This year, think portable!

Dear nonprofit marketing friends,

You’ve spent the past decade or so getting a website together and trying to drive people to it.

You need to turn that model inside out.

Now is the year to drive your content out into the web – and not just through your own efforts but also through your supporters. Instead of looking at Facebook, Twitter, widgets and others as tools for you to start conversations about your organization, think of them about ways to listen - and tools for your supporters. The ultimate power of these tools is not what they can do – but who is using them. And if it’s only you, that doesn’t do much for you.

Every single thing you do has to include a way for people to take your message to their own circles of influence. You want people to pack up anything they like and transport it online, like a super-duper cyber suitcase.
One reason this is so important this year is tempo. The speed of information flow has gotten so fast – virtually instantaneous – that you simply can’t be the only one communicating online. You need other, passionate people taking your content into their own communities often and adapting that content to their needs and interests. None of us can keep up alone.

So how do you ensure this happens? Here are some tips.
• Have great content. If something is fascinating and wonderful, people will want to share it.
• The next step is making it easy to share. Network for Good estimates that about 5% of your donors might be uber-activists who would champion your cause and recruit others. Make sure you are making it easy for these supporters to take your content to where they congregate online. First step: do you have RSS on your website?
• Next step: do you have links to your presences on Twitter and Facebook on your home page?
• Do you include ShareThis or another service throughout your website that allows supporters to share your content on any social network they inhabit? You want to make it easy for your supporters to integrate your cause into social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Change.org. Your supporters’ presences on these sites have implied viewer trust and therefore the greatest potential for converting viewers into a new community of donors.
• Do you have logos in a format that people can grab to put in their own posts and content?
• Think low-tech too. Is it easy to print great content from your website in case people want to share information that way?
• Create campaigns for specific needs that your supporters can promote. Charity Water has gone as far as to create a tool for supporters to build their own fundraising page (see below). But you can do this with tools as simple as tell-a-friend on your email campaign tool (Network for Good’s EmailNow does this nicely), as well as tell-a-friend features on your donation forms (Network for Good’s DonateNow service has this built in).

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