Content Creation and Curation

How do organizations maximize their limited resources and take advantage of various online channels to not only put out information they themselves create, but to recycle content – content from their community, and also content from other organizations and resources that are relevant to their work and useful to their community?

Content curation (the act of finding, grouping, organizing and sharing the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online), can be very resource and capacity-friendly if done strategically. The challenge is in the strategy however: which channels should be used for which purpose? What kinds of content works best? What kind of volume? Frequency?

According to a forthcoming report: “Content Creation and Curation in Your Communications Mix” by the Nonprofit Technology Network and Idealware, 78% of nonprofit organizations do not have a curation strategy. Yet time-strapped organizations are still using lots of channels – almost four each on average: websites are the most widely used, followed by broadcast email, then direct mail. Facebook is the next most widely used, followed by Twitter, YouTube, then blogs.

Regardless of whether you are a nonprofit or a for profit company, how can you maximize your time and be strategic about giving your audiences the best of what's out there through the right mix of content creation and curation?

1. Start with your goals.
For each "stream", ask your self:

• Who is the target audience?
• What does that audience care about?
• What's going to encourage them to engage?

Identify the channels you're planning to use, and what audiences are going to be the main focus of each.

2. Aggregate potential content into a single place first.
Pull in good resources so you have them all in one place, and then decide from there how to parse them out to different channels.

• Find an aggregating tool that works best for your team (workflow, ease of use), and your end goal (what kind of content? for what use?)
• Divide things to follow across team members, according to their interest, so that it becomes more manageable and part of everyone’s workflow
• Assign someone to define what's in the queue and where the curated content goes– what makes sense for your Twitter feed, Facebook, eNews, etc.

In addition, repurpose the queue wherever possible; you’ve spent the time gathering resources, be sure to pull the best resources out and use them elsewhere as much as you can.

4. Find the "ideal" mix of created-to-curated-to-promotional content.
Not all social media tools are created equally. Twitter and Facebook, for example, have the most complex mix of use and not one type of content; while for blogs and e-newsletters, original content is typically more dominant. A good informal rule of thumb for content: aim for 1/3rd curated, 1/3rd new content (including curated new resources), and no more than 1/3 promotional.

3. Match each tool to the kind of content strategy you have there.
Don't start with the tool and ask "what can I use it for?" Ask "what do I want to accomplish?" first, then match the right tool and strategy. Some examples:

• On Twitter, re-tweeting is really important, but make sure you're adding to the Twitterverse value rather than just pinging the same info around that everyone's already seen elsewhere
• For blogs, people expect original content, but a really useful blog could have its primary purpose be to round up information from elsewhere and put it in context for readers
• Publish a "Best of the Web" newsletter to round up other good nonprofit tech blog posts and articles from around the web
• Send a daily e-mail with links to the best articles of the day, as well as news from other sources

4. Use fewer channels more strategically.
It doesn't make sense for busy small and medium-sized nonprofits to be experimenting way out at the bleeding edge of tools. Let large nonprofits and the business world figure out what seems to make sense, and what's a good return on the time, and then do that.

Organizations that take the time to be strategic about content on their various online channels are more efficient and ultimately ensure the ongoing relevance of their work.

Idealware has a free Social Media Decision Maker’s guide, that includes a lot of research, demographics, and a workbook that can help you decide what social media channels make sense to use for what.

Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie.

Infographic Of The Day

Here's a great infographic, created from this Copy Blogger guest blog post, that can help with content creation–something we all struggle with from time to time.



Like this infographic? Get more content marketing tips from Copyblogger.


Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie at http:www.linkedin.com/in/nzensius.

Mad Libs For Non-Profits: Sample Follow Us On Twitter Copy

Sometimes, when I'm under the gun to write marketing copy, I wish I could pluck exactly what I need from the internet. I'm not suggesting plagiarism, just getting ideas from what other people did well before me. Below this paragraph is some copy I put together for a non-profit looking to introduce their new Twitter account to their members. I used the copy on this page as my starting point to get inspired. If you're under the gun to get something out about Twitter and need some text to get your juices flowing, feel free to use what I wrote as your starting point. Just let me know as I'd love to see the end result.

You’re busy. We understand. If you don’t have time to go to our website regularly and check in to see what’s new, consider creating a Twitter account and follow [insert your organization's name here] at [insert your organization's twitter account here.]

Twitter allows you to exchange information quickly and in real time between [insert your organization's name here] and fellow [insert issue, activity, etc. here] lovers. We tweet about breaking [insert issue, activity, etc. here] news, plus activities and events at  [insert your organization's name here] that will keep you informed about our work.

Twitter facilitates real-time interaction. Do you know you can send and receive tweets by text on your mobile phone? Tweet any message to [insert your organization's twitter account here] and quickly send us things we should be aware of: comments, critique, questions, or simply let us know what you love about [insert issue, activity, etc. here.] We’re interested in you and what you have to say.

We don’t just do ‘corporate’ tweets so you’re just as likely to hear about [insert issue, activity, etc. here] as you are to hear about [insert issue, activity, etc. here.] We also promise that you won’t ever get inundated with tweets; we’d rather tweet about things that we find genuinely interesting enough to share, (even if that means we tweet less often), or that we want you to comment on and pass along.

We’re interested in using Twitter to get to know our members better and we will follow everyone if it looks like they have a real Twitter account.  And you needn’t worry, if you do start to follow us you won’t get a spammy automated direct message that tries to [insert issue, activity, etc. here.] We’ll only direct message you if it’s a relevant message that only you should see.

See for yourself by visiting the [insert your organization's name here] Twitter page. If you’d like to follow us you can also do so from that page.

We hope to see you soon on Twitter!

Curation Is The New Aggregation

As 2010 comes to a close I’m betting many marketing communications professionals have had a challenging year hitting their goals. Organizations that I work with all express a desire to attract more customers, members, engagement, donations, etc. in 2011. One strategy that keeps coming up as a means to accomplish this is to bolster efforts to become the ‘go to’ place on the web for all the information stakeholders need about a product, service or issue. What this generally translates to is a bigger, richer, denser website–full of information, media and links, created, collected and fed from around the web.

This is all well and good, but it isn’t necessarily going to help reach the goals listed above, even if the effort is undertaken with more gusto next year. There are organizations that envision themselves as central content hubs, with others providing them funds, attention, time and patronage as needed because of their hub status. The danger of this worldview is that it's at odds with the realities of a society that’s both energized and exhausted by social media and connectedness. As Seth Godin points out in Linchpin, being the information hub is no longer a differentiator because anyone can now find and learn almost everything–and then some–on the Internet. Plus, other organizations are just as busy generating and collecting content based on their own needs and interests; creating a glut of information on the web, much of it overlapping and all of it competing for people’s attention. Web 2.0 technologies have given organizations the ability to collect and share content easily. This can be stimulating, but it can also become repetitive and tiresome.

Smart brands know that they must figure out how to integrate to be relevant in a socially connected world but not overwhelm or fatigue their constituents in the process.

One way to do this is to take a step back and analyze the usefulness of the content being aggregated. Mechanized “more” is not necessarily better–it’s far more powerful when organizations use their expertise to make selective choices about what’s relevant and what will engage their core audiences. This is where the art of curation comes in. If aggregation is about collecting content somewhat indiscriminately, curation––very much a human, and sometimes time consuming, endeavor ––is about choosing content; it’s condensing overwhelming complexity into easily digestible, enjoyable and useful chunks. Or as Tom Foresnki puts it, “curation versus aggregation represents human web versus machine web.”

As the web evolves, people will increasingly look to the people behind the organizations that they have relationships with and trust them to make choices about what content they get to see based on the things they care about and the depth of their interest levels. The organizations that have success in 2011 might just be those that can delight their constituents by being good curators for them. One caveat about curating: the right to deliver anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who want to get them has to be earned. It's power comes with permission.

Aggregation will still have its place, (any organization that hasn’t developed the expertise needed to set up the automated collection of specific content on their website should make it mission critical for 2011), but to have added value, there should be a layer of curation over it so that it's more selective and customized; as the web evolves, it’s part of what customers will come to know and trust a brand for.

Regardless of whether it’s aggregated or curated, all website content requires a strategy that aligns with the larger organizational goals. It's critical to know why content is being put together, who will use it and how they will use it; whether constituents are able to get it somewhere else; what the internal staffing implications are for managing it and what the potential outcomes might be.

Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie at http:www.linkedin.com/in/nzensius.

Save "Save The Words", Ctd

Harkin responds to my blog post and makes an excellent point (italics mine):

When I said the campaign shimmered, I meant the idea. I meant the logocentricity of the site. And I forgot that, as a linguistic type, I am easily blinded by words. I was so busy drinking in obscure words I almost choked on the interface, architecture, and execution.

Thank goodness I work with great graphic designers, web coders, interface and architecture experts, and visual creatives who can point out the importance about things beyond my linguistic world. Because the synergy between words people and picture people is where great branding really happens.

Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie at http:www.linkedin.com/in/nzensius.

The Importance of Research and Good Infographics

Image: Neeta Lind

I had some routine blood work done yesterday to test, amongst other things, my cholesterol levels and whether or not I had diabetes. My results pleased me as much as if I had scored perfectly on the SATs (which, physiologically speaking, I had.) It took me a while to figure out that I was as healthy as can be though, because the numbers didn't mean anything and the information my healthcare provider had on their website explaining what the tests were looking for was confusing and sparse. I ended up having to do some searching around on the web to decode it.

Literacy levels in this country are going down and they are inextricably tied to two key demographics: the health and wealth of our population. The 2003 National Adult Literacy Survey found that adults with the lowest literacy levels (a number that has increased since the last time the survey was conducted in 1992) are more likely than those at the higher levels to be poor and to have a physical, mental, or other health condition. Older adults (who typically have more health concerns–such as diabetes and high cholesterol–to deal with) are more likely than middle-aged or younger adults to demonstrate limited literacy skills: 40% of seniors aged 65 or older read at or below the 5th grade level. Yet most health-related materials are written at the 10th grade level.

If I, as a college educated and web savvy individual, have a hard time understanding what my test results mean, I worry about what some people with less education must make of theirs.

I give major points to my healthcare provider (Kaiser Permanente) for the speed in which I received my results and how easy it was to access them. I had blood drawn at 10:30am and by 3:35pm I'd received email notification that the results were available on my password-protected user page. Within 24 hours I also got an email from my doctor telling me how great the results were, asking me if I had any questions, and to keep up the good work. Talk about fantastic customer service. But what about the people who can't get theirs if they can't read, don't have a computer or are not technologically comfortable?

In addition to being aware of the literacy constraints that many people face it’s important for healthcare communicators to understand other aspects of their audience demographic. How do healthcare providers give out test results for folks in poor rural areas, for example?

Whether the delivery mechanism is in person, an online message, or a printout received by mail, it's commonly accepted that more than 60 percent of individuals are visual learners yet my test results were all text and numbers. Couple a lack of graphic design with words that are hard to understand for most people and it's no wonder some healthcare communications (in this case test results) don't make sense. A 2000 Harvard literature review of medical and public health research addressing literacy issues offers little in the way of recommendations to improve communications beyond the written word, yet these communications are often critical to helping patients understand and manage their ongoing health. Good visual cues and clever use of iconography can help all healthcare customers, regardless of their reading level.

In my test results I would have liked to see symbols that represent what each test is for and some sort of chart that shows the scores on it. People are by nature, typically competitive, even with themselves, and this would be a great way to show a person visually how they rank, normatively. Since these tests are done regularly, it could also be customized to track a person’s improvement (or not) over time, which could be a useful teaching tool for docs to use, regardless of how they communicate it.

It's great that I got an email from my doc, with an open invitation to ask questions. It turns out that I was able to find what I needed and didn't need help, but here's yet another instance where doing the research to understand your audience is important. A lot of people who have problems with literacy hide this fact from family members, co-workers and, most likely, their doctors. Plus, people can be busy or lazy, or both. How many people are going to take the time to follow up on these test scores to make sure they really understand them, and wouldn't it be more efficient for everyone if that information could be gotten easily from the initial communication?

Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie at http:www.linkedin.com/in/nzensius.

It's The Little Things-Why Birthday Emails Matter

Image: Chaim Soutine

While I was in art school, one of my professors said something that stuck with me: when viewing a piece of poorly executed art, the average person cannot articulate why or how the perspective is"off" but they always pick up that something is not quite right. Their eyes, and thus their brain, knows that the world they are seeing reflected in the painting or illustration shouldn't really look like that.

Our professor cautioned us that we should either be able to draw perspective well enough to "get it right", or intentionally skew things in an unexpected way so that the audience would get our intention, and the piece would invite further evaluation. If we didn’t do either of those things, and were lucky, our audience might forgive our mistake and appreciate what we were trying to do. Most likely though, he said, it would turn them off to the work.

The same holds true in some ways for marketing communications. The average customer or member doesn’t question how they are being communicated with when things are humming along and it's business as usual, but they immediately notice when something is off; which can create negative perceptions towards the brand they're interacting with. Depending on the audience demographic, communicators have few chances to make mistakes. Older customers tend to be loyal to brands or organizations once they’ve committed to them, but younger customers are notoriously fickle and have little patience for brands that don't hit the right note in their communications.

Conversely, customers notice when something happens that goes above and beyond their expectations. It's my birthday in a few days and I've plugged my date of birth into online forms countless times so it's always interesting to see which companies and organizations that I’ve done business with reach out to connect with me on my special day. I could be jaded and unmoved by an email wishing me well as I get another year older, especially since I know the mechanics and intention behind it, but a personalized email–even if it is automated–still means something and I appreciate the effort that went into it. Someone, somewhere, understood that sending out a birthday email makes a difference and had the thought that it was worth taking the time to program the system to shoot out that email. And when they had the thought, they told someone, who told someone, who actually took the time to make it happen.



















Granted, these types of emails are a little self-serving and they're not always completely personalized (I got the birthday email above from the Marine Corps Marathon a full three days before the actual day of my birthday, for example), but they still add a personal touch that I often don't experience from many organizations. If some of the non-profits that I support thought to send me a birthday card expressing gratitude that I am still alive and kicking (and therefore able to continue sending them money) then maybe, just maybe, I'd be more inclined to write a larger check when it came time to solicit my annual donation. Or perhaps I'd be more willing to volunteer my time to help move understaffed projects along. There's no guarantees of course, but for those non-profits who want my continued patronage it's a small investment of time and should be worth a shot.

Furthermore, if executed really well, personalized birthday emails can communicate generosity to a customer; how nice that The Marine Corps Marathon reached out, connected and acknowledged me without needing anything. Now that's intentionally skewing my perspective of their brand, in a very positive way. (Note to non-profits: please don't ever insult your constituents when celebrating them with an ask for money in a birthday card. Same applies to thank you cards and holiday greetings too.)

Getting that birthday email made me feel good about the organization and in turn I spent some time on their website checking out their charity partners. They piqued my curiosity which took my relationship with the organization to a whole new level.

So, is your email marketing interesting your customers or turning them off?

Natalie Zensius is a marketing communications strategist with experience in both the for-profit and non-profit sectors. Learn more about Natalie at http:www.linkedin.com/in/nzensius.

Guidelines For Writing Non-Profit Board Of Director Bios

Written well, bios make a targeted, persuasive argument about what to think about someone without being unsupported self-praise or too salesy. Sometimes I write bios from scratch for people. When that's the case, I keep the finished bio to one page or less and write the biography in the third person. Mostly though I have to take disparate bios and rework them to create consistency in length, tone and voice.

In either case, I always ask people to make sure their bios contain these essential elements:
 
Description of their business in brief.
Not only do website visitors want to know what people do, they also want to know who people have worked with. I ask them to include a sentence or two about their business niche (or niches) as well as the types of clients they serve. Sometimes a modified version of their 30-second elevator pitch works perfectly.
 
A list of any awards they have received.
 
Names of the organizations, clubs, or associations to which they belong.
 
Any professional certifications and designations they hold.
I have them make sure they write out their names in full, rather than use abbreviations. Not everyone might know what an acronym stands for and in a different discipline, it might represent something else. If they no longer hold a particular designation, but it has played a major role in who they are and what they do, I make a reference to it. I don't include abbreviations of college degrees, like MBAs as it looks unprofessional. The only exception to this would be for a Ph.D. designation.
 
Places they've been published.
Self-published or not, their works add to their level of professionalism and credibility. If they've written any articles, books, e-courses or e-books I showcase them.
 
Media mentions.
Have they been a guest on talk radio or television? Were they or their business featured or even mentioned in a newspaper article? If so, I include it. Again, these types of "mentions" add to their credibility and presence.
 
A sentence or two at the end about their personal passions and their relationship to the organization.
This may or not make it into the final bio, depending on the organization, but it's always useful to have on hand.
 
Two headshots.
One professional, and one casual (which should still be a headshot and be a good picture). I ask them to make sure the headshots are as hi-res as possible.

Am I missing anything?