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?