Holly and I hadn’t even left NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) last week before we were thinking about the implications of all we’d seen and heard for our favorite do-gooders.

It’s hard to sum up three packed days of learning, but these were the standouts for us.

Time is the most precious and limiting resource.

While nonprofits’ need for tools is not particularly surprising, NTC attendees were jonesing for tools that could save them time and boost productivity—in essence, tools that could help busy nonprofiteers clone themselves.

That said, it can sometimes feel like we are drowning in a sea of the wrong tools or suffering with tools not designed with nonprofits’ needs in mind. NTC attendees were looking for do-able, relevant, practical tools and NTC sessions delivered.

• Idealware’s Nonprofit Social Media Policy Workbook can help your organization create a policy that can guide your entire staff and grow a social culture.
• Connect to and hire hundreds or thousands of real people using Mechanical Turk and accomplish big jobs that can be broken up into small tasks, for just a little money.
• More than a few heads turned our way during the Marketing Meet & Greet session as people discussed ways to manage editorial content for websites, newsletters, and social media. On their minds: LightBox Collaborative’s Editorial Calendar.
• Devon Smith of ThreeSpot gave a fast-paced 5-minute Ignite presentation on 14 research and analysis tools for digital media, including If This Then That (ifttt), which has a lot of productivity potential.

Emotional and visual storytelling has folks excited – and bit overwhelmed.

Rally Illustration

You might recall that LightBox is a proponent of visual recording and facilitation, and other ways of bringing a little graphic fun to nonprofit communications. Visuals and data visualization were frequent topics throughout NTC.

• The desks of many nonprofiteers will be strewn with napkins soon thanks to keynote speaker Dan Roam. He showed (and his book, Blah Blah Blah contains) methods for distilling ideas to their simplest form and then conveying them vividly, which combines the visual and the verbal.
• Sponsor Rally created graphic notes of several NTC sessions, for those of us who aren’t ready to dive into the hyper-rich and very detailed collaboratively-created session notes.

NTEN’s community is filled with smart folks. 

Finally, it was great to meet so many people “IRL” (In Real Life) who I’d met only virtually and also to connect with my nonprofit network here in San Francisco and afar. Several smart folks have already started reflecting on and sharing their NTC learnings:

• Zan McColloch-Lussier of Mixtape Communications is already thinking how to apply Dan Roam’s directive to draw to nonprofit mission statements.
• JD Lasica from Socialbrite has a meaty recap listing his NTC highlights.
• Peter Genuardi from Giveo managed to narrow down his three top marketing observations from NTC.
• My friends over at TechSoup Global have offered up a handy roundup of where they made their contributions at NTC.

Looking forward to more reflections from others in the days and weeks to come.

Got a NTC recap to share? Let us know in the comments below!

(Image courtesy of Nonprofit Technology Network)

. . .

Lauren Girardin is LightBox Collaborative’s tactical curator. She’s looking forward to the 2013 NTC in Minneapolis, MN on April 11-13.

It’s been at least a couple decades since I played an April Fools joke, but this week I’ve been getting inspired. Maybe it’s because I have a 7-year-old who is surely gearing up to play her own jokes on me. Or maybe it’s because, as we note in the LightBox editorial calendar, April Fools can be a humorous hook for serious stories. You can use the date to point out how politicians try to fool us (no shortage of that right now!) or to pull off a message-driven prank.

So I thought I’d check out how do-gooders had made use of April Fools’ Day in the past few years — to highlight their issues, get new supporters on board, or bring a playful dimension to their often sober work.

For sheer scope and scale of the ruse, there’s no one more effective year-round than the Yes Men. They’ve created a hoax edition of the New York Times, declaring an end to the Iraq war. They’ve staged a fake press conference announcing Chamber of Commerce support for climate change legislation. And they’ve created the incredibly goofy SurvivaBall, a self-contained living system for surviving climate disasters.

But if your budget doesn’t allow for a Yes Men-size prank (or if you think your staff will crack up too soon and ruin the joke), there are still creative ways to make use of April Fools.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) created three spoof messages in 2011 to highlight the perils of climate change:

• Climate change pushes Groundhog Day to January
• “Jersey Shore” cast warns of NJ sea level rise
• Giving away “Snuggies” to reduce carbon footprints

UCS sent the first message to supporters, and then gave them the option to share any of the three via social media or email. The result was a good bump in site traffic and increased social media buzz — and it’s still paying off a year later, with a mainstream press hit noting that Punxsutawney Phil could be out of a job if he doesn’t adjust to the new shorter winter.

Staff at charity:water showed their silly side by posting their April Fools jokes to their blog and sharing on Instagram – making the point that in addition to their critical work providing clean water to developing countries, they know how to have fun, too.

Missoula folks angry that major Missoula employers Macy’s and Smurfit-Stone had closed their doors — and laid off hundreds of workers right before Christmas — publicized their version of what these longtime employers should have done when they left town. They sent out a press release and blanketed Missoula with fliers about a completely fake “thank you Missoula” concert and gala event, complete with food and cash giveaways. You can read more about this prank and others in this Huffington Post article by Joseph Huff-Hannon and Yes Men co-founder Andy Bichlbaum.

And lastly, fellow LightBoxer Lauren Girardin pointed me towards an oldie but goodie cartoon from the archives at CompassPoint. The cartoon’s take-home message: make sure your April Fools joke lands right. If it’s too subtle, or simply makes people afraid, your message will get lost. Let on that you’re pulling your audience’s leg before they have a chance to get irritated.

Because the last thing April Fools’ Day is about is making people angry, right? Says the mom who’s sure to have a “kick me” sign on her back come 4/1/12.

So, what are you planning for April Fools’ Day?

(Image courtesy Flickr user Will Montague)

. . .

Isobel White is a LightBox collaborator who can’t keep a straight face but hopes you can.

Now that Holly has convinced you that you should be thinking about an ad campaign for your good cause, you’re probably asking yourself: How do I do it? To follow up on her recent post, I wanted to share some lessons we learned from the LoudSauce campaign I ran for Uniting NC last fall.

The campaign was a big boost to Uniting NC’s profile. We raised $3500 for a statewide billboard campaign that reminded North Carolinians of the values they share with their immigrant neighbors. The billboards themselves attracted a huge amount of media attention, with dozens of stories in local, regional, and even national outlets like The Huffington Post.

If you’re considering your own crowdfunded ads, here are three things to think about:

1. Shorter campaigns have more momentum. Campaigns raise most of their money at the beginning, when there’s a new story to tell, or at the end, when the pressure of the funding deadline creates a sense of urgency. There’s not as much to talk about in the middle of a campaign, so why not shorten it? We ran a three-week campaign (based on the advice of a guy named Craig Mod, who wrote a great case study of his own Kickstarter project), and it worked well for us.
2. Don’t ask for anything less than $25. Almost half of the donations to the campaign came in the form of $25 donations—we offered everyone who donated that amount a poster of one of the ads. Asking for anything less from your supporters is setting the bar too low. Another quarter of our donations came in the form of $100 pledges, so it’s probably worth including that as an option in your campaign as well, and higher pledge levels (we used $250), will make $100 seem more doable for your supporters.
3. The money raised isn’t the most important thing. It might not even be the second most important thing—that’s probably the media attention that the billboards earned. The most important thing is the chance to connect with new supporters willing to amplify your message—and who are ready to put their money where their mouths are. Uniting NC saw a 5% bump in their email list through the campaign, and more than half of the donations to the campaign came from new supporters.

That’s the big lesson of the Uniting NC campaign: the ads are only a means to an end. Sure, it’s nice to have a way to share your messages directly with a wider audience, but that’s only the beginning. A smart earned media strategy can leverage even a small ad buy into a much bigger story.  Even better, a good ad funded through LoudSauce can attract new support for your cause from people who want to publicly associate themselves with your message. That’s the kind of support that money just can’t buy.

For more lessons learned from the Uniting NC campaign, check out the full case study.

(Image courtesy Flickr user elycefeliz)

. . .

Heath Wickline is a raconteur at LightBox Collaborative and hopes your crowd finds you.