A blog is a great opportunity to provide content and steady communication to your donor base. It’s a forum to link to relevant news articles, share organizational updates, and highlight sponsors and volunteers. Blogs take a lot of work to maintain and keep up to date. Below are some tips in case your nonprofit organization is considering starting a blog.
What is your purpose?
Understanding the purpose and intent of your blog is an important initial step to creating a sustainable and successful blog. Consider these questions:
- Who is your intended audience?
- What content will they find engaging?
- Are you looking to inspire and educate with your existing constituents or attract new volunteers?
- What do you want readers to learn about your organization?
- Why is this going to be an important communication tool for you organization?
- What do you hope to accomplish from blogging?
Spend some time writing out your goals and what you hope to accomplish. This will be especially helpful as you start to craft potential blog pieces. It can be a challenge to find the appropriate message and voice when writing in this format. If you struggle with writing content, come back to these questions and focus on writing something that will be relevant and interesting to your intended audience.
Determine how you will measure your results
It is important to decide how you will measure the results from your work. How do you plan on tracking progress? How will you know if you are accomplishing your goals? By building this into your planning, you’ll be able to measure yourself along the way.
Evergreen content
Some blog posts are timely due to a relevant news article or organizational update. Other times, you’ll be creating content that can be posted at any point in time. Evergreen content is a post that you could publish tomorrow or six months from now. We recommend writing a few evergreen pieces before launching your blog. There will be times that due to workload, vacation, or illness you might not be able to write new content. Having evergreen content as a back-up plan will help your efforts to keep sustained communication happening.
Highlight your work
This is an obvious step, but can be overlooked. Promote the blog on your homepage, social media, and, when appropriate, email. Highlighting the blog will help drive readers and engagement.
Looking for more tips and tricks to help keep your audience engaged? Check out our Resources page for more information.
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.