At the Toronto Cause Marketers Meetup this week, Aurelia Dalinda and Erin Elliott shared Evergreen’s blogging experience to date. With limited time and resources, the decision to start a blog was made carefully and strategically. Today, Evergreen has two successful blogs in place: the local Brick Works blog as well as a national Evergreen blog. These are my notes from the case study event.
Launching the Toronto-oriented Brick Works blog in 2008 made good strategic sense. Evergreen had communities that needed inspiration, stories to be told, and digital properties, such as photos, at their disposal. The Brick Works story was unfolding weekly and already required a significant amount of information sharing and updates. A blog would facilitate the sharing of links/news and is relatively light on production. A year after launching the Brick Works blog, Evergreen built upon their success by launching a national blog in support of their many other programs and activities.
Evergreen’s innovative approach incorporated the following elements and strategies and has become a recipe for success:
- Opt-in participation: a call was made for contributors, capitalizing on interested staff
- They presented blogging as a professional development opportunity; building writing skills and learning how to post content
- They emphasized making it fun and a point of pride
- Efficiency: content is reused and recycled, for example, in their newsletter
Today, with zero budget, the Evergreen ‘blog squad’ has 17 contributing members regularly delivering fresh, relevant content about making our cities more livable. Blogging has been a way to increase the impact and reach of the stories they already had.
Some additional lessons I picked up from the Evergreen experience:
- Put guidelines and parameters in place to protect the space/message.
- Provide editorial support/review to keep posts timely and relevant. Evergreen uses bi-weekly meetings.
- Your blog is an opportunity to educate and engage staff and build community.
- Take advantage of every opportunity to leverage/promote your blog, such as distributing content via your newsletter, website, Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Does your nonprofit have a blog? Are you considering blogging? How would a blog fit into your marketing strategy and social media plan? What assets do you have at your disposal?
Related Resources
10 Ways Nonprofits Can Use Blogs
