruing big numbers.  Having all of the content in one place — even event or retail promotion — may make the content more interesting for your entire audience.  Unless a nonprofit has the resources to promote more than one brand (and I don’t know of any that do), you’re increasing the work and diffusing your impact.

*I’ve been keeping an informal tally of local nonprofits’ Facebook growth since March 2010.  This week I enhanced that effort by using United Way’s certified nonprofit partners list as a starting point, checked about three dozen websites, and threw in some nonprofits of interest to me.  I’m now watching 42 organizations.  Among other things, I was surprised at some large nonprofits that have very poor websites and no Facebook presence (not necessarily the same organizations, by the way).  We have work to do, Sacramento nonprofits!

Everybody and their mother has written about Facebook changes this week (here’s an overview from Mashable) but I feel compelled to jump into the fray with a few thoughts about the implications for local nonprofits with limited resources.  Are the current changes good or bad for local nonprofits trying to build a channel for engagement and communications?

• Thought #1: Change is good if it helps preserve and protect the “cool, fun” factor of Facebook;
• Thought #2: For the truly engaged, nonprofits’ updates may receive more attention because of their placement in to top news stories….
• Thought #3: But visibility may suffer among friends-of-friends as people pick and choose what they want to read more about from the news ticker (at right in image above);
• Thought #4: Anytime Facebook changes anything, people worry what FB has done to their privacy settings, breeding an environment of distrust about “friending” nonprofits’ FB pages.

Despite the emergence of new channels of communication — or maybe because of them — a nonprofit’s website is more important than ever.  An integrated communications strategy encompassing email, traditional advertising, PR and social media should point back to the website – or at least a basic landing page – as a “place” to learn more and get involved.  And the website must be designed to attract people who are searching for information related to the cause or issue.

I talk to many nonprofits who “put up” a website a few years ago and figure they have that box checked.  Last they looked into it, it was too expensive to make any dramatic changes. At one point, it did cost tens of thousands for a basic overhaul… but that’s no longer true. If you’ve been told by your agency or firm that you’re going to have to spend a bunch of money for them to update your content, or figure out how to improve your website, you may be working with the wrong resource.

Heard the slogan, “There’s an app for that”?  Third-party tools have also changed the world for website designers, making it easier and cheaper to integrate sophisticated capabilities into websites for organizations with limited budgets.

Cheaper tools don’t necessarily make for an effective website.  That takes a clear understanding of audiences, objectives and the kind of relationship you want the website to help build.  But so much more is possible, for less money and less effort, than was once the case.

Last year, I had the opportunity to hear a great presentation by Digital Deployment at the Nonprofit Resource Center fall conference.  I invited Mac Clemmens and Carsen Anthonisen to give Philanthrophile readers a quick update on what’s new in the world of nonprofit websites.  Digital Deployment has designed websites for nonprofits ranging in cost from $15,000-$50,000.  The price tag depends on the complexity of the site, size of the organization and so on.  If you want to check out some of their recent work, here are a few websites they’ve developed in the past couple of years: Jesuit High School www.jesuithighschool.org;
Nonprofit Resource Center www.nprcenter.org; Stanford Home for Children www.stanfordhome.org; United Way (redesigned) www.yourlocalunitedway.org/

And, no, I don’t have any commercial connection to Digital Deployment and this is not an ad – just thought they’d be good people to ask, and they were nice enough to respond.  (Apologies in advance for the changes in font and font sizes… WordPress is not happy that I pasted in their answers from an email I received on my Mac, and I can’t edit the section below.)

What’s changed with respect to website technology in the past couple of years? What’s possible now that would have been too expensive before?

Today websites are easier than ever to use, and are nearly limitless in their ability to share content, video, photos, and documents. Modern websites are easy to update, can provide a website visitor with potentially limitless information about the cause of the nonprofit, and can easily leverage third-party services and plugins.  An example of this is the Make-A-Wish Foundation in Los Angeles. A wish recipient’s parent was able to share a video she took with her digital camera on the website of her ecstatic daughter walking into her newly redecorated room. It allowed them to share a powerful story, and remind others why the non-profit was so important to support.

Is it building measurable business value, and how are we measuring its success? For a domestic violence website, it might be something as simple as measuring the number of anonymous questions that came through the anonymous question board. Other nonprofits might measure the number of new subscribers to their blog or newsletter, the number of “likes” they have on Facebook, or the number of visits to the Donate Now page that were converted into actual donations. The process of establishing quantitative goals for the website is key to its success.

You can get someone to put together a theme for a WordPress blog for $1,000, or you can pay someone to spruce up a Facebook canvas page. But most websites, deployed on your own domain e.g., www.yournonprofit.org with some sort of content management system (CMS), usually start at a few thousand dollars. The costs are usually in how unique and customized you want your design to be, and how refined you want the functionality to be. Generally, we find the more you pay, the easier and simpler the site is to use and administer, and the more unique the design is.

The best thing a non-profit can do is to start having conversations with different developers/designers and ask them what opportunities an upgraded website might offer them. This is especially important to do before developing a scope of work and issuing an RFP. Since building a website means different things to different people, a scope of work helps define the offering. We usually define comprehensive website development as: a) conducting a rigorous analysis of the opportunity and developing quantitative measures of success, b) Providing branding, design, and theming services, c) providing content consulting and information architecture services, d) tailoring and deploying a content management system and integrating third party services, and e) driving traffic through e-mail blasts and monitoring success through analytics.

A robust, well-managed website is actually becoming more important because it is what is generally referenced as the authoritative source of information. Facebook and Twitter are channels to distribute content, just like e-mail. But what is being communicated, and how the communication is referenced and attributed to the domain for search engine optimization depends on a careful and thoughtful implementation of the website on the organization’s domain. That being said, the barriers to entry for non-profits to organize events and manage registrations, for example, have come down significantly. Eventbrite, for example, is a fantastic, simple way for non-profits to allow people to buy event tickets online.

Most websites are built from the inside out, rather than from the user’s perspective. In other words, organizations look first at themselves and then decide what to publish. Websites need to be planned and executed from the outside looking in, taking into account the demographics and lifestyle considerations of the audiences for the site.

Many nonprofits often post too many PDFs of documents, rather than posting content directly on a page of the site. This makes it harder for the user, and complicates the ability for search engines to find relevant content.

We sometimes see nonprofits buy overly complicated, overpriced, difficult-to-use software or products that don’t suit their needs.  The irony is that we sometimes also see a reluctance to spend money on a website content consultant or strategist who could help them tighten up their message or select less expensive and more effective tools.

McKinsey has a new report out quantifying the gargantuan value of search worldwide (a free download if you register but not a must-read).  It serves as another reminder to nonprofits to pay attention to how people use the Internet and use search find and create communities of cause.  All of us who communicate about nonprofit organizations need to remember to “think keywords” — those phrases people use to search and find out about issues, ways to get involved, or consider donations.  And beyond the need to keep websites fresh and interesting, we need to remember that much of what we do now is to create content that can be “broadcast” in one-way communications or used to pepper social conversations.

A few tidbits:

• In 2010, an average Internet user in the United States performed some 1,500 searches.
• Some 90 percent of online users use search engines, and search represents 10 percent of the time spent by individuals on the Web, totaling about four hours per month. 
• Some 30 percent of US Internet users now use social networks to find content, and 21 percent use them to find videos. 
• When people search online, they are signaling information about themselves: what they are looking for, when, and in what context—for example, the Web page they visited before and after the search. Such information can be harnessed by those seeking to deliver more relevant content…

There’s some good stuff in the report about the future of search.  It starts to feel like Carl Sagan’s “billions and billion” (or “billions upon billions” depending on which account you believe)… only it’s about trillions and trillions of gigabytes of data.  How will search remain relevant when there is so much stuff out there — and so many SEO experts chasing your attention?  Will people turn more to aggregated (or vertical) sites that they trust?  What will that mean for nonprofits?

Those questions are out there in the cosmos for nonprofits, at least for now.  But McKinsey’s report is a salient and current reminder: as you choose communications media and messages, bear in mind that search is firmly embedded into most people’s daily rhythms.