Tag Archives: Westchester Not-For-Profit Leadership Summit

More from Summit: Fundraising in the 21st Century

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As promised, below are my notes from Andrew Nibley’s presentation, EDonors: Fundraising in the 21st Century, from Monday’s Westchester Not-For-Profit Leadership Summit:

To maximize exposure of your nonprofit’s web site, use search engine optimization techniques.  (While this function is often handled by marketing, I handled this area while working as IT Director at Cross-Cultural Solutions.)  This should be a part of every web site redesign.

Manysite visitors don’t realize the difference between organic search engine results (which result from search engines analyzing content on your web site) and sponsored links, where organizations pay for their site to show up when relevant searches are done (even though sponsored links are usually clearly marked in Google’s results).

Promote your web site address everywhere: email signatures, offline materials, brochures, ads etc.

‘Share a story’ that relates to your mission, with photos if possible – and invite site visitors to submit their own stories.

Important content on your web site should be no more than three clicks away; this becomes especially difficult as the amount of site content increases.

When someone finds your web site, visitor registration should be top priority so you get their email address.  Don’t ask for anything more than email address.  Too many required fields will discourage visitors from completing registration.

Use information about your donors to customize web site and email blast content.  (I’ve often heard vendors encourage this, but seems like many organizations aren’t able to make it happen.)  It’s helpful, for example, to customize donation forms based on a donor’s previous giving history.  Papilia has an interesting approach to this.

Search for your organization on sites like MySpace and YouTube to learn whether your organization is listed.  Use these mediums to supplement what is on your web site since many constituents may look there first.  Similarly, find out what’s on Wikipedia and, if necessary, get someone outside of your organization to update the entry.

Andrew also suggested participating in social networks, such as Care2, Gather, LinkedIn and Eons (the 55 & older population are the fastest growing group of Internet users).

Report from Westchester Not-for-Profit Leadership Summit

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On Monday, May 14, I attended the 5th annual Westchester Not-For-Profit Leadership Summit.  Hilary Clinton spoke at breakfast and Thomas Tierney of the Bridgespan Group presented during lunch.  I also attended sessions on the fragile relationship between nonprofit CEOs and boards as well as a nice review of online fundraising strategies.

Probably the most interesting insight was presented by Tom Tierney, who discussed nonprofits’ difficulties in recruiting and retaining executive talent.  With many nonprofit leaders approaching retirement age, this is becoming an even larger problem.  While there are no easy solutions, he offered a few observations:

  1. Nonprofits can no longer rely on the system of ‘hiring a friend.’  New pools of talent must be found;  it’s not always necessary (or possible) to find someone from another nonprofit with a similar mission that is already a senior executive.
  2. Executive Directors usually spend most of their time on fundraising, but this is not enough to insure a nonprofit’s continuing ability to achieve its mission.
  3. Nonprofits often go outside the organization to recruit talent (while corporations often hire from within).  Nonprofits must offer on the job training and coaching, as well as job rotation to develop talent

He also commented that he considered work in the nonprofit sector to be more difficult than anything he has done in the private sector;  many who switch from for-profit to nonprofit mistakenly feel that their jobs will be easier and less stressful.

More on Bridgespan’s site on The Nonprofit Sector’s Leadership Deficit