Blogging for Personality
In the struggle to retain donors, nonprofits need to use the full arsenal of tools that are available to them. Blogging is just one more way for a nonprofit organization to reach the community of people that are interested in its cause.
Nonprofit guru Roger Craver is founder of Arlington, Va.-based nonprofit and advocacy marketing agency Craver, Mathews, Smith & Co. and co-creator of the blog The Agitator. He says he enjoys blogging because it forces him to stay up to speed on the latest research and trends in the industry.
The Agitator covers areas nonprofit professionals should be thinking about for the future, policy issues that affect organizations today and those that may affect them in the future, and new media best practices.
Blogs are a great resource for nonprofit professionals in that they offer a platform to think and communicate about new things and stay on the cutting edge of the topics in the nonprofit industry, Craver says. And they’re a way of staying in touch with the sector without having to wait for the next conference.
“You learn things you can’t learn at a conference, and so it’s just one more piece of continuing education and continuing involvement,” he adds.
Craver also sees blogs as a great way for a nonprofit organization to convey its personality to constituents.
“These personal statements about what’s going on are very important for nonprofits to put in front of their constituency because very few nonprofits have a personality and what we’re seeing increasingly in [our DonorTrends] research is that donors want to get involved,” he says. “They don’t just want to give money; they want to participate, and participation in a conversation online, which is fundamentally what a blog can be. It takes very little money and very little effort to do it well and I think that’s something that every organization that has personality should be putting out there.”
A nonprofit blog doesn’t have to be long or elaborate. A couple of sentences a day about what’s going on in the field, updates on research your organization is doing, or responses to positive and negative constituent feedback should suffice — something that reflects the personality of the organization, Craver says.
Here, Craver’s tips for starting a blog, which, he says, should:
1. Reveal information that isn’t readily accessible or that is thought provoking (e.g., controversial or takes a contrarian view) on a fairly regular basis.
2. Have personality, a style that sets it apart from other blogs and that sets your organization apart from other organizations.
3. Have a philosophy. Why are you blogging? “It can’t just be a random collection of thoughts because then it’s almost juvenile. But it certainly can be far-ranging in the subject matter,” Craver says.
Roger Craver can be reached via www.theagitator.net, or www.cravermathewssmith.com
