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Monday, March 21, 2011

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

1 comment:

Marion Conway said...

Hi Emily,

It was great to meet you in person at the NTC conference. Thank you so much for posting these notes on the Nonprofit Affinity Group meeting.

You have inspired me on this topic - I will be writing about this topic soon at my blog.