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Planned giving in this volatile economy has new-found potential for longer-term institutional investment and growth in nonprofit organizations strapped for cash in the short term. You can find the details and data in this metrics-based analysis, which I wrote with the planned giving specialists at Marts & Lundy, a leading philanthropic consulting firm.  Use the free login-in to access the indepth report, “Making the Sense of Planned Giving Metrics: Advancing the Dialogue About What Really Counts.”

The first comprehensive study of 33 donor management systems was released today by the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference – with comparative ratings for the top 10, detailed analysis of the top 12 and useful summaries of the rest. “Low-cost” means under $4,250 for the first year.

Funded by the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN), the two-part report is just the research that nonprofits desperately need, especially in this economy, to sort through and compare features of multiple software and web-hosted customer relationship management (CRM) options for fundraising management, including tools to streamline events, online giving and volunteers. Be sure to download both parts. The report gives recommendations about how to choose depending on an organization’s specific needs.

The CRM fundamentals and scenarios offered in the report — and some of the products — can also be used by small businesses building their brands and customers.

The NTEN study with the nonprofit Idealware first found out what nonprofits are looking for and then connected with the technology firms to get insider information that the typical customer can’t find so easily or thoroughly in a web search. Increasingly, they found that nonprofits are opting for hosted systems so that they don’t have to buy, install and manage software systems on their own servers. You can hear an interview with the executive director of Idealware on the Chronicle of Philanthropy conference notebook.

Although the NTEN conference in San Francisco sold out early, you can follow it live through Tuesday.

By Just Pen, Creative Commons

Ever ask the question — what’s wrong with this picture? A communications audit is the way to find out. 

With endowments still struggling, alumni organizations striving to cultivate more effective engagement and sales revenues seeking an uptick, a communications audit will help you find out if your marketing messages and materials are truly reaching your customers and keeping them closer. What’s more, you can act on the answers immediately, recalibrating to enhance branding and relationship-building.

If exemplary marketing thinks like the customer, then audits let you know how your customers — internal and external — see you, in no uncertain terms. Are your messages and materials truly advancing your relationships with them, or are you wasting your time, energy and dwindling budget dollars? Is your organization structured so that your communication activities can achieve their goals? 

The data produced by a communications audit also tends to be quite persuasive to leadership strategies — and justifies making important adjustments in the way your organizations conducts its communications. A thorough audit places a laser-like lens on an organization’s marketing strategies, activities, processes and, importantly, behaviors. And then it sets a new course for the future.

Keep these criteria in mind as you consider a communications audit:

• Audits provide the big picture assessment of strategic communications effectiveness. They ask the tough questions, typically by professionals outside the organization.
• Audits challenge assumptions that may have been operative for a long time and provide hard data that can foster alternatives and be measured for future activities.
• Audits are creative. They surface new ideas and innovative approaches because your customers are telling you what will work for them.
• Audits are more than SWOTs. Through interviews, questionnaires, surveys and materials review, they yield information and connect the dots, leading to strategic communications plans based on analysis, evaluation and goals.

To launch an audit, know what you want to accomplish and measure even if you don’t know how to get there. Whether the audit is internal, external or both, keep the end in mind. What is the outcome you seek? And how open is your organization to implementing the findings? How can you move the dial to make an audit successful and gain internal buy-in to the results?

Audits are especially effective in a time of reduced resources but greater demand for services because they take organizations back to their core marketing objectives. Getting ahead, yet working with less, means applying new and streamlined ways of advancing the mission to engage the market. A communications audit can put you in position for new connectivity and engagement with your constituents and customers, stronger internal communications partnerships and measurable ROI.

Nonprofit technology expert and educator John Kenyon made the power of social media a more accessible concept when he presented at our consultants network of the Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership of Marin County. “Making Web 2.0 Work for You” began with the “Conversation” prism, Brian Solis’  iconic visual that neatly frames “the art of social media listening, learning and sharing.”

And he made really clear that a website and email communications are the foundation of any strategy, with email still the “killer app.” For fundamentals, that means that your chances to build relationships are only as good as your email list — eg, your audience database.

John’s big themes for any social media strategy:

• Start with your needs — who is your audience and where do they “live” online?
• Find people who are passionate about your causes (through Technorati and Google Alerts).
• Grow people’s awareness and familiarity with your cause, and own the search engines! (Google Adwords, Blogging).
• Amplify word of mouth and grow your email list (YouTube and Flickr).
• Plug your supporters into fundraising widgets (ChipIn.org, SixDegrees.org, Change.org).
• Go where people are and tap into user participation (Facebook).
• Inspire people to visit your website and engage with you.

How to know if you’re headed in the right direction? Since Web 2.0 is still the “Wild West,” there are no industry-wide benchmarks and not a lot of data. So start with measuring ROI against your organization’s goals, not goals that other organizations have.

Check out this ebook, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission, which John, Beth Kanter and other nonprofit technology gurus have just published. They’ll all be at the national Nonprofit Technology Conference, sponsored by the pace-setting Nonprofit Technology Network NTEN in San Francisco, April 26-28.

One of my small business clients said recently, “We have to keep all of our options open and reassess every 30 days.” Certainly it’s important to be nimble in this environment, but we also have to choose a direction for our creativity, dollars and energy.

I found Jonathan Krantz’ analysis right-on in his Marketing Profs article, “10 High-Impact, Low-Budget Ideas for Marketing in a Down Economy.” The three that resonated most:

• Choose your social media weapons carefully.
• Play to your strengths.
• Profile your best customers.

To these I would add:

• Choose 2-3 marketing tactics — and implement them. Select wisely, and get going.
• Consider every encounter an opportunity for relationship-building.
• And, like my client above, assess and reassess, staying nimble while maintaining your direction forward.

More people are on the Internet these days, generously sharing advice about how to survive as a marketer in the recession. But the amount of information is overwhelming, and there’s a lot of repetition. That’s why it’s important to drive your decisions by data and analysis in each case, customizing your solutions to what works best for your customers — and you. 

The filter — what drives value? Do solid research on your customers and their markets and adjust your tactics accordingly, while sticking to the core, writes Harvard Business School marketing professor John Quelch.

As a marketer, review your own business. Take stock of key factors in your own success that you overlooked, took for granted or failed to articulate in past years when you were so busy you couldn’t come up for air. Define your expertise in a fresh way that fits the ever-changing needs of today and acquire the skills you need post-recession. It’s a balancing act of staying in touch with marketing trends, equipping yourself with new tools and mining your potential for the future. 

• Understand your competitors thoroughly.
• Identify influencers and cultivate them.
• Build and rebuild professional networks. Unique visitors to LinkedIn, the fastest-growing professional site, soared 22 percent between December and January and time on the site doubled, while Twitter grew by one-third just in the past month.
• Create your marketing roadmap. As we tell our clients, incremental marketing gains are a waste of time, resources and energy. Go back to Step 1 and focus.

Marketing budgets are squeezed, staffs are shrinking, sales and fundraising are down, and the demand is to communicate more with less. These turbulent waters are roiling many marketers and their clients between two extremes – flailing at a dizzying pace or stuck in paralysis. 

The first essential survival strategy is to step back, review marketing plans — and focus — on your own business as a communicator and on the timely marketing needs of your clients.

• Elevator speech: Is your 45-second sales pitch honed to a laser-like message about what makes you and your clients distinctive?
• Basics: Are you focusing on what’s worked and where key priorities lie for the next 3-6 months?
• Audit: Have you taken a hard look lately at your communications tactics and whether some should be stopped or temporarily halted for higher-yield activities and slimmer budgets in the short term?
• Creativity: Are you trying something new? Upgrading your professional toolkit by becoming savvy with social media and helping your clients do the same will better position you and them for the recovery. As Gerard Braud wrote in Communication World this month, when the economic downturn is over, things won’t be the same, and smart marketers will have prepared themselves to be ready.

Clearly there is no shortage of ideas about surviving these times, so here is more “best of breed” thinking in a whitepaper from Thunder Factory.

Look left and right and see those organizations cutting marketing in the down economy. All together now — bad idea!

Philip Geier’s themes from his upcoming book, Survival of the Smartest, are well worth considering as tried-and-true communications practices in good and bad times.

President Obama’s 2008 campaign manager David Plouffe was the keynoter at today’s Marketing Profs online conference, and the Obama 2.0 guiding themes for harnessing and managing volunteers should be in everyone’s brand loyalty playbook:

• Core messaging never changes, despite pushback.
• Messages are consistent across all communications platforms every day.
• Repetition, repetition…and more repetition.
• Believe in the power of people to deliver the message.
• Use every tool — from old-school tactics to innovation — and no tool is more important than any other.
• Embrace new technology, but don’t let it take you away from your strategic mission.
• The campaign’s website (“the people’s home”) and email were the central drivers. Twitter didn’t even exist when the campaign started!
• Arm volunteers with information and data so they can spread the word through their own social networking entry points and in their own words, as long as they stick to the core message.
• Use videos and Flickr for personalization.
• Don’t get ensnared in negative comments, but understand that they can be early warning signals.
• Analyze the customer base continually.
• Measure obsessively.
• Take risk!

KD Paine’s data-driven analysis of how journalists use social media kicked off the sessions I attended at today’s Marketing Profs online conference.

First, her most memorable quotes on the trends in PR 2.0:

“I check Twitter before I check email.”

“Everyone is a journalist, and there are no more deadlines.”

“Twitter is news before it’s news.”

These recent changes in news-gathering have changed how journalists and marketers relate, as indicated in some telling facts from one of her recent media relations surveys:

• 100% of “millennial” journalists, ages 18-29, believe new media communication tools are enhancing journalism.
• Only 40% of journalists ages 50-64 think these tools are important.
• 87% of journalists ages 18-29 confirm new media communications are enhancing their relationships with their audiences.
• Only 42% of journalists ages 50-64 agree.
• 48% of all respondents use LinkedIn and 45% use Facebook to assist in their reporting.
• 68% of all respondents use blogs to keep up with issues.
• 86% of all respondents use company websites for information about an organization.

For marketers, KD shared her ”7 Steps to Social Media ROI”:

(1) Define the R (what return is expected?)

(2) Define the I (what’s the investment?)

(3) Understand your audiences and what motivates them

(4) Define the metrics (what do you want to become?)

(5) Determine what you are benchmarking against 

(6) Pick a tool and start your research

(7) Analyze results, gain insight, take action — and keep measuring

If you remember nothing else, repeat after KD: “You are what you measure.”