nonprofits discovering and conquering pinterest

I like Pinterest (social network). I have two accounts, one for me and one for my charity, because I think is perfect to communicate the mission visually.

In my country very few people use it so far. For now it is easier to find English-speaking fans, so my pins include a bilingual description.

I have used this site for two weeks. Now in March I shall see an interesting impact with the start of classes in colleges and universities. It is therefore important to haveinteresting and varied boards. Who would want to follow a charity that hopefully is less than 20 pins?

in my work I have many responsibilities. For it does not seem logical to add another social network that is not even more important in my country. But certainly when Pinterest start the Spanish version will be very popular here (and surely this will happen in 2012) and then the NGO will be well positioned.

To communicate the work of a nonprofit organization is more impressive to do it with pictures rather than words. For the current generation visual appearance is very important for it everyday.

On the side of the followers, I think they may find valuable things like photos with an artistic touch on the work of volunteers, old and new posters of our campaigns,  great pictures of our fundraising activities, etc.

The experience of your charity in Pinterest may be a failure or at least have a very low profile if you do not consider that as any social network, listen to the voice of others is important and you should always post thinking interact with your followers.

Google panda, a very good friend of a charity

Dear charities / nonprofit, last year Google change the algorithm of search, so several websites had a negative impact. You just not need to have a good website in general, need to be also in particular too. Now weak posts impact your website:

• Do you have very short post (under 200 words)? Edit now
• Do you have post with very low visits? Improve it or delete it.
• Do you have several post which are quite similar? Edit now
• Did you copy post from a partner website? Edit now. You can quote text, but try that 80% of your post is original.

I also have another important challenge about create content:

• Twice a month, you will post one testimony of a person impacted with your charity. Perhaps you can use the same questions, but you will get a story with a personnel flavour.
• You will promote each story on Twitter, Facebook and email.
•  Be relevant for your donors / volunteers / advocates. That every publication has a photo of the person, a headline informative and attractive. That the text is between 200 and 500 words in which people can read details about how “a person’s life was improved thanks to our help.”
• Good redaction. Check the spelling, use simple phrases, a 3/5 phrases each paragraph, ask another person to read the post before publish.
• Light images / pages. Your image has more than 100kb, consider saving in lower quality or size. Try that all photos of the same page do not exceed 500kb.

So, having original articles that are of interest to our loyal audience, well written and shared contexts in our social networks, you should see better results on Google.

Have increased the number of visits and an increase in the number of messages you have received from your contact form on the website will be the proof that we have taken a step forward.

Mobile and WordPress in 2012

If your website don’t have a good template for mobiles, do something now. Smartphones are growing fast and is important to be friendly with small screens.

Different CMS have easy solutions. In WordPress I used “WordPress Mobile Pack” plugin, but because created double pages, something that is not good for Google I change. Now I’m using WPtouch and is working fine. Is free and just need to activate.

Also will be helpful to have an application in Itunes and Android Market, but will be appropriate for your organization? Do you will get more donation / volunteers / advocates with this?. It depend of the kind of people wich you appeal, but If you can afford, do it,

How are your numbers in Google Analytics? You get similar numbers in avg. time on site and pages/visit between mobiles visits and the others.

Tell me your experience.

Read more

• 5 Non-Profit iPhone Apps You Should Know About  (July 2010 / Mashable)
• How nonprofit supporters are using their smartphones (April 2011 / Socialbrite)
• Building mobile applications for social good (December 2011 / Socialbrite)
• Top Four Mobile Apps for Your Fundraising Efforts (Fundraising Insight)