This should be self-evident, but in the heat of the moment, when you’ve just launched your darling new website or campaign, it’s easy to forget that the rest of the world isn’t as excited about it as you are. They probably don’t know it exists. Most of them will never stumble across it on their own; and if they do, most of them won’t help promote it for you.

I don’t mean to discourage you from taking on bold projects! Certainly, plenty of nonprofits struggle to get buy-in on ambitious web projects, even ones that will have major benefits for the organization, and you don’t need another obstacle in your way. But if you’re going to build it, you should make sure it gets the attention it deserves.

There are few things sadder than building a cool site or campaign launch, and then watching it sit there, and eventually be forgotten about. It’s always disappointing for the project team to see the potential of a great project go to waste, and it doesn’t make a good argument for doing similar projects in the future. If you’ve put in lots of time and energy on a project, you should expect to see some results.

There’s a financial argument for doing good marketing on your projects, too. On its own, marketing adds to your budget, and it takes extra time. But it usually takes far less time and money than building your website or campaign in the first place, and it’s essential for driving new audiences to it.  If your goals for the project require an audience beyond your staff and your email list, the only sure way to get it is through well-planned marketing. If one of your goals is, for example, to acquire new supporters, then if you don’t follow through on marketing the campaign, it’s a wasted effort.

Consider how much money and energy you’ve already invested in your project, whatever it is. Is it worth spending 10% or 20% more (time, or money, or possibly both) to make sure people see it, and that it accomplishes its goals? In almost every case, the answer should be “yes”.

Yet, still, marketing often gets left by the wayside. There are a few common reasons this happens.

1. You’re too busy:

You know you need to market your site, and you may even have a marketing plan, but you never got around to it. Or, you’re short-staffed and other priorities got in the way.

This is probably the most common reason that a new project doesn’t get properly promoted. It can be avoided, but it requires active planning to make sure you’ll have the staff resources available at the right time.  It also requires that your organization prioritize the marketing just as it prioritizes the project itself. Make sure your leadership is behind you and gives you the tools and time to do the job right.

Consider this: it’s rarely too late to start promoting a new project. Unless it’s tied to a current event or legislative issue, it’ll be new to your visitors no matter when they first see it.  Of course it’s best to do marketing while your own enthusiasm is still strong. However, if you’ve got a neglected marketing plan for a site that launched a couple of months ago, dust off the plan and call your earlier launch a “soft launch” – then get busy bringing in new visitors.

2. Lack of planning:

You’re caught up in the moment, you launch your site, and then you’re so relieved that you don’t even think about a marketing plan. In the back of your mind, maybe you thought that word of mouth alone would be enough, or that someone else was taking care of it. Months later, you realize that traffic to your new site is a tiny trickle compared to what you hoped for.

This is a more challenging situation than if you’d had a marketing plan ready to go, because you’ll need to do some planning before you start promoting. But, again, it’s probably not to late. Start with any of the obvious channels that you haven’t hit yet: your email list, Facebook, Twitter. Ask your supporters to share the site with their own networks. Next, figure out what budget (if any) you have to promote the project.  If the answer is “none”, try using your Google Grant, if you have one, and reach out to partners and bloggers who might be interested in what you’re doing.

3. Misplaced faith in Viral

You believe that your new campaign is so wonderful that it will inevitably go viral, all on its own. That people can’t wait to share your content.

We’ve all seen examples of things that go viral on their own, to the great surprise of their creators. But they’re in the extreme minority. For every YouTube video of a dancing child that spreads like wildfire across your social networks, there are literally millions of videos that no one ever sees. And of the ones you do see, especially if they were created by a company (instead of an individual), you can bet that most had a solid marketing plan to help them on their way.

If you have serious dreams of your campaign going viral, you need to put in the work to help it happen.  Hard work is no guarantee of success in social media marketing, but it goes a long way. If you believe that everyone (at least, everyone in your audience) should care about your project, then tell them about it! Put in the work it takes to spread the word.

Learn your lessons

Has this happened to you before?  If you recognize these situations, you can confront them head-on when you’re starting a new project:

• Make sure that you allow enough time, budget, and staff resources to do proper marketing after you launch.
• Be realistic about how much organic traffic you can expect, and how much you can drive via advertising and word of mouth.
• Set goals in the planning phase. Make sure those goals are specific (for example, how many visits, and how many conversions) and realistic, and that you create a plan to help you meet them.

When you plan and follow through on promoting your newly-launched campaigns and sites, you can make sure that they not only look and work great, but also accomplish your goals.

Is building a better banner ad even worth it?

Here’s how it began:

If you’re fed up with online advertising, you’re not alone… Special ire might be reserved for the banner ad, which, 15 years or so after its introduction, still has a click-through rate of 0.1%, or about 1 in 1,000.

This doesn’t mean that banner ads aren’t useful, but there are two inherent difficulties with non-profits running banner ad campaigns.

What’s Your R?

Our clients consistently ask about ROI (Return on Investment) for banner ads vs. search engine marketing.  But the answer really comes down to what “R” you’re looking for.

Banner ads generally run on a cost per thousand impression basis – with premium placements costing anywhere from $8 to $20 per thousand and remnant ads costing as little as $1 or $2 per thousand.

If your goal is to drive website traffic to spread awareness about a piece of website content, paying $8 per website visit probably isn’t the most efficient way to spend your money.

But the reality for most organizations is that website traffic isn’t the ultimate goal, so judging the successfulness of an ad campaign based on click-through rates doesn’t make sense.

Here’s a corporate example.  This month Toyolta ran an ad (right) on MSN.com.  Website visits don’t hurt Toyota, but their goal isn’t to get you to go to Toyota.com.  Their goal is to sell you a Camry.

The same principle is true for ads telling you to watch the latest NBC sitcom or drink Coca-Cola –getting you to interact with their website isn’t the end goal.

For our non-profit clients, the ROI usually has a more concrete online goal: getting email sign ups or raising money.  For either of these things to happen, you need to get quality visitors to click on your ad as frequently and efficiently as possible.

Cheaper vs. More Targeted

In Banner ads, except in the case of some remnant networks, the more targeted things get, the more expensive things get.  Websites charge a premium for geotargeting to a specific city, content section, or age group.  This makes for a difficult balance act that goes something like this (but is never this clean):

The right direction for any campaign will depend on the ROI you’re hoping for.  If it is brand awareness, than skewing towards General Audience may be better.  If it is donations, than it’s all about rigorously segmenting to see which group (or groups) are most efficient.

In Search Engine Marketing, the opposite is generally true: more targeted = cheaper. Running an ad on a broad single word searches like “cars” can cost $5 or more per click.

An ad run on searches of “used car dealer huntsville alabama” that geotargeted only to people in Huntsville, Alabama, will cost you a fraction per click because there aren’t as many advertisers to compete against.

Lack of competition isn’t the only benefit to more targeted keyword text.  You’re also only hitting people who are more interested in your product.

Here’s a non-profit example.  Wildlife Conservation Society could chose to run ads on “tigers,” but if they did so they’d also be competing for the attention of people who want to buy tickets to a Detroit Tiger’s baseball game – probably not the most prime audience for email sign ups or donations.  But if they run ads on related searches like “save the tigers” and “endangered tigers,” they can keep their CPC down while hitting a much more relevant audience.

Conclusion

Lets face it, banner ads could be a lot better.  But before discounting them from your next  advertising campaign, take a good look at your audience and goals. And if ultimately you decide banner ads are a good fit, make sure your campaign is set up so that the impact of the banner ads can be compared to other advertising mediums.

And speaking of Star Wars, this chipmunk gave us some additional inspiration as we continue our search for the perfect 404 (Page Not Found) page for our website. Nothing quite says “go back!!” like a chipmunk with a light saber.

We’re all visualization geeks at heart, and a new Jquery toy blew us away. If you’re looking for a slick way to liven up your lists, look no further than this new Jquery plugin for list layout. And once you start with one, you can‘t stop there…

If you weren’t on your iPad/iPhone/iThingy earlier this week, it’s not too late to check out how Google demoed a cool use of the acceleromater through their home page logo of the day:

After you’ve finished watching that video, figure out which was your favorite nonprofit video of  the past year and submit it for Youtube’s 2011 DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards. The noprofit could win $2500, Flip camera, and receive some additional promotion by Youtube.

That’s all for this week. Have a great weekend, and see you next week!

I don’t get this.

http://summerofsocialgood.com/

It looks like this is a huge, well-funded, well-organized program.  It also shows that someone (say… Mashable) is really, really invested in showing that you can do fundraising with social media.

But aren’t they going about it backwards?  I thought “social media for social good” meant rallying people on social media who care about your particular cause, not rallying people who care a lot about social media and then challenging them to support “social good” in general…

They’ve got the big name organizations, but the campaign’s not about them at all.  Or am I missing something?

Very astute question. What is going on here? What is Summer for Social Good really about?

Yes, this does seem a little backwards from how a campaign would typically be driven – identify important issue and promote the issue. In this case, it’s promoting the action first – spreading the work to donate through social media – and then splitting it evenly to the 4 brand name charities.  In traditional advertising, the concepts at play here are “product” promotion and “category” promotion. The products are the organizations, the category is social media promotion of online giving as well as online giving itself.

This campaign is about pushing the category, building the base of individuals who engage in this behavior with the near-term benefit going to the category building.  In this case, it’s Global Giving, the online donation processor for the effort who will be the near-term beneficiary of the effort. They’ll grow their base of flow through donors whom they can leverage to build their community.

In the late 90s, Heifer International was the “category builder” for alternative giving online. For nearly a decade, they were also nearly the only “product” in the market. Now, the category is more crowded with Oxfam, Feed the Poor, World Vision, etc. having created their own alternative giving catalogs to compete for that category of donations. In this new millennium, Kiva has created a new category online – microfinance. They’ve had a great run at something of an “exclusive” product in the category but are now facing competition from other “products” ranging from direct competitors like MicroPlace to category spin-offs like Vittana for student loans. There’s also “category confusion” with the introduction of micro-donation competitors like OptIn Now from Opportunity International whose micro-donation feels like a micro-loan but isn’t.

Global Giving’s campaign is an innovative play to help build their category (nonprofit donation aggregators) using channel partners. In this case, the channel partners are both the message multipliers (TreeHugger, Federated Media) and the “medium promoters” Mashable and by invocation twitter, facebook, linked in, etc. Clever category campaign, but will it build the Global Giving brand?

And more importantly, will it raise money for the 4 organizations?

Let’s start with keyword selection. When identifying keywords to target, a common mistake is to focus on words that your website already ranks well for in organic search results, like the name of your organization. Instead, think of new potential audiences that might be interested in your organization and write down a few key search terms for each. Then, enter each of these terms into a free keyword suggestion tool, like the one that comes with Google Adwords, to identify additional related terms. You will soon have hundreds of words added to your list.

Many are unaware that they can assign different ‘match types’ to keywords and end up using only the default broad matching. Broad matching shows your ad even when your keywords make up only a portion of someone’s search. This leads to more impressions. Exact matching only shows an ad when a search term matches it exactly. Because Google gives preference to exact matches over broad matches, you should use these for keywords that you value highly. Bidding more for these exact match phrases will also help. Make sure to also set your high-value terms to broad matching. That way your ad will also be displayed for longer terms you may not have thought of. Later, when you analyze your keyword search reporting results, you can determine which of these longer terms were valuable and place them in their own exact matching bucket to give them more weight.

Another common mistake is lumping keywords into a single ad group. Instead, create multiple ad groups where each one represents a unique audience. Place similar keywords in each and incorporate the ones you value the most into the ads because they will appear bolded and draw more attention. Also make sure to create multiple ads which are fairly different from one another. Google can rotate them and tell you which one is getting better results. Afterwards you can modify the winning ad to get even better returns.

Finally, many non-profits use Google Grants to run their campaigns. This generous program  provides non-profits with up to $300 per day in free ads which should be more than enough to meet your needs. It’s easy to apply and Google will usually give you the OK. Just make sure to leave yourself enough time because it can take up to 6 months to hear back.

Also note there will be a featured organization in residence in The Beacon all day long sat-mon. Come lounge with a conscience with these featured non profits at The Beacon and find out how you can change the world!

Saturday March 14th
Lunch for a Cause
Blackbaud Internet Solutions is sponsoring lunch in The Beacon for people who donate their lunch money the Capitol Area Food Bank of Texas, a partner of Feeding America. If you can’t make it at lunchtime, come by their table anytime to help hungry Texas families.

Sunday March 15th
Entrepreneurs Ending Global Poverty
What if in one day, you could change the lives of hundreds in the poorest countries and help end poverty? OptINnow .orgwill be at The Beacon all day to show you how you can. Your Mission, Sxsw: Fund as many entrepreneurs as possible by 5pm!

Monday March 16th
SXSW Smiles
Operation Smile wants to know what makes YOU smile! Come by their table in The Beacon to find out how you can spread smiles around the world (and around sxsw), and be entered in a drawing for a one-of-a-kind gift. You can start smiling right now to get in the sxsw spirit!

In just over a week, the worlds hippest, smartest, network-iest people in technology will be converging upon Austin for South by Southwest interactive (known as SxSW-i to those in the know) and Beaconfire will be there in full force. Not only are we sponsoring THE coolest spot for non profits to hang out in (The Beacon – Lounge with a Conscience, Room 19A 4th floor) BUT you can meet the (in)famous Michael Cervino, Ali Cherry, Jo Miles, and yours truly (Eve Simon) there. What more can you ask for?

To get updates on all the cool things happening in The Beacon, including events from Blackbaud Internet solutions, Free Range Studios, NTEN, Operation Smile, Feeding America and Opportunity International, follow @TheBeaconsxsw on Twitter all week.

We hope to meet many of you in Austin next week, so please seek us out to say hi. For those not able to make the trip, we will be blogging between March 13-17, so hopefully you’ll feel like you’re there with us.

I’d like to say I was prescient enough to know Obama would emerge victorious the second I saw his campaign’s logo, but you would call me a black-turtleneck-wearing-
abstinithe-sipping-the-revolution-will-be-designed-hippie.

But I really did.

Why? Because short of the ubiquitous American brands of our generation (Coke, Harley Davidson, Nike, Chevrolet) there has not been one as seamlessly versatile, and consistently leveraged without breaking a sweat, as the O.

Much has been said about the unique choice of font (Yay, Gotham) and the multi-channel appeal to a variety of audiences, but I propose one more reason for it’s success: The unspoken sense of hope the “Obama rising” visual has conveyed to a world thirsty for inspiration. When a brand becomes more than just a graphic, but invokes a sense of “what could be if you just believe”, there is truly no stopping it.

1. It’s immensely cool for a marketer, voter targeting guru, or demographics aficionado
2. It’s yet another example of how awesome Google is for giving us tools like this for free
3. It will make some privacy advocates likely go bonkers, as happened with some other Google innovations

Here’s the reader’s digest version: the Ad Planner leverages Google’s gigantic barrel o’ data to help users understand what sites people browse, based on a variety of demographic information and their other online behavior. It then helps you to build a list of sites to run advertising on, and even provides the ability to export your target list in MediaVisor (so that’s where that DoubleClick acquisition went).

The long version, as always, is a lot more complicated – the tool is very powerful, and not just for advertisers. Follow me below the fold to learn more…

First, let’s try an experiment to show how the Ad Planner works. I’ll include some screenshots for the benefit of anyone still waiting for their account to activate (if that doesn’t include you, just turn on AdBlock – I’m pretty sure that I’ve talked about ads enough in this post for the images to get hit). Let’s start with a hypothetical goal: we want to get young people to use Barack Obama’s Vote for Change site to register and early vote.

Let’s start by going to the research tab and entering in some criteria. We start out with an audience of 230 million potential visitors, 100% of the country (the Ad Planner currently only works in America. Fortunately for our hypothetical, so does voting for President of the United States). Ad Planner lets us pick from a variety of languages, and Vote for Change includes English and Spanish versions, so let’s start with those sites. This has virtually no effect on our reach, unsurprisingly, but if we’d chosen a less common selection of languages in the US, such as German, French, or Japanese, we’d be looking at a combined 2.8 million visitors, 1.3% of the total market. Unfortunately, there’s no state level targeting yet – we could cut out states that don’t require pre-registration to vote, like Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Next we start diving into the regular demographics – they include four core demos that marketers like to divide by: gender, age, education and household income. Since we’re running a campaign in 2008 and not 1908, we won’t touch the gender criteria, but let’s go ahead and segment by age. We just want to reach young people, but they have to be able to vote, so let’s check off the 18-24 box only. That cuts us down to 15 million hits already, so we’ll go ahead and add in the 25-34 group, bringing us up to 45 million visitors, 20% of the web browsing public.

For our next audience, we’ll go ahead and select just those individuals who are at least attending college, as well as those who’ve graduated. This brings us down to 28 million visitors, 1 in 8 Americans online. We’ll leave the household income demo filter alone – here’s one place that I wish that Google was more precise, as we might want to allow everyone with “some college” but segment only certain income levels of graduates, with the assumption that income levels of individuals currently in college are wildly off from the demographic they most resemble. So leaving this alone, we hold steady at our current levels. Here’s what our settings look like now.

Now we get to the really cool part: we ask what other sites people are visiting. For this campaign, we’re going to need to recruit people who are willing to give out some information about themselves on the internet. That means social networking sites: Facebook, Flickr, and (sigh…) MySpace are three of the most likely to pay off. We can keep putting in more sites – I’ve got the filter set to “or” at the moment, so every site we add will increase these numbers. With just these three, we get 13 Million visitors, which is probably a manageable number.

Now it’s time to start going through the actual sites. For each site, we see how much of their audience we’re likely to reach with each site. These range from about two-thirds, with Facebook or Yahoo, to around 23% with Amazon, to 9% with the New York Times, all the way down to 0.7% with Penny Arcade. There are some weird results in here (the Pirate Bay and WordPress are more popular than Fox News… heh.), but since they’re backed by the power of Google, I’ve got to assume that they’re credible.

Beyond this, though, we can go through the sites on the list and see if they accept advertising, and, if so, what types we can place there. If we want to learn more about a given site on the list, we can just click on the tiny green icon () to learn more about that site. If we look into the Apple.com, for example, here’s what we see. This data comes from a variety of sources and given Google’s concern for privacy, I think they’ve done a good job of balancing the desire to have a useful tool with not revealing anything about individual browsers – most of the aggregate data is nothing that Compete couldn’t provide as well.

With all that said, Google did put some restrictions on the tool. A big one is that if the sample size gets too small, they won’t provide recommendations: this means that you won’t be able to pull data on very niche sites, or combine enough demographics to get a user pool smaller than about 10k or so. Sorry, folks, but you won’t be able to get any data on the traffic of Beaconfire.com, though I checked several large national non-profits and was able to get some recommendations. It’s definitely worth checking your own organization’s name to get some idea of where else your users are visiting – as they say, the results may surprise you.

I think that this is a fantastic tool for a variety of purposes – I’ll probably dedicate a separate post to describing a few. Sign up for the beta today to give it a try, and leave your thoughts on the tool in the comments, then stop by again in about a week to hear what some of the Beaconfire team found by using the Ad Planner when building campaigns.