Sunday, August 15, 2010

A Creative Way to Nurture a Blog


This month Kivi LeRoux Miller is hosting the Nonprofit Blog Carnival at her blog – The Nonprofit Marketing Guide. The theme is “Creative Ideas You Can Make Your Own.” This is a great topic and I can’t wait to see the ideas in the roundup post at the end of the month. Here is my idea that you can make your own.

I love blogging and always recommend starting a blog in my social media workshops for nonprofits. I am fully prepared for the looks which say “Go on to the next topic, I don’t have time for that” or “I don’t have enough to write about to have a blog.” Well here is a simple painless way to have a blog and keep it current and interesting.

Marion’s simple recipe for posting up to 7 times a month:
1 post: Executive Director writes on “industry” news and trends and advocacy issues related to your mission. Use a graphic to compliment the article. You can search a word or phrase in the Creative Commons section on Flickr for a free photo or graphic.


1 post: Program Director writes about a program event or just about what’s happening in one of your programs. Make sure you include a picture – anecdotal articles on your blog really contribute to telling your story.

1 post: Development Director writes an article related to fundraising –about a current campaign, an event or whatever is relevant. Compliment with a picture or graphic.

Wordless Wednesday - - This is popular with the mommy bloggers. Every Wednesday post a picture with a caption – no article necessary. This sort of approach – having a predictable pattern will cause people to come back on a regular basis.

So there you have it. This is an easy, painless way to have an active and varied blog and all you need is three people willing to write one article a month to make it happen. At this point in my workshops I always have some people making copious notes and some people looking at me thinking about it. I always hope some of them are thinking blogging isn’t such an off the wall idea anymore.

Think about it – and be creative in how you can make it happen!