This document provides guidance on content creation for non-profits. It discusses developing a clear mission statement, differentiator message, tagline, and hook statement to engage visitors. It recommends using questions to test ideas and develop strategies for different aspects like context, content, commerce, community, and search. The document also covers content formats, legal content, blogging, social media, email marketing and other tactics, providing examples and best practices. It emphasizes telling your story and focusing on the donor or visitor experience rather than internal details.

1. Content Creation: The Ultimate “How To” Guide
Katharine Coles
Use Twitter Hashtag #npweb
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Katharine Coles
CEO and Founder, Mad Marketeer
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4. Content Creation:
The Ultimate “How To” Guide
presented by
MAD MARKETEER
Corporate Quality at Nonprofit Prices
Katharine Coles
Katharine@MadMarketeer.com
310-947-8511

5. What’s Your Story? Good content isn’t easy!
This set of questions will help you through the process of testing and validating
your idea and building an effective Go-to-Market strategy.
Who is your target donor/user?
What is the user experience you plan to offer?
Does the donor care? Why?
What is your differentiated value proposition to the donor/user?
Which market? Which segment? What demographic? What psychographic?
How big is the market? Is it big enough? How do you expand, if not? Do you need to expand, or is
staying within the niche desirable?
What is the usage model? Can you actually fund what needs to be funded?
How does the donor/user currently accomplish the objective?
What other organizations are in the same space and how do you position against them?
What is the business model? Donations? Members? Sponsors?
How do you build traffic?
What (FREE if possible) incentive can you offer to bring users en-masse to your site?
What premium offer can you make that donors/users would want to pay for? How much would they
pay?
© 2005 - 2010 Sramana Mitra

6. What’s Your Story? (cont’d)
What is your context strategy?
What is your content strategy?
What is your commerce strategy?
What is your community strategy?
What is your search strategy?
What is your personalization strategy?
Are you going to advertise online to recruit donors/volunteers? Google/Yahoo! PPC? On blogs and
other sites? Which sites?
What are your search engine marketing/search engine optimization strategies? What keywords are you
trying to own/position around? How expensive are they?
For your category, what are the most influential blogs? How will you get them to talk about you?
What are the top mainstream media properties that you need to get written up in?
Whom do you need to partner with to offer a full solution/whole product?
Whom do you partner with to generate traffic? Under what terms?
Do you have a widget strategy for Facebook, iPhone, Hi5, MySpace, etc. to generate traffic and
visibility?

7. Content and Messaging

8. Challenge Question
Do you always think in terms
of your visitors and people that
don’t know you?

9. The Messaging Elements:
Used in Website, Print, Social Media, etc.
UNDERSTAND:
•Mission/Purpose
•Differentiators/THE Message
DEVELOP:
•Menu
•Tagline
•Hook Statement
•Content for Conversions

10. Create a CLEAR mission statement
An effective mission statement should include:
• What you do
• Who you do it for
• How you do it
• Your values

11. Mission Statement Before
Strengthening Communities Through Strong and
Healthy Families.
What do they do?
For whom?
How?
Values?

12. Mission Statement After
Helping victims of sexual abuse, ages three through
adult, and their families to heal by treating the
“whole person” and addressing the comprehensive
needs of the individual and the family with
individual, group, and family psychological and
emotional therapy.
We believe that healing is more effective and
complete when addressing the abuse related issues
of the entire family unit.

13. Differentiator/ THE Message
“The ‘surplus society’ has a surplus of
similar organizations, employing
similar people, with similar educational
backgrounds, coming up with similar
ideas, producing similar things, with
similar prices and similar quality.”
Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale,
Funky Business

14. “ WHY DOES
IT MATTER
TO THE
DONOR?”

15. “EXACTLY
HOW DO I
PASSIONATELY
CONVEY THAT
DIFFERENCE TO
THE CLIENT ”

16. Create Your Menu

17. Tagline
Tagline (a sub-line usually used with your
logo): WHAT you do.

18. Taglines: Are YOU the Salvation Army?

19. Create a tagline that tells a complete
story - BEFORE
Organization Tagline BEFORE
Mid-Coast Family Services Changing lives every day
Northwest Infant Survival & In the belief that every child should live
SIDS Alliance

20. AFTER
Organization Tagline BEFORE Tagline AFTER
Mid-Coast Family Changing lives every Helping youth, adults &
Services day families eliminate family
violence, homelessness &
substance abuse
Northwest Infant In the belief that Supporting families &
Survival & every child promoting safe sleep
SIDS Alliance should live

21. Taglines: Use crisp, concise
communications

22. Tagline

23. Challenge Question
The tagline game
ASK:
What does your organization do?

24. Hook Statement
Hook Statement (a “welcome” block of
information): WHAT/HOW you do it, WHO
you do it for and WHY someone should care.

25. Hook Statement must be obvious

26. Talk about what you can do for your
constituents, not about your mission

27. Communicate emotion
Cedar House is dedicated to improving the lives of those suffering
from chemical dependency by providing evidence-based, high
quality therapeutic clinical treatment services, while educating and
engaging the community through open communication
and outreach activities.

28. Your “Hook” Statement:
Is this effective?
If your child is critically ill or injured, will the healthcare
providers make the right decision? It is frightening, but
true, that not all children have access to the same quality
of care. It appears that where a child lives has an
important impact on whether the child can survive a
serious illness or injury. We want to create a system in
which patients of all ages, and in all communities, receive
well-planned and coordinated emergency and critical care
services. Every baby, every child, needs the most
appropriate care, at the optimal location, with the
minimum delay. That is our mission.

29. Keep it short & concise!
When seconds count, emergency
care providers, nurses and
physicians should be up-to-
date on the latest pediatric
emergency care. TN EMSC
provides on-going education
and training so that the best
care is given to every critically
ill or injured child
– no matter where they live.

30. Using photos/animation to reinforce
Our Mission is to empower people with
vision loss to maximize their
independence.

31. Remember: Tell a Story
Visitors are not interested in your mission,
history, or boring facts.
Talk about the wonderful things you do.
Talk about how their money or time can help.

32. Do you want to read this?

33. Rule of Thumb: Keep your text short and use
headings, sub-headings, and bullet points. Most visitors
do not read, they scan!

34. Format is important - 20 Second Test

35. Transparency: Don’t pretend you’re
something you’re not
Photo by Keith Allison
http://www.flickr.com/photos/keithallison/2311062920/

36. Don’t hide the obvious (blogs or
otherwise)
Face controversial or sensitive topics head on
when possible …. It rings true.

37. Using photos/animation to reinforce

38. Using photos/animation to reinforce

39. Using photos/animation to reinforce

40. Animated Gif
40

41. Flash
41

42. Create content so visitors can engage

43. Longer duration = greater success!

44. Sharing and Storing Your Content
DropBox.com
http://aws.amazon.com/s3/

45. Marketing Tip: What’s so great about
creating content?
Leads by Indexed Web Pages
Source: State of Inbound Marketing Lead Generation Report - http://bit.ly/cVMpkn

46. POLL Question
How many of you know how many
indexed pages you currently have
in your website?

47. Indexed pages help traffic & branding
when you keep showing up in results

48. B2C example

49. Marketing Tip: What’s so important
about SEO and PPC content?
It can impact “findability”
Paid Search
Results
Natural
Search
Results

50. How to Find Your Google Page Rank
(highly correlated with search results)
Download Google Toolbar OR go to:
http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php
► Reflects Google’s view of the importance of web pages
► High correlations between page rank and search results

51. POLL Question
How many of you know what your
Google Page Rank is?

52. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Internal actions to improve results:
•Meta Keywords
•Meta Descriptions
•Keyword Density
•URLs - http://www.artkidzinbizfoundation.org/Art-Contest-2010
•Title Tags
•Header Tags
•Alt Tags
•Intra Site Links
•Sitemap
•Footer Links

53. POLL Question
How many of you have your site
search optimized?

54. The Big Question?
What terms will someone search
on that does NOT know you
exist?

55. The Next Big Question?
How many other organizations
are also using that term?

56. Search: Cure Autism (page #27)
Google PageRank 4/10

57. Search Term: Abandoned pets, Los Angeles (#1
spot) Google PageRank 1/10

58. Why you need content!

59. Paid Search or Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
Create an ad, then pay ONLY when someone clicks
through on the ad
- Relatively inexpensive
- Practice ground for learning most effective keywords
- Drives traffic to your site of people actively seeking
information

60. Deliver on your promise

61. Goal: Finding Your Information

62. Site Flow Disruption

63. Would YOU trust this company?

64. Discontinuity: Phrase Matching

65. Marketing Tip: What’s go great
about blogging?
One of the most effective tactics

66. Blogging & Social Media Influence SEO
Source: Data from over 1,500 small businesses - http://bit.ly/XDkQV

67. Blogging Attracts More Visitors
Source: Data from over 1,500 small businesses - http://bit.ly/XDkQV

68. Marketing Tip: What’s so great
about email marketing?
Email delivers $42 for every $1 spent.
(Source: The DMA, 2010)
U.S. spending on email marketing
increasing by compound annual rate of
11% until at least 2014. (Source: Forrester)

69. Communicate with constituents regularly

70. 10 Content Ideas for
Blogs, Email and Social Media
Answer Customer Questions (Generate a list of questions)
Aggregate Industry Information (Compile popular industry statistics,
images, videos, etc. into one article … save them time!)
Think Beyond Text (Publish video, audio interviews of industry experts,
event photos, etc.)
Seek Out Guest Authors (They get exposures and a link to their own
website or blog!)
Make Lists (how-to, best-of, etc.)
Make Charts
Think Like an OpEd Writer (Take a stance… get controversial
Look at Your Analytics (Write a post relevant to who is following you)
Review Industry Books (Write or produce video reviews; identify segments)
Break News (Summarize news announcements and relate to your industry)
http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/6023/10-Simple-Strategies-for-Business-Blog-
Content.aspx#ixzz1ElRzEq6m

71. A few RULES for blogging & social media
Don’t talk about your self because people don’t care
What they want are insights, opinions, your unique
perspective or voice. Talk or blog AS yourself, not
about yourself.
Grammar matters! (otherwise no one shares)
Quality matters! (otherwise no one reads)

72. Top Elements for Online News Room
PR contacts
News releases
Background information
Product info/press kits
Photographs
Searchable archives
Executive biographies
Social media links (not page)
Blog
News coverage

73. Legal Content
What MUST be in email legal text:
As all CAN-SPAM compliant emailers know, marketing
emails need to include a physical address and an opt-
out, both of which often end up in the legal text. The
address (street or P.O. box) where your brand can
receive actual, physical mail, makes it clear that you're
not a scammer and gives subscribers one more contact
point.

74. Legal Content
Handling offer disclaimers and exclusions:
Details about special offers and sales -- "the fine print"
-- often end up in the legal text at the bottom of
messages as well. When deciding what makes sense to
include in your legal text as opposed to in the email
body, consider why subscribers need the info (i.e., rare
situations or natural assumptions).
Avoid asterisks at the end of a special offer

75. Legal Content
Avoiding (or dealing with) long legal text:
Nothing is less visually appealing or effective than legal
text that goes on forever. But what to do when you
have lots of info to deliver?
State "Exclusions apply" and include a "Get details>"
link
If you have to have long legal copy, find a way to keep
it organized and scannable.

76. Thank You!
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