You are on a roll!  You've put together an editorial calendar for next month that lays out the themes, news events, and content ideas for all channels, including social media.  With your metrics in hand, you know that visual content like infographics or text overlay images work really well with your audience.     Unfortunately,  you don't have an in-house designer to create this content for you and you barely have enough time to get all the tasks on the to-do list complete.      What to do? Keep … [Read more...]

As part of your organization's digital strategy, you need to create engaging content for your web site, email newsletter, or blog.    This content can be easily optimized for social channels like Facebook or Twitter – with a focus on making it visual.    And, of course, there are benefits to visual content like increased engagement.     A popular type of DIY (do-it-yourself) visual is "text overlay,"  used to illustrate a blog post or shared on Facebook.      Here's a simple recipe for creating … [Read more...]

Note from Beth: Two years ago on this blog,  Porter Gale published a guest post asking "Can Social Media Save Lives?" and described how Amit Gupta was leveraging his network and social media to find a bone marrow match.  This story became a case study in "Measuring the Networked Nonprofit," to illustrate the value of crowdsourcing and how to measure the return. Taryn Degnan picks up on this them of using social media to save lives to share her observations about the use of social media to find … [Read more...]

Note from Beth: I'm thrilled to participate in the LinkedIn Influencer Program where I get to write regular posts about leadership, failure, analytics, big data, presenting, and training from a nonprofit perspective.   But even better,  I've had a chance to connect with some of the other amazing folks who write regularly as part of this program.    You see, I really enjoy cross-disciplinary learning from other fields and other perspectives. One of the participants is Jonah Berger, Best Selling … [Read more...]

See3, YouTube and Edelman have released a new report and guide for nonprofits about using video.  The report, "Into Focus:  Benchmarks for Video and A Guide for Creators,"  is based on a survey of 500 nonprofits and interviews with experts (including me).   The report describes current nonprofit use, adoption challenges, and best practices.  Free webinars are being offered to share the report.  You can download the report here (with email registration) or sign up for one of the free webinars … [Read more...]