When the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act passed in 2009, Community Services Consortium needed to a way to let local nonprofits and the community know about the programs and services they were implementing with Federal Stimulus funds. They had no budget, minimal staff time, and little technical knowledge, but they did have a staff member who regularly wrote news articles and press releases for the agency.
The solution: I created a free blog on Blogger, customized it, and then trained the staff to cut and paste their articles and news stories into the blog template. The real time-saver is the creation of the eNewsletter–it’s completely automated! The eNewsletter template was created in MailChimp, a free email service provider, and uses the blog’s RSS feed to automatically generate an electronic newsletter each week and month. Staff members are not spending hours each month laboring over a newsletter template, managing email subscribers, or assembling content–all the work is done once, when an article is written up and then published to the blog, and that’s it! Email subscribers receive a formatted eNewsletter in their inbox with all the stories and articles published on the blog that week.
If you’d like more information about how I can implement a similar solution for your time-strapped nonprofit, get in touch with me here.
