blogging to advance your core mission

Do you think your organization needs a blog? Or is it just a "someday" thing -- a back-burner item that you feel just has to wait until you can get more on track with fulfilling your mission, becoming better known and better respected, building your donor base, getting the press to cover you, and driving attendance to your events?

And what, exactly, is it that you think blogs do?

Many organizations that would benefit from establishing and maintaining a blog are "putting it off" because they think of blogging as an "extra," an additional, unnecessary piece of PR fluff that will take staff time away from the real, serious matters that are central to their mission.

A blog isn't a bell or a whistle. A blog is a powerful, easily hefted tool that can achieve several goals at once. They are also cheap, easy, and incredibly low-tech.
This recent article in NPTech News (that's nonprofit technology news for the uninitiated) spells out very clearly what the benefits of organizational blogging are.

My favorites:

1. Search engine optimization

Hosting a blog on your site can rapidly and vastly improve your search engine results. Why? Because Google (and other search engines) prize fresh content. Updating a blog takes almost zero technical skill and merely a basic business-writing level competency. For that, and ten minutes a day, you can greatly improve your page rank.

2. Expert in the Field

Don't just be a children's theater. Be an expert on children's theater. Don't just be an art gallery. Be a resource for the artist community. Don't just sell your art online. Teach others about the process of creating art, about color theory, about outsider art. It's not marketing - it's sharing. The marketing is secondary, accidental -- and far more effective because of that.

3. Awareness

Be your own media source. Cover yourself, your mission, your services -- relentlessly. Feature your volunteers, your sponsors, your staff, your members as much as humanly possible. Do all this in your own distinctive, human voice.

4. Events

Spend less on postage. Annoy your newsletter subscribers less. Maintain an interesting blog, with fresh content regularly served, and people will willingly visit and read your news and information. Hard to believe, I know, but it's true.

5. Fundraising

Online donation is rising every year, and not by a little. Nonprofits of all sizes, missions, and demographics have successfully used "charity badges" to make it as easy as one or two clicks for supporters to donate online. Each blog post gives your readers a compelling reason to hit that Donate Now! button, and hit it hard.

...and that's only five out of the ten cited in the article.

Do I think it's a bit of headline-crafting hyperbole to say that "Every organization MUST have a blog?" Sure.

But I also think that organizations would be harder pressed to make the case for not having a blog than for having one.

For every core objective you have in your communications plan, there is a way that blogging can advance that objective.