By Evan C. Parker, Associate Director, Online Donor Engagement, The Nature Conservancy
There are dozens of tactics and platforms that the nonprofit glitterati will tell you are "absolutely essential" to nonprofit marketing success. They're right about each and every one of them.
What makes the difference in my day-to-day work, however, are those intangible tools that you don't really buy -- you just sort of "wing it", and hope that the powers that be don't figure out what you're doing.
The "Quick and Dirty" Project
People seem to forget, but there are actually two ways to get great returns on your investment: you can either have fabulously successful projects, or you can have projects that took so little time to implement that any return you get is free money.
We launched a digital photo contest through Flickr in 2005, not because we thought it was going to raise a ton of money, but because we thought we could launch the whole effort in just a couple of days.
To this day, I still have no idea how much money the photo contest has raised for us -- it turns our cross-platform social media projects are ridiculously hard to metric -- but on a very real level it doesn't matter. Our investment in time and resources is so low that even an amorphous “branding” return is enough of a success.
"Share and Reapply"
I don't attend conferences for the stellar food, or to be pitched by a seemingly endless stream of vendors. I go to conferences to hear what other people are doing -- so I can take the interesting bits home and do the exact same thing myself.
Need a good idea how to refresh your donation forms? Find someone who's already done the work -- and hopefully have invested a lot of money in testing that work, too. Need a welcome series that works? Sign-up for ten good nonprofits' email lists. Want good language for SMS campaigns? Dust off that unlimited texting plan that costs you so much.
Even when the lessons can't be applied directly, look for the analogy. What's my organization's This Place Matters campaign? What's my organization's Text a Coffin Away campaign? Your colleagues are already doing the work; flatter them by taking their best bits and making them better.
Numbers
All nonprofit marketers say they like numbers, but few actually mean it. Numbers get in the way of gut instinct. Numbers prove that you were wrong. Numbers can be used against you in the court of your-next-annual-review.
But there is another side. Numbers, if used by the forces of good, can actually help depersonalize tricky conversations about sacred cows. Are the numbers up? Congratulations. Are the numbers down? Now you know (and knowing is half the battle).
The single best thing you can do for your organization is to create a culture that isn't afraid of numbers. If you aren't afraid of numbers, you aren't afraid of failure. And if you aren't afraid of failure, you'll find there wasn't that much to be afraid of in the first place.
The Apology
In DC, we talk a lot about political capital -- have you earned enough goodwill that you can cash some in towards good karma for your most important projects?
Certain projects need to be done a certain way. Sometimes, a proliferation of chefs will actually impact the soup. Often the only way to prove a project is worth doing is by actually doing it (and then using numbers to show that you were right).
If you've got the capital, sometimes it's just easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission -- and then hope that the numbers prove you right.
Organizational Buy-in
There are some things you just can't fake, and a reporting structure – from your manager, to your peers, to your Board of Directors – that demands interesting and innovative work is one of them.
You can only do so much without the buy-in from the people around you, so be prepared to do everything you can to get it -- from quick and dirty projects, to sharing and reapplying, to developing a love of numbers, to not being afraid to have to apologize.
If that isn't enough, see if you can write yourself a new job description or align yourself with more receptive people. In the end, we are all the sum of our peers, so make sure you're surrounding yourself with the best.
What'd I miss? What are the skills and tools that get you through your workday? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Evan C. Parker, Associate Director for Online Donor Engagement at the Nature Conservancy, heads up the organization's online communications efforts. For the past fourteen years, Parker has specialized in mobilizing online audiences for nonprofit and political causes. Prior to joining the Conservancy in 2005, Evan led Congressman Bernie Sanders' online outreach efforts.