Category Archives: Associations/Non-profits

New Year’s Resolutions for SEO, Part 1

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Periodic Guide to SEO

Are you one for New Year’s resolutions? I’m not usually. But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about search engine optimization (SEO), and I have some suggestions for webmasters or marketers who aren’t sure whether their website is well optimized. Here are 12 suggestions that you can use to make your website more attractive to search engines – not because there are exactly 12 actions that will ensure your website will be found and recommended by search engines, but because there are 12 months in the year. Continue reading →

What You Can Learn from Nerdy Science Geeks

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This video has been making some rounds this week, and I think it’s worth sharing. I saw it first on the Sched events blog, whose author called it “simply awesome and one of the most interesting promotional videos I’ve come across in quite some time.”

I watched it; I liked it; I re-shared it on Twitter, and then other people started chiming in that they also had seen this video and loved it and could not stop watching it.

I’m going to be honest. Their praise went way beyond what I thought when I first saw this vid. Continue reading →

10 story ideas for your organization’s blog

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I wrote yesterday about the need to have a content plan in place for your blog or website, including either a formal editorial calendar or at least a list of article topics that you plan to write about. This both helps keep you focused on your site’s mission and gives you a jumping-off point when it’s time to publish a new article. You don’t necessarily have to start from scratch and come up with a new idea every time you sit down to write.

If you don’t have that list – or if, as happened to me, you misplace it – I said you were pretty much out of luck; there was nothing I could do for you.

I’ve changed my mind. If it’s time to get some new content out on your organization’s blog, but you just don’t have any ideas, here are 10 story suggestions – topics you should always be able to draw on to write something useful and compelling for your members and supporters: Continue reading →

Do you really know your audience?

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I recently read a report on social gaming, put together by eMarketer, that includes this delightful statistic: More than 40% of casual social gamers are age 50 or older.

Does that surprise you? It probably shouldn’t. I know lots of people in that age group, and I see many of them playing games on smartphones and on Facebook — so many that I’m constantly hiding those posts from my Facebook news feed. Not long ago, during a long weekend at a friend’s beach house, I realized at one point that four people — three of them adults over 50 – were sitting near each other, each separately playing Angry Birds on whatever device they had available. Continue reading →

ASAE Technology Conference: Mobile wisdom

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I’m attending my first-ever ASAE Technology Conference, with association technology professionals from all over the country (and maybe beyond). Day 1 of 2 is behind me, and I walked away from it with some interesting observations and great insights — most of them regarding mobile devices and information delivery.

I’m not going to try to wrap a lot of wisdom around this information because I’m running on fumes right now. But here are some of the best tidbits I scribbled in my notebook (yes, pen and paper at a tech conference; really). Continue reading →

3 Questions to Answer Before Building a Mobile App

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About a week ago, I checked in on my friend Kiki L’italien’s newly redesigned blog and saw a sweet little hand-drawn cartoon with just a one-sentence post: “Turn this photo into a blog post.” The drawing showed a woman balancing two things in her two hands: “existing budget” and “mobile app.”

balance mobile needs with existing budget

Posted with permission from Kiki L’italien

I took this as a challenge to fellow bloggers to consider this topic and weigh in via their own blogs. Since I’d been thinking for a while about starting a blog, this was my call to action: Get this blog started, and answer Kiki’s challenge. As it turns out, I went back to Kiki’s blog a few days ago and found that the one-sentence “challenge” had been removed, and a short post on the subject of mobile apps had replaced it; what I had thought was Kiki’s call-to-action to other bloggers was, in fact, a note to herself. But by then, it was too late to stop me. So here are my thoughts on the same topic.

Continue reading →