NTEN member and nonprofit communications expert Kivi Leroux Miller just released the 2012 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, based on a survey of over 1200 participants at the end of 2011.

The survey asked nonprofit professionals about their plans, expectations, perceptions, and even fears regarding their organization's communications in 2012. You can download the complete report from NonprofitMarketingGuide.com.

Here are some of findings that stood out.

By Holly Ross, Executive Director & Brett Meyer, Communications Director, NTEN

As nonprofits have flocked to the e-newsletter as an inexpensive and timely way to communicate with stakeholders, the number of newsletter tips has also proliferated. While subject lines, “from” addresses, and your template design are all important, they aren’t the biggest challenge to putting out a quality newsletter. The most difficult part is creating good content, content your subscribers want to read.

For many organizations, simply getting an e-newsletter out regularly, with enough content — let alone enough good content — is a win. That was certainly true for NTEN a few years ago. But since then, we’ve developed loftier goals for our e-news NTEN Connect, transforming it from a chore we had to cross off the monthly to-do list to a blockbuster driver of traffic to our blog. And we managed to reinforce our values and culture while doing so.

Here’s how we did it.

By Nam-ho Park, Director, Mobile Service, Forum One

With the arrival of smartphones, it’s amazing how much data we are collecting and consuming on our mobile devices. We tweet, checkin, google, blog, instagram, post status updates, yelp and a host of other things from our handheld devices. And somewhere on the internet this information is quietly collecting. In the ancient times, pharaohs had scribes that shadowed them, recording what they said. Now we have our mobile devices diligently collecting our data. There was once a time when people used to record their lives and thoughts in leather-bound diaries. Now we have smartphones, whose data, when strung together forms the story of our lives.