Kivi Leroux Miller’s list of recommended copywriters & consultants that work well with nonprofits is a great starting point for organizations looking for help articulating their missions online or in print. Hiring a copywriter who understands the language of nonprofits and how to reach your unique audiences can really make a difference in a new website’s success. A well-designed and user-friendly nonprofit website is only half the battle, but content is the star of your website.

The next time your organization is redesigning your website, don’t skimp on the copy and try to do it in-house, hire a professional! It may even increase the odds that you’ll hit your target launch date–your professional copywriter won’t be too busy planning your annual fundraiser to work on writing copy for the new website.

I provided some basic info on registering a domain name, selecting and setting up web hosting, and using WordPress to get a website up and running quickly and on a small budget. We also talked about some simple SEO strategies that you can implement on your website immediately. Hopefully, I’ve made the topic a little less scary.

Thanks to the Oregon School of Massage for this wonderful write-up and for collecting a few responses from participants:

“She was very approachable & knowledgeable and great about answering specific questions. I appreciated the specific recommendations she had about WordPress. For people new to websites there were good specifics such as where to get a host, domain name, etc. Her visuals were good in that she had screenshots of what she was talking about.”

“It was very nice to have some ideas about how to set up your own site using the suggestions that she had. I think that many people were also pleased that they could pay her once and then make changes as they chose.”

Your questions are welcome, just put them in the comments section.

GettingAttention.org makes a successful transition to WordPress! The blog published by nonprofit marketing guru Nancy Schwartz of Nancy Schwartz & Co., launched on its new WordPress set up last week.  The blog has been published for 5 years on Typepad, and the goal of this project was to disrupt readers as little as possible, so the new blog looks identical to the old one.  This kind of project presents its own challenges and the result is that my work should be invisible to blog readers–if I did my job, readers won’t notice the change at all.

I developed the website and blog using the latest version of DIY’s Thesis Theme for WordPress. It’s a solid theme that has quite a few features that make it worthwhile.

Portfolio

I did image production for the donate block on the sidebar as well as modifications in the CSS to change headline and link colors, search box positioning, replaced the logo with the new version and made other minor changes. I’m proud of the final result, and prouder still to have the opportunity to work with such an excellent organization. Check it out yourself at Bitch Media.

I’m thrilled to be working with Nancy Schwartz, of Nancy Schwartz and Company and publisher at GettingAttention.org on several web development projects. Nancy’s been blogging on Typepad for several years, but is eager to make the leap to WordPress because it will be much easier to for her staff to update and to create new pages for product launches. We’re using the Thesis theme for the new blog and I’m enjoying working with it, although figuring out how to use the custom functions and hooks is a bit of a challenge.
Nancy Schwartz publishes the excellent Nonprofit Tagline Report every year, it’s a great reference, of course, but it’s also a good read. My favorite is the list of taglines at the end of the report–usually there are some great examples of how much help nonprofits need in this particular area.

Here are a couple from last year’s tagline report that, honestly, make me very glad I’m no longer required to sit through the kinds of meetings that produce gems like these:

Providing bicycles to improve access to healthcare, education and income generation opportunities.

To do that which otherwise would not be timely done.

Finding ‘fur-ever’ homes for the cats and kittens of Las Vegas.

Now, I didn’t include any names above because it’s not my intention to call anyone out–after all the whole point of the tagline report is to help nonprofits write better taglines, and what better way to learn than to see examples of what not to do.

You can download Nancy’s 2009 Nonprofit Tagline Report at GettingAttention.org.

The site also includes email capture for their eNewsletter prominently throughout the site and the ability to sell sidebar advertising. Announcements made on the store’s Facebook fan page appear on the site’s home page as well as scrolling images of their products and projects.

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