Wired Causes

You are browsing the archives of 2010 April.

Now here’s a home page for you.  Be sure to click on it for the full effect.

What to say?

First off, I have to credit Webpagesthatsuck.com for tipping me off to this splash page, which won the dubious honor of one of the worst nonprofit websites of the year.

Second, I hope it made you laugh.  It is the month of April Fool’s Day, after all.

Third, this is no joke.  It’s a microcosm of what’s wrong in nonprofit marketing.  While this tacky look-at-me website and its flaming torches takes self-adulation to an extreme, it’s an apt representation of where we go wrong in online outreach.  Too many of us are too focused on trumpeting our organizations and too forgetful of everyone else - the people we help and the donors who make that help possible.  They deserve center stage, not our logo. 

We need to exit center stage and let the spotlight shine where it belongs: on other people.

Bonus tip: skip the torches.

A couple days ago, Facebook announced some major changes in its platform that will make the entire web more social: “We’re building toward a web where the default is social. Every application and product will be redesigned from the ground…

Lethal Generosity View more presentations from Beth Kanter. On Wednesday, fellow Zoetica founder, Kami Huyse and I presented on Lethal Generosity, (a term from Shel Israel’s “Twitterville”). The topic is our Society for New Communications Research Fellowship research. Kami and…

Photo by Funkyah I have the honor of collaborating with fellow Zoetica founder, Kami Huyse, on our Society for New Communications Research Fellowship research on the concept of Lethal Generosity - a way that for-profits can leverage social media for…

In fundraising, we tend to focus on what we can extract from our donors.  Instead, we should focus on what we can give our donors: gratitude, social impact, good feelings.  The money will follow.

Think of your donors and how they feel.  It is a very personal, emotional choice to give away money to something you care about.  You as the organization these donors support want to handle those strong feelings of your donor with care. They have acted in a way that is deeply meaningful to them.  If the only way we react to their gift is with a tax receipt, we’re not only being rude, we’re being disrespectful.

It is far easier to keep and cultivate a donor than to go find a new one and convince them to care about your cause. That’s one reason to give thanks early and often in your online outreach.  Another is that your gratitude bonds the donor to your cause. And, because most nonprofits stink at online relationship-building, if you are good, you are going to stand out. 

Be extra nice to your donors today.

If the Kresge Foundation isn’t giving matching grants for brand-new arts buildings anymore–and it’s not–the arts-building bubble is over as surely as the housing and financial-industry bubbles.  Granting funds instead for renovation and repair means the new Kresge posture will benefit the arts groups that got while the getting was good (or, perhaps, have some [...]

Photo from San Jose Library This week (April 18th to 25th) is National Volunteer Week in the US. The week is a signature event created by the Points of Light Institute, to celebrate ordinary people doing extraordinary things to improve…

When we launched the NetSquared conference in 2005, our premise was simple.  We set out to produce an event that brought together people working in the public and private sector who were interested in the potential of web-based tools and strategies to transform the way entrepreneurial nonprofits and social innovators operate.  The conference, held at Cisco’s headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley, brought together around 300 people from foundations, corporate developer networks, and entrepreneurial social innovators working at the intersection of technology and social–change projects.

Over the last four years, the annual conference has been a success on so many levels. 

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