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By Jill Friedman Fixler and Beth Steinhorn, JFFixler & Associates

This is a guest post from two of our favorite clients: Jill Friedman Fixler and Beth Steinhorn of JFFixler & Associates. Jill is the President and Founder and Beth, a Senior Strategist, coordinates the marketing at this consulting firm that specializes in transforming organizations through innovative volunteer strategies. The firm works with some of the biggest names in the sector, including Canadian Cancer Society, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, Hostelling International – USA, California State Libraries, and many more. Since April is National Volunteer Month, and these two are the go-to experts on the subject, we asked them to write about how to engage volunteers in your marketing efforts.

In a time when economic reports continue to bring challenging news to nonprofits, it’s rare to read about a resource that’s growing – but volunteers are a growing resource that can help your organization fulfill its strategic priorities. You can harness the abundant skills and interests of your volunteers and apply them towards your organization’s priorities, including marketing and communications.

Here are a few examples of how volunteers, cultivated strategically, can help your organization fulfill its marketing objectives:

Developing an Effective Marketing Plan

Engage marketing professionals as pro bono consultants to advise your marketing team on effective tactics. They can consult on the development of a realistic marketing plan, share trends to inform how you prioritize your efforts, and leverage their existing relationships with local media to get coverage of your organization. Many corporations are seeking ways to shift their philanthropic efforts from cash to in-kind, pro bono contributions. Contact local companies to see if they will “loan” their marketing professionals to your organization and connect with local volunteer centers and online volunteer matching organizations, such as VolunteerMatch.org.

Keeping your Website Dynamic and Updated

Keeping your website dynamic and up-to-date is a challenge for many organizations – but it is critical to maintaining a meaningful dialogue with your constituents. Who amongst your existing volunteer corps is proficient in online technologies? Who is a good writer? They can be tapped to partner with staff to enhance your web presence. A technologically savvy volunteer can become your “Calendar Guru,” keeping your online calendar updated and posting new, relevant events on your calendar as well as other community calendars. Volunteers who are good writers can write guest blogs, sharing their stories and interviewing others to diversify the “face” of your organization, while also sharing important news with your followers. Don’t have a Twitter account yet for your nonprofit? Consider cultivating a “Twitter Tutor” to help staff set up the account, research and select the organizations and individuals to follow, and help staff and other volunteers determine how and when to tweet and post links.

Promoting Your Programs and Other Volunteer Opportunities

It’s easy to get caught up in technology as the marketing world continues to change at lightning speed. However, it’s important to remember that technology is most effective when it is used as a tool to extend the ever-powerful “word of mouth.” Whether marketing programs, cultivating new donors, or engaging volunteers, word of mouth reigns supreme. The vast majority of your volunteers are online. How can they use their profound networks to share the work of your organization and engage their friends (real or virtual!) with you? Provide your volunteers with carefully crafted messages about upcoming programs for them to easily post on their Facebook status; ensure they list their volunteer work with a link to your website on their LinkedIn profiles; and ask that they forward your volunteer opportunities to friends and colleagues who may have the skills you are seeking in new volunteers.

Engaging volunteers to enhance your marketing efforts is a powerful strategy. Developing project-specific opportunities for people to share their experience as marketing directors, PR specialists, writers, or graphic designers will attract new volunteers to the organization while also helping you fulfill your strategic objectives. Meanwhile, engaging your existing volunteers in your marketing efforts is also critical. They know your organization and can tell your story in ways that staff can’t. Having them share why they feel connected to your mission and how your organization helps make the world a better place is compelling and powerful and will strengthen your presence now and in the future.

For additional ideas about how volunteers can help with your website, see Talance’s earlier posting, 21 Ways Volunteers Can Help with Your Website.

About the Authors

Jill Friedman Fixler is a thought leader on building organizational capacity through re-inventing, re-engineering, and re-vitalizing volunteer engagement. As Founder and President of JFFixler & Associates, Jill combines her skills as a consultant, trainer, facilitator, public speaker, and coach to share new volunteer engagement strategies with organizations throughout North America.

Beth Steinhorn is a Senior Strategist with JFFixler & Associates and has over two decades of experience in nonprofit organizations, including museums, education agencies, and faith-based organizations.

What we’re reading this week:

10 Examples of E-newsletter Footers and Headers with Social Links
While working on a redesign of his newsletter, Ben, a blogger for e-newsletter service MailChimp, collected standards and best practices. Here’s what he found.

How To Split Up the US
A very cool visualization that represents how relationships develop across geographical boundaries in 210 million public Facebook profiles. It helps understand how your social network forms and travels.

Measuring Type
“A selection of the most commonly used typefaces were compared for how economical they are with the amount of ink which they use at the same point size. Large scale renditions of the typefaces were drawn out with ballpoint pens, allowing the remaining ink levels to display the ink efficiency of each typeface.”

Articles on Nonprofit Marketing and Communications
Long list of helpful articles on how non-profiters can market. Via kylacromer on Twitter.

Advertising people will tell you that before anyone will act on an ad, they have to be reminded 18 times. That’s a lot of dead-horse beating. It’s all the more effective if you can find online and offline places to promote. To get you started, here are 18 ways you can tell people to visit your website:

1. Put your website address on your return address labels
2. Mention your website on your voice mail recording
3. Add your site to your e-mail signature
4. Mention any new development any time you talk to someone
5. Update your business cards with your address
6. List yourself in directories
7. Ask partners to display literature with your website
8. Open a Facebook, MySpace and Flickr page and send people back to your website
9. Create a custom background on Twitter and make sure it has your website on it
10. Wear your web address – have it printed on T-shirts, hats, bags or even cheap buttons
11. Put a custom magnet on your organization’s car
12. Send out press releases
13. Encourage paper newsletter subscribers to read issues online
14. Send an e-mail with your new website to everybody you know, and as them to forward it to anyone they know
15. Have a website launch party/fundraiser
16. Start a blog – more pages means better online coverage
17. Add a Send This Article to Friends button on your website
18. Hang posters with your web address

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.

Bev Freeman over at the Boston chapter of the American Marketing Association has been working on a great series about nonprofit marketing. Check out her posts on:

Nonprofit Marketing….Really?
Using marketing to enroll people in a significant program or initiative, increase awareness about an agency’s mission, its services, or the response to a crisis in your community, and/or raise the visibility of an organization as a basis for successful fundraising or “buy-in” (acceptance) by your constituencies.

Nonprofit Marketing – Using a Plan, Considering Social Media
Outlines the benefits of a plan, encourages you to engage in planning and helps you understand where social media may fit in.

Nonprofits—Begin to learn about the social media
Set aside time every week to learn more about the social media. Nonprofit communicators have a unique opportunity to employ any of an array of social media tools – these are low-cost (often downloadable for free) and very often effective.

Innovation is one of the first things on the chopping block during tough financial times. Understandable, especially if organizations are being asked to fund something that’s risky. But innovation has a partner up there with its neck also extended, which is marketing, I’m very sorry to note.

What many people don’t realize is that marketing is necessary for keeping your organization afloat, no matter what your organization is. John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing fame says, “Every business is a marketing business.” That goes the same for nonprofits, because you’re constantly trying to stay in front of the people who believe in your cause.

And what is a website if not one of the cheapest forms of marketing out there?

“The Internet is the cheapest and most successful form of marketing around,” says Micah Sachs, Director of Web Strategy at InterfaithFamily.com, who I interviewed for an article that will appear in an issue of The Forward next month. He’s been using bargain basement web marketing to great effect. Namely, he’s instituted a few changes in SEO (search engine optimization) and Google Adwords.

After InterfaithFamily gave itself a modest marketing makeover about a year ago, its traffic immediately increased 63 percent. It’s seen a steady increase, and Sachs said that up through June 2008, he never saw less than a 40 percent increase.

Here are a few of the easy steps he followed to boost his traffic:

1. Give each page a unique title
2. Create URLs that match the article titles
3. Add article keywords on web pages

At first, it required a significant time investment, and he company brought in an intern who spent about 40 hours per week for 10 weeks writing in descriptions, adding keywords and generally optimizing the site’s old articles.

“But now it’s part of our culture,” he says. “Any time we create anything new on the site, we don’t even think of something as additional work. We create keywords, create title tags. It’s just a part of what we do.”

Once your organization has figured out a system for creating these three main changes, an increase in web visibility should come naturally and simply.

“This is all stuff that’s simple and straightforward,” he says. “It’s amazing how many sites of major orgs aren’t search-engine optimized. It will cost them no money; they just have to ask their webmaster to make some changes.”

A client called the other day wondering why more people weren’t using their brand spanking new synagogue website. It was a nice site, all the bells and whistles, and there wasn’t a very good reason I could see that no one was using it. But it didn’t take long to figure out what the problem was.”Well, do the people in your congregation know about the site?”

“We sent an e-mail when it launched.”

“Do you mention it in your monthly bulletin?”

“No.”

“Do you have the URL on your business cards?”

“No.”

“Do you tell people during services that they can find more information on the site?”

“No.”

“Do you have a message on your voice mail about the website?”

“No.”

And that’s the problem with many websites – synagogue or otherwise. Just building it isn’t enough. Just mentioning it once isn’t enough. The marketing begins with other channels – and you undoubtedly have many available. Think about all the ways you touch your community, and make sure you use them to mention your website and its benefits.

Eventually they’ll come, and if you do it right, they’ll keep coming back.

Targeting and addressing your website audience isn’t a problem for synagogues alone. Web ventures across the secular and religious world grapple with the same problem. But it’s important to know who you want to attract to your site, because it will affect not only how you build it, but who might be attending services and programs.

Generally speaking, synagogues can target existing members or new members. That’s just scraping the surface, though. You should know:

• How old are those people? If it’s an aging congregation, they might not know or care much about technology, but that’s not the same for younger generations. All synagogues should be addressing a younger membership, otherwise your existing membership will eventually fizzle out.
• Do they have kids? If so, put information front and center about Sunday school or Hebrew classes.
• Where do they live? If it’s a snowy climate, put cancellations on the homepage. And always include directions.
• What’s their economic situation? Would your congregants be interested in auctions? Registering for a 5K? Can you tap them for heavy fund development?
• What gender are they? Men and women will each have different questions about your programs.
• Can you guess what kind of technical equipment they have? Are they accessing your site through a PDA? Are they logging on antiquated equipment at school?
• Why are they visiting your site? Guests might want to know about membership information or how to find your building. Members might be interested in volunteer opportunities.

Synagogue sites should be inclusive for everyone, but by finding and knowing your target audience, you can prioritize information for them.

Here are some useful articles on how to learn more about your target audience:

Defining Your Target Audience from the American Marketing Association tells you how to conduct this research.

Evolt.org’s Making websites: what’s your target audience? speaks from a more technical perspective.