More favorite nonprofit strategy and technology blogs

Ever since Sally Heaven's roundup of "nonprofit-strategy-and-technology blogs" on the Convio Connection Cafe, I've wanted to list a few of my own favorites to add to hers.

Sally's list (visit her post for the excellent reasons):

• Frogloop, Care2's nonprofit online marketing blog
• Beaconfire Wire
• Mobile Commons
• Sea Change Strategies
• The Agitator

And mine:

Three smart consultants:

• Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media - Lots of great advice, plus additional projects like We Are Media.
• Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog - Using marketing techniques for social good - she's the author of Robin Hood Marketing.
• SocialFishing by Maddie Grant - How associations can use social media, along with the Nonprofit Technology Network Water Cooler weekly chats.

Two software companies Convio would (for very understandable reasons) not list:

• Wild Apricot Blog - Advice for nonprofits and associations, centered around technology but going beyond their own products.
• Blackbaud's NetWits Think Tank - Some ideas posts, some technology posts, with an aggregated list of jobs at their clients at the bottom - nice touch.

And one innovative foundation:

• Pro Bono Junkie's Blog - News of the volunteering world and how to integrate volunteering into your career.  The Taproot Foundation puts together teams of volunteers that provide strategy, marketing, and technology consulting to nonprofits (I've volunteered with them as a project manager).

Would love to hear anyone else's favorites as well.

Social media "expert" evaluations

Dave Fleet has an excellent post this morning on 8 Questions to Ask Your "Social Media Expert", building on Ike Pigott's on finding useful Twitter "experts". Dave is offering a guide to "weeding-out the pundits from the practitioners," so I figured I'd answer his questions for Amplify's Internet practice.

1. Can you give me an example of social media work you’ve completed for a client recently?

Sure. We're working with a religious organization to promote education about and understanding of other faiths, using Facebook and YouTube among other avenues.

2. How do you go about pitching bloggers?

We research an issue area, finding influential and interesting bloggers who would care about our topic (usually they've written about something related in the past). Often we already have relationships with some bloggers who fit those criteria. Whether we know a blogger or not, we write offering information and say we hope they'll consider blogging about it.

3. How do you monitor what people are saying about you?

Google Alerts, Twitter search, comments from clients and friends at other organizations (offline conversations count too). We're investigating several social media monitoring services but haven't made choices yet.

4. Where can I find you online?

Our website, our other blog Disruptive Women in Health Care, Facebook. Our staff is on LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and lots of other places as well.

5. Can you write my blog for me?

We do blog training and work with our clients so they can easily keep something fresh on their blogs - create publication calendars, set up Delicious so they have a recent news feed, etc. Writing a blog is a valuable process as well as a way to promote your work (listen to Tom Peters and Seth Godin), and having someone else write it makes no sense.

6. How do you measure results?

Usually number of actions taken - advocacy lends itself better to hard numbers than marketing generally does.

7. How would you define social media?

People interacting online. I'm waiting for a better way to say "and I include mobile services in that too," but no one's invented a good word yet.

8. Can you just pretend to be me online?

No. See (5) for some of the reasons. We actually don't have people ask us this, so either we're just lucky or most advocates want to convey messages themselves.

All right, now go look at Dave's post and see if I got the right answers!

Starting a Group Blog: Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

Starting a Group Blog series:

• Introduction
• Preparation - Strategy
• Pre-Launch - Expectations
• Launch - Execution
• Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

Just as you planned and agreed with your bloggers how leaving the blog would work, you now need a plan for how adding bloggers will work. Maybe adding a blogger is entirely the decision of the sponsoring organization, or maybe it requires the approval of some percentage of the current bloggers. Think about whether adding bloggers means each person posts less often or whether it means your posting frequency grows.

Whether or not you add regular bloggers, you should consider having guest bloggers. In fact, one of the best ways to recruit additional regular bloggers is to have them guest post a couple of times first and see how they fit into your blog's community. Guest bloggers can be recruited from regular commenters, bloggers on related blogs, and experts on your topics.

You should inform all the bloggers regularly (probably monthly) about how the blog is doing - how many hits, links, comments, etc. Make sure the bloggers can see how the blog affects their own careers, not just the benefits for the sponsoring organization - for instance, mention any blogger's media hits or speaking opportunities to the whole group.

Conclusion

Managing a group blog can be a great opportunity for an organization to be seen as a leader in its field and for that organization to promote like-minded voices in the blogosphere. If you invest the time to start up your group blog with clear focus and expectations, it will be easier to manage and more likely to take off. Your bloggers will enjoy writing for you, and you'll enjoy working with them. And you'll have a great blog.

Good luck, and have fun blogging!

Starting a Group Blog: Launch - Execution

After last week's launch of our new group blog, Disruptive Women in Health Care, we're back.

Starting a Group Blog series:

• Introduction
• Preparation - Strategy
• Pre-Launch - Expectations
• Launch - Execution
• Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

Designing and building your group blog will be almost exactly like creating an individual blog, so there's no reason to discuss it at length here. The only obvious addition (other than more user accounts) is that you'll need to set up a reminder system, so bloggers know when they're supposed to post.

The sponsoring organization will probably be responsible for the launch strategy: contacting all those bloggers you found in the preparation stage and recruiting them to link to you, as well as more traditional public relations. You should be at least copied on any media requests to the bloggers, and if one of your bloggers receives a request they should make sure you hear about it immediately.

The sponsoring organization will probably have primary responsibility for monitoring comments and responding as detailed in the comment policy. Plan staffing for the blog accordingly, and realize that as your audience grows comment management will take more time.

Starting a Group Blog: Pre-Launch - Expectations

Starting a Group Blog series:

• Introduction
• Preparation - Strategy
• Pre-Launch - Expectations
• Launch - Execution
• Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

Once you've chosen your strategy and found your bloggers, you'll need to set expectations with them. Each blogger's actions will affect the reputation of the sponsoring organization, of the other bloggers, and of the blog itself, so all parties will need to be comfortable with these standards.

First come analogs of journalistic standards. Controversial statements are fine (and will probably increase traffic), but libel (false and damaging statements) is illegal in the US. Be sure bloggers understand the difference. While no law requires the retraction and correction of an error, it's good practice for bloggers to strike through that text and add a correction, either at that point or at the bottom of the post. Let your bloggers know that you require them to do this. For a particularly important error, they may want to also write a new post explaining and correcting it. Writing a new post without altering the original one shouldn't be permitted, since visitors may come only to the original post from a search engine and not see the correction.

Next, set up your posting/commenting standards. One common method is to assign a person to each day you plan to post (for instance, one blogger is responsible for posting every other Tuesday). Bloggers should be expected to monitor and comment in the comment threads of their own posts, and you'll jumpstart commenting and increase the community feel of your blog by also expecting them to comment on your other bloggers' posts on a regular schedule. If your posting schedule has each blogger posting every two weeks, it's reasonable to expect them to also make a comment on another post every two weeks.

Starting a Group Blog: Preparation - Strategy

Starting a Group Blog series:

• Introduction
• Preparation - Strategy
• Pre-Launch - Expectations
• Launch - Execution
• Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

The first part of your strategy is the same as for starting an individual blog: choose your focus/niche, determine your expected audience, and choose the blog name / domain name (and trademark them if you choose). Once you have those, start compiling a list of related blogs, both as a resource for your writers (who can react to related posts) and to use in your promotion efforts.

Then start recruiting your bloggers, and determine (probably with their help) how you're going to structure ownership and copyrights for this blog.  Most likely the bloggers will want to retain copyright on the posts they write, while the sponsoring organization will have the right to publish those posts indefinitely.  If you're interested in rights to republish the content in other forms (ebooks, podcasts, white papers, books), make sure to discuss that early!  See the content reuse and leaving the blog sections (in later posts in this series) for additional considerations.  The sponsoring organization will probably own the blog name, domain name, and design.

You'll want a variety of bloggers with different expertise and viewpoints, so don't rely on one person's network to find them. Consider teaming up with established bloggers, and consider recruiting excellent writers who've never read a blog.  Note that in a group blog you probably don't want ghostwriting, because that additional layer of coordination will be frustrating over time.

Starting a Group Blog: Introduction

Why start a group blog instead of an individual blog?  Clearly the first reason is to cover your topic more thoroughly.  One person has only so much time to blog and, more importantly, can only know so many sides of a topic.  Recruiting multiple bloggers means more perspectives, more options, more ideas (and for the bloggers, it means built-in discussion partners and commenters).

More prosaically, while starting an individual blog definitely requires less coordination than sponsoring a group blog, a group blog can multiply your efforts since others will be helping with writing and promotion.  You'll be able to spend more time on making the blog successful, rather than on creating all the content yourself.

There are four stages in starting a group blog.  The first is preparation, in which you set your strategy by determining your topic, your audience, and your bloggers. The second is pre-launch, in which you get down to the nitty-gritty of expectations for bloggers, for the sponsoring organization, and for the public.  The third is launch, in which you create and publicize the blog.  Finally, the fourth is post-launch growth, in which you monitor the continuing effort of writing and promoting the blog.

This post starts a weekly series on what you need to do and the decisions you need to make to start an effective group blog.  It's written from our experience (lots of thought about legalities, for instance) so we're hoping others will chime in with more advice!  Why should (or shouldn't) someone consider starting a group blog?

Starting a Group Blog series:

• Introduction
• Preparation - Strategy
• Pre-Launch - Expectations
• Launch - Execution
• Post-Launch - Growth / Conclusion

Updating your blogging policy - you have one, right?

In 2002, Heather Armstrong wrote about her job on her blog, dooce.com, and was fired for it. Since then, being "dooced" has been slang for being fired (or otherwise getting into trouble) for your blog. Last week, possibly for the first time, being dooced spread to microcontent.

A week ago, John McCain's campaign suspended staffer Soren Dayton for posting a link to an inflammatory video about Obama on his Twitter microblog. I first saw the story mentioned on Twitter itself and started paying attention when someone mentioned the name of the staffer in question, since I've met Soren but didn't know he was working for the campaign. Then I read the Politico story and the NPR news blog story and started thinking about "private" spaces on the Internet and how closely organizations are associated with their employees or their members.