Andrea Berry's blog

When Is It OK to Break The Rules?

By Andrea Berry, December 13, 2011

We're proud of what we do here, but honestly, the Idealware story is not all that attention-grabbing--at least, not compared to the rest of the nonprofit field. Helping nonprofit staff who are struggling with technology definitely has trouble competing with organizations who are saving things like cute puppies, adorable children and beautiful landscapes. Concerned with our ability to compete for funds with the heart-warming and the heart-wrenching, we set out to search for an alternative approach.

One thing we played around with was the concept of moving our campaign to a different part of the year to help us stand out more, but we felt that missing the “giving culture” of the year-end was a mistake. Last year we tried a substantial matching campaign that worked well, but felt a bit awkward. So this year we took a bold approach to our end-of-year fundraising campaign. If you've seen it, you know it's obvious that we broke the rules--strategically, and yes, intentionally.

We chose to go against some of the email fundraising best practices in order to stand-out from the deluge of letters. The actual credit to our approach falls to Chris, our Senior Editor extraordinaire, who wrote two drafts for our appeal--one a true traditional fundraising letter, the other a version that bucked the rules almost completely:

• It was too long

• It started off talking about what we are not rather than what we are

• It was punchy, and a little sarcastic

• There was no announced goal

• It didn’t have a P.S.

But when we read it, the nontraditional letter resonated in a way the other letter did not. It was the same base content, but it spoke to the reader in ways we hadn’t been able to achieve with letters past. I conceded that it was okay to break the rules if it worked this well, so I held my fundraiser’s nose, took a deep breath and sent out the letter the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.

We’ve gotten a tremendous response! Yes, people unsubscribed from our list at a higher rate than normal, but not drastically higher than last year's campaign. Yes, a few curmudgeonly people emailed us to explain exactly what we did wrong in the email, although we got no irate “I signed up for this list for free resources and now you are asking me for money!?!” emails like in the past. And we raised almost double off of that first letter than last year.

So was it okay to break the rules? I think the answer has to be yes. Consider this me giving you permission, with the following caveats:

• It has to make sense.

• You must have a good reason.

• You don’t do it all the time.

• Your gut tells you that you definitely should.

What do you think? Here’s our letter…was it okay for us to break the rules? Let us know what you think in the comments.

And while you’re at it, why don’t you speak with your wallet, too, and make a donation to support Idealware?

Broadcast Email Tools VS. Microsoft Outlook

By Andrea Berry, October 25, 2011

Should You Be Using Microsoft Outlook for Your Broadcast Email? Quick and simple reasons not to:

Outlook’s lack of formatting control. What looks beautiful and well-designed to you in Outlook will very likely look messy in another email client. If you are trying to do anything with a template, colors or formatting of any type, don’t expect Outlook to maintain it as it sends out the email—and don’t expect other email tools (like Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc) to see it the same way.
Outlook will not offer you templates. Yes, you can write your own code and create a template to make your emails look snazzy, but Outlook won't offer them to you included and easy to use like broadcast email tools.
Outlook provides no metrics. You will not be able to see open rates, click through rates, conversion rates or unsubscribe rates with Outlook email. And as we often mention in our trainings, metrics are the core way to evaluate the overall success of your email and your campaign.
Outlook has no unsubscribe option. Managing subscriptions is really difficult in Outlook. You need to remember to take people off of your list when they ask and have to keep an up to date list. It can be difficult to know who was on your list and who is not anymore, and to make sure you don't accidentally re-subscribe people who ask to be unsubscribed. Broadcast email tools will have unsubscribe options built in to make list management easy.
Outlook does not allow you gather emails for your list. Most broadcast email tools will allow you to put subscription widgets on your website or social media pages to enable better list building.

Perhaps most importantly, using a broadcast email tool instead of Outlook will remove the danger of getting your domain blacklisted. Let's say I send out an email to 150 people from my Idealware email address about an upcoming training, and some recipients reported my email as spam. If that happens too often (as it will when you send out mass emails), my domain will become blacklisted. That means that nothing from my email address (or any others from the Idealware domain) will be allowed. The system won’t differentiate between person email or mass emails.

It takes time to get off a blacklist, and will be detrimental to an organization's ability to communicate. Using broadcast email tools lets you avoid this situation. Some tools are even “white listed,” which means their emails always go through to different providers.

Many broadcast email tools are quite affordable, at $30 a month or less. Vertical Response offers deals, including the first 10,000 emails a month free for qualified nonprofits.

One last note about security: You should feel safe using cloud-based email systems. While there have been a small number of widely-publicized instances of system lapses, overall these systems have way more security protecting their data than we do at small nonprofits. Honestly, I'd trust a large organization like Network for Good or Vertical Response to keep my data very safe. They will also back it up frequently and effectively so there is no fear about data loss.

Check out a few broadcast email tools, and take advantage of all that they have to offer.

Q & A: A Basic Introduction to LinkedIn

By Andrea Berry, August 16, 2011

I just got an introductory question about LinkedIn from a training participant, and realized that many of you might be asking similar questions. I thought I'd share my answer with you all...

Mary Grace's Question:
What brief overview can you give me about LinkedIn? I am not yet on, but keep getting invitations to connect with folks on it. Do you think this might be a good means for me to find adult ed instructors? I think I get the general gist - it sort of seems like Facebook, but for professional connections - am I close?

My Answer:
Regarding LinkedIn, yes, you are right. In essence it has the capacity to be a social network like Facebook for professional connections. Some people use it this way- they connect what they are posting on Twitter to their LinkedIn account, post what they are doing, etc.

However, I don't think this is really the best way for us small nonprofit staff to use LinkedIn. You should think about it as the most true form of online networking. Essentially a place to collect contacts, more like a constantly updating Rolodex. With one great addition, you have access to all the Rolodexs of your contacts! As a fundraiser, that makes me salivate. That capacity allows me to peer into my Board member's contacts (as well as other core supporters). I can play the "who knows this person" game that so frustrates us at fundraising committee meetings before the meeting even gets started. I can see who knows the Bank President or that Board member at the local foundation and approach that connection directly to help me make an ask or get an introduction. Fantastic! This translates well into your situation. If you know of someone in the community who you think would be a good candidate for a instructor position, you could find them on LinkedIn and see who you knew who knew them and ask for an introduction.

On the basic level, LinkedIn is a way to publicly post your resume. When I worked as a contractor that was extremely valuable. My current clients would recommend me to a potential client who would check out my resume even before contacting me. It was a nice way to promote my skills and experience in often a much more personable way than a website. You could definitely use LinkedIn as a way to double check the references of potential Adult Ed teachers, and search for skills that you would like to cultivate (for example, looking for people who worked as a web designer to potentially lead a "Basic Websites Class")

Nonprofits are also more and more using LinkedIn as a way to facilitate online discussions and forums. There are likely ways you could use this to your advantage, such as creating a forum for adult education concepts and best practices, but I don't think that makes sense for your organization right now given all of the other things on your plate! On the flip side, I am sure a forum like the above exists, and it might be worthwhile joining to gain access to a network of Adult Education professionals who can help you answer your tough questions. See this search for some examples: http://www.linkedin.com/groupsDirectory?results=&sik=1312852057634&pplSearchOrigin=GLHD&keywords=adult+education

For a more detailed description as to what nonprofits can do with LinkedIn, I'd check out this well-done blog post from Community organizer 2.0: http://www.communityorganizer20.com/2011/06/15/linkedin-for-nonprofits/

Remember Why You Joined in the First Place

By Andrea Berry, August 15, 2011

When I asked around the office “Why did you join Facebook?” Idealware staff shared the following reasons:

• To announce that I was pregnant and then to share pictures of my daughter with friends and family easily

• Kicking and screaming. My agent forced me to.

• I was in college when it first came out, and it was the "new" thing. It was a big deal when my university was "turned on".

• To see what it was about and to keep in touch with work colleagues

• To stay in touch with friends from high school when we all went off to different colleges.

• I joined in 2007 to see who I could dredge up from my past.

No one said “to hear about breaking news." No one said “to watch commercials for brands I am interested in." And of course, no one said “I joined Facebook to hear about what my favorite nonprofits are doing.”

Unfortunately, as nonprofit staff members, as we put up our Facebook posts and go about our Facebook routines, we often forget this important point. Your constituents may have decided they want to receive updates from you on Facebook, but you are not the reason they are logging in. When you post a continuous newsfeed about your organization- what you want people to do and why they should support you- your constituents will eventually tune you out. It is our job as nonprofit communications staff to remember that this is a social media. We need to ask questions, engage our constituents, do things that start and continue conversations. We need our posts to fit comfortably between the picture of cousin Fred at the baseball game and Beth’s check in at the local bar.

Yes, our constituents like to hear about the great things we are doing, but don’t forget that they want to feel invited to participate instead of like they are watching a commercial.

How do you make your posts memorable? How do you fit into the stream of photos of friends’ children, sports talk and posts about drinking binges? We need to ask ourselves these questions on a regular basis. Engagement is the key…the more we can emulate the social nature of our own posting and the postings of our friends, the further this tool will take us and our nonprofits.

Some Thoughts on Measuring Blogging Success

By Andrea Berry, June 20, 2011

A great question came in from one of our partners:

"I know your research found that organizations didn’t get many comments. But is that the measure of success we should use? Maybe it is, but I’m not sure. We just hired a communications officer (a former health reporter for our local paper) and she’s got us on Facebook and we are about to start blogging (all staff contribute). Obviously I want our blog to be exceptional!"

Thought it was an important question, so I am sharing my answer with all of you too! Here goes...

I definitely think there are better ways to measure blog success than just comments. Comments are really tough to measure, and are just one piece of an engagement calculation.

First, I would start by figuring out what your goals are. Is it to raise awareness about the work of the Foundation? Is it to showcase foundation grantees? Is it to generate a conversation around health related topics? As you can imagine the measurements that will be of value will differ for each of the goals.

Certainly you want to look at comments, but I'm not sure that you can learn a ton from that set of metrics alone unless you end up having a reasonable volume of comments over time. Idealware's blog is a good example of the comment metric, looked at comparatively over time or even between posts, as not being super informative. Recently we put up a post about the top ways to navigate a vendor demo. It got relatively few views, but had 10 comments compared to our most popular post about QR codes that was widely read but had just a few comments. If we were only looking at comments, you would think the vendor demo post reached a substantially larger audience, when in fact the opposite was true.

As a general rule of thumb you should try and measure a few different blog metrics in addition to comment rate. The first would be your readership. You can see how many people are actually looking at the blog in general and then drill down to see how many are looking at individual posts. Looking at overall readership over time will give you a solid sense of overall growth and reach into the world. Looking comparatively at individual posts will help you to hone in on what your readership finds interesting, as well as good days and times to post. Keeping track of RSS subscribers and the growth of that population over time, will also help you get a sense of popularity of your blog and growth of that committed readership over time.

Tracking how often and where your blog is re-posted can also be a very valuable piece of info. Again, this will let you get a sense of both popularity and reach. To do this I would use a listening tool (a simple one would be Google Alerts) to collect mentions of the blog. You can also see how people are getting to your blog in general and to your individual posts, specifically, using a web analytics tool like Google Analytics. This will help you determine who is talking about you and where people are hearing about the blog. If you send out alerts about the blog in newsletters, on Facebook or Twitter, you will be able to see the sources of traffic with a web analytics tool.

Finally, you definitely want to track where people go from the blog, as this is likely part of the goals of having one in the first place- getting people to come to your website and explore (prefeably for a long time and quite extensively). You should look at the rates of clicks on links within the blog as well as where on your website people are going after they come to the blog. If you are aiming to draw people to your fellows program from the blog, seeing how many people go to the fellows page from the blog can help you gauge effectiveness. If you wanted people to sign up for your newsletter, or follow you on Twitter or Facebook, you could track conversions (or at least potential conversions) in this way.

Remember, you don't need to track all of these things, instead, identify the metrics that will inform progress towards your goal and start with them. 2 to 4 metrics should give you a pretty good sense as to where you stand and what you need to do to reach your goals!

How do you measure your blog successes? Help me bulk up this list with your comments!

Ask Idealware: Do You Need Volunteer Management Software?

By Andrea Berry, June 3, 2011

Idealware's newest staff addition, Research Analyst Kyle Andrei, talks about how to decide if you need a dedicated volunteer management system for your organization in this Ask Idealware video.

Kyle was the lead researcher on our new Consumers Guide to Volunteer Management Systems report so has lots of interesting stuff to say about volunteer managment. Like where he is going? Kyle is preparing to lead his first Idealware webinar on June 9th on the same topic (yes, you can still register for the class).

Are you using a dedicated volunteer managment system, managing volunteers within your current constituent managment system or using a spreadsheet? What works for you?

Ask Idealware: What are QR Codes?

By Andrea Berry, May 5, 2011

In this week's Ask Idealware video, Laura Quinn answers the ever present question, "What are QR Codes?" Watch Laura explain the mystery of those odd black and white boxes and a little about how nonprofits can use them effectively...

Have other burning questions? Use the comment box to let us know what questions we should tackle next!

Get Listed in the 2011 Donor Management Consultant Directory!

By Andrea Berry, April 26, 2011

We are excited to announce that in partnership with NTEN, Idealware is updating our Consumers Guide to Low-Cost Donor Management Systems! We're taking a detailed look at donor management systems and CRMs that cost less than $4250 in the first year. Make sure you’re listed in the included consultant directory so that nonprofits can find you when they’re looking for a partner to help choose and use a system-- don't miss this opportunity to be included.

We'll notify everyone who downloaded the first edition, and all the individuals and organizations on our substantial mailing list and in major nonprofit technology communities about this new update. We'll also work with our partners, like TechSoup, NTEN and the Nonprofit Times, to make sure the report is distributed widely.

The first version of the report, released in March 2009, received terrific feedback, and more than two years later more than 20,000 people have downloaded it. But a lot changes in two years, and we’re in the midst of researching a new version of the Guide. Through feature summaries, recommendations for systems based on particular needs, comparison charts, summaries of about 30 low-cost systems, and detailed reviews of ten of them, we’ll provide unbiased comparative information to help nonprofits narrow down their choices in a fundraising system.

But nonprofits need more than a system! They need consultants, like you, who can help them understand and implement them. To help highlight the consulting firms that can help, the Consumers Guide will have a Consultant Directory, included in the back of the PDF report.

We’d love to include you. To make the directory accessible to all, the price for a directory listing is based on a sliding scale, and start at $45 for small firms. Alternatively, you can make a splash in the directory with a half-page ad, at $1500. Take a look at the options now.

Don't miss the chance to be included in our Consultant Directory. The deadline is May 13th -sign up now to be sure you're listed.

Six Tips for Navigating the Vendor Demo

By Andrea Berry, April 5, 2011

Here at Idealware we watch a lot of software demos, and I mean a lot (Jay, our senior researcher, has sat through over 30 in just the last few weeks). And with experience comes wisdom, or at least a thorough understanding of the demo formula.

First, cue the power point about the vendor’s commitment to the nonprofit field and an overview of their perspective. Only after that (often way too long) slide show do we get to jump into the demonstration. Remember, standard demos most often highlight the tools strengths while trying to breeze through weaknesses.
This formula makes sense, I mean the vendor is making a SALES pitch. The problem is you don’t want a sales pitch, you want the nitty gritty details of what the tool does well and where is it lacking.

So how in the world can you cut through the marketing lingo and get to what you really want to know? Here are some tips from a team who does this all the time:

Skip the power point. The power point is most often a marketing pitch about the vendor, why they are the best and why their tool is the only one for you. This is all great information, but let me tell you, they are all pretty similar. What you really need to spend your time on is seeing the tool in action- don’t spend more than 10% of your time watching a slide show.
Come with a list of questions that you ask to each vendor, including a list of features that you want to look at. This will give you the ability to compare apples to apples and ensure that you see everything that you need to see, not just what the vendor wants you to see.
Ask your questions one at a time. If you ask two or three important questions at one time a good demo-er will cherry pick the question that shines the best light on the system and may not ever get to the others. Asking one question at a time will ensure that you get all the answers you need.
Ask the demo-er to run through a series of real life processes to see how things will actually work. For example, if looking at donor management systems, ask the vendor to show you the process for entering a gift, creating a new donor, creating a mailing list and generating a report (or other processes that are important for your org).
Don’t get distracted by the bells and whistles. Remember that no matter the number of fancy or fun features, the system still needs to do what you need it to do!
Stick to your budget. Make sure to get quotes on exactly how much it will cost you to get the system up and running. Know the start up costs and how much the ongoing costs will be. And don’t forget support and upgrade costs! Often the sticker price is just a starting point.

An informed consumer is the best consumer! Do your research and due diligence. Ask the vendor to give you a list of other organizations who are using the tool so you can do some reference checks (a good tip here is to ask for a list of a specific type of organization similar to your own so you can avoid getting the vendor’s go to reference and instead actually access general users). And make sure to know more than the name of the system going into the demo (shameless pitch alert) by reading about how the tools you are looking at compare in one of Idealware’s articles or reports.

Okay, now go and have fun! Grab your coffee, something to take notes with and demo away!

A Great List of Social Media Case Studies!

By Andrea Berry, March 3, 2011

Learning about what other people have done- where they are successful and where they struggle- can be highly informative. And when those case studies are about social media, the uncharted territory of online communications, they are even better. We love case studies over here at Idealware, we know that you do too!

www.socialmediatoday.com has published an awesome list of social media case studies. Even better, it is a list of links to other lists of social media case studies. Worth a look.

Here is the link (hat tip to John Hayden for posting this recently): http://socialmediatoday.com/igiedrius/268023/fantabulous-lists-social-media-case-studies

Enjoy!

(and if you see any that are particularly interesting, pull out the link and share it in the comments)