Transferable skills?

I often hear people tout the MBA style of management – “I just need to know how to be a good manager; I trust that my employees know the field and are skilled at what they do.” That managing a team of database the developers is much the same as managing a department of textbook editors is much the same as managing in a car manufacturing plant.

I have never really understood how this works in practice; while yes, knowing how to manage and assemble a team is a great skill regardless of the work involved, at the end of the day, why would I want to manage a team of editors if I didn’t know the basics about editing? Or the textbook industry? About what is involved in the process? It’s not fair to my team if I haven’t the foggiest idea what they actually do all day. Sure, ultimately they need to be the experts, not me, but if there’s conflict amongst the team, I need to understand what the issues at hand are.

So let’s narrow it down a little bit: what about transferring basic marketing and communications skills between industries or causes?

There will obviously be a learning curve with any new job, especially if you’re changing from, say, an animal welfare agency to a public health organization. Your core skills and experience will serve you well, but you will have to adapt to a different type of audience with different messaging, etc. But a solid foundation in strategic communications should handle most of that.

When changing jobs within the sector – or changing industry entirely – which skills do you find transfer the best, and which ones do you find you most often have to relearn or adapt?

It always helps to be a good writer, but how easy is it to change style? How do your PR needs change if you’re working with an under-served population as compared to a high profile sympathetic community? What have you found to be least affected by a change in employer?

(Your editor is facing a possible relocation – and thus these very questions – soon, and will take advantage of this blog while she can…)

About SOPA and PIPA and why many websites are blacked out today

Although tsne.org is not currently able to “go dark” in solidarity with the protests against SOPA and PIPA (Stop Online Piracy Act and PROTECT IP Act ) today, as a website that provides resources – articles, columns, videos, podcasts, publications and links to other resources – and as a social justice organization we feel strongly that the World Wide Web should remain a source of free speech.

The Digital Divide  still poses barriers for access to the Web for underserved communities, but once a user is online, the Web has always stood as a resource available to everyone. For nonprofits especially – to advocate on behalf of their constituents; to find answers quickly when working on deadline and under capacity; and, most importantly, to have an impact in their communities.

Many great organizations have laid out the arguments better than we can today. So please read them, and think about how this legislation could impact your organization and its ability to do work.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech
• AmericanCensorship.org: http://americancensorship.org/infographic.html
• Wired.com: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/01/websites-dark-in-revolt/

Drowning in Jargon?

As communications professionals, we’re always battling jargon – even our own communications-related jargon.

We at TSNE also wrestle with finding alternative ways to express some of these phrases, especially on the Web when we need to be as short and simple as possible.

What are some of your favorite – and least favorite! – examples of jargon you’ve encountered in the nonprofit workplace? What suggestions do you have for restating them in clearer terms?

Comment here or on Facebook with your favorite stories. If you respond by August 31, we’ll include your submission in a poll to go out to readers of the TSNe-Bulletin in September. The winner of the poll will receive a basket of Equal Exchange products.

 

Live Tweeting Your Own Events

At last month’s New Models in Collaboration convening, we realized we wanted to live tweet from the event. However, we’ve never – as an organization – done this before, so we had to work out logistics on the fly. Especially since our Communications staff is also part of the training team and thus running event support throughout the day.

Questions we found ourselves asking, before, during, and after the event:

• What is our goal/reason to be tweeting this event?
• How many staff do we have who are able — and available — to tweet? What training might they need first?
• What content do we want to prioritize?
• How long is reasonable for a staff person to be on tweet duty at a full-day event? What sort of rotation do we need to put in place to give someone a break?
• How do we handle the breakout sessions – especially when there are more workshops than there are people available to tweet? (@npc_life was leading one of the sessions)
• How do we juggle event support (“Help! The microphones just lost power!”) with focusing on content enough to glean tweetable content?
• Do we need a hashtag? If so, what is the best way(s) to get it (#npcollab) out to people?

Some of these questions we were able to answer, some we had to guess at in the moment and try to improve next time, and some we never resolved. Developing our policies is definitely a work in progress.

How does your organization deal with live tweeting while also hosting/organizing an event?

Blogging platforms as websites

Since we’re using WordPress for this blog, when WordCamp first came to Boston last year, I took the opportunity to attend.

A common theme throughout the event was the increased functionality of WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System), not just a blogging tool. Presenters were promoting WordPress as a CMS solution for nonprofits and small businesses.

I hadn’t realized how much WordPress  and other blogging sites (such as Blogger) were growing the CMS functionality of their products. For a small nonprofit that doesn’t have a heavy web presence, this could be an excellent solution.

Take Time to Stop and Smell the Roses

This past weekend I was at a housewarming where the topic of Valentine’s Day came up. Generally, most of us didn’t do much to celebrate it – we’re not fans of the crass consumerism, amongst other reasons.

But I, at least, always acknowledge the holiday, even if I don’t “celebrate” it by  buying anything or going out to dinner. Since it is conveniently located approximately 6 months from my anniversary, I personally like it as the kick in the pants to slow down from the craziness of life and the doldrums of winter, take a deep breath, and appreciate my partner. A reminder  to stop and smell the are-you-kidding-me-$40-per-dozen?!? roses.

And this hit me as a good practice for other parts of my life, especially work. We’re so caught up with deadlines and workloads (such as being too busy to maintain this blog!) and crises that I sometimes lose sight of why we’re here. I get so busy supporting our mission and the social change we seek to effect that I forget to take a breath and celebrate the change that has happened and is happening around us.

So I’m left pondering how best to incorporate simple reminders – like a birthday,  anniversary or Valentine’s Day – that help me to slow down and treasure the successes of our constituents.

What sort of vital battery recharging opportunities do you build into your work? What strategies do you employ to remember to stop and smell the roses to feel reinvigorated on a regular basis?

How do you present your Analytics?

As I recently quipped on Facebook, I love Google Analytics. I love playing with and analyzing the vast array of data that it provides (after all, how else would we know that the number of visits via dialup has increased over the past year?). But I dislike preparing the report that goes to staff.

First, there’s the data that I find interesting and useful as online communications specialist. Then there’s data that my teammates, as communications professionals, find interesting and useful. And then the statistics that program staff find interesting and useful. As well as the broad trends and figures that senior leadership and the board want to see.

Not all of these are the same facts and figures. Executive Transitions likes to know how many page hits a new job posting has received, while our communications assistant looks at spikes in traffic corresponding with the promotional efforts she’s made for our training series. My boss and I are concerned with bounce rates, increase in traffic, and visitor engagement.

Sometimes there aren’t any noticeable trends or fluctuations since the previous report.

So, then, how best to present enough information to answer most questions, but not overload everyone with more information than they care to ever know?

SEO Update

With the new website design launched late last year, we’ve really taken some time to focus again on search engine optimization (SEO) the past several months. Reformatting text to adapt to the new template was an excellent opportunity to take a closer look at our language and ask whether we were following our own rules for web writing.

The new template for first-level landing pages forces a very brief, simple explanation of a program. This really helped us to keep top-level pages short and to the point. The boxes allow us to introduce content that isn’t static, to keep our pages fresh. We’re using better headings and subheads. The new design also allows us some flexibility for a page title – the title within the page can be different from the title in the navigation, which can help with context. We also now have deeper levels of navigation.

We’re not done reworking all of our higher-level pages yet, but the difference is already stark. They feel cleaner, crisper – we’re taking the guidelines for writing for the web to heart.

But how does this affect our search engine optimization?

Using Facebook to Promote Events

We’ve been trying to leverage social networking sites to promote our various training opportunities, and are struggling to find the right way to utilize Facebook.

Facebook has a built-in event feature. The problem is that the event management is assumed to live on Facebook. TSNE hosts registration for most trainings on our own website (sometimes partner organizations host, as in last month’s Email Fundraising Bootcamp with Idealware), because we have a maximum capacity and some events cost money.

The challenge we’re running into is how to use Facebook to drive people to register on the TSNE site. For example, last year several people had been invited to a conference via Facebook, and just clicked the RSVP button on the Facebook event page without actually visiting the TSNE/NonProfit Center website. The conference charged a small fee. So none of these people were actually registered or had paid for the conference (because they didn’t realize they needed to), but thought they were registered — and the conference sold out through regular registration, so we had to juggle to make room for these people.

There are events where an exact count doesn’t matter – June’s NonProfit Center Ice Cream Social, for instance. We needed a rough headcount so that we could provide enough ice cream, but there wasn’t a hard limit in terms of capacity like there is in a conference room for a training. So some people RSVPed via email, and some via Facebook, and we had an idea of how many people to expect. The viral aspect of Facebook worked wonderfully, and everyone had a great time.

But looking forward to this next year’s trainings, we’re trying to brainstorm the best way to use Facebook for events that require pre-registration on the TSNE website. While a “group” (TSNE Events) can create an event but block the ability to RSVP on the event, that setting also prevents people from inviting others to the event – so the entire point of networking is lost.

We are currently experimenting with creating a group specific to each event, but are afraid that this method will quickly become tedious and inefficient. I personally receive a dozen group invites per week, and rarely pay much attention to them.

What methods have you used on Facebook to promote an event with registration that is hosted elsewhere? What worked? What didn’t?

SEO vs. Consistent Style

In the process of promoting this year’s Capacity Building Training Series, we’re implementing some of the SEO techniques we’ve been studying.

As Communications staff, one dilemma we’ve encountered is the use of alternate spellings from what we use in the TSNE style guide. Such as “nonprofit” vs. “non-profit” and “fundraising” vs. “fund-raising,” etc. TSNE uses “nonprofit” (except for the NonProfit Center) throughout all materials and the website.

So “non-profit” (the example in question was “non-profit financial management”) does not actually appear within the text on our page. Which translates to a lower quality score for certain search terms (“non-profit fund-raising”), and thus lower SEO potential.

If you have an organizational style guide, how do you address this issue? Do you ignore the style guide on your website in order to allow for multiple options to appear within the text? Do you stick to your style guide and remain consistent? Have you created a new style rule that still allows for consistency?

Keeping the reins on viral marketing?

Last year, marketing for the Nonprofit Workout was simple in one key way – we promoted it in as many places as possible. We had several hundred seats to fill, after all.

The challenge is that we don’t necessarily know what worked and what didn’t. There were obvious spikes in our web traffic and registrations that could be tied to specific e-Newsletters or partner events, but as is the way with these things, most people registered in the final weeks before the conference. And while there is a “how did you hear about us?” field in the registration process, it’s not detailed enough to pinpoint which specific websites/calendars/partners were most effective.

So the conference wound up selling out — and even had a waiting list! — and we breathed a sigh of relief.

This year we are running a training series, so the marketing plan is very different. Instead of several hundred seats available at an all-day conference, we’re only trying to fill 30 seats at a half-day training — each month. We’re trying to find the right balance between promoting it enough places to sell out each training, but not having a long waiting list full of disappointed people.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO has been on our minds here at TSNE, and we’re excited to kick-off a more concerted SEO campaign this afternoon.

We’ve read a lot about SEO, and we’ve hosted a series of articles about it. It was certainly interesting to post an article and then realize – d’oh! we’re not doing x ourselves! – as we sat down to integrate the lesson learned.

But what we haven’t done yet is take a more systematic approach to our SEO, and build in techniques from the ground up. We’re so often putting up content under an immediate deadline that SEO is an afterthought.

Today we have a meeting with an outside consultant so we can finally start pulling all these pieces and techniques together in a comprehensive way. With the redesign in the works, this is the perfect opportunity to really practice what we preach. We’ll soon have some new content that we’ll be able to work with, and remap our brains to automatically think of SEO when posting.

I’m quite excited. We look forward to sharing what we learn.

CSS and e-Newsletters

We recently had some lovely e-Newsletter templates developed for us for our newest mailing lists. Imagine our dismay, then, to learn that Gmail strips CSS from incoming emails, rendering templates near useless.

But how much does this matter? Well… that’s what we’d like to find out. It feels like more and more people are subscribing to professional e-Newsletters with personal addresses rather than work addresses, to avoid having to unsubscribe and resubscribe between jobs. I know of several people who have created secondary personal email accounts just for subscriptions.

Our email client in the office reads the templates just fine. But we don’t know about other office-environment email clients, or how many readers are using personal accounts. Are our readers seeing what we see? Is it worth developing specific templates for our e-Newsletters, especially in the wake of the upcoming redesign?

How do you subscribe to e-Newsletters? What client do you use to read them? Do you think they look good, or that something’s missing?

Being smart about smart quotes?

When the TSNE website was last redesigned, staff looked at other nonprofit websites to get a sense of whether or not they were using smart quotes in web text. The prevailing trend seemed to be that smart quotes were common, and a choice to use smart quotes on the new site was made.

However, it turned out to be more time-consuming than intended. When under deadline, having to go through and change each individual quote and apostrophe on top of everything else was a headache.

But it has been improving over recent months. While no CMS can handle direct pasting of MS Word documents as well as it claims, it does seem to be a focus of improvement for many vendors. Because let’s face it — we all paste from Word whenever we can. Having formatting – including smart quotes – carry over cleanly is highly desirable.

So now we’re putting together thoughts for the next redesign, and it’s time to revisit the topic of smart quotes. Do we still want to use them on our website? Are other sites still using them? Will they become easier to use as CMSes work to integrate MS Word documents more cleanly?

A big question – for one of our web staff, anyway – is whether readers notice smart quotes/lack thereof, and if so, what do they think of them. Without going to look at any websites, what would you say the standard is? After going to look at your favorite websites, did your memory hold up?

Other thoughts?

Using Google Analytics?

Google Analytics now offers benchmarking statistics. Google looks at the data to determine which category it belongs in, and then removes any identifying information so that your data is anonymous when it goes into the benchmarking aggregate.

However, “for sites of a similar size, a category of industry verticals can be chosen when there is a sufficient number of accounts in that category.” Which means in order to compare your statistics to an appropriate category, there have to be enough organizations signed up.

So if you’re already using Google Analytics, sign up! (Especially any nonprofit capacity building organizations out there…) Hopefully they’re not too far off from being able to flesh out a nonprofit vertical – you could be the last organization they need to add a category.

(For now, categories under “Society” hold the most promise.)

What is required content for a nonprofit’s website?

We recently learned that there was specific EOE language – in addition to what we already had with our job postings – that we were required to place on our website to remain compliant with a funder’s guidelines. This set us to thinking about what other necessary or important things we might be missing.

This led us to discover that our directions page didn’t mention anything about building accessibility. We are now rewriting our directions to include information for those who have restricted physical abilities.

We also realized that our privacy policy didn’t migrate over in the last website transition, and are working to put it back in.

What other content do you think is necessary for a website, that might be overlooked?