Creative

This is the story of how a small nonprofit with no social media experience used the power of storytelling to raise $12,000 in 12 days. Smoky Mountain Meals on Wheels is located in Maryville, Tenn. It provides home-delivered meals to seniors in Blount County, and that’s just the start. It also provides groceries for special…

Content marketing is about creating and sharing information (videos, images, infographics, newsletters, white papers, etc.) in order to attract and engage with your prospects and constituents. Nine out of 10 organizations use content marketing, while marketers, on average, spend more than a quarter of their marketing budgets on it. Why? Because content marketing is effective.…

If reading your appeal seems like hard work to me, than why should I bother? I work all day! My brain needs a rest. Even more, my brain would enjoy a treat. Something that lights up my pleasure centers and makes me feel good. Does your appeal do that for your would-be donors? Or does it require them to put in great effort to get through it?...

It’s that time of year again. A time to reflect on the state of online marketing over the past year and a time to figure out how to score big marketing wins over the year to come. Since every new year brings new marketing challenges, we can use these predictions to help build forward-thinking strategies…

Experienced writers and designers who do email and direct mail marketing know this for a fact: The littlest things can add up to make the biggest difference in response and sales. How much attention are you paying to details like these? 1. Perfect your preheaders. Use the area at the very top of your email…

Nonprofit Tech for Good experimented with Periscope for live-streaming for the first time during the 2015 Independent Sector Conference. Like all new tools, there is a learning curve, but for nonprofit social media managers that spend a good portion of the their time on social and mobile media, Periscope is intuitive, easy to use and…

Time to get out your checkbook. Wait—what’s a checkbook again? That thousand-dollar-a-plate charity gala may seem hopelessly out of touch, not to mention financially out of reach, to your average debt-ridden, tech-savvy millennial. But that doesn’t mean that Boston-area nonprofits aren’t devising new ways to win this generation’s philanthropic hearts. This cohort—the 75 million or…

Creating an email is like conducting a mad science experiment: You put in a little of this and add a little of that to produce something unique. The process can be as maddening. Evolving from concept to creation can involve multiple minds to make the visual presentation come together. Plus, there are so many best…

Creating a year-end campaign is like telling an epic tale: There’s a beginning, middle and end to the story. There’s a noble protagonist. There’s something monumental that stands to be gained (or lost). Nonprofits use many techniques to engage audiences in their campaigns throughout the year, but successful year-end campaigning requires a unique type of…

If you live in New York, you've probably noticed an influx of costumed pedestrians and strangers since last Thursday. Blame the 2015 New York Comic Con. The sold-out event is always a spectacle, which reverberates outside the Javits Center walls, and these events are only getting bigger. In many ways, the growth of these events…