7 Nonprofit Blog Best Practices
A nonprofit blog can work wonders for your site traffic, help grow your email list, and expand awareness of your cause. But with most nonprofit teams strapped for time, it can be challenging to get blogging right.
We talked with nonprofit blogging experts for their advice on how to brainstorm, structure, and share in order to make the most of every blog post you write. Follow these tips to use your blogging time wisely for the most impactful results.
Before you blog:
1. Understand your readers. The first step to creating a successful blog is to get a handle on who your audience is, and what they want to read.
"When you're just starting to blog, you need make sure you've outlined who your ideal reader is going to be," says Kami Huyse, CEO of Zoetica Media, a boutique communications and marketing agency for nonprofits. "From that, you can start to create the content that makes sense for those people."
For example, if your nonprofit funds cancer research, some of your audience "categories" could include cancer patients, caregivers, family members, and community fundraisers. Think about the specific questions each of those audience members may have, and answer them in your blog.
"While the patient is going to be very interested in the more nitty gritty how is it going to feel after certain procedures, family members might be more interested in how does it affect the family, and how do we support the patient?" says Huyse.
When your content answers questions that your community members are asking, your blog posts are more likely to rise to the top of search engine inquiries around those topics.
If you've been blogging for a while and you've hit writer's block, thinking about your audience can also help inspire new ideas. You can even ask them directly what they would like to read about on your blog through a survey or a question posed on social media.
2. Set goals. Once you have your audience figured out, the next step to successful blogging is to set goals. It may be too much to ask of a blog post to rake in donations, but regular blogging can help you boost your site traffic and spread your nonprofit's message.
"If your organization has a goal of increasing your thought leadership, increasing your expertise and being recognized as a subject matter expert, this is one of the things that help you move toward that goal," says Vanessa Chase Lockshin, President of The Storytelling Nonprofit.
One popular nonprofit blog goal is to grow an organization's email list; if this is true for your blog, a well-placed email sign-up capture in the post or in a pop-up on your blog page can make a big difference, too.
3. Create a content calendar. Putting together a content calendar is a helpful way to plan out your content after you brainstorm ideas based on your audiences. It's also useful for tracking important events at your nonprofit that you might cover, the disease awareness month for your organization's condition area, the timing of fundraising events, and other key events. Track which audiences you're reaching out to in each post, so you can make sure you're creating a good mix of content. You may also want to track which keywords you're targeting as part of your search engine optimization strategy.
In your blog post:
4. Make sure it's readable — and scannable. Are you scanning this blog post? If you are, you're consuming this content the same way 79% of online readers do, according to a study conducted by web usability researcher Jakob Nielsen. To make your blog post scannable, use short paragraphs, bold text, headings, or bullet points to break up your text.
Another way to make your text more accessible is to check the reading level before you post. Enter your blog text in a tool like Hemingway Editor to find out your post's reading level. If average patients are your audience, you should aim for [insert] reading level or [insert] readability score. These types of tools also highlight difficult-to-read sentences. It can be important to make these simpler, espeically if you're writing about scientific topics for a non-scientific audience.
5. Include an image. Adding images in your blog posts also helps break up your text. Be sure to include alt text for your image, which can help your search engine optimization efforts.
After your blog is published:
6. Distribute your blog posts. You can write the most brilliant blog post the nonprofit world has ever seen, but if you don't share it, you'll miss many potential readers.
Start by sharing your post on social media. Go where your audience is already spending time – and use your time wisely. If your audience generally isn't on Snapchat, you probably don't need to create special content for that channel.
In addition to sharing the link to your blog post, consider making simple multimedia content around it, too. You could create an image featuring a quote from the post to share on Instagram, for example, or record a simple video interview through Skype or another video call platform.
"YouTube is a really great way to reach people who are searching for your topic," says Huyse.
You can also include your best blog content in a weekly or monthly newsletter for your subscribers.
7. Recycle "evergreen" content. You put a lot of effort into your blog post — don't just let it languish in your archives after you've only shared it once. If your post is a big hit when you share it, pop it into your content calendar or social media calendar as a reminder to circulate it again, if it's not time-sensitive. Evergreen content can include how-tos, general information about research or your nonprofit, profiles, and more.
Looking for more ways to optimize your nonprofit blog? We work with members of our Connect Network to develop engaging content around medical research. Get in touch to learn more about getting involved.
