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Helping Tulsa Area United Way member Agencies
make the most of Technology
A project of the Tulsa Area United Way Technical Assistance Fund
Effective Online Outreach
Michael Stein and Marc Osten
CONTENTS
- TECHNIQUES
--> Define your audience
--> Prepare your materials
--> Reach out on the Internet
- CASE STUDY
- TOOLS and CONNECTING THE DOTS
- HOW TO SUBSCRIBE AND UNSUBSCRIBE
>>> TECHNIQUES
To get your message out on the Internet, you will need to identify online audiences and locations that will allow you to reach the people that you want to connect with. In this section, we review the techniques for researching and identifying these locations and the materials that will be helpful in your efforts. We then go through the mechanics of outreach.
We bring you this with the assumption that you have already clearly defined the objective of your outreach campaign and specified clear outcomes you are hoping for.
--> Define your audience
Your audience are the people you are trying to reach with your message. Your online audience may be quite similar to the regular audience of your nonprofit agency. It's helpful to put together a target list to aid you in planning your outreach on the Internet. Specifically, you should brainstorm in your agency about what kind of listservs, Web sites, and Web portals your audience participates in and visits online. What search terms and key words allow you to identify and target these online destinations?
As you collect your information, ideally you will want to enter it into a database for use in this and future Internet outreach pushes. The information you're collecting should include things like:
- Type of outlet: Listserv, Web Site, E-Newsletter, Discussion Forum, etc.
- Outlet's audience: Executives, Program staff, general public, etc.
- Strategy to use the outlet: Do you post directly, do you contact someone else in the field to post for you, does the outlet take your posting and put into their own format, etc.
- Activity level of the outlet: High, medium or low volume.
- Reach: Number of people subscribed or traffic
- Usefulness of the outlet (you can go back and fill this out later).
--> Prepare your materials
Consider what materials you're going to need to do effective online outreach. Here's a checklist of materials that you should consider preparing:
- A press release: written in the classic style, this document can be faxed
or emailed to inform people about your online announcement.
- A short email announcement: this is a little less formal and can be quickly emailed to people, who can then forward it to others. This announcement can also be emailed to editors at Web portals and Web sites (see below) who can post it on their Web site. Finally, this announcement can be posted on Listservs (see below).
- A FAQ document that explains in more detail all the things you think folks will want to know more about. You can post this on your Web site and/or keep it in cue so that you can e-mail it directly to anyone with questions.
- An e-mail signature that can be used with any outgoing materials. The signature should
specify any web addresses (URLs) you may want people to link to.
--> Reach out on the Internet
"Reaching out" is about using the tools of the Internet -- usually email --to contact people and publicize your news. Here is a run down of the techniques for accomplishing this:
- Use Your Personal Connections
People that you know in your field are your first and best resource. Pull out your rolodex and get in touch with people that you know. Work these 'external' contacts you have as well and with other people in your organization to reach out and spread the word. Concentrate this stage of your research on people that you know well that you think can give you ideas and places to contact to post an announcement. They can help you identify nonprofit Web sites, Web portals and Listservs that are targets for your outreach. You can also use your personal connections to forward your announcement to other people that they know personally, or "forward to a friend." In fact, some of these people may be active on listservs and having them post your message will have far more impact than if you do.
Create a list of listservs that your staff is subscribed to. Anyone who is already active on a listserv
should post the information, as their names will be familiar to the other members on the list.
Be sure to contact people that you've identified in previous Internet outreach efforts. Update the information in your contact management system (database) each time you do more research or outreach so you don't reinvent the wheel each time. Soon you'll have a great list of people, listserv, web sites, portals and discussion forums where you can post future announcements.
- Identify and Contact Web Portals
Portals are high traffic Web sites connected to lots of other sites and organizations. Portals post a lot of content from external sources and people trust portals and go to them for information. It's important to develop relationships with the producers and editors at these portals because they offer so much access to their readers. Portals can be used to post your information directly on their Web site or in discussion groups or listservs. The better your relationship with the portal, the more likely your content will be posted prominently. We STRONGLY suggest you find the right portals, develop and maintain strong relationships with the editors.
General (Horizontal) Portals are large portals that target the general public. These often have subsections focused on a particular subject area. In addition to linking to other Web sites, they often have newsletters and discussion groups. Their subject areas tend to be generic -- women, politics, travel, entertainment, etc. Examples include:
http://www.msn.com/,
http://www.about.com/,
http://www.zeal.com/,
http://www.yahoo.com/.
Issue Specific (Vertical) Portals focus on specific areas of interest and host content from
external sources that are concerned with that particular issue. Examples include:
http://www.techsoup.org/,
http://www.jointogether.org/,
http://www.benton.org/.
Other Portals exist that target certain segments of the population (e.g. the Hispanic community or women), while geographic portals focus on a particular region like http://www.boston.com/.
Once you've identified appropriate Web portals, you need to determine what you need to do, where you need to go, who you need to talk to, to get your information on the site. Spend 20-30 minutes checking out the web portal to find the following information: Can you post on the website? If so, how do you contact the Webmaster? Is there an email newsletter? If so, who do you contact to get your information in it?. Do they sponsor a listserv? If so, how do you subscribe and unsubscribe? Is it open? Do they host a
discussion group you can post to? How/where do you post? How do they link to
organizations? Do they do special promotion efforts on their home page?
- Identify and Contact Other Nonprofit Web sites
Do outreach to other nonprofits that work in your field, so they can help spread the word about your efforts. Some national nonprofits have affiliates across the country to which they disseminate information. You will want to post to these national sites so they will get their information out to the people at their chapters. They may even have their own e-newsletter or listservs that they operate for affiliates. Try to get your announcement paved wherever it will be useful You can find lists of major nonprofits in your field by brainstorming with your staff or other colleagues, or by doing keyword searches on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo or About.com. As with Web portals, you need to determine if and how to post post your information. Follow the same instructions
as we described for Web portals.
- Identify and Post to Listservs
In addition to posting to Listservs that your staff and colleagues are subscribed to (see above), take the time to identify other Listservs and discussion groups that may be interested in reading your announcement. There are several good Web sites where you can perform searches to find listserv by subject area:
http://www.tile.net/,
http://www.liszt.com/,
http://www.topica.com/,
http://groups.yahoo.com/
Generally these sites have a description of the listservs and occasionally even tell the number of members who subscribe to the particular list. Often, listservs have names that reflect their interest area, so using your list of key words will be useful here.
When posting an announcement on a listserv, make sure you sign your name and leave your contact information, to make the announcement more personal. Make sure that the
announcement you are posting matches as closely as possible the topic of the Listserv. This may require you to edit your announcement a bit.
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>>> CASE STUDY
In each issue of DOT ORG, we showcase an example of what is being done well on the Internet. In this issue we interview Jeffrey Betcher with the Family Violence Prevention Fund (http://www.endabuse.org/), a national nonprofit based in San Francisco, and showcase the online outreach work that they've done to promote their new Web site. In this example, they rebranded their Web site by changing its name, and introducing a new design.
"During the last couple of months, we've launched our new site at http://www.endabuse.org/. We rebranded the address of our Web site to make it more engaging to our audiences. Our old address was the acronym of our organization and it was hard to remember so it worked against us. We did outreach in a number of ways. We hired a public relations firm to help us reach the traditional media and sent out a press release about the new Web site. We sent out an announcement to our own list of email addresses, about 5,000 names, which includes both interested individuals and also other nonprofits. We also have a special email list of about 1,000 advocates that we sent an announcement to. We're also counting on some of our key partner relationships with big Web portals such as http://www.oxygen.com/ to get the word out. Every October is Domestic Violence Prevention Month, and for the past two years we've done a Web ad banner campaign that has generated a lot of publicity for us, and we're counting on that to increase our visibility and drive traffic. There's a lot more we could have done that we didn't have time or the money to do, but we feel the things we did do were pretty effective for us."
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>>> TOOLS and CONNECTING THE DOTS
In each issue of DOT ORG, we reference other resources on our main topic.
- ONE/Northwest's Activist Toolkit is an invaluable online reference for making the most of technology and the internet. It includes many good documents on effective online outreach.
http://www.onenw.org/bin/page.cfm?secid=5
- TechSoup.org's "Web Building" section offers a medley of articles, resources and links on doing outreach on the Internet. Also check out the "Message Boards" for a discussion forum by the same name, there are some good topics in there.
http://www.techsoup.org/articles.cfm?topicid=13&topic=Web%20Building
- The Benton Foundation "Best Practices Toolkit" is consistently a good source of information on nonprofit Internet use. Related to our topic, we like the entire section entitled "Think it Through: What it takes to design & fund an effective communications strategy." The three subsections entitled Planning, Audience, and Message Shaping will direct you to high quality online resources.
http://www.benton.org/Practice/Toolkit/thinkthru.html
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