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As the only full-time employee with the Waterloo Region Suicide Prevention Council, Tana Nash — you would think — has no room in her day to fuss with the organization’s online presence.
Not so. In fact, she will tell you it is time well spent.
“If you’re trying to get your organization known, it’s one of the best tools to impart knowledge,” said Nash, the council’s executive director. “One of the key missions for the council, because we don’t provide front-line services, is to promote other services in the community — really good resources, tips on things to calm stress, calm depression, something to do for anxiety, continually educating people. This is a great way to do that.”
Nash was among about 30 workers in Waterloo Region’s charitable non-profit community who attended a morning workshop Jan. 22 on online marketing, a kind of catch-all term for getting the most out of websites, social media and e-mail.
Faced with a bewildering range of terms and tools, from Facebook to Google Ads, where does one begin?
“Don’t overwhelm yourself,” said Mark Hallman, owner of Evergreen Digital Marketing. “Pick one or two things you can bite into.”
Hallman and Shubhagata Sengupta, an entrepreneur, student and social-media expert for Capacity Canada, led the workshop at the Family Centre in Kitchener. The Family Centre’s Community Hub project regularly hosts sessions on topical issues in the charitable non-profit sector.
And online marketing is certainly one of them. With some care and feeding, it can greatly improve the profile of a community group and its events. As an example, Hallman and Sengupta used the annual turkey drive held by the Kitchener Conestoga Rotary Club.
Thanks in part to strategic e-mailing, shared Tweets and periodic nudging, the “Talk Turkey” campaign exceeded its $300,000 goal. Online donations grew by 22.5 per cent over 2013.
The pair offered a tonne of pointers, such as:
• Build a website that respects the time of the people who drop by. Make donor and share buttons easily accessible. Engage visitors with stories — text, video and photos. Blog about news and events. On the tech side, don’t allow a website to take forever to load. If they have to wait more than two seconds, Sengupta said, visitors will go elsewhere.
• Carefully choose social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) Better to use a few of them well, than many of them badly. Then share, share and share some more.
• Use tools to save time. Options mentioned by Hallman and Sengupta included WordPress for website building; Buffer for managing social media; and CampaignMonitor for staying connected to supporters by email.
• Check out the advantages of Google Analytics, Google My Business and Google Ad Grants. The last on that list offers eligible charities in-kind Google advertising (the yellow-stickered items that come with a search result) worth up to $10,000 per month.
The most difficult part in all this may simply be taking the plunge in the first place.
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Watch for more details, but the next workshop in the series examines diversity and “cultural competency” in the non-profit sector. The workshop will be held in the morning of March 12. The Family Centre is on Hanson Avenue at Hayward Avenue in Kitchener.
