How to Make Twitter Useful

While Twitter use is still very low among most nonprofits' desired demographics (5% of those 45-54 years old tweet, and fewer of folks older than that), its popularity among the media is sure to make those numbers grow, especially among those who are highly wired.

Maybe no one is following you right now, but if you start posting tweets on topics where your nonprofit is the expert, then clever use of hashtags will propel your messages around the twitterverse. For example, I'm following #swineflu and so I'll see lots of tweets about swine flu that have that hashtag, even if I'm not following the users who posted those messages.

This is a great way to reach the mavens on the issues you cover.

For more on hastags, see the Twitter Fan Wiki

Rick...

The twitter limit

How many tweets are too many?

One nonprofit I follow went from one every few weeks to 5 or 6 a day, including inane posts like "Is it Monday again?" There are a few very smart people for whom I've turned off posts to my phone because I can't stand the traffic. My rule of thumb? If you try to have more conversations with me in a day than my wife does, you're over the line.

And if I "unfollow" you once, or set your account so I don't get posts to my phone, you cease to exist for me on Twitter. I suspect that's true of most followers.

Radical Concept: Asking the Donors to Decide

The title of the email was bland: "Help us Serve You Better." I opened it anyway, and the first words from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Foundation caught my interest: "The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (NLEOMF) strives to communicate with you in a timely manner to keep you abreast of our efforts..." It went on to ask,"

Please take two minutes to complete our seven-question survey to help us better serve you. Your answers will enable us to modify the type and frequency which we send information to our supporters and subscribers.

We aim to provide only the information you wish to receive and in the format you choose. Participating in this survey today will allow us to better serve your needs through direct communication.

Please click here to begin the survey and thank you, in advance, for your participation.

So I did. It asked me what kind of information I wanted to receive, via what channels (hard copy, email, RSS, or "I'll would prefer go to the web site on my own to get updates" (which is so much nicer than saying, "Don't call me, I'll call you"). The survey went on to collect a little bit of interest and demographic information.

We preach this all the time. It's so nice to see someone doing it. I was tempted to submit a few different submissions just to see how the different answers are used. That's the hard part, of course. It's easy to ask your email supporters their preferences. It's another thing to be prepared to truly delivery on them.

Rob Prisament has too much fun at March for Babies

Also, he positively loves it when you laugh at him... so long as you're supporting MOD!

So this is the latest thing he's come up with:


Create Your Own GushyGram
Visit Marchforbabies.org


It's the first video I posted to my MySpace page in a long time. I just don't have the nerve (or time, or creativity) to create my own. Maybe we need to empower our crazy-about-you supporters to do crazy stuff like this?

Rick...

CityYear.org - great graphics

Yesterday I was riding the "el" from downtown Chicago to O'Hare. It's a 45 minute ride, so my eyes took in all of the advertising material One of them caught my eye. It was a very simple "time line" drawn across the add. On the left it said "born." About a quarter of the way over was another dot labeled "Graduate." Not far to the left of that was one that said "Get a job." Three quarters of the way towards the right was one that said, "retire," and on the far left was one that said "die."

In between "graduate" and "get a job" the ad had a handwritten additional dot labeled "change the world."

The organization is called CityYear, and their motto is "Give a Year. Change the World."

The timeline is pretty depressing (especially since I'm fairly far along the line) but it must seem very staggering and almost pointless to a young person... until they grasp the opportunity.

Where are you supporters - right now?

The new "Loopt" application, currently available on some Sprint and Boost phones, uses phone's GPS abilities to display your position graphically on a map on the cell phone's display -- and on the displays of your friends who use the application. Sure, you can now find out "who else is at the mall" as Loopt pitches the service ($2.99 per month), but think of the applications in the nonprofit world:

Locate potential visitors to your museum, church, etc. and guide them to you;
Attract fellow activists to the rally;
Encourage supporters to meet the candidate;
Pinpoint the location of today's blood drive;
Follow your teammates on the bike-a-thon;

Cell phone companies, according to an article in the Washington Post, are eager to recoup some of the money they've invested in meeting federal requirements to provide precise positioning along with 911 calls. So they're finding fun ways to package the information and sell it to subscribers.

The result is potential for nonprofits beyond the obvious. It also provides a real-time authenticity to web activism and fundraising. And it's new, hip and cool. So who's using it? Let us know.

Mike Huckabee emails caught in my spam filter

Republican candidate Mike Huckabee is trying to use email to communicate with me. His campaign has sent three emails to me in the last four days. The problem is, they're getting caught in my spam filter.

The reason? He's sending them from an address at "explorehuckabee.com" but the return address is "bounces@bounce.mikehuckabee.com." My spam filter says this violates its "Reverse DNS not found" rule.

It's too bad. They're well-written and full of calls to action. They even refer to previous emails and offer a continuous conversation.

Lesson: test your emails with all major ISP's and spam filters to make sure your message is getting through.

We'd love to hear your observations on the Presidential campaigns online.

Give up meat in America to help feed Europe?

On October 5, 1947, in the first televised White House address, President Truman asked Americans to refrain from eating meat on Tuesdays and poultry on Thursdays to help stockpile grain for starving people in Europe.

The above quote is from today's New York Times' feature "on this day in history."

I'm impressed that the first-ever White House televised event was to ask Americans to forsake some favorite foods so that we could support Europe, still recovering from the devastation of World War II.

I'd like to see that kind of leadership, and that kind of response, to the silent crises of the world today. Sure, cash pours out after a Tsunami in Asia or a devastating hurricane at home, but what about an all-American response to hunger in Africa?

Verizon blocks text messages from NARAL

An article in today's New York Times discusses Verizon's decision not to transmit messages to their cell phone customers who have signed up for action alerts from NARAL Pro-Choice America. The article expands to cover the broader issue of "net neutrality" wherein carriers of internet content, and presumably SMS messages, can (or can't) make decisions about which messages or content to carry.

Verizon says it makes decisions based on issues, not on specific content.

“Our internal policy is in fact neutral on the position,” said the spokesman, Jeffrey Nelson. “It is the topic itself” — abortion — “that has been on our list.”

Of course, since Right to Life groups aren't using text messaging at the moment, that's an unproven point.

We can't help but wonder how letting a carrier make a choice about the content it carries compares to letting a woman make a choice about the baby she's carrying. We agree that everyone benefits from a healthy discussion about a controversial issue. We wish Verizon and other carriers would agree to carry any message between organizations and the cell phone users who have opted in to receive messages from those organizations. We're just not sure that requiring Verizon to, shall we say, carry the message to term, is consistent with a pro-choice position.

What do you think? About text messaging, that is.

Web users have varied interests in online news

One of the best ways to create a surge in web traffic is to get some great press coverage. How big? One of our clients captured 50% of its 2006 online donations in June -- most of that within 24 hours after its spokesperson appeared on CNN's Anderson Cooper for an hour. We're talking over $350,000.

Some good news has just been published by Pew's Center for Excellence in Journalism. They compared the top news stories offered by "mainstream" news outlets to the most popular stories in user-driven news sites, like Reddit, Digg, Deli.cio.us, and Yahoo! They found very little overlap.

In addition, they found that the top stories on user-driven sites tended to be much more varied and much more transient. This means that nonprofits have a greater opportunity to get their stories "published" in these user-driven sites. But, the decision to make these stories popular does not lie with editors. Instead, users drive the rankings. In other words, your communications department can stop schmoozing the editors, and instead publish press releases that are hip, relevant, unique and easy to read.

Whether this is good news or bad news for your nonprofit depends on which of those skills your communications department practices.

Read the report highlights here.