Posts Tagged ‘nonprofits’

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Fill Your Empty Seats with RCG’s Exclusive Marketing Planning Package

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

We’ve been giving you guys tons of tips and how-tos about conference marketing, and now its time to help you put it all together and fill those empty seats at your next conference.

“We cannot adjust the wind… but we can adjust the sails.”  Unknown

This marketing plan package equips association and non-profit executives with the tools and knowledge to fill the empty seats. This package is especially designed for:

  • Associations and non-profits with a limited staff
  • Organizations not meeting their attendance goals
  • Organizations with an In-house marketing team that needs a fresh set of eyes to review currents strategies

We are only offering this special package in the first quarter of 2010. If you want to reach your conference attendance goals for next year, then check out the details and special price for the workday sessions and remote guidance provided in our exclusive Marketing Planning Package.

Rottman Creative Group

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We were featured…

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

Our e-newsletter for the month of April was featured in the Communication News section of ASAE’s web site. The featured e-newsletter focused on innovative ways to increase revenue from publication and product sales.

You can read the article below:

Stop Selling Like It’s 1995
Is your online store more like an old-fashioned emporium than Amazon.com? Try these innovative techniques to enhance the shopping experience while using web analytics to track your sales performance.
By Gary Rottman

If your association has an online store, you probably realize that the more effort you put into selling your publications there, the more likely your potential customers are to discover their value. Simply using a small picture of a publication cover does two things for you:

1. Makes you seem stuck in 1995.
2. Gives the impression that since you haven’t learned how to make the shopping experience innovative, you probably aren’t capable of producing innovative publications, either.

If that’s the reputation you want, you can stop reading now and continue to use your tiny picture. But if it’s not how you’d like your members to view your products, I’ve put together a few tips to help you examine how you’re marketing your publications and identify new ways to increase revenue.

Note: These are not tips on how to improve your publications. I trust that you already know what your members want and are creating targeted, valuable products. Instead, I’ll offer advice on how to better market your publications and entice potential customers to pull out their credit cards.

Enhance the shopping experience

People shop online because they are looking for the best deal, don’t have time to go to the store; or want to buy something that’s not easily accessible to them. However, even with all the advances in online shopping, people still prefer going to an actual store. They want to see and hold the product they’re about to purchase. They want to weigh its value against the money they’re about to spend.

You may not be able to let members finger the texture of your publications’ paper. But you can give them a feel for the product’s value so they’ll make a purchase.

There are many ways to bring your publications to life and increase sales. Consider Amazon.com—one of the largest booksellers on the Internet. Amazon gives potential customers a quality experience before they purchase. The experience includes:

  • Detailed page views of a book’s cover, table of contents, first few pages, and index
  • Detailed summary with quotes
  • Suggestions for other books that might be of interest
  • Reader reviews and ratings

If setting up these features in your own store seems a bit daunting, start with the most straightforward: the detailed page views and a thorough, enticingly written summary of each publication. Then study all your offerings and provide links to related books, products, and even conferences and webinars.

Coming up with reader reviews can be somewhat more labor-intensive. Begin by posing questions to your audience via social media tools such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Then collect the responses and post them alongside the summary of each publication.

You can generate more buzz by taking advantage of other social media techniques. The following methods will provide key product information whether potential buyers prefer to read about your offerings, listen to a podcast, watch a video, or receive recommendations from like-minded professionals.

  • Create videos of association members talking candidly about the publication’s highlights and what they valued about it. Then post these testimonials on YouTube or other social media sites.
  • On the day your publication launches, conduct a webinar hosted by either key staff members or board members. Discuss how and why this publication was created; summarize key points, value, and purchase information; and then be sure to close with a strong call to action. Afterward, turn the webinar into a podcast and post it on your website for future visitors to discover.

Find out how engaging your store is

Before determining how to best promote your publication sales, it would be useful to know how you’re currently performing. Many tools are available for analyzing the publications part of your website, but I recommend Google Analytics. http://www.google.com/analytics/ Besides being free, the service is comprehensive and easy to use.

After a quick primer at Google Analytics (or whatever tool you use), you will become familiar with terms such as pageviews, bounce rate, time on site, and new visitors. You can interpret the new knowledge, trends, and data you gain to meet your goals, including identifying who is coming to your site, how they’re getting there, and what they do once they arrive.

This information provides you with a wealth of opportunity. For example, you can develop great cross-promotional relationships with websites that are directing traffic to your site. Also, you can identify which keywords are bringing users to your site and build a strategy around those keywords.

But the big picture is that a web analytics can provide clues about (1) what visitors expect to see when they visit your website and (2) whether you satisfy their curiosity or fail to meet expectations. For any website that sells products, this information is vital.

  • To increase the performance of your publications page, use the information you derive through web analytics to:
  • Tailor popular landing pages to entice visitors to stay on your site longer
  • Identify pages that need a stronger call to action to turn potential customers into buyers
  • Easily track average-order total and number of products sold to help you establish goals
  • Track how long customers are on site before they place an order

Check out my blog post, “A Lesson in Using Google Analytics to Optimize Web Performance,” to see how my firm used web analytics stats to improve the performance of one of our site’s most popular pages. By adopting the same principles, you can learn to translate information about high-trafficked parts of your store into happier shoppers—and better publications sales.

Rottman Creative Group

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Three Key Facebook Features Nonprofits Should Use

Thursday, July 16th, 2009

Facebook Tools

Facebook’s popularity is still growing at exponential rate. Is your nonprofit taking advantage of this gold mine?

Here are three key features that can help your organization get the most out of Facebook:

Key Feature #1: Pages

Facebook has introduced Fan Pages for businesses and organizations, whereas, profiles are meant for individuals. From your Facebook Fan Page you can build community and increase communication with your members by posting updates, sharing pictures, blogging and interacting with your fans. It can also be helpful in recruiting volunteers, raising money and essential networking. It is free to set up a Facebook Fan Page. The only commitment your organization will have to make is one of committing time to create the page and keep it active.

RCG Facebook Fan Page

Key Feature #2: Causes

Facebook has a diverse group of users who want to use their Facebook for various reasons. To help users get just what they want out of the social networking site, Facebook has allowed other companies (or web geeks) to create Applications which users can download to their profile. These thousands of applications include games, ways to share music or pictures, quizzes, polls, and lots more. The one that nonprofits need to be aware of is Causes. Instead of us telling you what they do, here’s a snippet from their website:

“Causes offers nonprofit organizations of every budget size, staff capacity, and issue area access to Facebook and MySpace, which between them have over 400 million monthly unique visitors. Facebook, the world’s “stickiest” site, sees over 100 million people log in on a daily basis. Beyond the sheer reach of these social networks, Causes provides nonprofits with specialized tools for spreading awareness, building community, fundraising, circulating petitions, and promoting other actions. Whether you want to reach out to a new supporter demographic, expand your donor base, engage and mobilize existing supporters, or spread the word about your incredible work, Causes is a platform for efficiently and effectively achieving those goals.”

The Causes website has a wealth of information for nonprofits interested in using their platform, including everything you need to know to get started, success stories from other nonprofits, and information on corporate and foundation matching grants.

Key Feature #3: Events

Besides allowing users to manage their contacts and multimedia, Facebook has a feature which allows users to create events and invite guests. You can customize the event, edit its privacy settings, invite members (you can also invite members not on Facebook through email) and add pictures or video. After creating the event, you can send reminder messages to your guests, monitor RSVPs, and interact with guests via a comment section.

Rottman Creative Group

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The Adult Version of Rock’em Sock’em

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Rock'em Sock'em

When it comes to meeting conference attendance goals or fundraising goals, we know that sometimes you feel like the champ, but there are also times when you’ve taken a hard hit.

The competition can be tough as you battle for your audience’s attention and commitment. Many associations are finding that marketing plans that have worked in the past are now producing poor results.

Remember the classic game Rock’em Sock’em? The hours of fun spent knocking off the block of your tough opponents? And, the strategy that went into moving your red or blue robot into position, throwing punches at the perfect time – and most importantly, to try again after defeat.

Association marketing can often feel like today’s adult version of Rock’em Sock’em. You take those hard-blowing punches when e-mail blasts give less-than-desired results, or few members are jumping on board for early-registration.

It’s times like these that you simply have to pick yourself up, and keep swinging. Think on your feet and keep an open mind to new possibilities. If the same old punches aren’t working anymore, learn some new ones. Strengthen the impact of your conference marketing with a finely tuned logo. Improve membership retention with better communication through social media. Re-think your event marketing plan.

Keep rockin’ and sockin’ to discover those block-buster punches, and celebrate with that beloved gotcha victory cry!

Rottman Creative Group

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The Conference Brand Mark Podcast

Wednesday, July 8th, 2009

In this podcast we are going to attack this lesson by breaking brand marks down into five key elements. As I explain how to make your conference brand mark a successful tool in portraying the overall value of your event, you will notice a reoccurring theme of pushing the value of your event, instead of the location of the conference. So I may start to sound like a broken record, but that just reinforces the potential strength your conference logo can have.

The Conference Brand Mark Podcast

Listen Now!

Be sure you subscribe to this monthly podcast!

Rottman Creative Group

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A Primer on Google Alerts

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

Previous Communication Methods

Here at RCG we love the world of social media and how it is transforming how people communicate with each other, how advertisers/marketers spread their message, and how it can connect us with each other in ways that makes the world seem smaller.

We could go on all day about the ins, outs and benefits of social media. But, today we want to touch on the first step into the world of social media: discovering what conversations are already happening (especially conversations about you – or your organization).

There are two ways to do this. First, you can spend hours each week searching the web for mentions of your organization. You may find a few news sources or blogs that make regular mention of your association, or a topic that is related to services you provide. But, it can be a very time consuming effort that gives you little information. So, we recommend the second option: using Google Alerts, a free tool that is praised by many.

The beauty of Google Alerts is that it searches the web for conversations about whatever topic you are interested in, and it brings those conversations to you – instead of you pulling your hair out while trying to rummage through inactive blogs and old forums.

It’s fairly simple to use and customize to how you prefer to receive information online. You can even set it up to “alert” you about your topic on specific websites, for example, if you are an association providing services related to victims of crime in the DC area, you can set a Google Alert for articles from the Washington Post’s website about “victim’s rights”. Whenever an article with that phrase appears, you will receive an email with a link to the article.

We hope you can see how this might be a useful tool for your organization. Here are some tips on how to get started:

  • Set up an account by visiting Google.com and going to the “Google Alerts” page.
  • Select your keywords or phrases that you want to be notified about.
  • Use quotations around phrases. For example, “North Carolina Association of Chicken Farmers”.
  • If you want to set up an alert for a specific site use this combination: “chicken farmers” site:washingtonpost.com.

This tool can help you easily target communities that are having conversations relevant to your organization. Without much effort, you have the opportunity to target your message to people who are interested and possibly in need of your services. So, go and hear what is being said about your organization. Then you can start to interact in these conversations and you might become as amazed with social media as we are.

Rottman Creative Group

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Direct Mail + Social Media Marketing = Fundraising Success!

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

easy tips to help nonprofits

To compliment our recent Whitespace Newsletter about conference marketing success by integrating direct mail and social media, we put together a few tips for our nonprofit friends who are slightly more interested in fundraising.

We’ve put together 4 easy tips to help nonprofits:

  • Engage previous supporters
  • Find new prospects
  • Convert prospects to donors
  • Raise more money without greatly increasing your budget

Tip #1

Let supporters know about your presence on social networking sites. In addition to finding supporters on Facebook and LinkedIn with your current email list, you can also inform them about connecting with the nonprofit through these channels with short blurbs on direct mail pieces, emails and the organization’s website.

Tip #2

Respond to feedback from social networking sites, and share it with supporters who are likely keeping up with the organization through direct mail or email. The nature of social networking is that it allows users to provide instant feedback – the good, the bad, and sometimes the ugly. We’re not going to touch on how to handle the bad or the ugly, but we think you should sing the good feedback from the rooftops! Well, not exactly, but we do recommend you share it on direct mail pieces and emails, just like any other testimonial.

Tip #3

Integrate the campaign logo and theme across all mediums. Some organizations feel that their online marketing has to have a different “brand” than the rest of their marketing. This has potential to confuse the audience. We recommend using the same logo and theme for your fundraising campaign, despite how you are communicating with potential supporters. However, this does not mean you can use the exact same message, word-for-word on your direct mail piece as used on the nonprofit’s Facebook Fan page.

Tip #4

A popular trend (and useful tool) on Twitter is to tag posts with a hash tag (#), plus a keyword. This helps identify what the post is about, but also makes it easy to find when conducting searches. One of the most popular tags is #charitytuesday. This tag is used, you guessed it, on Tuesdays. Twitter users will post something about their favorite nonprofit and include this tag, hoping that the post will help raise awareness.

Alerting Twitter followers about upcoming direct mail pieces will peak their interest and let them know you need their help in raising awareness about the campaign. This is a great opportunity for nonprofits during a fundraising campaign with the potential to encourage matching gifts and referrals.

Rottman Creative Group

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Relief Effort for Pakistani Refugees

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Text "SWAT" to 20222 - Donate $5

Recently we were asked to create an ad for a unique national campaign to raise funds to support Pakistani Refugees fleeing war-torn Swat Valley. As the number of men, women and children recently uprooted by the conflict in north-west Pakistan neared 2.4 million, the UN Refugee Agency stated that it is “absolutely essential” that the international community mount an immediate and massive humanitarian response. This campaign was kicked off by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton when she asked the American people to join in the world-wide humanitarian effort in Pakistan:

“Now, Americans can use technology to help, as well. Using your cell phones, Americans can text the word “Swat” — to the number 20222 and make a $5 contribution that will help the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees provide tents, clothing, food, and medicine to hundreds of thousands of affected people. And before I came over here, we did that in the State Department. So we are making some of the first donations to this fund.”

It’s an honor for us to participate in a campaign that can easily positively impact the lives of people in dire need of basics for survival. After learning about the magnitude of this refugee crisis, we set forth to design web and print ads. Here’s a little tip for nonprofits – we were able to obtain amazing pictures of refugees from the Associated Press. The photos they shared with us tell the story of desperation, need and hope better than we could explain with words. The AP is often willing to share their photos with nonprofits, and will typically offer them at a reasonable price.

Keep an eye out for our ad to appear in some national publications, but more importantly we hope you participate in the campaign. To learn more, visit www.unrefugees.org.

Rottman Creative Group

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How Associations and Nonprofits Can Benefit from Using Ning

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

In our most recent White Space newsletter we discussed conference marketing tailored to Millennials, and briefly mentioned the slight addiction to social networking among this generation. Turns out, the addiction is contagious and now the Millennials are teaching their parents how to use Facebook and Twitter.

But, did you know that those are not your only options for creating social networks? Using commercial social networks is becoming more and more popular for nonprofits and associations. But, they may not always be the best fit. This is especially true if your members are really active within your social network.

The next step up for organizations is to create a house social network, which is not as difficult and technical as you might think thanks to the help of Ning.

What is Ning?

What is Ning?Ning is an online platform for people to create their own social networks. With little time investment organizations can set up their own house social network that can add an alternative way to engage with their members and fulfill their goals or mission.

In a recent survey, nonprofits answered questions about social networking, over three-quarters of the survey respondents indicated that the network is valuable asset to their communication efforts.

Popular Features of Ning

Ning has several features that allow members to easily share information with each other.

  • Communicate with members through blogs, forums and videos.
  • Members can also interact with each other through chat and sharing pictures.
  • Communication is encouraged through the ability to form groups based on interests or geography.
  • Nonprofits can increase fundraising efforts by installing widgets to collect donations.
  • Increase event participation by posting information to your members.
  • Export your social network member data to increase your list of contacts.

Enough Talk

We’ve done some research and found some quality house social networks from organizations to help give you a picture of how this tool can increase communication and engagement in your members. Check them out, then come back and leave us a comment on what you think.

ASPCA
American Library Association
Geographical Association Network (A network for geography teachers)
Bridge Builders

Rottman Creative Group

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A Lesson in Using Google Analytics to Optimize Web Performance

Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

Google Analytics

One of the most sophisticated, safe, and user-friendly web analytics programs just happens to also be free for anyone to use, regardless of site size or amount of traffic. For many web developers, marketers and site owners, Google Analytics seems like a gift too good to be true. It performs just as well (if not better) than costly, high-end web analytics programs.

Google Analytics is enabled by including a tracking code in the template of your website. This code allows Google to see every page of your site and then give you information about the traffic you’re receiving.

We use Google Analytics to track the performance of our website by observing how visitors interact with our online content. On a regular basis we review our Google Analytics stats to evaluate which pages of our site are getting the most traffic, where those visitors are coming from, and how they are interacting with our site once they arrive.

This is invaluable information for any site owner who desires to make their website a powerful means of communication. The data provided to use from Google Analytics allows us to transform our website from being a one-way piece of communication, into a conversation with our visitors. Without this data, we would just be spewing information onto the web then sitting back hoping that the right people would find us, and that hopefully we’ve lived up to their expectations. But, through the magic of Google Analytics we discover how and why visitors come to our site, if they found what they were looking for, and how often they return. Then we respond in the conversation, by taking this information and tailoring our online content to better meet the needs of our visitors.

Most recently we identified a page on our site that was receiving a high amount of traffic compared to other pages on our site. Assisting associations with conference marketing is a popular service we offer our clients, but it was still pleasantly surprising to see the amount of traffic generated by a recent White Space (our monthly newsletter) edition on the topic. This simple page was where we dumped the newsletter after sending it out to our subscribers.

Google Analytics Keywords

Our Google Analytics told us that visitors were coming to this page when searching for:

  • Conference Marketing Plan
  • Increase Conference Attendance
  • Marketing A Conference Steps Deciding On The Content
  • Conference Attendance Down
  • Marketing Plan + Annual Conference

This clued us in on what our visitors are expecting when coming to this page: they want to see tips, information and resources about annual conference marketing. As you can tell, this is not rocket science.

With this information in mind we decided to improve this page of our site in hopes of better meeting our visitors’ expectations.

  • First, we added a link to our blog – a place that we update regularly with tips and resources that can be useful to associations planning a conference.
  • Second, we added a blurb about who we are and what we do to give the user an idea of who they are taking advice from.
  • And lastly, we added a link to our digital portfolio, which is a great opportunity for visitors to get an idea of how our ideas translate to strategy and practical pieces of visual communication.

Now when visitors come to this page, they have easy access to more information on the topic of their interest, they get a better idea of who we are and our capabilities, and they generally have a more enjoyable user experience.

Google Analytics Dashboard

With the help of our Google Analytics data we have quickly and easily transformed a high-trafficked page of our site into a stronger means of communicating with prospects. Associations and nonprofits have very different goals for their websites than we have for ours, but this lesson in optimizing web performance can easily translate to your site.  The data provided to you through Google Analytics can boost your website’s ability to capture the interest of potential members or sponsors and inspire current members for specific actions such as renewal or purchasing a product.

Rottman Creative Group

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