Fiddling while leadership churns: According to a Bridgespan Group survey of more than 150 nonprofit leadership teams, leadership development and succession planning for senior leader positions is the single greatest organizational weakness nonprofits face. To determine where your organization stands on the preparedness continuum, check out the free online diagnostic survey. You’ll be asked to respond to 31 statements that relate to five core processes of leadership development and succession planning.
Spit it out, quick: Unless you’re prepared to summarize your organization’s mission in 1 minute or less, forget it. You’ve already lost your audience. But it’s not easy figuring out what to include and what to leave out when crafting your 60-second spiel.
Now there’s Movie Mondays and advice from Melanie Morris of Realia Company on creating an elevator pitch that anyone in your organization can use and remember. She also has prepared an “Elevator Pitch Getting Started Guide.” You can find it here. (Did I mention that Movie Mondays and Melanie’s book are available at no charge?)
Flip that message: After creating your elevator speech, submit it via video or other presentation format to TechSoup’s Digital Storytelling Challenge. But do it NOW. The submission deadline is February 29. Winners of some terrific prizes will be announced on March 28 at an awards screening ceremony in San Francisco. And even if you don’t win one of the prizes, you’ll have a nice promo piece in the bag and ready to use.
Dead web walking: “Websites as we have come to know them are dead. In 2012, the brand whose sole social media/website ‘integration’ consists of a share this page, Facebook or Twitter icon will fast become a thing of the past.”
That’s the challenging word from the folks at Social Media Today. So what’s a nonprofit to do?
It will be crucial for nonprofits with websites that are in development this year to understand how they can better integrate social content into their websites – whether that be brand mentions sitting alongside brochure-ware pages, user-generated reviews or images sitting alongside product or simply a list of bookmarks to social channels where product is being mentioned.
While you’re at the SMT site, check out the video series highlighting 12 issues that should be on your digital agenda this year. These are a treasure-trove of great insights, provided to you free of charge.
And speaking of free stuff: Consultant and blogger Nancy Schwartz is back with her latest compilation of marketing tips from a global network of communication experts. Here’s preview of the great ideas that she’s pulled together for 2012.
- Make professional development and continuing learning a priority – and protect the time.
- When pricing out an item or service, call at least three vendors. This may take a few more minutes of your time, but you will save hundreds, even thousands of dollars. We’ve been able to save so much money on production costs for printing, photography and web design, by taking the time to incorporate this.
- Test, test, and test… before any campaign gets launched. Given the complexity of the tools today, and the speed with which we invariably put things together, errors do get made and you want to be the one to find them, not the people you’re hoping to engage!
Register now to download The Nonprofit Marketing Wisdom Guide 2012 and you’ll also receive Nancy’s Getting Attention e-updates — free for the asking.