Nonprofits love their emails newsletters and for good reason! Your email list holds your most committed supporters, and it feels so good to communicate with them!
But does your blog languish at the cost of putting out emails? Does your website feel stale and hasn’t been updated in two months?
Despite the benefits of a good email newsletter, too many nonprofits ignore their websites while pouring all their energy into newsletters. At best, some organizations post PDFs of their newsletters as “blog posts”, despite all the problems with PDFs on nonprofit websites. It doesn’t have to be this way!
If you blog first and share those posts in your newsletter, you get more engagement on your website while still producing a vibrant newsletter. It’s literally twice the results with the same effort.
(If you have WordPress, you have a blog)
You might not think of your website as having a blog or yourself as a blogger. But it does, and you are!
Your “blog” might be labeled “News” or “Announcements” or “Updates”, but whatever you call it, your WordPress website has a page devoted to showing all your Posts—capital “P” as opposed to “Pages”—in chronological order. That’s a blog!
Some people get turned off by the word “blog”, but don’t let that scare you away. For the purposes of this article at least, “blogging” is just regularly publishing new material to your site about news, events, your impact, media coverage, and whatever else is new and exciting at your organization. If you have the capacity for an email newsletter, you have the capacity to blog.
Infographic: Power your newsletter with blog posts
Now that you’re sure you have a blog, here’s the magic formula:
Post engaging and bite-size articles to your blog.
For each newsletter, pick your best posts (even 2 or 3 is enough!) and link to them in your newsletter.
Add a custom welcome message or something else exclusive to the newsletter. You want to make sure your newsletter subscribers still feel special.
Executed correctly, this format is engaging and primarily assembled with writing you already have!
The Benefits of Blogging First
If you’re not sold yet, making this change comes with all the benefits you get from following blogging best practices.
Your website is more up-to-date and vibrant with new information.
While many email newsletters are just digital versions of a formerly printed product, blogging is the publication medium of the web. That means it’s more user-friendly, engaging, and future-proof! Plus, doing it this way is simply a best practice among nonprofit professionals.
Start Today!
While it might take a few months to get used to this new workflow, this formula only requires a bit more effort than you already put into your newsletter while powering your blog, social media, and newsletter all at once! That’s a huge win and will surely expand your reach and quality of your communications.
Once you make the change, you’ll have a hard time ever seeing why you did things the other way around. So stop reading and go get blogging! (And then emailing. 😉)
Between new projects that improve your site and the critical weekly work to maintain a healthy website, it takes just as much work to support a website as it does to build it in the first place!
Nonprofit staff often wear two or three hats in their organization, so it can be challenging to find time for website work. Luckily, maintaining your site doesn’t have to be hard work. It can even be fun and a good break from other work.
Along with the new year’s tasks and spring cleaning tasks for your website, here are 6 more simple tasks you can do on a Friday afternoon that make your website better. When you’re out of steam but can’t go home yet, these tasks give you the best of both worlds:
You can usually do them without thinking too hard, so getting interrupted by your Executive Director won’t totally derail your work. (Some thinking required. Batteries not included.)
They will demonstrably make your website better over time.
Just like a new habit. Something that only takes a short bit of time, when repeated, can lead to huge results for your organization in the long term!
Review Analytics
Once a month, sit down and fire up your analytics software. See if you can find one valuable insight or ask a question of your data that can inform your work.
What can you learn about your stakeholders? Examples include:
Did the people who read our most recent blog post stay on the site after they arrived? (Look at Bounce Rate, Time on Site, and Exit Percentage.)
Did visitors to our annual gala page come primarily from social media, search, or directly to the site from a link? (Look at Referral Sources.)
What are the top 3 landing pages for the site. Do I know why these three are the top? (Look at Landing Pages.)
For visitors to our “Donate” page, what’s the last page they looked at before their arrival? Does that page prepare people to make a meaningful donation? (In Google Analytics, check out the Site Flow tool.)
Make up more questions to learn and improve your site slowly! Ask your E.D. and board if there are questions they’d like answered too.
Schedule Social Media Posts
Hopefully you’re using a tool like Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, Buffer, or even just Facebook to schedule your social media posts. Write five tweets or three Facebook posts and schedule them to go out next week! Your future self gives you a high-five!
Draft a Blog Post
If you’re anything like me, blog posts are best when they’ve marinated for a while, so Work on a blog post that you don’t need to post immediately. Do as little or as much as you can stomach:
Write three draft posts with catchy titles and brief bulleted outlines you can fill in later.
Start writing about the thing you worked hardest on this week. It’ll be easier to write about since it’s on your find.
What’s the big news in your mission area right now? Find three good articles and write a post linking to them while discussing how you’re contributing on that issue.
Pull in social media posts from your followers to show the amazing work done by your supporters!
These are the kinds of posts that don’t have to be published right away, but will be there when you need to fill in an empty week or month on your content calendar.
Audit ONE Page
Copy and paste the contents of a page from your website into Word or Google Doc.
At the very top of your page in bold, all-caps, red text, write out:
PRIMARY AUDIENCE: REASON FOR COMING TO THIS PAGE: NEXT STEP:
Fill these in with the primarywho (e.g. “Parents of preschools”), why (“Determine the entry age and requirements for signing up”), and next step (“Fill out interest form”) for that page.
With that information in hand:
Make the page as short as possible
Include the most important details at the top of the page
Voila! You’ve almost certainly made your website better, likely in less than an hour. Repeat this a few weeks in a row and you’ll really start to see results.
Audit Your Users
Once every few months, head on over to “Users” in your dashboard. From there, make sure that every user:
Is still an active site editor who actually needs an account.
Actually needs the level of access they have. (Could some Admins be made into Editors?)
Delete or demote users as needed.
Important note: Make sure to attribute content to a new user when deleting an existing user! Otherwise, anything they wrote will be deleted.
Look for Broken Links
Use the W3C link validator to test one or more pages of your site for broken links. Focus on your most heavily trafficked pages first and go to your analytics (see above!) if you don’t know what those are! If you don’t find any broken links, good job! If you do, get those fixed!
There you have it! These are simple tasks that are bite-sized but will still demonstrably improve your site if you keep at this week after week. So go carve out a bit of time this Friday, and see what you can do!
Ever wondered why you should blog? Are you stuck and lacking motivation to write? This post will get you inspired and excited about the possibilities of blogging to support your organization.
One of the newer pages on Nonprofit WP is “Blogging Best Practices.” There is a ton of great info on that page, including tips for blogging frequently, ideas for blog posts, and best practices for crafting the perfect post. But the crown jewel of the page is this diagram showing how you can use your blog to turn passive followers into engaged supporters.
Blog + Social Media = Engagement
Take a look, and then we’ll break it down…
It’s a tricky little diagram but here’s what’s going on. Start in the middle column:
First, publish interesting content about your nonprofit to your website’s blog.
Next, share links to your blog posts on social media. Make sure those posts have good “Meta Descriptions” and “Featured Images” so they generate nice looking link previews!
Instead of reading what’s on your Facebook page or in a Tweet, users visit your site to read your blog post. Make sure it’s worth their time.
Once on your website, users can reach important calls to action like the donate page or a volunteer signup form.
See what you did there? Instead of a user passively reading your email newsletter or watching something on Facebook, they can act on their interest in your cause and become an even bigger supporter of your organization!
So here’s that successful recipe for engagement through blogging one more time:
Post to your blog.
Share your posts on social media.
Drive traffic back to your website.
Use calls to action to generate deeper engagement.
For even more in-depth information about sharing to social media and other ways to promote your blog posts, check out this guide on “How to Promote Blog Posts for Nonprofits” from Wired Impact.
The Right Calls to Action
The best calls to action in a blog post are timely, relevant, and not too pushy.
If you ask for donations in every post, the request loses impact. Urging people to contact their senator at the end of a new staff member profile probably doesn’t make much sense either. Provide a single clear call to action at the end of your blog posts and make sure it relates closely to the content above it. Committed visitors who have actually read (or browsed) the blog post will be much more likely to click the link and support your nonprofit!
Educate Your Visitors (and Google)
Similar to call to action links, make sure you’re cross-linking from your posts to relevant web pages. Mention a program with it’s own page? Link to it! Discussing an important policy proposal? Link to your position paper. Mentioning a staff person? Link to their bio.
While these links may not drive engagement in the moment, they allow users to learn more about your organization and follow their interests through your site. A website visitor may need repeated exposures before taking a big step up in activity with you, so be patient and keep them interested.
As a bonus, linking from blog posts to other relevant information on your site helps search engines better understand who you are and what you do. In the future, this means people interested in your cause are more likely to find your nonprofit in search results!
Owning Your Content
WordPress lets you “own your content”, because it lives in a database on a hosting plan you have access to. It’s also easy—relatively speaking—to export that data into a new system should the need arise.
Tons of nonprofits post to Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram that only lives on those sites. By posting first to your blog, you know that if a social media site loses active users or reduces access to your followers—cough-FACE-hack-BOOK-wheeze-#%$@!—you still have the information safely stored on your website.
Blogs are powerful communication tools for reporting on your work and sharing your impact with your most committed followers. When fully optimized, a blog can become an engagement tool itself, bringing your social users closer to your organization where they can help you make the world a better place!
The new year is a great time to evaluate the state of your website and figure out how to make it better. But we all know that plenty of resolutions don’t get the followup they need. So instead of a New Year’s website resolution, pick one or two of these tasks and get started right now!
Since the goal is to get you moving forward on a concrete task, you don’t even need to read this whole post! Just pick the task that sounds the most interesting or useful and get to work!
Do a Content Audit
A content audit is the process of reviewing your entire site and assessing each piece of content individually to make sure it still serves your site visitors. It’s common to combine a content audit with a website redesign, but I think they work better separately. More-frequent content audits mean future website redesigns go more smoothly and your website will be consistently higher-quality for your visitors!
Whether it’s in a custom spreadsheet you set up or with a plugin like Content Audit, this is one of the best tasks you can do on your site.
Here’s how to do it:
Go through your site’s Pages one by one.
For each page, mark or list it as a meaningful status you can act on. I like to use the statuses Good, Minor Revisions, Major Revisions, Archive, and Merge with…. Then I’ll make a short note for each page about what should change.
If more than one person writes content for the site, also assign the Page to the person who will work on any revisions.
Once you’ve gone through the entire site, you will have learned a lot about the state of your site. Schedule the time to work on these pages throughout January and finish before February.
Quick Audit
If this sounds like too much, use your Jetpack Statistics or Google Analytics to identify your top 5, 10, or 20 pages. Then follow the steps above for that more limited set of pages.
Similarly, if you’ve managed to audit your whole site but aren’t sure where to start, let the site visitor stats determine which small part of the revision process to start on. Improving one high-traffic page is much more valuable that improving multiple low-traffic ones.
Clean Up Your Plugins & Themes
This one’s a little bit faster than the content audit.
Plugin Cleanup
While there’s no such thing as too many plugins, you never want to have plugins or themes that you’re not using installed on your site. These can slow down your site, clutter the admin, leave open a security hole, or force you to make unnecessary updates.
First, go to the Plugins page of the admin, and review each one. Do you know what it’s used for? Do you still need it? You may need to do a bit of research and contact your web developer or other staff, but figure out which plugins you don’t need and remove them from the site.
Once done, you’ll get a good reminder of how your site works and you’ll probably get some ideas for future projects (see below!).
[Fun fact: I just did this for NonprofitWP.org. With a bit of work to tweak a few things with my theme, I removed three plugins!]
Theme Cleanup
For themes, you really only need the theme your site is using. Delete all other themes from the Appearance > Themes screen in the admin. That’s it! 🙂
EXCEPTION: Child Themes
If your site is built using a “child theme”, then you’ll need two themes on your site, the active child theme and it’s parent theme. You can tell if you have a child theme by opening up your active theme details in Appearance > Themes and then looking for this:
The notice in the Theme Details panel saying whether it is a child theme of a parent.
If you see that notice, delete all themes except the active [child] theme and its parent theme.
Streamline Your Forms
Do you want more people to fill in forms on your site? Do you want to get better information from them? Streamlining your forms will probably lead to both outcomes over time!
If you’re using one of our recommended WordPress forms plugins, you’ll be able to easily improve the forms used to collect information from visitors.
Here’s what to do for each form:
Review your 5 most recent submissions and ask yourself these questions:
What questions don’t receive enough or accurate information?
Do certain optional fields get consistently skipped?
Most important: Can I tell someone how I use every piece of information I collect?
Once you’re more familiar with the reality of your form submissions, do the following for the form:
Make as few fields required as possible. These are the fields you couldn’t do without. An easy example: The email field for an email newsletter form. It won’t work without it!
Remove as many optional fields as possible. For example: Do you really need that person’s ZIP code?
Remove as many options from checkboxes, radio buttons, and select menus as possible.
Clarify each field name and, if needed, description. If you’re not getting good data, you’re probably mis-labeling your field or not being specific enough. Consider providing an example answer or sentence starter for free-form questions.
Rearrange form fields to increase commitment to finishing. For example: If working on a donation form, have people select their donation amount first. This builds momentum and gets questions that require active thinking out of the way earlier, letting users finish a form more or less on autopilot.
A streamlined form will be less-confusing for visitors and faster to fill out. That will increase the likelihood of people filling out your form and of you getting good data when they do!
Even if you didn’t use a consultant to build your site, it’s good to know who you’ll turn to when—not if—you face a website emergency or project outside your own technical abilities. A few phone calls, a visit to a meetup, or a strategic referral from a colleague is usually all it takes.
Once you’ve found someone willing to work with you, find a way to bring them on board with a small project. Maybe that’s signing up for their annual maintenance plan, doing a small project together (see below!), or having them performing a site audit with strategic recommendations for future improvements.
When your donation form or email newsletter signup form isn’t working, you don’t want to panic and working with the first person you can find. (“Well our Development Director’s nephew is great with an iPad!”)
Even if you have a consultant already, you need to make sure they’ll make time to help you when you need it most. Take a moment to get back in touch and thank them for their support.
Put in a bit of time and money now, and you will feel immense relief at the moment you need it most!
Do a Small Project
Too often, website work is an all-or-nothing endeavor for organizations. You get your budget together, you sink a huge amount of effort into planning, and then you make one big push to get the new site live.
But if your site is a year old or more, I bet there’s a pain point you’ve identified or a “Phase II” project that’s yet to happen. If we’re being honest, there was probably something not quite right immediately after launch too.
Take some time to think about one incremental improvement to your site that will make it better. A smart project here and there can extend the life of your site and make it more useful to your visitors.
With the year starting, plan now for a great new addition to your site and figure out what it will take—time-, budget-, and planning-wise—to get it up and running.
Make a Blogging Content Calendar for the Year
Content calendars are a great may to make sure your blog stays updated all year. They’re usually built around major events, donation drives, programmatic campaigns, and unscheduled important news as it arises. (If you don’t have many obvious events, maybe you work in some blogging seasons too!)
There are lots of great templates out there, or you can get fancy and use a plugin like Edit Flow to manage it right in your WordPress dashboard. Find a good format for you—I think it’s hard to beat a good spreadsheet!—and get to planning!
Start by making a list of key events and dates you’ll need to post on and leading up to.
Then make a list of less time-sensitive topics you can blog about to fill in the gaps. One easy idea: Do a fun social media roundup with the best posts about your cause from you and your supporters!
Finally, get these all down into a spreadsheet with due dates, staff writing assignments, and any other notes you’ll need to start writing immediately when a blog post deadline looms.
Now you’re ready to blog up a storm in 2017! 📝🌩☺
Content calendars help you think ahead leading to better-written posts and an easier time getting usable web content from your colleagues!
Remember Why You Picked WordPress. Incremental Changes to Your Website Are Good!
The whole point of using WordPress is to allow you and fellow staff members or volunteers to easily update your website. If you’ve already done the work to get a site up, take full advantage of that flexibility and control! This month, focus on a single task like the ones suggested here and just get it done. You should feel good about giving your visitors a better experience and simultaneously supporting your organization’s work more.
I always tell my clients that websites are never done. They’re more like a garden that needs tending. So put your digital green thumb to use, and make your site even better to support your organization and achieve your mission!
I just read a great post called “Publishing Regularly” by Andrew Woods. Nonprofits can take a lot from Andrew’s ideas about how to blog regularly:
Work fluctuates, commitments change, and sometimes – people need a break from time to time. Instead, consider a different strategy – publishing in seasons.
The idea of a blogging season is pretty simple: let your blog’s content fluctuate with alternating periods of posting and not posting. This isn’t any different from what many TV shows and podcasts have done for years.
To be clear: The idea isn’t an excuse to not write on your blog. Rather, the idea is to make blogging more sustainable, interesting, and fun!
Blogging Seasons Help Sustain Blogs
You don’t want your organization’s last blog post to be from September 2012, but it’s hard to publish every month or every week. This is where the idea of “seasons” can help. When deciding how to use them, take advantage of their flexibility and align them with your organization:
There are two factors about a season – the length of the season, and the publishing frequency during the season. The off-season time is equally important, as it helps set your audience expectations. If you publish your blog content in seasons, you can also plan for downtime during the gaps. The gaps between seasons becomes valuable time. The gaps provide you with time to focus on other priorities, while giving you time to plan your content for the next season.
There are then lots of examples of how you could do this:
Post weekly for 10 weeks and then take 2 off.
Post monthly for 5 months then take 1 off.
Post twice-weekly for a 8 weeks, then take 4 weeks off.
Since these seasons are time-driven, use a calendar to plan out topics, authoring responsibilities, and reminders to publish. These so-called “editorial calendars” are a crucial tool for any organization that expects to maintain a blog on their website regardless of whether it posts in seasons or not.
Ideas for Blogging Seasons
Blogging seasons for nonprofits can vary and adapt as necessary. Here are some ideas:
Use blogging seasons to build toward important events for your nonprofit. If you participate in an annual giving day, post a month’s worth of posts in the lead-up to the day highlighting ways the money gets used.
Focus on natural seasons that align with your constituents’ lives. For education nonprofits, the school year, spring break, and summer break all offer natural divisions of time that could align with a blog.
Key off important news in the world. An environmental organization might schedule a blog season following the passage of an important bill or a high-profile environmental disaster.
Do something silly or unexpected. It’s important for writers and audiences to not always be so serious! Post the funniest stories from your organization’s work or compare each program or project you do to a movie or Harry Potter character. Get creative in a way your audience will appreciate!
Align with your organization’s internal needs and work. If you do annual staff evaluations, have staff publicly share their proudest moment from the year and something they hope to improve next year. If you’re in a strategic planning year, a season could focus on alternate visions of your organization 10, 20, or 50 years in the future!
Play with format. Blog posts can be anything you can post on a website and that may interest your audience. Try photo essays, quick video field stories, or poetry. And of course, don’t forget how easy it is to include Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and more with WordPress!
Benefits for You, Your Nonprofit, and Your Blog
Blogging seasons can have lots of benefits:
Give authors a break to avoid burn out
Encourage more creativity and diversity among post content and types
Spin-off easy-to-write content like round-ups, reflections, and blogging season introductions
Make it easier for lots of staff members to contribute website content given the focus on a tightly defined topic
Improve coordination between your blog and social media
Give audiences something refreshing and future content to look forward to
All of the above should help keep visitors engaged and produce valuable (and probably search engine-friendly!) content for your website.
A Simple Idea. What Will You Do With It?
Hopefully the gears of your mind are spinning and you’re excited by the possibilities Andrew’s idea presents! Posting in seasons to your blog can make it easier to maintain in the long term and keep things fresh for everyone involved.
Got a great idea for a blogging season for your organization? Share what you do and what some seasons might be for your nonprofit!
The notice in the Theme Details panel saying whether it is a child theme of a parent.
