Content is king. That’s a phrase that all marketers hear on a regular basis and we’ve said ourselves. For many nonprofit organizations content curation and content creation are vital communication tools. Finding the right strategy to manage these two areas are important.
Content curation is the process of gathering information from other reputable sources and sharing content that is relevant to your audience. This strategy is important to nonprofits, as it is a cost-effective method for sharing meaningful content. While quite dated, Beth Kanter provides a great primer on content curation.
If you develop an efficient method to build content resources, you can quickly sort potential stories and publish worthwhile links on your communication outlets. Using Feedly or creating a private list of content sources on Twitter is a fast way to sift through the seemingly endless available communication.
This communication strategy also provides an opportunity for organizations to highlight the organizations that they collaborate with. By linking to their Facebook page, Twitter handle, or Tumblr you can forge stronger relationships and potentially educate their supporters on your work.
While content curation requires time to organize and publish content, it is less time-intensive than generating your own content. Content creation is the process of writing, editing, and publishing your own content on your communication channels. While this strategy can absorb a lot of time, it is imperative that organizations also utilize this method when communicating with constituents.
The creation of new content helps you share your voice and mission. The organizations that you partner with will not have the same perspective on all news items. This is what makes your organization unique. Generating new content helps you illustrate your organization’s viewpoint and opinion on why something is important. Content creation also helps drive new people to your organization or cause. Original content is effective for increasing your brand awareness.
If you interact with a lot of nonprofits you’ll find some organizations that skew very heavily on content curation. This can be caused by a variety of internal issues – many of which are related to time management and resources. You’ll see a Twitter feed that is primarily retweets or a Facebook page that is heavily influenced by shared posts. Finding a balance between creation and curation is important to your content strategy.
Another critical step to developing your strategy is creating a documented strategy. While this may seem obvious, there are many organizations that haven’t had the staff or time to develop a documented content strategy. As you can imagine, this has an impact on effectiveness. According to a Content Marketing Institute survey in 2013, “52% of nonprofit professionals who have a documented content strategy rate themselves highly in terms of effectiveness, compared with 14% of those without a documented strategy.”
Creating or evaluating your content strategy to ensure you are effectively balancing creation and curation will have a positive long-term impact on your organization’s success.
This blog post was content creation. The links below are content curation. We thought you might enjoy them.
- Taylor Maxwell of M&R shares some lessons learned from last month’s NYC Social Media Week with their usual mix of enjoyable gifs.
- Amy Sample Ward makes the statement pretty clear in her post – “Technology is everyone’s job because being an effective organization making real progress towards the mission is everyone’s job.”
- John Haydon provides three secrets to convert volunteers to donors.
- Do you have an email sign-up form on your website? Kim Stiglitz of Vertical Response explains the benefits and provides tips on implementation.
Justin (he, him) is a Principal and Co-Founder of Social Change Consulting. He has over fifteen years of nonprofit experience, with expertise in online fundraising, digital communications, and data management. Justin helps organizations connect their communication strategy to their income development needs. When he’s not on the clock, Justin is exploring Berlin, running, listening to too many podcasts, and drinking too much coffee.