Our friend Duane Raymond at FairSay wrote a great article outlining the critical elements of online advocacy and campaigning. Email tops the list, followed by your Website, your campaign savvy and the quality of the actions you ask your constituents to take.

Here's an outline of the article (full article here)

The critical elements
1) Email communications (the most important and powerful tool)
2) Your website: enabling people to do things and attracting new supporters
3) Expertise: develop it or hire it - but don't ignore it
4) Campaigning actions: you need things for people to do

Beyond the essentials
5) Tracking and Analysis: knowing what works, what doesn't work and why
6) Time: having the time, effort and focus to deliver a campaigning action
7) Budget: to spend on creative content, promotion and/or external help
8) Plan: how your online contributes to your offline
9) Feedback channels: listening to supporters and learning how to engage them

If you'd like to learn how to make the best use of video for nonprofits, RSVP to join us on May 20th for the NetSquared DC Video for Nonprofits event. I hope to see you there.

If you can't make it to our Meetup, our friends at ePhilanthropy.org ran a great story by See3, summarizing the top 10 tips for shooting online video. Here's the outline:

• Tell a story
• Keep the audience in mind
• Make a clear call to action
• Shoot video with repurposing in mind
• Think outside the box
• Prepare a script and get some feedback
• B-roll is important
• Sound is critical
• Give the viewer the right web tools
• Host a screening

To get the details, read the full article.

More frogloop articles on video can be found here. 

NTEN and M+R Strategic Services have released their 2008 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study at http://www.e-benchmarks.com/.

The study presents data from January 2006 through December 2007, covering 21 major nonprofit organizations that use four different major CMS platforms. Here's what you'll find:

• Email Messaging:

  Current benchmarks for open, click-through, response and page conversion rates

• Email List Size:

  How much 'churn' should you anticipate and how quickly are email lists growing?

• Online Fundraising:

  A look at growth in online giving, yearly patterns of giving, average gift size, monthly giving and fundraising messaging rates

• Online Advocacy:

  How are advocacy open, click-through, page completion and response rates changing and what impact are super-activists having?

• Reference Sheet:

  Keep the benchmark rates at your finger tips with this handy reference sheet! 

   

  More benchmark articles can be found here. 

Imagine having the ability to translate virtual reality into actual reality.

Roeland Ramakers of EEN, the Dutch affiliate of the ONE Campaign, found a way by launching the world's first real-life virtual protest. His creative and unusual campaign merged online activism with offline action, and combines the power of the web with live demonstration. The result shows a possible future direction of a new kind of protest for the new generation. By creating avatars to represent online protesters, Ramaker has twice used a unique approach to get tangible results.

Click to read more ...

A recent survey by  Harris Interactive and Virilion unearthed some surprising results about donor preferences for receiving information.

A majority of donors, 51%, were, "not at all interested" following organizations that they care about through blogs, social networks, and RSS. In fact, only 6% of donors reported using social media to track organizations.

Presenting nonprofits with somewhat of a paradox is the fact that 52% of respondents think its important that nonprofits use social media to connect with supporters.

When asked what types of information they would prefer to receive through social media, "Donation/Information Requests" ranked last, preferred by only 22% of donors. The top three choices were News and Announcements, Success Stories, and Volunteer Opportunities.

The survey, taken during late December of 2007 and early January of 2008, included 2,275 adults who reported donating, volunteering, or advocating on behalf of a nonprofit in the 12 months prior to taking the survey.

Though these results are somewhat inconclusive, the survey highlights the importance of knowing what your donors want and keeping in touch with their preferences.

Click here to read the full results and details. 

Thanks to The Chronicle of Philanthropy for their article that brought our attention to the survey!

With a content network that reaches over 75% of unique internet users in more than 20 languages and over 100 countries, Google AdWords can be a powerful marketing tool. Though the efficiency of the program continues to be debated, Google Grants could offer your nonprofit free ads and assistance setting up an account! It should be noted, however, that while Google Adwords is one potential source of advertising for nonprofits, the volume of response from its campaigns to date have been lackluster.

Google provides the reach, but it is up to you to write an ad that pulls net surfers in. Just how exactly do you go about writing an ad with a low cost and high ROI? An article from SiteProNews, by Leighton James explains 10 costly mistakes to avoid when launching your AdWords campaign.

We've taken this advice from SiteProNews and added a nonprofit twist. If you need more detail on what not to do, make sure to check out the article. Otherwise, read on for our modified list of the do's and don'ts of writing an ad for Google AdWords.

Click to read more ...

Convio recently released their second annual nonprofit online marketing benchmarks study. Don't let the lengthy sign-up form scare you, we're sure you'll find tons of worthwhile information in there, including benchmarks on:

•  Web site traffic
• Registration rate
• Email file size
• Online revenue: fundraising, eCommerce, growth, average gifts, and value of an email address
• Email appeals: open rates, click-through rates, response rates
• Email newsletters: open and click-through rates
• Legislative activity