Notes From Nonprofit Blogging Affinity Group Meeting at NTC

All Blogs Should Have:

• RSS Feed
• Use feedburner because you won’t lose readers if your blog url changes
• A title – mention what organization the blog is for
• Link back to the organization’s page
• Be sure to include a link to the blog on the organization’s page
• Analytics installed

Favorite Blogs

• Beth’s Blog (http://www.bethkanter.org/)
• Red Cross (http://blog.redcross.org/)
• Getting Attention (http://gettingattention.org/)
• Oxfam Blog

Challenges Organizations Have With Blogging

• Different audiences
• Not knowing what to say
• Who keeps the blog going

Content for Blogs

• Event Updates
• Content Swap/ Guest Blogging – Drives traffic to original content
• Add Contributor profiles at the end of each blog entry if blog is written by multiple people
• Use tags and categories
  
• One organization uses a rule that for every 4 entries written, one entry asks for money
• Follow Twitter to get news from staff in the field
• Wordless Wednesday – ASPCA does this and gets lots of comments (See Wordless Wednesday on ASPCA for more information)
  
• Ask Subject Matter Experts for content

Volunteers Blogging

• Huge asset
• Problem is they are not trained writers
• Ask them to write about a topic (Will you write about ___?)

Comments

• One organization closes comments after two weeks of posting the blog entry
• Moderate Comments
• Spam

Finding Photos

• Flickr
• Contact photographer directly to ask permission to use

Social Media

• Ping.fm to share blog posts
• It is best to share blog posts with different text on social media sites (wording should be different on Facebook and Twitter)

How to Measure Success of Blog

• Number of hits
• Number of subscribers