How to Nail Your Online Messaging to Your Donors

Kivi Leroux Miller of Nonprofitmarketingguide.com is one of the smartest communications gurus anywhere.

What I like about Kivi’s approach is that she cuts to the chase – no fluff, no bull. It’s straightforward advice on how to shape your messages so donors – and the world – will listen up!

Kivi Leroux Miller is our Go-To Communications Guru!

Today Kivi’s giving us a magic Bullet – how to break through ONLINE to our donors’ hearts and minds.

Online is where the action is, right?

Even though donors are still giving far more via the mail – you know as well as I do that it’s just a matter of time before we live and die online.

What’s worse: so many smart capable fundraisers are awful at messaging and communications in general.

Here’s how you can shape up your online communications so your donors will pay attention and stick with you.

Are you a Mini-Media Mogul?

Long gone are the days when a quarterly print newsletter was all you had to think about. Today, nonprofits are mini media moguls, publishing and broadcasting in multiple channels, from print and email to social media and the airwaves.

Sending your donors little morsels of information works!

And our donors are on the receiving end of all this stuff. Do they listen to you? Do they read it all?

Try Sending “Marketing Morsels” to Your Donors

Here’s Kivi’s revolutionary tip that can get your donors’ attention online:

Send your donors out little pieces of information in small digestible bites.

Kivi calls them Marketing Morsels. Here’s how she describes this strategy:

One important step in getting control of your communications is to stop obsessing about long newsletter or website articles and spend more time creating Marketing Morsels.

The smart communicator breaks down all that stream of info to your donors into little bite-sized morsels.

The majority of people who see your communications will pay attention to only the tastiest little bits of it.

The tastier the little morsels, the better, because then they will continue to read or to click for more.

Marketing morsels come in all shapes and sizes.

When it’s text like subject lines and headlines, it’s called (in marketing jargon) microcontent.

But morsels are other things too! They are every single social media update you post – because of the small spaces you are working in and the fast pace at which those news feeds are reviewed by others.

Morsels are also

• visuals and photos
• short videos (think snippet sized, like Vine on Twitter or Instagram videos)
• animated GIFs
• infographics.

Morsels are also what we see on mobile devices, simply because of the smaller screens.

Here’s how you can get your messages to stand out from the crowd!

Here’s why I think this concept is so important and even revolutionary:

We all labor to create lovely long magazines, newsletters, reports etc.  But our donors don’t read them! 

There’s that fancy 4-color annual report, your good-looking magazine, your expensive newsletter – all going into your donor’s recycle bin untouched.

It’s time to face the fact that this stuff is not working for us. What WILL work for us is to parcel out the information in small chunks, little by little.

What do you need to do to create more morsels?

Kivi says it’s possible for us all to create cool morsels of interesting bite-sized content.

Here are the skills we need to develop so we can produce good morsels – and if I can do it, then you can do it too!

• Get good – really good – at headline and subject line writing. (You know I pull my best subject lines from the cover of Oprah magazine!)

• Learn how to make graphics fast (e.g. overlay text on a photo and post it in under 20 minutes, tops. It’s really not that hard. Use these picture/text images in lots of places!)

• Get comfortable with your phone camera and editing/filters. (Quickly snapped photos can be amazingly powerful – especially when you use them to connect your donors more deeply to your work.)

•  As you write longer articles or stories, think about how you will break that longer content into morsels. (Always always keep stuff short and sweet. Break it up! Who wants to read long, long online newsletters or stories?)

If you want more help for your online marketing, consider joining Kivi’s webinar for us on Monday, April 14 at 2pm ET.  “Creating a Smart Online Marketing Plan That Works!” Kivi will share her 5-step process for improving our online communications.