As the year comes to a close, I wanted to share my reflections on what 2013 has meant for my business, along with my plans for 2014.
2013: developing a community
Early in 2013 I was inspired to build an online resource and community for my clients, friends and nonprofit communicators in general. This idea was several years in the making, but it really took shape in my mind in the early months of 2013. By the end February, I had the basics of a vision and plan, and by April 30, I launched the Nonprofit MarCommunity.
Though the site is not yet eight months old at the time of writing, the response to the site has already been amazing:
- I regularly hear from readers that we are helping communicators with their daily roles; which means we are achieving our #1 goal.
- Our community of contributors, readers and participants is constantly growing. Right now, we have blog posts booked until the end of February!
- Another big part of developing our community is our monthly #NPMC Twitter chat which has also proven a big success and a helpful resource to community members.
As a result of this undertaking, 2013 has been a year of significant learning for me in a number of areas:
- Blogging. I had been blogging here at the moflow blog since 2010. But the Nonprofit MarCommunity really took my blogging experience to a new level.
- Content marketing. It’s definitely more than a buzz word to me, and the emerging insights and best practices around content marketing have been a big influence on me.
- Twitter chats. Having only participated in my first Twitter chat in 2012, learning to facilitate one less than a year later was exciting and intense!
- The role of a managing editor. I’ve been in this role before, but it had been a while. Managing a blog that publishes twice weekly, with a focus on guest bloggers, has been a huge lesson and very rewarding.
- New social networks. I’ve been on LinkedIn and Twitter for a number of years, but finally joined Facebook (yes, this year!), Google+ and experimented with and learned about sites like Quora, Scoopit and Listly.
- Free tools. I’ve been amazed by the wealth of free tools available to help me get the job done, three favourites being Mail Chimp for email marketing, PicMonkey for photo editing and Compfight to search for images.
Best of all, establishing this platform has meant an amazing number of new connections, relationships and opportunities that I would never have otherwise accessed. Not to mention the vast amount of learning directly from guest bloggers and community members!
2014: developing the business
In 2013 I’ve also spent considerable time learning about building an online business as well as ways to deliver training and consulting services online. This is important, because my ongoing dedication to the Nonprofit MarCommunity means that I have to think about new ways of doing things.
So, while I continue to enjoy working directly with clients, in 2014 I’ll be expanding the ways I serve customers to include online courses. I’m deep into the process of developing my first course – on writing nonprofit websites – which I’ll be launching in the New Year.
This foray into online teaching is somewhat of an experiment and will help me to decide how far I go with this business model. If it goes well, I’d like to build a suite of courses, including nonprofit blogging and nonprofit speechwriting. I’d love to hear your feedback on these topics and other thoughts or ideas in the comments!
I’ll also be expanding the free information I provide to include more speaking, webinars and the launch of a new podcast.
2013 has really been an incredible year. And I’m very much looking forward to testing out new approaches in 2014 for the potential they might bring.
Thank you to everyone who has supported my work this year. I appreciate every insight, idea and helping hand. Happy holidays and all the best for 2014!
