Great Opportunity to Discuss Non-Profit Visibility

Check out this great opportunity from M & R!

If you run a nonprofit, work for a nonprofit, consult to nonprofits, sit on the Board of Directors for a nonprofit, or give all of your money to nonprofits, you won‘t want to miss this one-hour webinar conversation! On June 22nd, NPQ Editor-in-Chief, Ruth McCambridge, will have a “private” lunchtime conversation with Clara Miller, President and CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund, and you’re invited to listen in and submit questions for Clara!

M+R’s New England office has the pleasure of working with the Nonprofit Quarterly (NPQ), the nation’s premier media source covering the nonprofit sector. NPQ has a reputation for tough, objective coverage of stories large and small. Its editorial voice informs and shapes the nonprofit sector from coast to coast.

Nearly 300 NPQ subscribers have already registered for this free nationwide webinar and we just know that you, your staff, Board members and partners won’t want to miss it!

Ruth will be talking to Clara about her recent article that was featured in NPQ titled, The Four Horsemen of the Nonprofit Financial Apocalypse, found in the Spring 2010 edition. The discussion promises to be lively, thought-provoking and memorable. And for any nonprofit that is destabilized because of the economy – there are timely and important lessons to be had.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDTTo register, go to: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/489962402

Simplify Your Life with Social Media Aggregation Tools

This is a great article for all of us using a variety of social media tools! I'm familiar with TweetDeck- but netvibes, Yoono, Flock and profilactic- they're new to me and they look great. If you're a dedicated Mac user, Socialite might be right for you. And Hootsuite... now that looks amazing. I'll be checking it out today! You might want to do the same.

We live in a time of uber-speedy communication via social media networks. One of these aggregators could help you keep up, stay sane and save precious time. You'll need it so you can tweet about your great new aggregator.

Read the Article: 7 Social Media Aggregation Tools to Simplify Your Streams

Mobile Programs: What’s good? What’s bad? What’s the norm?

In the wake of the Haiti earthquake, we all saw the Red Cross show how mobile giving could change the face of fundraising, raising $32 million from $5 and $10 gifts through text messages.

Now, just a month after releasing benchmarks for social media, M+R Strategic Services teamed up with Mobile Active to release its first-ever mobile benchmarks study, taking a look at how nonprofits are using text messaging programs and establishing some metrics by which an organization can evaluate its own.

Some of the most interesting findings:
- Nearly 80% of subscribers to text programs signed up online.
- Mobile programs are a growth industry – the annual increase in list size this year was a whopping 49.5%! (But it’s important to note that list “churn” – the rate at which subscribers leave the list, mostly through their numbers becoming undeliverable – is also very high, 30.7%)
- One of the ways text programs have had the largest impact is on call-in efforts. Recipients of text messages participated in a call-in at a rate five times as high (4.7% ) as those who received the action via email (0.82%). That’s one of the benefits of having your advocates already on their phone – making a phone call is literally just a few clicks away.

This is just the first effort to try to quantify the norms in mobile programs, but it’s already clear that they have a lot to offer the world of nonprofit advocacy.

How to Deal with All the Negativity

By now, we all know that one of the prices you pay for opening up a real dialogue with your audience is that the feedback you get isn’t always going to be positive – or even nice. It’s everywhere you go in social media – from blog comments to Facebook Walls to Twitter.

How to – and even whether to – respond to the negative criticism can be tricky, if not frustrating. That’s why Mashable put together a “how to” specifically geared at responding the right way to the comments you need to respond to – and ignoring the ones you don’t. The key is staying positive, and it starts with separating the legitimate beefs from the trolling spammers. In other words, step 1: take a deep breath.

In the end, the open dialogue can be one of the most beneficial aspects of social media, empowering your audience to take control of the conversation.

Testing, testing...

Even when you think you know it all about what tactics perform the best in email marketing, it’s always good to take a step back from time to time and test it.

Pinpointe, an email marketing company, just released the results of its study Email Marketing 101, which tests a lot of the basics from subject line length to sender information to email personalization. The results, while not too shocking, help establish some key best practices in email communications:

1. Keep subject lines short.
2. Send messages from a real person, rather than sending from an organization.
3. Personalizing the messages increases response.

Take a look at the full results here – download the PDF or watch the webinar.

What's "normal" in social media?

Everyone wants to know how they should be using Facebook, Twitter and other social media to best promote their cause. Should we be tweeting more? Should I set up a Facebook Page or a Facebook Cause?

Two studies released this month dove in to try to establish some social media benchmarks among nonprofits and marketers.

A “mega-report” by MarketingProfs consulted with a panel of social media experts and surveyed its readers and concluded: Facebook is better than Twitter, at least in the marketing world. There’s a lot more content and helpful information than just that conclusion, though, and you can read a lot more about the report on Social Media Examiner.

In another report, this time looking at growth and social engagement metrics among nonprofits, M+R Strategic Services aimed to shed a little light on the social media habit of nonprofits, who up until now have been forced to “make it up as they go along.” With this study, M+R hopes nonprofits – no matter their size – will be able to develop meaningful metrics by which they can develop their social media engagement.

Social Media Lessons to Learn from Haiti

With the tragedy in Haiti just now starting to come into focus, the work that so many organizations – and individuals – have done to help save lives and bring relief to the hundreds of thousands of victims is inspiring. And it’s no surprise that social media played a pivotal role in so much of that good work. Geoff Livingston of Zoetica decided to take a look at the lessons nonprofit organizations can draw from social media’s impact on the relief effort.

"While terrible in scope and nature, catastrophes like the Haiti earthquake bring out the best in people. In the age of social media, we get to witness this firsthand.

"With the widespread adoption of social media in the non-profit sector, people’s ability to act and support communities in need like Haiti has only been increased. There’s no greater example of this than the incredible fundraising job the American Red Cross did with social and mobile channels. With its texting campaign, the American Red Cross raised more than $20 million."

You can read the whole article – with all five lessons for social media – at Mashable.com.