 Welcome everybody to another episode of the nonprofit show. We are so excited to have Ann McCauley Lopez back with us to talk about blogging best practices. And this is one of those hidden gems and things that I think we really need to be talking more and more about with our nonprofits and our websites. So we're really, really excited to have Ann back with us today as a nonprofit thought leader so we can figure out if we're doing this right, if we should be doing it, how to do it, all a million questions we have. So before we get going, I wanna make sure that we meet, if we haven't met, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. My interpret co-host, Jared Ransom, the nonprofit nerd is off today and she'll be rejoining us shortly. Again, we wanna thank all of our presenting sponsors who are with us day in and day out, Blue Moran, American Nonprofit Academy, fundraising academy, nonprofit nerd, your part-time controller, staffing boutique and nonprofit thought leader. Okay, Ann McCauley Lopez, you are a nonprofit thought leader. Indeed, you've been on with us before talking about websites, talking about content and really putting the two together. So it's not just a function of being a pretty picture but having some meat and potatoes on our plate. So thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for having me back. It's great to see you. Well, we're really excited about this and I wanna dig into the concept of something that we talk about, but we don't talk about it. And when the nonprofit sector, you're seeing kind of start by defining your target audience. And I'm like, wait, what? Can't everybody donate to us? What are you saying here before you freak me out? Most of the time for nonprofits, I think that is the call to action. In these projects that I've been working on with my partner web designer, the first question we ask in our meeting is who's your target audience and what's our call to action? I feel like I go to sleep saying that, I wake up saying that, but it really is, we really want to think about that. The reason for that is the way web design is right now is that we're really providing a simple message. So that users when they visit the site know exactly what you want them to do. If you're doing a volunteer push, then maybe your big button on that front page at the top is volunteers needed or apply to be a volunteer. If you're expanding your staff, maybe your focus is apply here. Whatever it is, or if you're promoting a program or an initiative and you're looking for people to serve or connections, whatever it is, they get one thing. So for example, the websites that I'm working on, one's a startup and one is kind of reigniting their mission. So both of course are gonna have big donate buttons and then we're also going to have a call to action to subscribe to their email list. If you wanna build that, we wanna reach the community of course, nonprofits or grassroots efforts a lot of times and local. So we want to give people a big bright button of who are we talking to? So it will be, it will a lot of times be your donors, but it's important to think about if there are other initiatives or maybe other phases of a website project, you might wanna change up the website throughout the year. Who knows? Yeah, I think that's a great way to think about this too because I think that a lot of times, our needs obviously change according to what our mission vision and values are and we have different times of the year. And I'm interested in that kind of reframing it or we're changing your mindset about what is it that you really need to engage on? And if you think of it that way, it probably changes website design. And maybe frequently it's also where, having a good partner for the website, website isn't one and done. I heard someone say just a couple of weeks ago, they said, you know, it's a living, breathing thing. Let it change, change it. Right, change. And I thought, wow, you know, for your people who visit your website often, we love seeing, oh, they need volunteers. Oh, they have this project going on, this initiative. Oh, they want donations for this particular initiative. We love seeing, okay, yeah, I'll hit that button. Right. We know you're working behind the scenes as well. So I think with a good partner, you can, you can get that done fairly easily. So when we talk about, and let's call it the purpose of the website, if you will, when you're talking about that, can you give us an idea of what that frequency change might be like, is this like something every quarter or is it crisis or is it once a year? Is it seasonal? Is it all of the above? Because it seems to me, we need to be planning this out too. Unless there's a crisis. That you have a, you know, a hurricane that befalls your natural catastrophe, I get that. But I mean, just the seasonality of things, what does that look like for you? I would think maybe it's quarterly. I think in terms of full website overhaul and maybe rebranding, like updating a logo and colors to be more modern or more of today, might be, I always say every couple of years, two to three years for sure, at least have it looked at to say, okay, what are the trends and websites? What are other nonprofits doing? What is our call to action? And really, when I say what's the purpose of the website, it came up, I was doing a project for a for-profit. And they said, you know, we're not selling anything on our website. And I said, who's not selling anything on their website? What they were, they really were selling, but they weren't selling items. They were selling, hey, we're a small and mighty company. We do construction work for these high-end businesses. We go behind security that we can't even talk about. All our people pass through that security check and are able to work at these high-end places in high security areas. That's what we were selling. But I get it, they're not selling. We do construction in this city. That's not what they're doing. The purpose is to say, we're amazing. Yes, partner with us. Yes, we're the people you hire if you're looking at a list of vendors. So in that sense, it's okay, what's the purpose? So it kind of goes hand-in-hand with target market, right? So if it's a, as a startup nonprofit and as kind of a nonprofit, and I know a lot of us are doing that, we're rebuilding post-pandemic. Maybe it's a message about, here's what we're doing post-pandemic. Here's the COVID protocols. Maybe that's what people are asking about because you need people in your facility to work, to volunteer. I don't know. Maybe it is donate, but really honing down, yes, we wanna do all the things, and yes, we can place those things, but what's that top priority? And then kind of tear it down. So donations and then volunteers and then telling about our latest initiative or something like that where we're kind of diving into what's the plan for the year and going, okay, and how do we do this digitally? How do we do this online as well to get our message across? You know, I like that because I think we forget that people are watching us. I mean, you know, clients that might wanna reach out to us. You know, funders of course, but you know, grantors, there are awards staff. I mean, when people are looking for jobs, they're gonna go to a website and learn about that. People that might think about, you know, volunteering for board service or committee work, or as you mentioned, you know, showing up on a Saturday for three hours or whatever, it's really, I appreciate that you kind of reframed this for us because I don't think we think about that enough. It seems like it's always about the money. Yeah, yeah, and obviously, you know, a big part of it is, but there's also kind of let's sit back and kind of look at the website, some older websites I've seen have those big buttons everywhere. And I'm like, that's a lot. That's overwhelming. I wanna give money and volunteer. And you're doing a thing on Saturday. Oh, but next week you're collecting hats or whatever it is, you know, that's a lot. Yeah. So think of it, you know, think of it as someone who comes to your website. And that's hard. Like we're in the thick of it. Like I can't think about my website. When I sit down and look at my website, I just sit down and go, okay, I'm just visiting someone else's website. And that's weird. Like who does that? Right, right. No, you're right. And I appreciate you kind of forming that up. Now we're talking about best practices and we're talking about blogging and we're talking about content and all of these magical pieces that make our websites function and help us to communicate. But this kind of strikes terror in my heart. Don't put good content on a bad website. I don't want to scare everyone. There are some templates that I recognize for my very early days here doing, you know, having a writing business and partnering with web designers. There are some designs that are still hanging out there that are from the 1990s. I know who you are. I'm just kidding. I don't know who you are. There was also a period of time where we wanted a lot of videos or a lot of sliders across the top of our websites. And those are a little bit dated. So I don't want to put good content on a bad, I shouldn't say bad website. It just kind of flowed, the words flowed out Julia and I sent you my notes. Not really a bad website, but a website that hasn't been updated in a little while, right? Like we want to be a little more gentle about it because there are some styles that are outdated. We don't have content crowded home pages anymore. We like white space. We're minimalist now and that could change. We might have pop-up videos again, who knows. But if your website has those kind of older elements, it's good to talk to someone, at least understand what they could do maybe in the interim. Maybe there's some things they can do in the background and say, we're going to shut this off. We're going to redo this page, different things that maybe it's not a whole website overhaul but it makes it look a little bit more modern. So it's not that it's a bad website, but oh, I know what I was going to tell you. So changing the pages and adding blog posts, adding content or changing the words on the pages, Google loves that. And I know we've talked about that a little bit, but I feel like it's like a dirty little secret. Nobody talks about that, but making little changes like that along the way will help the site get attention. Again, it's a living, breathing thing. So don't just leave it there. You know, I like that and I'm guilty of this. Of course, I'm listening to you and I'm thinking, oh man. We all are, that's insane, we all are. But you know what? It also leads a conversation or in a question that when donors are looking at us and they're thinking about, are they going to invest with us or are they going to serve with us or lead clients to us or whatever. They're making opinions or forming opinions. If you want to use the harsher word, judgments. And it seems to me that if you do have maybe a more outmoded website, that communicates a lot about you. You might not be able to articulate it, but good design really can win over hearts and minds. And maybe that's what I'm hearing you say. I'm just projecting onto my own message. Yeah, no, no, I think that's it. And here's the thing too is like I've been in business for 12 years. So my website looks vastly different than it did when I started, but I had one, right? Like I'm sure American Nonprofit Academy had a different website when you started. Jared's website for the Raven Group had a different look and I've known her through the whole thing, you know? Yeah, yeah. So there's a saying about that, but it's basically don't look at what somebody's doing who's been in this for 10, 12, 15 years and go, oh my gosh, I need that website. No, like let's give yours a refresh and give it some of those modern elements and some content that will get the attention of Google, which I think kind of leads us to a couple of other items. I know we want to talk a little bit about PR and SEO and... Absolutely. So I do want to get back to that because what I heard you say, and I've heard you say this before, but I do want to revisit it, is that it's not just change for the aesthetics of it, it's change for SEO and that when you do add this, it's making a difference. Talk to us a little bit about that. Yeah, so anytime you make a change to your website, Google will pick up on it and it likes when websites are... It reads websites a certain way, so that website from the 1990s or even from five years ago, Google may not read it the way you think it's being read. It probably optimizes, so I don't want to be technical. Google Love, you get less Google Love on than older site, it's just the way it is. Google updates all the time, they just released an update recently and it's not that you have to update your website every time Google updates, I'm not saying that, but there are some technical elements behind the scenes where I think it's worth a conversation with a web designer to say, okay, how is Google looking in our website? Are we mobile friendly? And then let's take a look at our content because maybe some of it's older and give me archived or we rewrite some of it and re-release new content that's just updated from what we've done or maybe we create new content. And each of those pages that you're creating, whether it's a service page, a donor page, a volunteer page, a board page, updating board bios, that works too. But anytime we're doing that, it gets the attention of Google and Google scrapes back through your website to look for relevant content. The other thing is as you're working with professionals, ask them, what do you know about keywords? You probably don't, for smaller nonprofits, I will say this, you don't need full $10,000 keyword research. You just, you don't. What you can do is start learning about who are the people visiting your website, how are they finding your website and create content that answers their questions. And I'm huge on that. That's organic SEO. And you can do that fairly easily. It's what I do for my clients. It's all organic SEO, technical SEO. Yes, I have people, yes, I can refer. But I always feel like that's really far down the road and part of a really big, really expensive marketing plan that for nonprofits, probably not fiscally responsible, shall we say? That's the right word. It's not a good idea. You want your money to go to your mission. But doing, making some changes, adding some content, making sure people know where you are or what you're doing or who you're looking for. And updating all of that is a great way and a pretty simple way and cost efficient way to get the attention of the internet of Google. The love, I call it Google love without being typical. You know, I appreciate that because one of the things we had and I know you and I talked about this and Jared and I bring this up all the time, but there are 1.8 million registered nonprofits in our country. And so that's a lot of competition. So what you're talking about really does make a difference in the long run on so many levels. Another thing that you talk about and I really want to delve into this even more is repurposing content. You know, when we think about the structure of our website, the information that we have, we worked so hard to get this all done and then it sits there. You're saying not so fast, rethink about this. So what does that mean, repurposing content? Julia, actually you're the inspiration for this slide. I remember one of the first times I was on, you said, oh my gosh, I'm so overwhelmed. Now I need a content calendar and what if something changes? And I really thought about that and I tell folks now, I said, listen, let's do one article a month. And then the other articles, so we want to post probably twice a month on a website is typically two to four times. I feel like two is super manageable for busy folks and you kind of hand it off or I or writer or whatever it is, that's more manageable. So maybe you have a budget and you say, okay, professional. You write one article and this is kind of what we want it to be about. And then the second one can be from your staff or from you or from someone in the community. And that can be used, either one or both can be used in a newsletter. You can post a picture on social media and you've got it on your website. So you get the Google love and you can call someone like me to say, here's the story. Can you throw some keywords in there? Can we get a little Google love for it? But not everything needs that SEO, that search engine optimization, especially for a nonprofit, we want to tell stories. So have one that maybe is a little bit more SEO focused but then on the other side is let's use a news, either use an old newsletter article and put it on the website or take something on the website and use it in your newsletter. So you're not creating new content all the time because that's overwhelming. Like that's a whole job. And yeah, it is. And it seems like too that, we do all this work and then it literally sits there and yet we're pressured to be active on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter. It just seems to me that if we can take, I love your idea, two good pieces and then funnel our promotions about that, about those two pieces. I mean, is that enough in a month to kind of pull that off for you? I think so. Yeah, I mean, it kind of depends on your capacity. So that's where I say, and that's where I was inspired, you were like, oh my gosh, I'm so overwhelmed. I'm like, okay, well then, you come up with a calendar, even the simple calendar that says, here's our campaigns that we have. Here's our big fundraising times of year, fiscal year ends, the end of June. So here's what our push for the beginning of our fiscal year is. And so when it comes to July, a lot of food banks don't have food. I always go back to food banks because it's kind of a simple, and I know it and all of that. So you do a July push. So then you go back in the archive and you go, what did we do last July? Or who did we help last July? Let's talk to them. Let's post some pictures from last year and we've got that content already and we pull it through from 2021 and we use it for 2022. So it's thinking about all the pieces of the puzzle and saying, okay, kind of strategically, where do we wanna put these for the coming year? And then we also allow for that space to say, okay, we might have another article. We have an intern for the summer. Maybe they can write some content for us that we can post for the next however many months or however it works for your staffing. Or hiring a writer to write some of it and maybe coach you through, here's how you kind of, I call it zhuzhig, make it pretty. Here's how you make it pretty and Google friendly and fun and informative and telling a story. So what I hear you saying then is that you could actually within your team or your team of volunteers or whatever, craft some things and then send it off to, in the olden days, we would use the word editor, but somebody would be more technical in inserting those keywords or lightening the load. Is that right? That's correct. So for example, I have a client and they are a placement agency. So they are a for profit, but this model I think can be applied in nonprofits. They send out, they place travel nurses and other medical professionals. They send basically like the same five to seven questions out to folks for an interview. And I don't know how they do it internally. Maybe they do a call out or they say, hey, can we share your story kind of a thing? But they love stories from out in the field because they have folks in the inner city. We did an article for a guy in New York City during COVID who was a physician's assistant. We just did one for a medical, medical technologist, a med tech. So they email, we email their provider, their nurse and say, hey, here's the seven questions. They email it back. And from there, I create a story and I say, oh, hey, thanks for sitting down with me interviewing me with me. We had a chance to sit down with so-and-so. Are we really sitting down with them? No, everybody knows that, it's okay. But we make it like, okay, now we've got an interview like we're doing right here and it's just kind of like a script. And super simple, like an assistant or a VA virtual assistant can send out those questions and bring it back and send it over to somebody like me or to me and we can make it pretty and that could be a piece for the website. So I think it's getting creative and knowing that there are some resources in different ways that we can get creative to get that content. Yeah, I love formalizing that too. Putting it into a structure that you can count on, you can administrate. It's a great kind of interface getting somebody's first-person comments. I love, love, love that approach. And I feel like it's easy to hand off. Like if you've got a marketing manager or you have the luxury of that or if it's just the person who answers the phones or your virtual assistant and they go on to get you can hand it off to someone else, it's not that hard. If you've done one of these podcasts with Julie and Jared, put that on your website and do a little paragraph about what you talked about Thank you, I appreciate that. And that is something that we try and encourage with all our guests because it is good content and it's third-party content. So yeah, I appreciate you saying that. Before we let you go is we don't have that much time left but you've been talking about SEO and the Google love and I get that and I appreciate it. But I wanna know how this becomes part of your PR strategy because it seems to me it's like tech on one side and PR in another and never the two shall meet. But you're saying that's not the case. Yes, so what we can do is when we're talking about what are the, what is the news that we're putting on the website? What are those articles we're putting on the website? We can also use those articles as PR or if you've put out a press release we can edit it to have those keywords in it that we want or to tell the story that we want to really put the spotlight on your nonprofit. So if you kind of think of it as, okay this isn't just a press release that's going to the news people this is also going to go on the website. Even simply taking that press release and putting it on the website is great because it adds another page of content and it has news about your organization and you can always put links into other articles or when it says volunteers link that to your volunteer page and things like that so that you can get that SEO. Don't let just like your website is a living breathing thing don't let that press release just kind of sit out there. Yes, you're working your network and contacting your media folks but you can also make it work online as well. I like that a lot especially with the changing face of not only public relations but the media you never know where another media outlet might be doing research on a potential story and go to those archive pages or press pages media pages whatever you want to call it and do some of that research or get that information because I think to your point too you want to advance the story and not have somebody tell your story and then maybe get it wrong. Exactly. I mean that's frightening. If you can do this sort of thing up front in the long run you're protecting yourself wouldn't you say? Yes, yes. And it's kind of I feel like we can put you can put an editorial calendar together with just the high points. What's going to happen this year and where do we have space? Do we need to do something in August? I don't know November whatever it is and then saying okay we can make an announcement because we're gonna do this event so that it all flows together and like what you're posting on social is from your website and it's also a press release and it's also optimized for search engines and Google love like it kind of it's it's own ecosystem. Appearing on here I talk about blogging because that's what I do. I could talk about sports but that's not gonna get me anywhere in the business and not very far either. You know it's interesting to do and when I talk to you I'm always fascinated at how there's an arc to all of this work. It's not a one-and-done thing that as you mentioned it earlier it's the PR aspect but it's really almost like continuity and if you can get into the habit of doing some of these things you're gonna have a more robust appearance but it all starts with your action, right? Exactly and I think it's you know what's the culture of the organization? I wish Jared were here. She could talk to us about that too is how do you bring that culture of share the stories of the people that you're working with especially as the organization gets bigger. It's still keeping that focus of hey, we've got this calendar here so you send the news to and that sort of a thing even if it's an outside person who's the point person to get that over to the marketing professional and just not siloing, right? We talk about silos in corporate world so that everybody understands listen this is what we're focused on this month or this quarter so it can all like you said like be an ecosystem. It's always a pleasure Julia, thank you so much. Oh my gosh, well you are an amazing, amazing resource. I wanna make sure that we redirect everybody to this really cool article that you've written what is the purpose of the website? You can find it on agencycontentwriter.com. You have a lot of great blog posts on this website my friend and of course that's the work you do but I learned something new all the time and I'm really appreciative of how achievable you make it. It seems like when I read your writing and I realize you're a professional writer and you're a great writer but you have a way of making this look like something that we can do, that we can accomplish and that we can be successful with and sometimes we don't get that as you know from being in this world of ours sometimes it's just so over the top that you're like, well, yeah, only IBM and their teams and teams and legions of people can do this but me, I can't but you always bring it down for me and so I really appreciate that. Anne McCauley Lopez, SEO content writer extraordinaire with agencycontentwriter. Check her out agencycontentwriter.com You can even email her at Anne at agencycontentwriter.com. Wow, you are such a marvel Anne and such a great asset for us in the nonprofit sector. I always learn so much from you so thank you, thank you so much for being here. You are most welcome, thank you. It's been a lot of fun. Again, I'm Julia Patrick. Jared Ransom, the nonprofit nerd will be joining us back shortly. We wanna thank all of our presenting sponsors from Bloomerang, American nonprofit Academy to fundraising Academy, nonprofit nerd, your part time controller, staffing boutique and nonprofit thought leader, which we've had on today. So thank you so much. Anne, you've given me a lot to think about. I'm gonna have to get back to you on some of these things but as we end every episode I wanna remind us all and ourselves to stay well so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow everyone. Thanks Anne. Thank you.