For Nonprofit Communicators - How To Craft a Message That Gets Results - 3 Key Steps
By Steve Cebalt

All nonprofit communication begins with writing. Writing a marketing plan. Writing an annual report, a PSA TV script, a PowerPoint speech, a Web page.

It’s a challenge to write messages that will stick with people and motivate them. People are bombarded with so many messages, how can you try to make sure you penetrate through all the clutter? Too often we see nonprofit literature that is internally focused, or not focused at all, leaving readers grasping for the purpose of the piece.

The key to nonprofit communications can be simplified if you focus on three key questions:

1. Define your audience:

Create a mental picture of one individual. Write personalized language directed at your mental model.

2. Define your purpose.

What do you want your audience to DO?

How do you want them to RESPOND?

• Call for a free brochure?

• Stop in for an initial consultation?

• Visit your website?

• Mail back a reply card?

• Read to their children 20 minutes a day?

Have a clear action step in mind!

3. Make an offer.

• This step is often neglected.

• This step shapes everything else.

• Offers may include: Availability of matching funds to double your donation;
Acknowledgement in your newsletter; A premium item (mug, tote bag, CD, etc.); Dozens of other standard offers.

If you are unsure what you are offering, STOP until you come up with a clear offer.

If you focus on these three things, the ideas will flow and your nonprofit communications materials will be easier to produce and more effective, every time.

Steve Cebalt of Bottom Line Public Relations is Founder of the Social Marketing Leadership Roundtable in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

www.nonprofitPRforum.blogspot.com

Copyright Steve Cebalt 2007 May be used with author acknowledgment

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Steve_Cebalt
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I love learning about Christmas traditions and how they started.

It was not until recently, that I learned what truly inspired the tradition of decorating the outside of our homes—and why.

I received an autographed gift copy of “The Christmas House” in the mail (thank you, Jim and Georja ). I opened the package to find an exquisitely bound book with a cutout in the center that revealed a picture of the Christmas House. My first impression was that someone was about to share something personal and very special with me.

The “Christmas House” was written by Georja Skinner. I love this book! I don’t know how to say it any plainer than that. It’s definitely a book for Christmas lovers, but more than that, it’s a book for everyone who has encountered an obstacle in life and didn’t know if they could cope.

I started reading it as soon as I received it. It captivated me completely and I didn’t put it down until bedtime and started reading again the next morning with my morning cup of Kona coffee. After finishing the book, I browsed through it again, cherishing someone else’s memories and photos and marveling at a young man’s courage and determination to fulfill a dream.

It’s a compelling and endearing story about George Skinner, (the author’s father) an athletic young man, who at the age of twenty-two was stricken with polio and confined to an iron lung and left with a devastating prognosis. If he survived, he would probably never walk again. As a result, he lost the girl he loved, but his courage and strength and desire to walk again took him in a direction he could not have predicted.

As he lay in his iron lung, his memories of his mother and Christmas as a young child helped him keep up his courage. These happy memories kept his fighting spirit alive.

Determined to walk again, he searched for help from every avenue, including the White House and Eleanor Roosevelt. With the help of the First Lady, his long and painful road to recovery began.

The mystery of his mother and two brothers he and his dad had left behind in Canada when they moved to California became a haunting reality that his father refused to reveal. When he finally learned the truth, he also had to learn how to forgive.

His love of Christmas through the memories of his mother when he was a little child and the support he received from his father and friends during his recovery, inspired him to do something wonderful and spectacular for the community. Thus enters the Christmas House and all the doors it opened for him and the joy it brought to others during the height of the depression.

No one had ever seen a house lit up and decorated on the outside before. It received much publicity from the newspapers and radio. Thousands of people flocked to see the beautiful and exciting spectacle. Little children and adults alike found joy and escape during a tough time when supplies were scarce and many children would have very little at Christmas.

This true story is interesting and fascinating enough to become a movie. It has its ups and downs and ins and outs and that’s what makes it a compelling read. You’ll be transported to another time, another place and into the life of an incredible man.

And when you drive through town during the Christmas season and you’re enjoying all the beautifully decorated homes and lights, take a moment to remember George Skinner, the determined and dedicated young man who changed Christmas for us all.

Please check out Georja Skinner’s website at ChristmasHouseOnline.com. Find out what other people are saying and meet the author. The website is far more informative and eloquent than I could ever be. Make a visit now. You’ll be glad you did.

http://www.amazing-christmas-ideas.com/the-christmas-house-book-review.html

How I Use Email Automatic Responders By: Jeff Schuman
An email automatic responder or auto responder is the second most important marketing tool I have to make money online. The first would be my hosting company. Without these 2 tools my internet marketing business is dead in the water.

In the world of internet marketing, millions of sites are fiercely competing with each other to gain new clients. For any e commerce site to succeed, it must capture the interest and the trust of its visitors. It is not enough that your site is perfectly designed or has the latest in animation of content.

You should focus your efforts not only in attracting visitors but also in leading them to make a purchase. There are dozens of marketing strategies you can use to attract more buyers and pump up your sales. One of them is by establishing an excellent and professional reputation for prompt and efficient response.

As more potential customers visit your site, you should expect a flood of inquiries and requests for information. This is an excellent opportunity for you to capture more clients and lead them to buying from your site. Thus, it is important that you carry out an efficient and prompt response to every email you receive. The fastest and most effective way to do this is by utilizing an email automatic responder.

Autoresponder services use a computer program that automatically return a prewritten message to anyone who sends an email to your site. It is widely used for responding to consumer inquiries and visitor comments and suggestions.

Follow up automatic responders are also used by e-zines in responding to people who subscribe or unsubscribe to their online magazines. Companies, who send out their e-newsletter regularly, also use utoresponders.

How can effective autoresponder services help boost your business? The answer lies in its ability to return a prompt response to any e-mail the site receives. By responding rapidly and efficiently, you create a very good impression on your potential customer. Good email autorespondrs help you get important information back to these customers immediately. An effective autoresponder service helps you communicate your message promptly, creating a sense of professionalism and efficiency that your clients will definitely appreciate.

Another very important advantage of email automatic responders is that it saves time with multiple marketing tasks. Certainly, you do not have enough time to personally make and send all correspondence. Autoresponder services allows you to send thank you letters, newsletters, product information, brochures, orders etc. to hundreds of clients almost immediately and simultaneously. Autoresponder services are also indispensable in any email marketing campaign.

Choosing the right autoresponder is very important. What makes the best automatic responder? First, you should pick an autoresponder that is reliable and can give you 24/7 service. You cannot afford to lose a customer because your autoresponder failed to answer his query or request for information. The ability to respond promptly is the first thing you must look for in any automatic responder.

Another key factor you should consider when choosing Autoresponder servcies is flexibility. Good autoresponders allow you to customize unique responses that will have maximum effect on the customer. You should avoid creating an impression that the customer is communicating with a machine instead of a real human being.

An excellent email automatic responder lets you provide the information that is specifically targeted for what the potential customers are looking for. Because any email from potential customers essentially represent the customer’s intent on getting more information about your product, which can ultimately lead to direct sales, all emails are important. Thus, a top Auto responder service must fulfill all these duties to help you boost your business.

For all of our auto responder needs we prefer Aweber. They are very reasonably priced and have proved to be reliable and easy to use.

Team-Schuman.Com contains the best make money online and make money websites available today. If you want to make money check us out here: http://www.team-schuman.com/email-automatic-responder.html

Social Media Isn’t Everything: But still Win it.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Stop pulling your hair now. A must adopt media that brings Traffic and also does SEO for your blog Google’s way, WIN IT.

Any kind of publicity is good publicity and can bring you large amount of Traffic. Whether you get a link from A-list Blogger, getting your story on the top of Digg Charts, or from Search engines, for your site all possible resources are needed and well appreciated.

After doing the last post about Social Media, I was surfing through few other ones of Darren Rowse and Amit Agarwal.

In Darren’s words from his post- “in most cases the Digg traffic comes and goes quickly and doesn’t usually hang around for dialogue - whereas referrals from other sites is more likely to ‘convert’ either as a longer term viewer, RSS subscriber, newsletter member or comment leaver”
Darren did also actually mention- “Of course Digg traffic isn’t completely useless - in fact if you harness it you can grow a blog over time. It comes in such high numbers that even if only a very small group stick around it can be worthwhile.It also brings a round of secondary links - which can be good for SEO and lastly it doesn’t hurt the old ego and can give a rush of motivation to a blogger. The key with Digg traffic however is to work on converting readers into loyal ones. “

The points raised by Amit in his post while comparing Traffic from the site of A-List Blogger and Digg are, (1)After traffic floods your post they’ll at the most increase the count by one and leave. (2)The Digg crowd will never leave comments on your site but they’ll do so on the actual Digg page. In most case, the comments (or curses) from Diggers will make you feel depressed unless you write about Kevin Rose, Diggination or 10 Reasons Why Vista Sucks. (3)The majority of Digg crowd will visit your site for one-tenth of a second. (4)You might notice higher page impressions during Digg days but the CTR and effective CPM will reduce so the net result would stay the same. (5)Getting on Digg is unlikely to boost your page rank or search engine rankings - infact, there are cases when the Digg pages rank higher than the actual page it is linking to.

These may be confusing to a reader who may take with him all the negative points about Social Media, when it can benefit him in the direction he wants his blog to rise.

Why Social Media Networks are important-

Search Engines index you only after a certain amount of time. Any News is old News. You need to get to people as soon as possible and get maximum exposure to the story, so that people come to know about it and link it. Will you depend on Search Engines for that? People spend lots of effort, time and money to Search Engines Optimize their sites but when they say they do not like Social Media Sites, I cannot do anything but pity them. If you are not in Social Media you are seriously leaving a goldmine of traffic. A little effort and time devoted on these sites can bring you results never imagined, and its free.

When inbound links are the passing criteria for Search Engine Optimization, everybody runs for Links. Link exchange is the only way a few bloggers are left with and you will find 100s of blogs in their blogroll. Asking for links not only sounds scary to me but is also of little use, and is discounted by Google. Everybody says get incoming links, but from where is still a secret. All you need is giving right exposure to your content.

Search Engines send you traffic on keywords used in your article but not its Tags. On the User end when you search for information about any site lets say Google itself, the results that the search would lead is the site itself and 1000s of its indexed pages. On the other hand if you are using Digg or Technorati you will get latest stories written about Google. If you are interested in a particular company lets say Ford, and want to know about want to know about what people are saying about it, where should you be headed to? By mentioning all this I am no where suggesting the supremacy of social media sites over search engine traffic. For a blogger its best to use both for theirs pros.

Normally, business blogs are an SEO tool for static sites, and even if not links, mass exposure and getting yourself noticed by the experts of the field. Here is where Social Media Sites come into play. Its all about relationships.

Myths Regarding Traffic from Social Media Sites-

1). The traffic from sites like Digg is often termed as inconsistent and not much fruitful.

2). It is focused only on one article and is mostly non-convertible.

3). Visitors from else where are more prone to linking to you and subscribing to your RSS feeds.

4). Only the articles from influential Sites/Blogs or Spam reach front page.

5). Only your friends Digg your article and vote for you.

6). The job is done after submitting the article or the story and it will be promoted on its own.

7). It is just targeted to one article.

Now the Truths

1). Its very true that you need an influential circle to make your story appear on the home page, but all the Diggs and votes you get once you reach there totally depends on the quality of your article and its content. That is why you’ll see 300 votes or Diggs for one, in thousands for another and not even 150 for another. The only people who are interested in your article will digg or vote for you, and do not forget that there is a bury button along with every story as well. People do not hesitate to use it if your story is not relevant or of poor content.

2). The traffic you get from these sites is easily convertible. Once you have them to visit your site and provide them quality content, they’ll either bookmark you, digg your story, subscribe your RSS feed or leave a comment, and would never forget you if you proved to be offering a useful insight.

3). Everybody is hungry for more if they find the first bite delicious. They came to you for your first story, but nobody leaves the opportunity to browse through other chunks of information you are providing.

4). Again depending on the quality of your blog this traffic will link you through their blogs or write an article just on the point of view you put forward. The greatest part is these are incoming links, organically created and very helpful from Search Engines perspective.

5). These sites are best for building relations with other bloggers, and increase your contacts.

Its not traffic for a day. There would sure be a rush of traffic on the day your story reaches the front page, but it wont stop there. Supposing you have a daily traffic of a 100 visitors, and one final lucky day you get to the top of Digg, your blog will see a rush of 8000 visitors. Amongst these lets say a minimal 5% are converted, and 50% of the following become your regular visitors. Not bad, I guess. As it is this is not a one day effect, it continues, though not as vigorously. If you make sure that atleast you get one story at the top fortnightly, you will see a dramatic increase in your traffic, incoming links and your feed subscribers.

Exposing your content through the Social media sites will increase your brand awareness and more the people know you, more is your fan following.

Isn’t social media adding more sense to the word WEB, is this the reason we say WEB2.o.

Till then,
Happy Blogging,
Divya Uttam.

Hello Again,

Just following up on a comment that makes all this sense in the world, unless you are running a Christmas oriented company. Comment from Totaltransformation was, Good Blog, a little early for Christmas isn’t it. I have made that same comment seems like hundreds of times. Well with all the excitement and hard work of just a few months back, I would naturally want say yes. That is until I got in the Christmas Wreath Business.

We actually start in early august updating site and marketing materials. I am not sure about other company’s, but we start signing groups up for the fundraising and corporate gifts programs as early as September and that means they have been looking for a while.

Most groups want to get their team together and start generating plans and picking  leaders. Corporate buyers and fundraising groups want to get the decision making out of the way and assure that they will be able to get in the programs that are their 1st choice. The actually program is simple its but its all about timing. Our company would rather hurry up and wait even though that rarely is the case.

Yes boughs grow on trees, (unlike money) but snow and in our case the Rockie Mtns. limit getting to the trees, so we limit the amount of new clients each year.   I am sure other company’s have similar issues about getting all the materials they need to manufacture their products.

We start making wreaths in October to deliver at Thanksgiving most groups want to get the work done so they can enjoy the Christmas season along with everyone else. We like that plan too, all our products are out before December starts.

We are a little different that Corporate giants. We focus on each individual wreath and customer. Our goal is to provide the best in quality, size and freshness. So we may not make as many, but we do make them better.

Having said that, no its never to early to get ready for Christmas. Also this is our 1st attempt at blogging and my English teacher and I never did seemed to agree on much, so it won’t hurt for me to start practicing early. Thanks for the comment and it makes perfect sense to me, but!

I was out researching the tagged surfer gizmo and find it very cool found amany good sites. I will visit them a again and get  good and relevant reading for us. I am just getting in to this blogging think so hopefully I will get better at writing “As time goes by”.  I am adding short comments to articles to get the hang of it. I really need to edit before I publish those comments sorry about that. Its not like at home where I can have a redo. Oh well live and learn. I see a lot of good information on Fundraising and Christmas, GOD and the Devil. Seems like a lot of people out there seem to have them mixed up for some reason. Maybe the ones that need him the most, will surf on in to the message they need to open their eyes to see and clear the ears to hear.

GOD Bless and keep

A new coin came out this month The U.S. Mint hopes the redesigned $1 coin will win acceptance with consumers. It does not have In God We Trust on it. Another way of leaving God out. Send this on and let consumers decide if it will win acceptance or not.

Listen to Glenn Beck read the Story of Christmas

Love came down at Christmas,
Love all lovely, Love Divine;
Love was born at Christmas;
Star and angels gave the sign.
~Christina Rossetti

David at Third World County gives his thought on a wonderful Christmas song, The Gift of Gifts and with a tip of the cap to Humphrey Bogart, he plays it again, Sam with his song, “The Gift” These wonderful links came to us through Adams Blog

Christmas is a lot like fruitcake - and fruitcake can teach us a lot about Christmas.

Let’s start with the obvious (and the honest):

Fruitcake isn’t the most attractive offering on the Christmas table. In fact, most people consider it better suited to paperweight-or-doorstop duty than its originally intended function (Dessert, people. Not trebuchet fodder.).

Fruitcake is dense and lumpy and often hard to swallow. It’s got strange things inside, some of which take time (and bravery) to identify.

Fruitcake lasts a virtual eternity, somehow managing to avoid spoiling and going stale (some say because it started that way, but let’s move on and leave that be). Properly made and properly preserved, the life of a fruitcake is measured in years - forever, when compared to the lifespan of other holiday treats.

And yet, few people like it and fewer still welcome it as a holiday gift.

Just like Christmas.

Jesus Christ didn’t come to earth as the most powerful (or likely, the most attractive) of men. Born in a manger, not a palace, and saluted by shepherds instead of minstrels, the birth that someday would be celebrated around the world was, at the time, a humble one. He grew up a carpenter, not a prince, wearing average clothes and eating average food. To look at Him, the average person might have considered him better suited to hammer than to rule. (Yes, pun intended. Move on.)

His teachings? Dense and more than a little difficult to swallow. He spoke in parables so many would not understand - at least, not without a genuine desire to follow Him. His way - and that of His father - is not for those seeking a simple, leisurely path. Determining His will for an individual life requires time, fortitude and effort - to say nothing of bravery.

God promises Christ’s kingdom is eternal, lasting far beyond even a fruitcake, and open to all who seek it. Like the fruitcake, some claim it started spoiled and stale - intolerant of those who refuse to acknowledge Christ as Lord, demanding sacrifice at the cost of unfettered “freedom” to satisfy personal desires and fundamentally less attractive than the sweeter offerings of a secular, Godless worldview.

They do not welcome Jesus - as they do not welcome fruitcake. They claim Christmas - and all its attendant celebrations, bells and whistles (yes, even tinsel) - has gone “commercial” - has gone stale.

They completely miss the point.

It is easy for the secular mind to dismiss Christmas, like fruitcake, as the jumbled inedible creation of a warped and distorted mind. To one without faith, Jesus’ appearance on the earth represents one more false prophet crying out in search of power, His teachings difficult to understand and impossible to realisitically implement in daily life. His eternal kingdom, not visible to the naked eye, defies secular logic - how can anything be preserved beyond time, resurrected after death? All things spoil. All things end.

And yet, to the one with eyes to see, Christmas never gets old or stale. Each element - from Jesus’ birth, foretold and heralded by angels, to the great gift of His teachings, life and ultimate sacrifice for our salvation, becomes something to be treasured, appreciated and shared. The secular trappings of the holy day provide a mechanism through which we express our joy that He is born (and dead, and risen again) and we are saved.

For the mind truly seeking after Christ, His teachings become increasingly easy to follow (though never a “piece of cake” - fruit or any other kind). The mind and heart trained to love and seek the will of God recognizes the difficult bits as treasured opportunities for physical and spiritual growth - though (like those fruitcake lumps) they don’t always form the best or most-appreciated portions of our spiritual walk. On the other hand, the Christian walk also contains the “tasty bits” - the unexpected joys and blessings which come without warning and demonstate the LORD’s favor and presence in our lives. Good and not-so-good, mixed together in a manner that, if not always tasty, is at least never dull.

Properly prepared and properly cared for, the Christian heart never ceases to love the LORD or to celebrate His birth, His resurrection and His presence in our lives. At Christmas, the Christian’s heart literally runneth over with joy, if permitted to recognize and appreciate the great and wonderful gift God granted each and every one of us on the day of Jesus’ birth. A joy - and a gift - which lasts forever, never fading, spoiling or going stale.

And if that makes me a fruitcake, then Merry Christmas, fruitcake.

Linked to the Christmas Alliance HQ Homepage (and submitted to the Carnival of Christmas)
Filed under: Holyday Yaks, Faith Yak, Christmas Alliance — Random Yak @ 1:57 pm on December 20, 2006

Here you go if you want to get the Christmas Spirit! (Its Free and legal to watch.)
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)

For Conservatives Only ! No I did not say Republicans only.
Right-o-Meter