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Starting and maintaining a blog for your nonprofit shouldn't be an intimidating idea; it should be an exciting opportunity to better communicate with and inform your service community.
Blogs are a great way to quickly and easily inform readers of news from your organization, advertise about an event (speaking of which, have you registered for our second event in the series Communicating in an Age of New Media?), or providing industry information.
Blogs can be updated as frequently as you decide, though the more often you update, the more benefit readership and RSS subscription is for your users. Knowing that your supporters expect to have something new to read is a good incentive to developing content routinely. This is also a great reminder to keep the rest of your information on your website current, so that it is truly a resource and tool and not an information parking lot.
If developing your own content is too difficult, overwhelming or time consuming, do not fear! One key to remember when it comes to blogging (and other areas of your website for that matter) is that if the information already exists, just point it out! You are serving your readers and community better by saving yourself time to do the rest of your job and taking only the time to write an introduction sentence or two with a link to the website, story or information of interest, than you would by taking all day trying to rewrite it all.
Another way to provide information to readers without much work is to publish an interview you have with an intriguing yet pertinent guest or asking someone involved in the field to write a short article on an emerging issue. This also helps attract readers who may not have known about your services before but follow the work of the invited guest.
There are many ways to create a blog that do not even require changing your actual website. Many blog providers offer blog space for free and have simple posting and editing interfaces. You can check out Google's Blogger, Word Press, or Blog.com. If you want a quick tutorial and additional reading on blogs, click here to visit BlogBasics.
You have the option to create a blog address to closely mirror that of your organization's web address and can direct people to it by posting a link on your site. Most all of the blog providers you go with will automatically generate an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed for you, enabling readers to subscribe and receive new information as it is published. (To learn more about RSS, click here.)
At our upcoming event Communicating in the Age of New Media: Distributing Information, there will be an entire session devoted to blogging for nonprofits, in addition to other new media focuses. If you haven't already, you should really check it out and register!
What are you waiting for? Create your blog today and start communicating with your supporters!
