Did you know that you can use your blog and article posts to drive donations, volunteer interest, and community support? All you need is an easy-to-use content management solution and the three steps below!

Does your web writing encourage donation?

Write about the cause, not the nonprofit.

Your nonprofit is awesome. I know it, you know it and you want the world to know it.

One problem: Readers don’t care about the organization. They care about the cause. Promoting your organization’s specific passion is much more engaging for readers. Donors and volunteers want to know one thing: What’s in it for my cause?

How to Write About the Cause:
Example: Let’s say your  nonprofit collects toys for underprivileged children. You would write about the effect that you have made on the cause, such as how the Jones’ family reacted when you delivered the gifts. You’ll also be blogging about the different toy-donation collection locations you’ve set up, examples of toys that can be donated, and which neighborhoods you were going to distribute toys to.

Encourage action in every article

Believe it or not, people will not make the connection between an informative post about your cause and the fact that you need donations or volunteers. That is why you need to include a “call-to-action” in the article that tells your readers exactly what they can do to help.

How to Encourage Action:
An easy way to incorporate action is to use the 3i (inform, inspire, impact) article structure, a structure I developed for issue articles on Yourpbc.org.

• Inform: Educate the reader by informing them about the cause
• Inspire: Show readers that progress has been made on the issue
• Impact: Show them how they can impact the cause (by donating or volunteering!)

Keep your posts short!

Social media and content sharing sites like Facebook and Twitter have become popular because they encourage succinct and timely information. This “short and instant” phenomenon has also influenced the way people like to read blogs and articles online. The best  way to ensure site visitors will read your blog, news, and press articles is to keep them short, current and relevant.

How to Keep Posts Short:
Always strive to keep posts between 500 to 600 words maximum. This will ensure your readers won’t get afflicted with “book-mark-it-for-later” syndrome – e.g. bookmarking a long article to read later, only to have it collect dust along with everything else that’s too long to read. Also, use bullets and section headers to break up blocks of text, it helps give the appearance that an article is shorter than it is.

Posting articles can be a powerful way to attract and preserve supporters, donors, and volunteers.  Posting information frequently using an easy-to-use content management system will help your organization succeed both online and offline.