4 Nonprofit Marketing Mavens Offer Advice to Socialactions.com

I recently asked 4 nonprofit marketing mavens and bloggers (Katya Andresen, Kivi Leroux Miller, Nancy Schwartz and Nedra Weinreich) if they would take a look at socialactions.com and share their tips for how Social Actions can communicate and market their mission more effectively. I hope you'll take a look through their tips (I bet they'll apply to your site too), and add your own ideas in the comments.

In her blog post, Taking Social Actions, Nedra Weinreich offers 6 insights:
1. The focus needs to be centered on taking action.
2. Nowhere do I see anything about the specific issues I care about.
3. The home page is also missing the heart and emotion of why people come in the first place.
4. Even when I select the link that says "I would like to...Find ways to take action," I am confronted with four text-based choices that are still not entirely clear for the person who is just looking for how to help stray cats.
5. Help your users continue to use and spread the word about Social Actions once they have been impressed by the range of action options for their cause.
6. And finally, focus on your mission and whom you are serving.

In her post, Shouldn't It Be Easier to Act via Social Actions? -- Website Audit, Nancy Schwartz suggests 7 tips:
1. Use clear, consistent and accessible messaging so I stay focused, not confused.
2. Focus messaging, and the home page, on action opportunities.
3. Feature a profile w/photo of folks who have found their dream action op.
4. Give me a choice of action and/or issue arena front and center on the home page.
5. Make finding the right action clearer and easier.
6. Tell me where I am in the site, wherever I am, so I can easily get to the next place I want to be. And let me browse, please.
7. Keep me interested with more graphics and photos, less text.

Kivi Leroux Miller emailed me her thoughts:

The Social Actions home page suffers from the same problem that plagues many nonprofit websites: it’s too focused on the organization and the tools and not focused enough on the users and the benefits. I guess there is some utility in having all these various social action sites combined into one, but the point is I shouldn’t have to guess at the why this is such a good idea. It should be crystal clear to me as a potential user when I hit the home page why this site is going to be so helpful to me. Right now, it’s too “Inside Baseball” – or rather “Inside NpTech.”

So how can you make a site like this more user-oriented? With lots of examples (made-up ones are OK) and testimonials (must be real). Show me how this works and why I should be using this site. What do I personally get out of it as a user that I can’t get elsewhere? Include a photo of a person with an explanation of what that person was able to do on the site, why it’s so great, and what benefits she got out of it – all in plain English. In the phrase “Our mashup aggregates actionable opportunities from 19 social action platforms” the only plain English words are “our,” “from,” and “19.” Try to get away from the tech jargon as much as possible on the pages that are meant for individual users.

Finally, Katya Andresen shared three suggestions via email:

1. Turn the model inside out. People don’t go to portals shopping for an “action” to take. They go to places where like-minded people congregate online. SA should not be a portal but rather shift to a far more distributed strategy, with aggregated opportunities for action by theme made available to communities who care about those themes in other places online. We learned this lesson at NFG [Network for Good] – we have a portal but we spend much more time and energy enabling people to give anywhere they want online.

2. Fix the home page. There are so many actions, but it’s not clear what an action is. If I get there and I want to do something for pets, I don’t know where to start. The search should work better with this kind of thematic browsing made possible.

3. The UI is very flawed on IE6. For example, when I click on actions I get this:

A big thanks to Katya, Kivi, Nancy and Nedra for sharing their nonprofit marketing wisdom! I hope you'll add your thoughts in the comments, and give these nonprofit marketing mavens' blogs a click.