In honor of the launch of the Atlas Network’s new blog we ask the the above question. More and more, many are finding that the answer is Yes! The Wild Apricot blog offers 10 reasons why you should, including the benefits of search engine optimization, being seen as the “expert in the field,” increased awareness of your organization and added credibility. Finally, a blog can be the “heart” of your organization:
While blogs are beneficial for marketing and fundraising purposes, their most important function should always be to convey interesting and compelling stories about the organization.
Policy Map makes it easy to link geographic data over 4,000 indicators related to demographics, real estate, crime, money & income, jobs, education, energy, and public investments.
According to their website you can:
create an unlimited number of reports about a specific geography (state, county, place, zip code or census tract), a congressional district, a school district, a custom region, or a unique radius of up to 8 miles around an address.
It is free to use although in order to upload your own data you must become a premium subscriber.
The Participatory Culture Foundation has created a guide with step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos. If you just getting started in video production this is a good start so that one day your videos can be “watched and subscribed to by millions of people.”
If you are just getting started and finding this overwhelming, they have also compiled Four Steps to Publish online video.
Hopefully your think tank already sends out regular newsletters to a growing number of adoring subscribers. Whether you are or aren’t, the Non-Profit Marketing Blog offers some effective tips on how to get the most from your e-mail efforts. Some of my favorites are:
- Send e-mails no more than once a week and no less than every six weeks.
- Make it personal
- Include specific calls to action
What tips work for you? How do you send your e-mails out? We’d love to hear your comments below.
This morning I did my normal routine of sorting new e-mails when one stood out. It was from an individual at a think tank who sent me, and a lot of other people, an e-mail with an attached policy report which had nothing to do with me. I did three things:
1. I used the service at stopforwarding.us to send the author an anonamous e-mail informing him of his e-mail eiquette violation.
2. I set up a filter so future e-mails from this person would go directly into my spam folder
3. I wrote this cathartic blog post
We all want to grow the size of our audience and have our products read but sending spam (the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages) is never the answer.
So asks crisscrossed.net. I say yes, as long as the audience for your think tank uses twitter or will use it. Considering twitters growth, I imagine they will.
Here is a visualization of worldwide social network market share. While Think Tank Tech discusses Facebook a lot, we encourage you to use whatever platform your audience uses. Many times this depends on what part of the world you focus on.
The Center for Media Research report on the results of the BIGresearch Simultaneous Media Survey. Conclusion: “Bloggers are a diverse group and not who you would expect…”
If you’ve been waiting to create viral videos for your organization, I have some bad news for you. Congress beat you to it. We all know how slow Congress can move so it’s probably time your think tank gets serious about moving ideas through video. Here are some tips to get you started:
Rip the DVD your organization made and then upload it in multiple places using tube mogul. They will also help you measure the effectiveness of your videos.
If you want to be a video star, TechCrunch has a nice primer.
