Strategy

Aaron recently shared The Non Profit Tagline Report from GettingAttention.org with me and I immediately though this is a report that more people need to see.  The report offers up a series of really great recommendations for crafting a tagline, as well as a checklist for evaluating exiting taglines.  To top it off, the report includes a list of 2500 non profit organization taglines.

 

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." Anonymous, often attributed to Dan Quayle

Determining if your website project will be a success or failure is tricky. It's like trying to decide if the pizza you're about to eat will be good or bad (which can be a trick question- when is pizza ever that bad?). 

"There are some that only employ words for the purpose of disguising their thoughts." -Voltaire (1694 - 1778)

While most web projects only focus on the engineering of the site, the most critical component for a successful site launch is the content. All too often the content is an afterthought; a last minute exercise of copying old content from an existing site to your shiny new site. However, content is the reason visitors are coming to your site at all, whether that content is text, video, images, or audio. How easily the content can be found lies in the domain of information architecture, but what gets found is the domain of content strategy.

I've previously written about how organizations can start Tweeting, and last week found a great primer on using Twitter for Activism. The DigiActive Guide to Twitter for Activism is a concise and informative guide that any organization looking to evaluate or deploy a Twitter strategy should read. While it is geared towards activism I think that most non profits would find it helpful.

In "How to Create Effective Personas for Your Projects, Part 1" I wrote about the three main components of effective personas: A name, a face, and an ecology (biographical data, lifestyle, and preferences).

In this fifth and final article in our series on creating an SEO strategy we will tackle the topic of community. Websites are not like the "field of dreams" -- if you build it, they won't necessarily come. Certainly if you do everything right up to this point: write good content, use appropriate markup and install the right Drupal modules, the search engines will index your site. However, when you start receiving quality inbound links is when your organic search results will increase exponentially.

In Part 3 of Creating An SEO Strategy we discussed ways of writing better HTML markup in your content. In this part of the series, we will discuss some Drupal specific modules and tips, as well as other resources for learning more about SEO.

In Part II of Creating An SEO Strategy, Ron focused on content and keywords. But there is more to content than just the keywords. The markup and code underneath can make your content even more attractive to search engines and help your visitors find what they are looking for faster.

Amy Sample Ward at NetSquared posted the following question for the Net2ThinkTank:

What are the key questions nonprofit orgs should ask to help them determine how to prioritize social media training and experimentation as they do their technology and organization-strengthening planning?

I provide Social Media Training and Coaching to our clients.  While there are many good reasons to make social media a part of an organization's overall internet strategy, there are plenty of wrong reasons too.

This is an interesting post about increasing blog readership through RSS and email subscriptions. One tip: "Popular bloggers will all say that to build a large dedicated following you must keep a blog that is consistently on topic and make it as easy for your visitors to subscribe." Another tip that is repeated in the post, and in the posts linked to is prominence of "subscribe" buttons, both for RSS and for email subscriptions.