FIVE SINS OF NONPROFIT MARKETING & THE PROMISE OF

SOCIAL MEDIA

Agenda

• Introductions• Why Nonprofit Marketing Matters• Five Sins of Nonprofit Marketing• Why Social Media Matters• What You Need to Know about Google,Twitter &

Facebook• Social Media Audit Results for CL&M Clients• Appendices

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Why Nonprofit Marketing Matters

• What is “Marketing?”– Market Research that provides data & insights

– Marketing Communications that create awareness

• How does that help nonprofits?– Research enables them to:

• Target communications• Refine programs to meet audience needs

– Awareness enables them to attract/retain:• Donors• Members• Volunteers

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Marketing Planning/Communications Not Grounded in Research

• Sin #1– “We know our audience – we’ve been doing

this a long time”– But times change, now more than ever– Research need not be expensive

• Online tools like Survey Monkey• Telephone surveys by staff• Visitor surveys

– Without research, it’s tough to measure ROI

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Marketing Basics Ignored

• Sin #2– Brand positioning/differentiation – Marketing strategy– Audience definition– Messaging– Marketing plan w/ objectives tied to

organizational objectives

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Communications Not Consumer Focused

• Sin #3– Often reflects lack of research – organization doesn’t

know stakeholders

– It’s all about the organization and what it wants to do

– Everyone – Board & Staff – is an expert: “Let’s show ‘em what we know

– Website devoted to XYZ Disease Association, not people with XYZ disease 

– Flip side: communications try to be “all things to all people”

• Also reflects lack of solid positioning/differentiation

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Content Development Given Short Shrift

• Sin #4– Multiplicity of channels, especially Social, makes content

development critical• “Everyone is watching you … all the time”

• Organizations can’t afford dated websites, month-old blogs

– Content development need not be expensive• Again, online surveys

• First-hand stories about/by the people your organization helps

• Trends in data maintained by your organization

– Every organization has hidden content assets – they just have to look for them

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Marketing Treated as Cost – Not Necessary Investment

• Sin #5– Organization leaders don’t understand power of

marketing• Hire web designers, brochure writers

• Instead of strategic thinkers who can impact overall results

– “Why spend these dollars if we can’t measure results?”

• But results can be measured

• In fact, if you can’t measure it, don’t do it 

– Which is why you can’t afford Sin #1

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Why Social Media Matters

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“The word blog is irrelevant.What's important is that it is now

common, and will soon be expected, that every intelligent person (and quite a few unintelligent ones) will have a media platform where they

share what they care about with the world.”

Information Delivery is undergoing a radical change

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• Pace of change: It took more than 1 year to sell 1 Million iPods but only 28 days to sell 1 Million +iPads

• New technologies: By 2012 smartphones will out sell desktop and laptop computers combined

• New consumer behaviors: Search is the most performed action on the internet. Email is a close second

• New leader behaviors: 6/10 C-suite executives conduct more than 6 daily online searches

A Part of Marketing

OUTBOUND MARKETING

• Direct Mail / email• Advertising • Marketing collateral

INBOUND MARKETING

• Blogging• Social/Digital Media• Public Relations• Website

Interruption Permission

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Social Media is for Leads and Sales

Source: State of Inbound Marketing Report - http://bit.ly/aewfHr 12

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What Your Clients Need to Know Now

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“Your brand isn’t what YOU say it is, it’s what GOOGLE

says it is”- Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine

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Is your company ranked on the first page of Google?

If not, 3,923,869 sets of eyeballs missed your website

16Source: http://training.seobook.com/google-ranking-value

• Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging tool

in which users send and read posts of up to 140-

characters called tweets.

• Tweets are distributed to followers on a “feed” which

displays the tweets in real time

• Twitter now has 105,779,710

registered users

• New users are signing up at the

rate of 300,000 per day

• 180 million unique visitors come to

the site every month

• Twitter's search engine receives

around 600 million search queries

per day

Source: Huffington Post, 4/21/10

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Let’s Not Forget Facebook

• If Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest in the world

• Idealware’s 2011 survey of Nonprofit Facebook users found:– 85% had moderate to substantial success in

increasing awareness of their organization – 70% saw an increase in website traffic– Almost 80% said they reached new “supporters” 

• How much time did this take? An average of 2.6 hours a week

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CL&M Clients Social Media Highlights

• Beth Abraham Health Sciences – Barely on the radar screen

• Collegiate Chronicles– Better but not much

• Museum of American Finance – Rising star

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Appendices

• Speaker biographies

• Law firm use of social media

• Social media audit CL&M clients

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Speaker Biographies

• John Bliss is the founding principal of NonProfit Solutions LLC (www.non-profit-solutions.com), which provides marketing services to nonprofit organizations. In his previous life, he founded BlissPR in 1975 and grew it from two to 35 people with offices in New York and Chicago. He is a former Chair of the Americas Region of Worldcom, the largest global network of independent PR firms. On the nonprofit side, he is currently Treasurer of the Board of Trustees of the Hudson Highlands Nature Museum and a Board member of Boscobel Restoration Inc. in Garrison NY. He also previously served as Chair of the Museum of Holography in New York and as a national Board member of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. He is a cum laude graduate of Princeton University with a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Boston University.

• Elizabeth Sosnow is one of two Managing Directors of BlissPR (www.blisspr.com) , a New York-based integrated communications firm with annual fee revenues of $6 million. The firm focuses on professional, financial and healthcare, and its clients have included Deloitte & Touche, Hunton & Williams, Towers Perrin, BDO Seidman, MetLife, KeyCorp, Chubb, Davies, Ward and the Ontario (Canada) Ministry of Economic Development & Trade. Ms. Sosnow is a recognized Social Media authority, having been named a “B2B Social Media Thinker” and “100 People to Watch in PR.” Ms. Sosnow serves on the Board of Directors of Worldcom as Digital Chair, is a graduate of Denison University.

Law firm use of social media

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Lawyers are already experimenting, even Biglaw

• Leads: 10% of lawyers have had a client retain them as a result of use of online SM, according to an ABA report

• Blogging: 96 of the 2009 AmLaw 200 law firms are now blogging. This number is up from 39 firms since August 2007

• Reading Online: Blogs are most frequently used tool among in-house lawyers at the largest companies (revenue of $1.5 billion to $9.9 billion) with 35% visiting a blog in past 24 hours and 54% in the past week

– Nearly 70% of Corporate Counsel aged 30 to 39 expect their consumption of business and legal industry news through SM platforms to increase within the next six months

• Tweeting: 29 of AmLaw 100 firms have a Twitter account, though many “blast” like @WeilGotshal

• Updating: 37 percent of Counsel aged 30-39 have used Facebook for professional reasons in the past 24 hours, and 48 percent – nearly half – have used it professionally in the past week

– More than 10% of law firms in the country are on Facebook and more than 40% of attorneys, per ABA

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How Lawyers Use Social Media

• Sullivan & Cromwell partner Frank Aquila, who was named a Legal Rebel by the ABA Journal in part because of his use of Twitter (@FAquila). He now writes for BusinessWeek, too.

• Land Use attorney Robert Thomas’ blog inversecondemnation.com led to two Fortune 100 companies asking him to start work, not to submit a proposal. They found the blog via Google.

• After 3 years, Roy Ginsburg’s blog Quirky Employment Questions hit over 10,000 unique visitors and led to a six-figure client.

• Dr. Lisa Haile, Partner and co-chair of DLA Piper’s global life sciences sector uses Twitter extensively to demonstrate her thought leadership. It netted an inquiry from a general counsel of a large target company

• Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer set up an internal wiki to encourage collaboration and knowledge sharing among its top rainmakers

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How can Law Firms get started?

• Recognize that you don’t have to start by getting “social”– Combat distrust & cynicism with competitive intelligence and emerging insights

• Audit online activity on at least a quarterly basis– Radian6, Techrigy, Scout Labs

• Construct “early warning” systems on key issues, competitors & conversations

– TweetBeep, Backtype, BoardAlerts

• Harvest your existing contacts on LinkedIn, even if the lawyers are not ready

– Flowtown

• Benchmark & monitor clients/peers using social media & LI report

• Consider targeted SEO project, perhaps for an up and coming practice

• Construct recruiting SM strategy to demonstrate that firm is evolving

• Harvest analytics from website and current email blasts

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Resources

• Legal Marketers– Jayne Navarre: Virtual Marketing officer, upcoming

book on SM case studies for lawyers– Nancy Myrland: Myrland Marketing, former in-house– Heather Milligan: The Legal Watercooler – Adrian Dayton: Marketing Strategy & The Law blog,

“Social Media for Lawyers: Twitter Edition”– Nicole Black: “Social Media for Lawyers: The Next

Frontier” – Mailing List: Both the LMA and Larry Bodine’s mailing

list offer good SM nuggets26

Legal Networks: Leads or…referral sources?

• Legal On Ramp: invite only community with in house counsel & attorneys

• Martindale-Hubbel Connected: just won an award for “Best Closed Community”

• JD Supra: “cross-share” lawyer contributed articles (Mintz Levin has given nearly 600 documents)

• Civile.IT: has more than 100,000 users per month (Italian)

• ACC listserv

• LexBlog: is blog publishing platform used by 65% of AmLaw bloggers (incl. Russell Jackson’s)

• Avvo: has free lawyer profiles and a “content network”

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