Experiments in (Almost) Free Internet Marketing for Non-Profits
Ranked #2,401 in Nonprofits, #484,145 overall
About This Lens
Hi, my name is Kerry and I'm the cofounder and manager of a tiny little non-profit start-up that seeks to provide poverty relief and development aid to a country that many people have never even heard of. Needless to say, one of the very first things I thought about was how on earth I could raise awareness not only of the existence of my baby organization, but also of the problems within the country that caused me to found it in the first place. Unfortunately, being a start-up, money for marketing and public relations was pretty much non-existant, so I had to figure out not only how to do this, but also how to do it as cheaply as possible.
The world wide web seemed like the obvious solution to me, and this lens details some of my experiments in using the tools of the web for (almost) free marketing and public relations. I can't pretend to be an expert on either marketing or the internet, but I can give you an honest account of what's working for me.
At this point in the process, it's still a little early to know for sure what's working and what's not, so I'll start with an introduction to some of the programs, applications, and tools I'm experimenting with, and add more in-depth evaluations as I go. This is a learning experience for me as well, and I hope you will find the journey as educational as I have.
A Website of Your Very Own
One of the very first things I did was register a domain and build a website. In this day and age, just about every organization bigger than a neighborhood gardening club (and many that aren't) has a website, and websites are one of the most effective ways to give people information about your organization, what you do, and why you do it.
I was lucky enough to have some experience with web design. I've had a personal domain devoted to some of my shallower pursuits for several years and know the basics of HTML, CSS, and other languages pretty well. Since not everyone is so lucky, however, I've put together some useful information for beginners. Experienced web designers can skip down to the next section, although you never know - one of the fun things about web design is that there's always something new to learn!
I was lucky enough to have some experience with web design. I've had a personal domain devoted to some of my shallower pursuits for several years and know the basics of HTML, CSS, and other languages pretty well. Since not everyone is so lucky, however, I've put together some useful information for beginners. Experienced web designers can skip down to the next section, although you never know - one of the fun things about web design is that there's always something new to learn!
What You Need to Build a Website: The Basics
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Notepad
There are lots of programs out there to help you design a website, but my favorite technique is simple hand-coding using Notepad. It requires a little more time and knowledge than programs like Dreamweaver and FrontPage, but the results are usually better. Plus, it's free! Just remember to save it with the file extension .html, .css, .php or whatever you need instead of .txt. -
A good graphics program
The best program for web graphics is Adobe Photoshop, but unfortunately the cost can be prohibitive if you don't already have access to it. A cheaper program that's also pretty good is Paint Shop Pro. If you can't get your hands on either of these programs, make friends with someone who can, or resign yourself to a webpage that's mostly text. The graphics produced by Paint are almost universally amateurish and unappealing and I don't recommend you use them on your site. -
An FTP program
FTP is what you'll use to upload your website from your computer to the web itself. There are several really good, fairly inexpensive programs available like WS_FTP and CuteFTP, but my favorite is actually freeware: CoreFTP. -
A host
There are lots of free web hosting services out there, such as Angelfire and Geocities, but unless you're really, really pressed for cash, I don't recommend them. Sites hosted by them tend to be covered in annoying banner ads and pop-ups, and they rarely support PHP, databases, and other useful tools you may need. Cheap services like Yahoo's are slightly better, but not much, so in short, this is where the almost free part of the lens comes in. You're better off spending a little money and getting a good, basic web hosting service than saving a few dollars a month and irritating potential donors with the pop-ups and amateurish design of free hosting sites.
A couple of my favorite web hosting services are DreamHost and ThinkHost. Both offer a good basic web-hosting plan for about $9.95 per month (not including set-up and registration fees). DreamHost's plan has more features (plus they'll register your domain for you so you don't have to do it seperately via GoDaddy.com or similar domain registration services) but ThinkHost offers significant discounts for non-profits. -
A plan
Before you start actually building your site, it's a really, really good idea to have a good idea of what you want your site to look like and what kind of information and functions you'd like it to contain. Trust me, it will save you LOTS of time.
One of the best ways to get inspiration for both of these goals is to browse websites that are similar in purpose to the one you'd like to create. For example, I browsed a bunch of websites for fairly small, country-specific organizations devoted to poverty relief, as well as some of the leaders in the international field (hey, a girl can dream). A great way to find active, reputable organizations similar to yours is via Charity Navigator.
Useful Websites
A few of the most useful websites I know of for web designers of all levels of experience
- Lissa Explains It All
- Written for kids, this is nevertheless one of the best introductions to basic HTML and CSS coding around.
- A List Apart
- Articles on coding and design for more advanced web designers
- W3C Markup Validation
- Invalid coding can screw up the appearence of your entire website. This helpful service tells you what you did wrong.
- CodeGrrl
- Useful tutorials and scripts, plus a fairly active forum here you an ask for help. The Convert To PHP script is a fantastic tool for beginners to PHP to help streamline hand-coded pages for small-to-medium sized sites.
- CSS Zen Garden
- More inspiration than instruction, the CSS Zen Garden demonstrates the incredible versatility of CSS for web design. Every one of the hundreds of layouts showcased on the sites uses exactly the same HTML code, but no two designs look the same.
Web Design on Amazon
Get Your Website Noticed
Once your website is live, the first thing you'll want to do is get it noticed by search engines, Google and Yahoo at minimum. This is pretty easy. Simply fill out a short form, click submit, and within a few days or weeks your site will show up in search engine results.
Google
Yahoo
Once your site is included in search engine results, there are lots of tricks to help you get it to show up higher in the results, but that's a topic that could fill an entire lens of its own. Look for "search engine optimization" for more info on the subject.
Another useful trick (if you have a decent graphics program) is to provide banners or buttons that your visitors can post on their own websites or blogs to advertise for you. You can host these on your own site (although you might want to keep a careful eye on your bandwidth usage if you do) or use a hosting service to do it for you.
A great (and free!) hosting service for web buttons and banners is Word of Blog. Another site I like (80x15 pixel buttons only) is GT McKnight's Steal 'Em.
Yahoo
Once your site is included in search engine results, there are lots of tricks to help you get it to show up higher in the results, but that's a topic that could fill an entire lens of its own. Look for "search engine optimization" for more info on the subject.
Another useful trick (if you have a decent graphics program) is to provide banners or buttons that your visitors can post on their own websites or blogs to advertise for you. You can host these on your own site (although you might want to keep a careful eye on your bandwidth usage if you do) or use a hosting service to do it for you.
A great (and free!) hosting service for web buttons and banners is Word of Blog. Another site I like (80x15 pixel buttons only) is GT McKnight's Steal 'Em.
Blogging
Reading and writing blogs has become one of the most popular web activities, and the most popular blogs today can wield an enormous amount of influence on politics, popular culture, and more.
Businesses and non-profits have discovered the many uses of blogs more slowly than individuals, but the number of corporate and organizational blogs is climbing. Blogs are a great way to provide updates on your organization's activities and programs, stories from the field, and other interesting and useful information about your organization.
Blogging works best if it's done regularly and in a fairly conversational style. Personally, I kind of suck at it because I'm too lazy to do it regularly, plus I tend to slip into a too-formal style of writing. However, well-written blogs can be a hugely effective tool for raising awareness and a good way to keep in contact with your members and supporters through comments.
Remote or locally hosted?
Once you've decided to blog, it's time to choose a platform. You have two basic options: remote and locally hoted. Local hosting means that you install the blogging program on your own web server (this will likely require MYSQL database capacity); remote hosting means that someone else hosts the blog for you.
Generally speaking, if you're not at least moderately experienced with web design and programming (if, for example, you just read the words "MYSQL database" and went "huh?"), you'll want a remotely hosted blog. They generally have the same capablities as locally hosted blogging programs, but you won't have to worry about installing and setting them up if you don't want to.
The downside to remotely hosted blogs is that visitors will have to leave your website in order to read your blog and the blog's URL will be different from that of your website. Instead of http://www.blog.yoursite.com, it will be, for example, http://www.yourblog.wordpress.com. This can be annoying or confusing for visitors, so if you have the tech know-how to install and set it up, a locally hosted blog is preferable.
Businesses and non-profits have discovered the many uses of blogs more slowly than individuals, but the number of corporate and organizational blogs is climbing. Blogs are a great way to provide updates on your organization's activities and programs, stories from the field, and other interesting and useful information about your organization.
Blogging works best if it's done regularly and in a fairly conversational style. Personally, I kind of suck at it because I'm too lazy to do it regularly, plus I tend to slip into a too-formal style of writing. However, well-written blogs can be a hugely effective tool for raising awareness and a good way to keep in contact with your members and supporters through comments.
Remote or locally hosted?
Once you've decided to blog, it's time to choose a platform. You have two basic options: remote and locally hoted. Local hosting means that you install the blogging program on your own web server (this will likely require MYSQL database capacity); remote hosting means that someone else hosts the blog for you.
Generally speaking, if you're not at least moderately experienced with web design and programming (if, for example, you just read the words "MYSQL database" and went "huh?"), you'll want a remotely hosted blog. They generally have the same capablities as locally hosted blogging programs, but you won't have to worry about installing and setting them up if you don't want to.
The downside to remotely hosted blogs is that visitors will have to leave your website in order to read your blog and the blog's URL will be different from that of your website. Instead of http://www.blog.yoursite.com, it will be, for example, http://www.yourblog.wordpress.com. This can be annoying or confusing for visitors, so if you have the tech know-how to install and set it up, a locally hosted blog is preferable.
Some Popular Blogging Tools
WordPress.com
The remote-hosted version of the extremely popular more...0 points
Blogger.com
Popular remote-hosted blogging tool. Fewer feature more...0 points
WordPress.org
Popular free blogging program. Extremely easy to i more...0 points
Movable Type
Popular free blogging program. Slightly trickier t more...0 points
Technorati
One of the most popular blog tools for bloggers an more...0 points
TypePad.com
Popular hosted blogging tool. Not quite as user-fr more...0 points
FeedBurner
I've never used this tool, but it's supposedly use more...0 points
BlogRolling
A tool to help maintain the "blogroll," more...0 points
More info on blogging
- Ready to Start Blogging?: How to set up and run your nonprofit's own digital soapbox
- Useful article from TechSoup
- Top Blogging Tools For Non-Profits
- Another useful TechSoup article for non-profit bloggers
- How To Blog
- A useful general series on blogging
- Blog Software Comparison Chart
- Comparison of the features of some of the most popular blogging tools
Books on Blogging
An Introduction to Social Networking Online
Or, more accurately, an introduction to MySpace.com
Social networking is another great way to raise awareness of your organization and activities.
The current king of social networking is MySpace.com. As a longtime devotee of the blogging/social networking site LiveJournal, where I host my personal journal, I was horrendously prejudiced against MySpace before I started researching internet marketing. The prevailing view on LiveJournal is that MySpace is populated 99.99% by teeny-boppers and pedophiles. Not only that, it's cursed with exceptionally bad design, lots of hideous, flashing advertisements, and rather counter-intuitive navigation.
This opinion is, however, clearly in the minority. MySpace.com is currently the tenth most visited site on the entire internet, and businesses and non-profits alike are racing to take advantage of the site's popularity. Mine included.
MySpace is useful for marketing primarily because of its enormous popularity, but there are some genuinely useful features to help you do so, including a basic blog, the ability to share photos, videos, and music, active forums, comment capablities on public profiles, discussion groups, and the heart of the whole site: the ability to add other users as "friends."
The current king of social networking is MySpace.com. As a longtime devotee of the blogging/social networking site LiveJournal, where I host my personal journal, I was horrendously prejudiced against MySpace before I started researching internet marketing. The prevailing view on LiveJournal is that MySpace is populated 99.99% by teeny-boppers and pedophiles. Not only that, it's cursed with exceptionally bad design, lots of hideous, flashing advertisements, and rather counter-intuitive navigation.
This opinion is, however, clearly in the minority. MySpace.com is currently the tenth most visited site on the entire internet, and businesses and non-profits alike are racing to take advantage of the site's popularity. Mine included.
MySpace is useful for marketing primarily because of its enormous popularity, but there are some genuinely useful features to help you do so, including a basic blog, the ability to share photos, videos, and music, active forums, comment capablities on public profiles, discussion groups, and the heart of the whole site: the ability to add other users as "friends."
Other Social Networking Sites
MySpace might be the biggest, but it's certainly not the only social networking site worth checking out!
Idealist.org
A huge database of organizations looking for emplo more...0 points
Friendster
Probably the second most popular social networking more...0 points
TakingITGlobal
An international community for activist youth, wit more...0 points
LiveJournal
Technically a hosted blogging tool, not a social n more...0 points
More info on social networking
- What Can Social Networking Do for Your Organization?
- An extremely useful article from TechSoup
- Promote Your CafePress Shop on MySpace
- A Squidoo lens on MySpace marketing for small businesses, useful for non-profits as well
Other Useful Websites and Applications
CafePress.com
Design and sell t-shirts, mugs, and other products more...0 points
LibraryThing
Primarily intended for individual use, but organiz more...0 points
del.icio.us
The oddly punctuated social bookmarking tool could more...0 points
The Art of Effective Tagging
Many of the sites listed above use a tool called tagging to organize bookmarks (del.icio.us), photos (Flickr), books (LibraryThing), and more. Tags are like keywords, and they're basically a way for users to organize web content more effectively. If, for example, you are looking for websites about fundraising on del.icio.us, you can use tags to search your own bookmarks, everyone else's, and the most popular sites saved with the tag "fundraising."
Tagging can be an effective tool for non-profits to raise awareness of
Tagging can be an effective tool for non-profits to raise awareness of
More Info on tagging
- Thirteen Tips for Effective Tagging
- Good article from TechSoup that focuses on tagging in del.icio.us for non-profits
- Tagging: Keeping Tabs on the Net
- Interesting article from BusinessWeek about the implications of tagging for business
- Tips From Top Taggers
- Article from Wired.com
Other Useful Sites For Non-Profits
- TechSoup
- Lots of information on using technology (web-based and others) to promote and manage your non-profit
- FrogLoop
- A blog connected to the social networking site Care2 focusing on improving non-profit internet communication and marketing
- Getting Attention
- A blog focusing on improving non-profit marketing strategies
- IdealWare
- "Candid reviews of non-proft software." Registration required to view some articles.
- Organizer's Tool Crib
- A directory, with user reviews, of online tools for non-profits
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by kerryg
Kerry is a web addict and the co-founder and manager of a start-up charity dedicated to fighting poverty.
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