9 Easy Tips for Helping Your Nonprofit to Think in Marketing Terms
One of the most difficult parts of running a nonprofit is the administrative work and fundraising that happens behind the scenes. When you’re focused on meeting your nonprofit’s goals, the last thing you need is to miss those goals because you’re behind the curve when it comes to marketing your mission and the work that you do. The key to making connections and drawing support is to work smarter, not harder, to reach potential supporters. Sharing your nonprofit’s work and thinking in marketing terms – like you might if you were running a for-profit business – can help you meet or exceed your fundraising and support goals. With those out of the way, you can spend more time and resources on the projects that matter most to you and your supporters. Here are some ways to market your nonprofit in a way that won’t leave your supporters with a sour “used car salesman” taste in their mouths: 1. Define Your Target Audience Let’s face it: not every person you meet is going to relate with what your nonprofit does and want to support you. That’s okay. Actually, that’s a great thing. There’s no company or nonprofit that appeals to every human being universally. And that’s what allows your work to really stand out. Instead of using blanket approaches to raise funds or find support, look to audiences – groups of people – who are most likely to support the work that you do. For example, if you run a nonprofit that’s dedicated to saving local ecosystems, look for individuals who are committed to the local landscape and already support other groups, like bird watching clubs, or events, like cleanup days,…
The Wyneken Project
“Excellent design and superlative support. They are always there to help.” - Rev Roy Axel Coats, Treasurer for the Wyneken Project The Wyneken Project is revitalizing and planting churches in Baltimore city. While they were busy changing lives within inner city Baltimore we were busy revitalizing wynekenproject.org. Wyneken’s existing website was a simple wordpress.com site with limited functionality and a canned template design. The Wyneken Project Board of Directors knew that in order to continue to increase their support for Baltimore churches they would need to communicate their success and effectiveness online. That’s where we came in to help. Branding Design As the Wyneken Project continues to grow, a unique atmosphere for their website and other digital and physical communication will become increasingly helpful. Consistent visual atmosphere in communication makes nonprofits instantly recognizable to their volunteers, supporters, and donors. Our creative design team developed consistent branding for the Wyneken Project including colors and typography that they can use on or off the web. We then took this branding design and used it as the guide for their new website’s look and feel. Implementation of Event Sign Up Functionality The Wyneken Project’s success rests in pairing churches with churches in order to jump start churches in need. An important piece to this work is organizing volunteers to assist with events, outreach, and generosity at Baltimore churches. So we implemented an event sign up feature on the new wynekenproject.org. The Wyneken Project is now able to create events, manage volunteers, and send emails to individuals who have signed up. Their volunteers can view events and sign up right on their website. Implementation of a Dedicated Online Giving Portal with Recurring Online Giving…
Using a Website Template or WYSIWYG Website Builder? Don’t Forget to Tie Up These Loose Ends
Few websites are built without some kind of templating. Even web developers use low level templating to organize their code and streamline their development process. If you’re building your own website you’re probably using a visual template for your website (often called a theme). You may even be using a what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) drag and drop web builder (like what is offered by WordPress’ Gutenberg, Wix, or Weebly). But there is an inherent danger when using website templates - forgetting to make them uniquely yours. You don’t want someone visiting your website only to find some content they have seen on a similar looking site elsewhere. If you find this article helpful consider giving it a share ? Once you’ve completed your first draft with your website template don’t forget to tie up these loose ends: Boilerplate Most web templates include some static text meant to get you started, explain the purpose of the template page, or give you instructions on how to use that page template. Don’t forget to replace or edit this text. Your best bet, read it and then delete it and write the content for your own page. You don’t want boilerplate on your site. Even if the homepage template’s text sounds like it's gold you don’t want to run the risk of sounding like someone else, publishing duplicate content, or being noticed for being identical to another site. Write your own content or hire a copywriter to write uniquely great content for your site. Default stock photos You want your website to look great. Hey, we get it. You don’t have the time or equipment to take photos as great as the stock photos included in…
Should I Use a Slider on My Webpage? Slider Pros and Cons
So you want to use a “slider” on your webpage. But should you? Find out here. What is a Slider? An image slider (or carousel) is a popular webpage feature - especially on homepages. A slider is basically a slideshow of images, text, and/or videos that may either automatically scroll or allow visitors to scroll through the content. Sliders are usually powered by JavaScript, used on the top of webpages, and automatically advance at time intervals. But, like most popular webpage features, there are a variety of slider solutions. You’ve probably seen sliders used before. This ecommerce store, for example, uses a slider to show off the variety of custom products they offer: Slider Pros Some trends defy explanation - the slider trend isn’t one of them. Here’s why sliders took over the web: Pro: More content in less space. Sliders, by nature, make portions of your content visible at different times. The upside to this is that you can pack a lot of content into a small space. Want to tell a visual story about your new product (but don’t want to use a lot of vertical scrolling to do so)? A slider solves this. Pro: Text on image layering without image manipulation or writing code. Before popular slider plugins layering images and text required either image manipulation or code. Sliders have eliminated this need for most users. A robust slider plugin will handle the image changes and coded functionality for you - so you can focus on design. Pro: Interactive content that draws your visitors’ attention. The best sliders give the visitors control (either through forward and back buttons or with scrolling). Such functionality makes sliders interactive. Interactive…
Basic HTML Primer for Copywriters
Every copywriter should have some web development know-how before taking web writing jobs. Since the modern copywriter often has the responsibility to craft some – if not all – of a brand’s online content, it’s important that they have the ability to make that content really work online. If you’re a copywriter, it’s no longer enough to know how to write stellar content – you have to know how to make it work in front of your readers’ eyes. And if you’re a brand manager, it’s reasonable to expect that your copywriter knows how to do more than format a great Word document. After all, you hire a copywriter to sell your brand online. Why Should Copywriters Bother with Web Formatting? At a minimum, you the copywriter should be familiar with some online formatting basics. If you’re uploading posts to WordPress or sharing content on any web platform, you’re going to need a coding knowledge that’s little more robust than what clicking the “bold” or “italic” buttons at the top of your text editor can provide. Often, you’ll be the one posting content online or working with a marketing manager to get the work done. And unless one of you knows how to format outside of a GUI (graphical user interface), eventually you’re going to run into trouble when posting content online. Sure, you could call your web developer to give you a hand. But why waste the time when you could easily make a few tweaks yourself? And if your clients don’t have developers on staff or retainer, you’ll quickly become their hero. Better yet? Copywriters with web formatting chops can easily charge more for their content because they…
J.R. Snider Plumbing
J.R. Snider, Ltd has been providing professional plumbing services to the Northern Virginia region for more than three decades. From general plumbing to water heater replacement, J.R. Snider does it all. J.R. Snider has been working with an area social media expert, Michelle of Loud Mouth Social, to grow and improve their online presence. But they were in need of a couple tweaks to their WordPress website that required some professional WordPress Maintenance and Support. We’re thrilled that Michelle contacted us to help out. We’ve enjoyed collaborating on this project with J.R. Snider and Loud Mouth Social. We assisted J.R. Snider by… Changing Colors Consistent branding is important for every business to effectively reach its market across various media. J.R. Snider’s logo is primarily blue and red but their website utilized orange often as an accent color. It was natural for their website’s design to match the atmosphere of their logo. Their original developer hard coded those colors in the home page template. They could not be easily changed using additional CSS or by editing the page in the WordPress admin panel. The theme template itself needed to be edited. We carefully replaced the orange elements of their homepage with blue and red colors from their logo in order to lend greater consistency to their homepage. Adding a Page for Requesting a Quote When we began working with J.R. Snider their website lacked a dedicated form for requesting a quote. Using their criteria we designed a form for them, styled it to match their site, published a new web-page with this form, added it to their menus, and tested the form for reliability. Now J.R. Snider can receive detailed quote…
Get Your Time Back and Reduce Your Stress with a Web Maintenance and Support Retainer
Maintaining a website is no easy task. From security to backups and software updates to new content, a website can consume a lot of your time. Worse, if you aren’t a web professional, maintaining your website may become yet another stressor. No wonder so many small businesses and nonprofits leave their websites unattended for months (or even years). Your website isn’t a billboard or a Yellow Pages listing - it doesn’t perform well if it is just created and then left behind. Your website is more like a digital storefront or office. It doesn’t only exist to be seen. As a digital location for your business your website also needs to maintained, secured, visited, and shopped. But are you the guy or girl to do it? If you haven’t been maintaining your website it’s about time to leverage it and get noticed. If you have been maintaining your site but it’s taking too much out of you it’s about time to delegate. A web maintenance and support retainer with a web professional may be just the thing you need to get the most out of both your website and your time. [text_with_frame id="368c1dbfefba91dceb946d322e0e86bc" content="‹¨›p‹˜›‹¨›em‹˜›If you find this article helpful consider giving it a share‹¯›nbsp;‹¨›/em‹˜›?‹¨›/p‹˜›" line_color="rgba(0,0,0,.07)" text_font="body" heading_font="heading" animation="none" animation_speed="2" animation_delay="0" __fw_editor_shortcodes_id="e6852c2dacc162bc8c34ba646905e841" _fw_coder="aggressive"][/text_with_frame] Why Did You Launch Your Website? Perhaps you launched your website to drive more leads to your business. Maybe it was to invite more foot traffic to your storefront. Or maybe it was just so you would be perceived more professionally when people searched for you. (Why did you launch your website? Let us know in the comments below.) Regardless of the reason, you need to get back…
The Parenting Copywriter
Gabrielle, our own Chief Creative Officer (CCO), is The Parenting Copywriter. As Rystedt Creative’s CCO she leads our copywriting team but she still loves writing herself - especially on parenting. As her client base has grown she has focused increasingly on the parenting market. Countless businesses need to market to parents effectively. Target is focusing on millennial parents in much of their marketing, cloth diaper companies large and small market to new parents, curriculum publishers market to home-school parents, etc. Gabrielle is uniquely suited to help these companies market through her copywriting services. She herself is a parent of three children, a professional and established copywriter, and holds a degree in business. We at Rystedt Creative realized that we could market parenting copywriting services even better through a separate website dedicated to this niche. So we launched parentingcopywriter.com! parentingcopywriter.com is owned and operated by Rystedt Creative and leverages our existing copywriting team and experience. Within a week we were page one in searches for “parenting copywriter”. Today, we’re the first result in these searches. Gabrielle is indeed the Parenting Copywriter and we are excited for what’s ahead.
Should I Let AI Build My Website?
What is AI? “AI” stands for Artificial Intelligence. But what is that, really? What People Think AI Is: What Developers Want AI to Be: What AI Actually Is (to date): Alright, humor aside, here’s what AI actually is: Colloquially, the term “artificial intelligence” is applied when a machine mimics “cognitive” functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as “learning” and “problem solving”* True Artificial Intelligence, a machine that can learn and evolve beyond its programming, does not yet exist. When we speak of “AI” today we’re actually referring to machines and applications that mimic human learning and problem solving. Such applications are indeed sophisticated but they only mimic intelligence. They are not, in fact, demonstrating independent learning. [text_with_frame id="368c1dbfefba91dceb946d322e0e86bc" content="‹¨›p‹˜›‹¨›em‹˜›If you find this article helpful consider giving it a share‹¯›nbsp;‹¨›/em‹˜›?‹¨›/p‹˜›" line_color="rgba(0,0,0,.07)" text_font="body" heading_font="heading" animation="none" animation_speed="2" animation_delay="0" __fw_editor_shortcodes_id="e6852c2dacc162bc8c34ba646905e841" _fw_coder="aggressive"][/text_with_frame] Can AI Build Websites? Numerous companies are now boasting website building AI. These web based applications ask users questions, compile data from external sources, and design a website using the criteria and input given. Some website AI builders are more sophisticated than others. The best website building AIs generate a unique site template for each user. The worst, are nothing more than a well crafted skin atop a handful of templates. AI really do build websites. But are such sites ready to publish after the AI is done? After all, you want AI that builds you a website you can launch the day you see it - a cheaper and quicker replacement for web-developers. But does that type of AI exist yet? Which AI Build the Best Websites? Some of the best AI website builders available today include:…
Boost Your Non-Profit’s Bottom Line With Recurring Online Donations
There’s a common misconception that non-profits don’t make any money. But if you operate, work for or volunteer with a non-profit, you know that this couldn’t be any farther from the truth. Non-profits need money to operate and serve their communities. Sometimes, non-profits need a lot of money to accomplish their goals or carry out their mission. Often, non-profits rely on donations to meet their financial goals. But raising funds can be its own headache. Recurring online giving is an ideal solution to round out your non-profit’s funding puzzle. Of course, it can’t wholly replace fundraising or the excitement of an annual pledge drive, but recurring giving can help to even out your non-profit’s budget from month-to-month, and even increase donations from year to year. [text_with_frame id="368c1dbfefba91dceb946d322e0e86bc" content="‹¨›p‹˜›‹¨›em‹˜›If you find this article helpful consider giving it a share‹¯›nbsp;‹¨›/em‹˜›?‹¨›/p‹˜›" line_color="rgba(0,0,0,.07)" text_font="body" heading_font="heading" animation="none" animation_speed="2" animation_delay="0" __fw_editor_shortcodes_id="e6852c2dacc162bc8c34ba646905e841" _fw_coder="aggressive"][/text_with_frame] Streamline Donations Recurring online donations allow your donors to pledge a certain amount for monthly/quarterly/yearly giving in a way that’s similar to the pledge cards that you already use at conferences and event tables. However, unlike with physical pledge cards, donors can fill out recurring online donation forms from the comfort of their own homes – or on their smartphones while they’re on the go. Recurring online donation portals safely capture donor information and consistently withdraw the requested amount at preset intervals from the donor’s bank account, PayPal account or credit card. Best of all, the information collected through a recurring online donation platform keeps information safely stored in one place – versus piles of pledge cards with information that must be manually entered. Additionally, the monies collected online all end up in a…