A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing

A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing was distributed during the New England GiveCamp (http://newenglandgivecamp.org) weekend event which was held June 11-13, 2010. New England GiveCamp recruits technical professionals to donate a weekend’s worth of their time and expertise in the form of providing a much needed technology solution to a nonprofit organizations. Typical New England GiveCamp Projects include building a new website or designing a software application.

A Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing was written to combat the disproportionality of internet marketing knowledge that exists between the for-profit sector and nonprofit organizations. The document also represents my attempt to extend my personal contribution to the event by endeavoring to help every nonprofit organization in the best way I know – by sharing my knowledge of internet marketing.

The Nonprofit’s Guide to Internet Marketing is designed to be practical and action-orientated. This is a 15-page guide designed to help nonprofit organizations activate or to accelerate their online marketing efforts. As such its content includes:

Why nonprofits should leverage Internet marketing and how it can help to expand membership rolls, event participation, donation collection, and to increase awareness
A brief overview of the main disciplines within online marketing and how nonprofits cans get started, including search engine optimization (SEO), paid search marketing (pay-per-click) , and social media marketing (SMM)
Specific programs offered by companies like Google and Flickr to assist nonprofits in marketing online
Guidelines for vetting and working with online marketing agencies
Additional opportunities within emarketing and a brief look at how to implement each grassroots style

Practical Application

As for my New England GiveCamp weekend assignment, I was part of a group of volunteers tasked with converting WomenOfMeans.org from a static HTML website onto a WordPress platform. As a developer of the website, I utilized many of the same internet marketing techniques described in the document on WomenOfMeans.org, including search engine optimization, social media integration and email list building. In January 2011, Dr. Roseanna Means, CEO of Women Of Means, was honored as a CNN Hero, and as a result the updated website was directly linked to from CNN.com and other news media outlets.