SlideShare for nonprofits

I recently started experimenting with SlideShare and think it has great possibilities for the nonprofit community. You can see my profile and two SlideShare presentations here or watch one here:

Fundraising: How to better understand your donors' needs

View more presentations from Tim Bete.

If you ever make presentations about your organization to other groups (e.g. Rotary, etc.), you can easily turn it into a SlideShare presentation. Simply post your PowerPoint to SlideShare and then post your recorded remarks in MP3 format. SlideShare lets you connect the two pieces, and tell it when to change slides. It's a very quick and easy process. You can even sit at your desk and create the entire presentation using your PC's microphone.

I see SlideShare possibilities for volunteer training, staff training, and donor updates, among other areas.

Marketing books for non-profits

Dayton, Ohio -- I recently asked LinkedIn users for the best marketing books that help non-profits accomplish their missions. Here's the list of books in no particular order. Now get reading!

• Positioning by Jack Trout
• Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz
• What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith
• Tribes by Seth Godin
• Dan Kennedy's No B.S. series
• Marketing Strategies for Nonprofit Organizations by Siri N. Espy
• Getting Everything You Can Out of All You've Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition by Jay Abraham
• Outrageous Advertising That's Outrageously Successful: Created for the 99% of Small Business Owners Who Are Dissatisfied with the Results They Get by Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy
• There's a Customer Born Every Minute: P.T. Barnum's Amazing 10 "Rings of Power" for Creating Fame, Fortune, and a Business Empire Today Guaranteed! by Joe Vitale and Jeffrey Gitomer
• Social Marketing in the 21st Century by Alan R. Andreasen
• American Writers and Artists, Inc. (AWAI)'s course on copywriting for fundraising
• Common Sense Direct Marketing by Drayton Bird
• The Three Laws of Performance" by Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan
• What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis
• Robin Hood Marketing by Katya Andreson
• Let's Have Lunch Together by Marshall Howard
• Purple Cow by Seth Godin

I would add the book, Influence by Robert Cialdini.

Would like fries with that, and would you like to donate to the Ronald McDonald House?

Dayton, Ohio -- Yesterday I bought a coffee at the McDonald's drive thru. The person on the other end of the speaker asked me, "Would you like to donate a dollar to the Ronald McDonald House?"


When I got up to the window, I asked her how many people donate a dollar. She told me about 1 in every 20 cars. That didn't seem like a very good number, so I began to think about how she could modify her question to increase results. I also wondered how many people she asked even knew what the Ronald McDonald House does? I also figured she only has time for a single sentence.

I think her results would be significantly better if she asked this:
"Would you help families whose children are in the hospital by donating a dollar to the Ronald McDonald House"

Why would it be more effective? Because her original question was "would you like to donate a dollar..." She gave no reason to donate a dollar, only a request. It's easy to say "no" to that. It's more difficult to say, "no, I don't want to help families whose children are in the hospital." The new question also puts the "ask" at the end of the sentence, after the reason.

Research has shown that using the word "because" in a request significantly increases the affirmative responses. So, perhaps this question would be even better:

"Would you help families whose children are in the hospital by donating a dollar to the Ronald McDonald House, because it would mean a lot to those families."

The interesting thing about the research is that it doesn't matter what the reason is you give after the word "because," simply using that word increases response.

So today I'm going to buy coffee at the same McDonalds and give the person at the window my new question.

How would you change her original question to make it more effective? What questions do you ask in your solicitation letters that could be made more effective?

How quickly do you mail thank-you letters to donors?

The book, Donor-Centered Fundraising, did a national survey of donors. The results said that donors expect a thank-you letter within two weeks, although a few days is even better. Major gift donors expected a response, preferably a phone call, within 24 hours of making a major gift. How does your non-profit stack up? How can you streamline your gift processing process to get thank-you letters out quicker? What's standing in your way?

A great viral campaign: Big Boston Warm Up

Dayton, Ohio -- Jeff Sawyer from Lands End, a very talented copywriter and former co-worker, just sent me a video for the Big Boston Warm Up campaign. They have a goal to provide 7,681 coats to homeless people this winter. Toward the end of the video, look for my name "Tim Bete." You can personalize the video with anyone's name and send it to them. The personalization makes for a great appeal that tugs at your heart strings and will get people to act. I wouldn't be surprised if they get 20,000+ costs donated. You can personalize your own video here.

Higher search engine rankings for your Web site

Dayton, Ohio -- At the SummitUp Social Media Confab last week, I attended a session on SEO (Search engine optimization) by Steve Phillips from Purple Trout. Steve is a genius when it comes to getting your Web site to come up higher in searches for the keywords that describe your non-profit's programs and services.

I've created dozens of non-profit Web sites and used Google Webmaster Tools (a free service) for quite a while. One feature is the ability to tell Google where the sitemap for your Website is located. (A sitemap is a list of pages of a Web site accessible to crawlers, such as Google.) Google takes the information from your sitemap and indexes your Web pages so others can find them when they do a search.. If your non-profit's Website doesn't have a sitemap, you should add one.

I had always used a text file sitemap, and had pretty good success. But Steve suggested creating an XML sitemap using a free site, such as xml-sitemaps.com. This site will produce a free XML sitemap, as long as your site doesn't have more than 500 pages. It even adds PDF files on your site, such as newsletters and brochures that you've put on your site.

I always put newsletters and brochures on a non-profit site to make it easier for potential clients and partners to quickly print the information they need. If your non-profit has client forms, those can be put on your site, too.

Because the XML sitemap included the PDF files on my site, I now have more high level search results. For example, when you search for Huffman Place, one of St. Mary Development's apartments for low-income seniors, the PDF brochure for the site is now the third search result. It wasn't there at all before I changed to an XML site map. (See the search on Google.)

So check your sitemap (or have your Web person do it.) The more people who find your Web site, the better able you'll be to accomplish your mission.

What makes a successful non-profit?

Dayton, Ohio -- Howard Adam Levy has a great post about the attributes of a successful nonprofit at his blog, Wake up Call. Levy provides 12 criteria for donors to use in evaluating a nonprofit organization and argues that non-profits often miss the things that motivate donors.

He's right.

For example, non-profits have always focused on the cost of fundraising, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But when donors look at fundraising ratios, I think what they don't want to see is a high percentage of revenue being plowed back into fundraising. (There are still many non-profits whose primary mission seems to be fundraising. I just got a direct mail package from one the other day.)

In the past, donors didn't want to see a lot of overhead expense either, but they've been comfortable with non-profits increasing overhead to measure program effectiveness.

Donors want results. And if you can prove that you're succeeding in delivering your mission, I don't think donors worry as much about the rest of the numbers. But if you aren't succeeding, they're quick to look at overhead expense and fundraising ratios.