Blogs

We love this blog post, 3 Words for 2010, by fundraising consultant Sandy Rees on her Get Fully Funded blog —  and the comment that follows it.

Starting next month, the FS Web site will feature two blogs: The FS Outrageous Hope blog and ProSpeak. Outrageous Hope will be a forum for FS editors, as well as a few regular guests bloggers each week. ProSpeak will allow for longer, column-length posts from a variety of contributors. If you'd be interested in contributing to either, please e-mail mbattistelli@napco.com. Specific topics will be up to the bloggers, as long as the information is useful for and of interest to nonprofit fundraisers.

We're calling a new rector for my church. This entails creating a detailed profile of our institution, assessing our ministries, analyzing our finances, and praying and reflecting on our next "calling." It also entails letting some ministries go.

Blogs are a good way for nonprofits to expand their reach and communicate more directly with supporters and their community. But where do you start?

In August, TechSoup sponsored the webinar "Introduction to Blogging for Nonprofits and Libraries," in which presenters Allyson Kapin, blogger for Care2's blog Frogloop, and Jason Griffey, co-author of the book "Library Blogging," discussed the basics of getting started with a blog, covering how much staff time to devote to it, who should blog and which tools to use, and offering best practices.

In the webinar "Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps, and Tales" last month, Kivi Leroux Miller, founder of EcoScribe Communications and keeper of the Nonprofit Marketing Guide, covered blogging inside and out, including information about the types of blogs nonprofits can create and questions organizations should ask themselves to make sure a blog is right for them.