Your Board is a Branding Asset

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Many nonprofits struggle with how to engage the board in branding and marketing. Sometimes staff even view the board as adversaries in this work, who think marketing is a distraction from mission. But the board may be your hidden asset if you give them the right tools. Consider these five ways to engage the board on behalf of this important work.

1. Connect Marketing to Mission. Board members are involved because they care about the mission and are connected to it in some personal way.  Set aside time at one meeting to have each board member identify a core aspect of your mission that they find most important and why.  Have each board member name one or two ways they could connect another circle they move in (social, work, alumni, etc.) to this aspect of your mission.

2. Find Examples From Other Spaces. Nonprofit board members often work in the for-profit world. Bring them examples they recognize–from banking or real estate or law.  A legal video that went viral on YouTube (there are some!), a business Twitter campaign, a newspaper story that generated web views and buzz. All of these can help your brand ambassadors understand the role of marketing in delivering on the mission.

3. Help Board Members Use Social Media. Many board members skew older than staff.  They may not be comfortable using social tools, or they may not consider using them to promote the work of the organization. Give board members monthly updates with hashtags, photos and other resources to help promote your upcoming fundraiser or event.  Give them examples of how retweeting or tagging and posting a photo on their Facebook page might net you hundreds of new views and real dollars.

4. Give Board Members Tangible Updates of Your Messaging Impact. Give board members an inside look at your social metrics–what pages on your website are most “sticky” and why, how many people follow your blog, what happens when you tweet, when you post a new item on Facebook.  Give them not just numbers but stories about who your communities are, what they need from you, and what they respond to.

5. Show and Tell. Do a live demo of as you interact with various communities and constituencies through your different social networks. Let board members see in realtime the kind of impact you have, and how the message can be multiplied exponentially.

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Social Web Advocacy: Do’s and Don’ts

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A canvasser knocked on my door last night to sign us up for a petition in a community clean water campaign.  On the same day, I got an email link to a new candidate’s YouTube Senate campaign video. Both campaigns offer case studies for things to do and those to avoid in issue advocacy.

An engaging, passionate, and very cold (it was below freezing outside) canvasser made a great case for lobbying our county council against development along Ten Mile Creek, which eventually makes its way into the Potomac. We asked for more information and he left us with a printed fact sheet. I wanted more information so I emailed a friend who works at an environmental organization and he asked me for the sheet. That’s when the problems began. I couldn’t find the talking points anywhere online–not on the organization’s web link provided, not anywhere on its website, not by Googling it.  Having a physical person come to my door to sign me up for the petition was great. No one loves those telemarketer phone calls–even for a good cause. And he was able to engage in more in-depth conversation about the issue. But the handout was too long (front and back of a page!) for today’s short attention spans and there was no way to share it other than scanning it. The website doesn’t feature any way to Tweet, promote on Facebook, or otherwise connect socially to this campaign–boo hoo.

Takeaways: Handouts are great. Emails are even better, with web and social links. But all physical page handouts should include easy ways to share the content in social forums.

The next campaign came via email. Shenna Bellows is running for Senate in Maine and looks like a great candidate from her YouTube campaign video. I love the personal interviews and the way they cut together people looking straight to camera to convey the variety of her prospective constituents. What I HATE HATE HATE (can you tell I hate it?!) is how she is reading “off-axis” from a teleprompter. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had to do this reading from prompter thing. But the axis is entirely too severe to be believable as an interview setup. [Insert shameless self-promotion here:  See my Lynda.com Art of the Interview class for more on best interview setups.]  It would have been better to cull these points during a real interview. Or to just do the prompter-over-the-camera and have her deliver straight to the audience. Either way, the great techniques of the rest of the spot are undermined by this rookie mistake.

Takeaways: Real people, real interviews are key to believability in social web.

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