5 Free Ways to Market Your Nonprofit

Just like any for-profit business, nonprofit organizations need to have a marketing strategy to survive and thrive.
Nancy Schwartz, founder and president of the nonprofit marketing firm Getting Attention, emphasizes that marketing for nonprofits is all about building relationships, and those relationships are vital to an organization's success.
“The goal of marketing is to build and strengthen relationships," says Schwartz, who in addition to her consulting work also serves on the board of the Nonprofit Technology Network and on marketing committees for her synagogue, local high school and PTA. "Nonprofits are based on fundraising, but you can’t meet someone the first time and ask for money. You need to build that relationship."
Nonprofits don't have a lot of money to throw around on marketing, however. So it's important for you to make every penny count. Luckily, free marketing opportunities abound. It's just a matter of being innovative, creative and flexible in your marketing approach.
Here are five ideas for affordable nonprofit marketing.
Engage your current supporters
Nurturing and engaging your current supporters, donors and volunteers is, according to Schwartz, one of the most effective free marketing strategies for nonprofits.
“You have to be very appreciative of your supporters," explains Schwartz. "Nurturing your existing supporters is the best low-cost, highly-effective marketing strategy. It’s always easier to retain existing supporters than it is to get new people in the door.”
That means keeping them updated and informed, and it also means getting them to do things with and for your organization. And here is where the second part of this strategy comes in: Ask them to tell their friends, family and colleagues about your organization.
"Not only does that expand your reach and increase the number of folks engaged in your organization, it’s asking people to get involved more than just writing a check," says Schwartz. "It works to get your existing supporters engaged.”
Social media
Social media sites are a gold mine of free marketing opportunities. Set up a business page on Facebook, and use it to communicate with your various constituencies—posting photos, updates, links and information. Create a Twitter account and mingle with others, keeping them up-to-date about your nonprofit's activities. LinkedIn, too, provides plenty of opportunities to market, by creating a business page, promoting your organization and keeping in touch with like-minded people. Look, too, for smaller, lesser-known social media outlets that are specific to the focus of your organization.
It's important to remember, however, that though there's often no upfront cost associated with these sites, it does take time for someone within your organization to keep them updated—and time is money.
"The key to effective use of social media is engagement, and engagement means that somebody from your organization is engaging with people through that conduit," explains Hamilton Wallace, owner of SmallBusinessMarketingConsultant.com. "To have an authentic voice and create engagement, it needs to come from someone inside the firm."
Blogging
Create a blog on your website and update it daily with helpful and useful information that readers be likely to share with others. The more useful the information you give, the more it will help your marketing strategy, increase awareness of your organization and mission and engage your audience. Another upside of blogging is it will draw people to the rest of your site, where they can see what you're doing and learn how they can support your activities.
Videos
Anyone with a smartphone and simple editing software can create professional videos that can be posted on YouTube or directly on your organization's website.
"We're a video-oriented culture, especially with YouTube," says Valerie Moody, owner of Fodeo, which provides photography and video services for individuals and organizations. “Anything we want to do we can go to YouTube and find something that shows us how to do that."
Your nonprofit might post an instructional video, for instance, or a video message from the director, or clips showing community service and involvement. Getting people to watch and share your videos will help spread your message.
Speaking engagements
Line up representatives of your organization to speak at conferences, trade shows and other events related to your field. This is a chance for free publicity and an opportunity to get your message out there. You can put information about possible speakers and topics on your website, so people searching for a speaker will be able to track down your organization, or you can register with a speaker's bureau.
Each of these techniques works in tandem with others. Thus, you can promote your speech-making over social media, or mention it in your blog. An e-mail newsletter can point people to your Facebook page. T-shirts that your employees wear to community events can have your organization's name and website on them.
Great marketing doesn't have to be expensive. In fact, the more creative you are with your marketing, the less you'll have to spend.
Vivian Wagner is a freelance writer in New Concord, Ohio. Vivian blogs via Contently.com.
Photo credit: Thinkstock

 American Express OPEN Forum

11:45 by Robert dawne · 1

Twitter Investors, Including Employees, Can Only Sell 20% of Their Stock [REPORT]

In a move designed to forestall an IPO for as long as possible,Twitter has a rule barring any investor, including employees, from selling more than 20% of their stock, according to a report.

Twitter initiated the rule about a year ago, but it hadn’t been made public, according to CNNMoney. The guideline is somewhat controversial within the company and allegedly prompted Senior Technical Engineer Evan Weaver to resign last August.

According to the article, Weaver’s departure prompted an explanatory email to staffers from CEO Dick Costolo. The email outlined Twitter’s reason behind the policy: To keep to the SEC-dictated limit of under 500 investors. Beyond that number, Twitter would have to go public. “We don’t want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth,” Costolo wrote in his August email, according to the article. “We’re not ready to be a public company for a couple years… There is one reasonable way to do this: Let everybody with vested common stock sell only some fraction of their shares,” Costolo added.

Twitter reps could not be reached for comment on the report.

Costolo’s stance on going public mirrors his other recent public statements. Like other social media firms, including, for a time, Facebook, Twitter appears to be holding off an IPO as a way of limiting outsider investors’ influence. That approach has hardly dimmed enthusiasm for the stock, though. Last March, Twitter’s valuationhit $7.7 billion on Sharespost, which trades shares on the secondary market.

Limiting shareholders means catering to deep-pocketed investors, including Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who sank $300 million into the company in December. Like Facebook, Twitter has also stopped giving out stock to employees instead offering them restricted stock units (RSUs), which can only be converted to actual shares after an IPO or a corporate buyout, according to the report.

Image courtesy of Flickr, eldh

15:52 by Robert dawne · 0

Raising Money for a Thoroughly Unreasonable Venture

A couple of years ago, Tyler Hartung, Daniel Epstein, Teju Ravilochan and Vladimir Dubovskiy had a very, well, unreasonable idea. The three, all in their twenties and University of Colorado at Boulder grads, had worked in businesses with social missions and knew how hard it is to jump start a social venture. So they decided to launch The Unreasonable Institute, a Boulder-based not-for-profit that takes its inspiration from the well-known tech incubator/accelerator, TechStars. The name of the organization comes from a George Bernard Shaw quote: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
The idea was to gather 25 social enterprises in Boulder for ten weeks, give them access to mentors, networks and the opportunity to raise capital, and watch them take off. The criteria:  “The ventures need to address the root cause of an environmental or social problem or need," says Hartung. Plus, all candidates must have sustainable revenue models. In the Institute’s first two years, the founders encouraged both for-profit and not-for-profit ventures to apply. This year marks a major shift, with the requirement that all must be for-profit businesses. “We were seeing for-profits take the most value out of the Institute,” says Hartung. The change also made it easier to attract mentors and capital partners who could potentially invest in the ventures.
But the most interesting aspect of The Unreasonable Institute is how its "fellows" are chosen.  This year, there were 306 applicants from around the world and 100 were deemed promising enough to advance to the second round, which involved a phone interview. Of those, Hartung and his co-founders chose 46 candidates from 25 countries whose ventures are featured on The Unreasonable Institute’s marketplace for 50 days (you can check them out on the Institute’s website until early March. That’s where individual donors fund their favorite entrepreneur’s $10,000 tuition fee, one donation at a time. Tuition goes toward transporting and supporting the fellows for six weeks, plus transportation costs for mentors. The first 25 finalists to raise $10,000 in 50 days become fellows and spend six weeks in Denver, starting in June.  To insure that deep-pocketed friends and family don’t tip the scales unfairly, maximum donations are set at $10 for the first week, then increase incrementally each week.
Currently featured in The Unreasonable Institute’s marketplace are, for instance: Quetsol, which is developing energy solutions for poor families in Guatemala; Waste Enterprises, which is tackling the crisis of waste collection and treatment in Africa; and Praki Design, a maker of charcoal stoves that decrease fuel consumption and smoke emissions.  They, and 43 others, are hoping to be among the 25 companies that will gather in June to live with one another and the mentors who will help them evaluate, improve, and scale their companies.
Hartung says that all but a small fraction of The Unreasonable Institute’s fellows from the previous two years are still up and running and that 66 percent of first-year fellows who were seeking funding received that funding. Among the Institute’s alumni success stories: Solidarium, a Brazilian company that connects local producers with big retailers, such as Walmart and J.C. Penney; and Eco-Fuel Africa Limited, which makes organic charcoal from agricultural waste and whose founder, Moses Sanga, was selected as 2012 TED Fellow. Sanga’s company also received a $20,000 investment after his participation in the Institute. That may not sound like a lot, but it’s a fortune in Uganda. “His trip to Unreasonable was the first time anyone in his village had been on a plane,” says Hartung. He’s hoping for similarly dramatic results from this year’s class.
Pictured: Co-founders Daniel Epstein (second from left) and Tyler Hartung (third from left)
Photo credit: Courtesy company

19:26 by Robert dawne · 0