[Photo credit: AVP Volunteer 2 by yuan2003, on Flickr]

As any charitable organization knows, volunteers are superstars. They give love and expertise and don’t ask for a dime in return. They can be especially helpful if your organization has a website. Bearing in mind that an entire Web development project is long-term and requires dedicated knowledge and commitment that you’re better off hiring someone to do (upshot: it’s easier to fire someone whose work you’re not happy with), there are still plenty of other tasks you can assign out to people who want to help. Here are a few.

[BTW, did you read Engaging Volunteers in Your Marketing Efforts or Volunteers and Website Management?]

1. Social networking cheerleader
2. Add comments to blogs
3. Contribute blog entries
4. Participate in discussion on bulletin boards
5. Data entry (i.e., cutting and pasting info into a new site)
6. Website promotion
7. Adding your website to directories
8. Writing news updates about events
9. Website literacy workshops
10. Checking for dead links
11. Updating old content
12. Convert press releases for websites
13. Usability testing (i.e., make sure everything works in a logical way)
14. Bug reporting (i.e., look for and report errors or problems)
15. Identify requirements for new development
16. Browser testing
17. Taking pictures for the website
18. Formatting and uploading pictures
19. Making videos for the site
20. Uploading videos onto a service like YouTube or Vimeo, and adding them to site
21. Help manage wiki

Anything we missed? Add your ideas below.

Considering that about half the people on the Internet find you through some kind of search engine query, it’s vitally important that you show up everywhere you should. Such are the intricacies of search engine optimization.

Improving your SEO is an on-going task, but here are five mistakes you can make to really kill your SEO strategy.

1. Use images for headings

Some people think regular old text is too boring for headings, so they use pictures instead. A major no-no. Search engines like header tags (< h1 >, < h2 >, etc.), so use these instead of graphics. You can always change the style of them through CSS if you don’t like the way they appear.

2. Leave image tags blank

This mistake is incredibly common, but it’s also incredibly easy to fix. Whenever you have an image display on a page, make sure you fill in the so-called “alt tag.” It’s a handy place to stash keywords (search engines figure anything you illustrate is important, so they pay attention), and it helps with overall accessibility.

3. Bad spelling

Search engines are skeptical of crummy spelling. Get a dictionary.

4. Flash only

Flash is, well, flashy, but it’s not incredibly usable. It’s hard for people to navigate, and also hard for search engines to catalog. Provide an HTML alternative so make everybody happy. As an added bonus, anybody using a hand-held device (like an iPhone) will have an easier time reading your site.

5. Ugly URLs

URLs with a string of nonsensical text does nothing for your site. They’re confusing, you can never type them into an address bar and search engines hate them. Instead, make sure you’re using real English in the address. Check out this article’s address for an example.

Too many of the non-profits and religious organizations that come to us think of their communications strategies as one-way streets that never intersect. While they may send messages through their website, Twitter account or Facebook Page, many never ask for feedback or take steps to build a conversation. Instead, they’re focused on one-way announcements of ticket sales or special initiatives.

Usually, those messages never intersect with a blended communications strategy. You may see that a church has a Facebook account – but only if you happen to come across it on Facebook.

The important thing to remember is that someone who might be really interested in what you do might not be a Facebook or Twitter user. So that means that if you put all your energy into Facebook or Twitter or any other singular thing, they’ll never find you. Spread it around.

Here are a few good examples of how to blend different communications initiative:

Detailed Twitter Background

Add a custom background on your Twitter page that has information on how to find your website or subscribe to your blog. Check out ours.

Double-Duty Tweets

Send messages on Twitter that point people to useful information on your website or blog. Rather than, “Did you know we have a blog?” try something compelling like a snippet from a recent blog post or initiative, “We’ve placed a bounty on Michael Vick. You read that right. Get details.”

Use Facebook Connect

This plug-in, which works with Drupal and Wordpress, in addition to other websites, lets members log onto your website using their Facebook login and share information in both places at once.

I was recently researching an article about declining congregation numbers at synagogues, but most of the information I found was anecdotal. Those anecdotal stories are powerful, though. Someone I talked to from a synagogue in Florida has a membership that went from 200 to 50.

With that in mind, how is your synagogue faring? Is it growing or shrinking? If it’s shrinking, are you doing anything with technology to boost your membership numbers?

Share your answer below, and then tell your friends. I’ll share results here in the near future.

[Photo credit: Small things that makes a big impact in Life, by man's pic, on Flickr]

Help search engines list you more easily. Even a simple tweak can yield a big results in the number of people who find your website.

Title pages so humans can read them.

Each page should have a logical name that makes sense to the people reading it. This page, for instance, is titled “Small SEO Tweaks with Big Impact.” It’s not “SEO, search engine optimization, search engine changes, search engine tweaks.”

Write pages so humans can read them.

The above is also true for the text of any given page. Search engines – and people – consider it a turn-off if you pack pages with keywords you think search engines are looking for. Use natural language.

Give every image an alternate name.

This means using the so-called ALT tag, if you’re working with HTML, or specifying an image description if you’re using a content management system.

Use a sitemap.

Sitemaps, which list every page on your website, are useful for people as well as search engines. These make it easier for search engines to find and index every page of your site in a snap.

Building a website is only half the job – promoting it is the other half, and it never really ends. Luckily there are several things you can do to make your site promote itself, freeing you to do more relationship-building and hands-on promotion.

Here are some things you can add to the site to encourage people to visit and share what they find there.

Add a Tell a Friend feature

Sure, you can encourage people to tell their buddies about your site, but you might as well make it easy for them. Create a tell-a-friend feature that makes it simple for them to forward your site or a resource they found there to a multitude of readers at once.

Add a Link to Us page

Empower your visitors to create links to your site, replete with your site icon, on their site with a Link to Us page, available on every page. Provide the HTML coding they’ll need, and make sure it includes well-formed SEO links (including a full title, alt and anchor text). Put together a variety of text links, images of different sizes and everything someone would need to link back to you.

Maintain an engaging blog

The single best way to build engaging information on your website that attracts a following is to start a blog. I mean, you’re reading this right now, aren’t you? So give people a reason to keep coming back. Just make sure it’s tightly focused and worth reading.

Encourage people to follow your social media

Once you’ve got a blog, tell people how to follow it. The beauty of blogs are RSS feeds, which let people receive updates of articles as soon as they’re posted. (See how to get updates of this blog.) This is the same for Twitter updates, which is really a microblog, and any social networking accounts you have, like Facebook.

Present tools for sharing

If you have an article-rich site, give people tools for sharing your resources with their friends. Try some little buttons like this:

Ask people to spread the word

Remind people, again and again, to tell their friends about you. Sooner or later, they’ll act on your request.

Add a calendar

Show people you have stuff going on that’s worth tracking. Your calendar might have trainings, appearances, fund drives, special events – surely you’re doing something that people can react with.

You should never stop promoting your site once you’ve built it, but invest smartly in tools that do the heavy lifting for you. While you focus on other promotional activities, your investment can multiply.

Imagine buying a new car, driving it home and never once putting gas in it. It just sits there in the garage, blocking access to your gardening tools. Ridiculous waste of money, right? That’s tantamount to building a new website and never updating it, upgrading it or promoting it. It just sits there and blocks your opportunity to purvey a message, boost membership or garner support.

Upgrading and updating are iterative processes that you might begin after a few weeks of living with your new website. But the first thing you should do off the chute is start promoting like crazy. One of the easiest ways to do that is to submit your website to search engines and directories.

The reason is two-fold. First, you want to make sure your name appears where people are looking. If you’re a synagogue or church, you want potential members to find you if they’re shopping around by browsing through local directories (”Massachusetts synagogues”).

Secondly, generating links is a great way to to boost your reach in search engines, and search engines are the top way people find information online. You need to follow some proven search engine optimization, or SEO, techniques to help your name move to the top of the list when someone might be trying to find you in a search engine.

Many directories charge a fee, and these are of questionable value. Focus on free listings, especially those in your community. Take a day or so to sit down and find every directory that relates to your organization, and then submit your site to each one. Here’s a list of free directory submission pages to get you started.

Google Open Directory
http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

Yahoo! Directory Listings
https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/reference/instructions

Yelp
http://www.yelp.com/

I’m asked many times by clients what kind of social media they should invest in. It’s a tough question to answer, largely because it depends on what kind of social media makes sense to the people who you’re trying to reach. That’s why the best idea is to ask them directly.

Put together a survey, either printed or digital, and distribute it to your constituency or congregation to see where they’d like to hear from you in terms of social media. Ask them what kinds of social media they currently use, and then ask them how much and often they use them. It’ll give you a good idea of their capabilities and tendencies.

You can also make a pretty good educated guess. If your constituency is made up of largely older people, you’re probably best off seeing if you can transition from a printed bulletin to an electronic newsletter. If your audience is young and hip, hit them where they go: Facebook, MySpace, YouTube.

Also check out our social media survey.

Many people will take the time to set a simple auto-response to go out when someone writes them an e-mail. It’s usually something like “I will be out of the office until Tuesday, 4/14. If necessary, I can be reached at …” Talk about a missed opportunity!

Why not get a little fancy with this message and do a bit of promotion while you’re at it? After all, you have to write something there anyway, how about adapting one of these lines for your next out-of-office reply:

1. I’m out of town and can’t respond to your message until next Tuesday. While you’re waiting for me, check out our blog at http://talance.com/blog
2. I’m not checking e-mail while I’m out of the office until Tuesday, but I’m still Twittering! You can get a daily dose of what I’m doing at http://twitter.com/talance
3. I’m out of the office until Tuesday, but I’ll be celebrating our latest website launch the whole time I’m away. Check out http://massmentors.org and tell me what you think.

The best part? You don’t have to do any extra work to do a little promotion.

With some mighty big funders losing money because of the bad economy and the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme, this is a good time for nonprofits embrace grassroots fundraising. This, after all, is how the president-to-be was able to raise such an enormous sum: lots of people making moderate donations.

If you’re not raising funds online, do it! Too many websites make it too hard – or impossible – to give online. Here are the top 10 transgressions I’ve seen many times. Learn from these mistakes.

1. No Donate or Give button. Don’t be shy. People want to donate. How will they know to if you don’t ask?
2. Donate/Give button not big enough. Make it easy for them to see a donate button. Big red or orange buttons are good.
3. No way to pay online. Sometimes those big buttons lead to an e-mail or snail mail address. People sit at their computers with a credit card in hand, ready to pay. Our clients use our shopping cart technology to collect donations, sell T-shirts and mugs or accept reservations for events – all classified as fundraising. That’s the best return on your investment, and there are plenty of free services out there too.
4. Clashing systems. Make sure your fundraising efforts dance together, not bump into each other. Coordinate direct mail campaigns with online campaigns, with a goal of moving more online. It’s vastly cheaper.
5. Neglecting other technology. You can ask for support though e-mail, blog, Facebook, and other places in addition to your website.
6. Paranoia. I’m always a little surprised to hear how many people think it’s unsafe to ask for money online. True, nothing is completely safe from fraud, and you shouldn’t be taking credit card numbers through e-mail, but donating through a secure website is much safer than a check in the mail.
7. Asking for support once. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
8. Not rallying the troops. Tell others to tell their friends about how they donated. Give them a button for their website that links back to yours. Have your supporters help by spreading the word.
9. Not tracking. There are great tools out there that you can use that track the number of people who’ve visited your site and what they did when they got there. Make sure you keep records of traffic and compare it month by month to see how your online fundraising campaign is doing.
10. Bad publicity. Asking for money isn’t enough. You need to market your campaign. Aim for media coverage, write about new campaigns in all of your literature and partner with other organizations for added punch.