Change your subject line
Nothing has inspired less interest on a cold, wet Monday morning than an email pinging into the inbox with the subject line: Greentree Foundation Newsletter March Edition. People don’t want to read newsletters, they want to read interesting content. Your subject line should flag up the most interesting story in your newsletter, and it should tell the reader what that story has to do with them.

Change who it comes from
Email is a personal medium, so your readers are more likely to delete emails that look like they’re from an organisation. Just think of all those MoneySupermarket or Amazon emails you delete without opening. Tweak your settings to have the email delivered from a named individual in your organisation.

It’s not all about you
The content of your newsletter should be interesting and relevant to your target audience, not just information about your organisation and what you are up to. For every story ask yourself: what has this got to do with my audience? Why would they want or need to know this? In every edition you should offer some really great nuggets of information that will be useful, interesting or just a really good read. It is great content that will keep readers coming back for more.

Be frequent
Your readers will forget they ever subscribed if you don’t send frequent, high quality content to them. A newsletter that comes out once a month just won’t keep your audience engaged – if they miss a couple, that’ll be a whole season they haven’t heard from you. Instead of a monthly edition with loads of content, split it up into fortnightly or even weekly emails.

Tell your readers what to do
Don’t expect your readers to absorb what you want them to do by osmosis. However good your story, they still need to be told what to do next. Give them a reason to do what you want them to do, and give them specific instructions in a highlighted link: Help sick animals now by clicking here to make a donation. Ask two or three times for the same action, and consider including a button to make your action clear.

Invite a response
There’s little more off-putting than receiving an email from noreply@thischarity.com or a warning: Do not reply to this email. You should be making interaction as easy as possible, and than means telling people it’s fine to Hit reply and tell us what you think.

Experiment with timings
There is no Golden Time to send your emails, though it might be best to avoid first thing on Monday morning when we all do an inbox mass delete. You can test sending your email at different times of day, or on different days, but for the effort involved you’ll probably get better results from following the tips above first.

Segment
Instead of sending the same newsletter to all your supporters, split the database up intelligently. As a woodlands organisation, perhaps you can segment dog walkers, parents, botany enthusiasts and conservationists. Then make your lead story for each segment relevant to that target audience. The more directly relevant your newsletter is, the better response you will get. (You do need a large database and decent email software to get the best from this technique).

Discover dozens of marketing and promotion techniques for charities that WORK.

Join us for the first national Small Charities Marketing Summit on 18 May in London and 25 May in Manchester.

Register now, and you’ll receive a FREE copy of the Complete Charity Media Skills Training (worth £147.97).

Click to find out more at www.ngomedia.org.uk/marketingsummit

So said Oscar Wilde, reflecting what most charity writers know only too well: writing can be very hard work and something dashed off reads exactly like it has been.

Whether writing an article for your newsletter or a case study for your annual report, good charity writers are never satisfied with their first draft. The best writers aren’t happy with the last one either.

But how do you develop that effective critical eye that will improve your own work? How can you ensure your continuous tweaking improves what you’ve written and isn’t just… well, moving commas around?

Here are 9 ideas to inspire you.

Go to bed
Sleeping on it is the very best thing you can offer to your writing, particularly if you’re delighted with what you’ve written. Time and distance between you and your writing will allow flaws to bubble to the surface, while delivering you back to the page the next day with a fresh critical eye.

Does it achieve your goals?
What was the purpose of your writing before you started the piece? Have you got so carried away that you’ve forgotten the piece aimed to raise cash, or inspire readers, or get them to pick up the phone? Always set your goals before you start writing, then beware of changing them to fit what you’ve written.

Put yourself in your reader’s shoes
Think about what situation your target audience will be in when they read your article. At a desk? On the bus? Snatching a few minutes away from the kids? Does your writing offer what is interesting to your audience, while being delivered in a way that is going to work best for them when they read it?

Is it important? Is it believable?
These are the two most important questions to ask your material if you are ingrained in the values, aims, passion and subject matter of your organisation. Something that seems important to you (or your senior management team) may just confuse, or worse bore your audience if they don’t have the background knowledge you have. Ask yourself: why does my reader really need to know this? But don’t go too far the other way, overblowing your issue with language that’s too urgent or emotive. Does your writing tread the fine line between important and outrageous?

Fact check thoroughly
Print your work out and highlight every time you’ve stated a fact or made an assertion. For each one, ensure you have your facts correct and you can accurately source what you’ve said. Even if it’s not for publication, consider writing yourself a footnotes section. You’ll find this critical eye for facts helps temper your writing, making it more credible.

Is it easy to read?
In the cold light of day, do you find your piece easy to read? If you find yourself skipping over parts, or stumbling over sections, your reader will too. Your writing should be so easy to read that you forget you’re reading it, and time goes quickly until you’ve finished. If reading your writing is a chore for you, your reader will never finish it.

Does it match your brand?
When we have a fancy idea for presenting information, or get carried away because we’re enjoying writing so much, it’s very easy to stray long distances from how our organisation tends to express itself. Has your organisation spent large sums coming up with editorial brand words like ‘honest’, ‘direct’, ‘thoughtful’ and ‘passionate’? Look at your piece again with your brand in mind, and admit to yourself it might need to be tweaked – however good it is.

Read it out loud
Go into a quiet room and read your piece aloud. Does your reading pace match the pace you intended? Do you stumble over sentences, or get confused about where you’re supposed to breathe? Mark each of these in the text, then revisit them to fix the problem. Another great idea is to have a computer’s synthesised voice read your piece aloud, with you just listening in and not reading. You’ll pick up problems you’ve become blind to because you’ve read it so many times. (Both PCs and Macs have inbuilt text-to-speech software).

If in doubt, leave it out
Writing rarely suffers from having fewer words, fewer points made, less padding and less background. Every word should earn its keep, and if you’re not sure then cut rather than keep.

Click above to register now and secure your FREE copy of the Complete Charity Media Skills Training

Many charities shy away from the idea of marketing, thinking it is only something for big brand organisations or private sector companies with deep pockets.

The fact is if you promote your organisation in any way, try to get people to do something, if you fundraise, sell services or products, promote membership, courses or consultancy, then you’re doing marketing.

And the better at marketing you become, the more awareness, money and impact you will generate, and the more products, services, courses and consultancy you will sell.

Here are eight basic things you should be doing right now. If you’re not, these simple actions offer a massive opportunity to have a huge impact – almost overnight.

Qualify your leads
How do you currently ensure those most likely to support your organisation, or most likely to have sympathy with your cause, end up on your database? Your marketing should be geared towards not just getting any people into your database, but the right people. If you know dog walkers are the very likely to support your conservation campaign, consider offering a free guide to ‘The Best Places to Walk Your Dog’ in exchange for joining your mailing list. Those who sign up have ‘qualified’ themselves as your target audience – non dog walkers wouldn’t be interested in your guide

Do more with your existing supporters
Are you putting most of your effort into recruiting new members and supporters, at the expense of those who have already made a commitment? It takes far less time, money and resources to get an existing supporter to give more, or take an action, than to recruit a new one. Are you asking enough? Communicating enough? If you’re not communicating with your existing supporters at least twice or three times a month you’re almost certainly missing an opportunity.

Pin down your USP
Do you know why someone should support your charity, rather than the next one? What makes you different, special, unique? Pinning down and then articulating your Unique Selling Point can make an incredible difference to your marketing success. Tell your target audiences how you do things differently and what makes you stand out from the crowd. Don’t be just another charity doing pretty much the same as any number of others in your sector. Tell people about your difference.

Follow up
You’d be surprised how many organisations receive calls, interest, enquiries, offers of help and more, then have a lacklustre follow up that goes nowhere. They will call back won’t they? If your target audience show an interest in your campaign, or responds in any way, make sure they get follow up emails, letters, calls and more until they take action. Your audience need to be reminded of their interest and continually offered an opportunity to turn it into something concrete. Many actions only take place on the fourth, fifth or sixth time of asking.

Use a marketing mix
Your single leaflet, web page or advert will not work effectively. Your target audience needs to receive your messages in a variety of different ways before they will take action: social media, leaflets, the press, word of mouth, email, direct mail, telephone calls, events and more. By having a marketing mix, you’ll reach more people and reach some people numerous times. Start with one new marketing method a month, and build on it over a year.

Consider the lifetime value of your supporters
If you knew each supporter donates around £1,000 during their long-term relationship with you, wouldn’t you spend £100 getting them into that relationship in the first place? Try to think of your supporters not in terms of their initial donation or action (which might be quite low) but in terms of their lifetime value, if you can build and maintain a strong relationship with them. Make that relationship building at least as important as getting them through the door in the first place.

Segment, then target
The more specific your marketing material is to your target audiences, the more success you will have when you communicate with them. If someone has shown an interest in, say, your asylum seeker project in the past, make sure they are ‘tagged’ as such in your database. Then send them asylum seeker specific material in the future. Tone down the asylum seeker based marketing to those who have never shown an interest. The best marketing returns come from charity databases that are ultra segmented, only delivering marketing and content directly relevant to each supporter. Think of what happens when you buy a book from Amazon. What other books does Amazon tell you about?

Track, test, evaluate
For every piece of marketing, every campaign email, every webpage, leaflet, Tweet or event, find a way to measure the results you get. Of the actions that were taken, how many were produced from which marketing method? Tracking doesn’t have to be sophisticated. A simple spreadsheet monitoring what you put out, and the results you get from it, is a good way to start. Use the information you collect to analyse what works for your audience. Then do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t.

Discover dozens of marketing and promotion techniques for charities that WORK.

Join us for the first national Small Charities Marketing Summit on 18 May in London and 25 May in Manchester.  Register now, and you’ll receive a FREE copy of the Complete Charity Media Skills Training (worth £147.97).

Find out more a www.ngomedia.org.uk/marketingsummit

Perhaps you think it’s you – after all, you’re the one doing the writing and communicating?

Or maybe it’s your manager, or chief executive. If you don’t do a good job, they’ll be breathing down your neck.

Or is it your charity’s beneficiaries and service users? Surely, they’re the ones that the communications are ultimately about?

The most important person in your charity communications is, of course, the person you’re trying to communicate with.

If your language, approach and content doesn’t resonate with your reader, they won’t take action or react in the way you want them to.

Before typing a single word of your charity newsletter, website, marketing material or social media, it’s worth analysing: who are your key target audiences? What are they like? What do they need to know?

For each audience group, create an ‘avatar’ – a single person who represents that audience. They should be the same age, gender, racial and social background as your audience. Find an example picture of your target audience (try the google image search for this), and give them a name.

Then write around the picture everything you know about them. When you write, it should be for that single person alone. Keep them above your desk, and let them influence your language, your content, your approach.

Here are 10 questions to help you pin down your avatar:

1. What does your avatar do for a living? Do they work? Full or part time?
2. How much money do they have? What do they earn? What is their disposable income?
3. What is their family situation? Do they have children, pets?
4. What social groups does your avatar move in? Who are their friends?
5. What does your avatar do on the weekend? What are their hobbies and interests?
6. What magazines, newspapers and websites does your avatar read? Why?
7. What motivates them, really? (Not just what you want them to be motivated by)
8. What upsets and challenges your avatar? What gets them angry?
9. Why would they want contact from you? What do they need to know?
10. What is their ‘tipping point’? What is likely to get them to take action in any situation – when they get angry? When they cry? When they sense injustice? Something else?

Do you have a ‘dorothy donor’? What is their name? How did you develop your profile of them? Please share your approach below.

When your appeal letter drops through someone’s letter box, it’s easily tossed aside. On your website, you have just seven seconds to grab someone or they’ll move on. When a potential funder receives your annual review, they’ll just skim read it. Then add it to the stack from other organisations also looking for money.

You need techniques to make your writing ‘sticky’ – to get people to read and take notice. Here are some top tips:

Make it useful

Say you’re trying to communicate with children’s services commissioners. Could you complement your core material (what you do, the impact you have) with something that is also useful for your audience? Perhaps a ‘Top 10 Online Resources for Commissioners’, or ‘How to Save Time and Money When Commissioning Services’? Hook your reader with something useful and valuable to them, then use it as a lever to get your own messages across.

With every publication, ask yourself: is this interesting and valuable to my audience, or is it just what I want to say?

Grab attention

When someone flicks through your publication, you have just seconds to catch their attention. But how?

Headers and standfirsts (the line or two under the headline summarising the copy) are key.

Ensure your headline is striking, tells the audience what the piece has to do with them, and tells them why they should read on. Try to tell the whole story of your piece, including your call to action, across your headlines and subheadings. Skim readers need to get the message even if they don’t read the detail.

Ditch the puns

Those oh-so-clever headlines (‘Government changes its tuna on fisheries policy’) you felt so smart writing in the office don’t often work when they make it into print or online. Your reader will at best be puzzled, at worst put off. Don’t kid yourself they will be so intrigued by the cryptic headline they’ll read on.

Leave the puns to the tabloid hacks.

Strong images with good captions

Strong images will draw readers to your work, but don’t waste your caption by simply describing the picture. They can see it! Instead, use the caption to relate your key messages, and attract the audience to read the rest of the copy.

Go short and simple

People will give up on your writing if it is difficult to read. Make sure sentences are short (try less than 30 words) and paragraphs brief. Eliminate jargon and acronyms – people should to be able to understand what you write the first time they read it.

Break it down

A page packed with dense copy to wade through will put many readers off. Break down your copy to make it easier to digest: use bullet points (but not too many), boxes, lists, A to Zs, Top Tips and other formats to make difficult information more digestible. Use lots of subheadings to break up text, particularly on the web. White space gives the eyes a rest, and makes your copy less daunting to read.

Use transition copy

‘After the break, a BIG shock!’ That’s what you hear on programmes like The X Factor to get you to tune in again. You can use this cliffhanger technique in your own copy to keep people reading.

‘Transition copy’ is the name for little phrases like ‘you won’t believe what happened next’ and ‘the truth will surprise you’ which, when read, almost compel the reader to keep reading. Drop a few in your copy, say every half a page, to give your writing pace and deftly carry the reader on to the next segment.

What techniques do you use to keep readers engaged? Please share them below.

But without applying the very basics of good writing, your charity communications won’t shine. Poor writing turns readers off, and weakens even the best content’s impact. Worse still, you might not be understood – and therefore ignored.

Use these five simple reminders to keep your writing on track.

1. Jargon free
You might talk about HJDs and JSPs and facilitating empowerment of your service users with your colleagues. But that language shouldn’t make it anywhere near your external publications.

We all tend to write in a charity bubble, where we assume our target audiences use the same terms and language as we do. They don’t.

Ask yourself, would your gran, or neighbour or bus driver get what you’re talking about – immediately?

There’s the obvious jargon like: “We facilitate improvements in health through the process of recruiting level three healthcare professionals and the construction of high quality healthcare environments”

But look out for other charity sector speak such as: supporters, stakeholders, direct mail, statutory funding, best practice, public benefit, outcomes, impact, engagement, service users. None of these would be immeditately understood by most of your readers.

Explain, or better get rid of, jargon and acronyms and use the simplest language, appropriate to your audience, if you want to create clear publications that make readers take notice.

2. Tight sentences
The best writing is often made up of short sentences. Every word should add meaning.

Every phrase in its shortest, simplest form. That way, your writing will be easy to digest.

After writing your piece, go through it again looking for opportunities to tighten, cut and simplify.

For example, ‘We spend more than £100,000 a year on running projects’ is better than ‘Our gross expenditure on charitable activities is in excess of £100,000 per annum’.

Look out for phrases that add no meaning, such as ‘it was totally unique’ (something is either unique or not) and ‘our office is located at’ (no need for located). Never use a complicated word or phrase when there’s a simpler alternative (‘use’ instead of ‘utilise’, ‘enough’ instead of ‘sufficient’, ‘because’ instead of ‘due to the fact that’). Beware of useless phrases like ‘at the end of the day’ and ‘at this moment in time’.

There are also very few instances where removing the word ‘that’ would damage clarity in your sentences. Try a search-and-remove in your next big article, and you’ll see what I mean.

3. Active, not passive
Statements have more impact when you write them in the active voice.

‘The Teenagers Trust improved the youth centre’, is active.

‘The youth centre was improved by the Teenagers Trust’, is passive.

Remember: the cat sat on the mat (not: the mat was sat on by the cat).

One or two passive sentences are OK in a longer piece, but if you fill your article with them it will read like an essay. Your writing will always have a bigger impact if you are not afraid to be direct.

4. Cut adjectives
Lots of adjectives weaken the impact of your writing. They force readers to wade through too flowery words and make your prose overblown:

‘Leading doctors have issued a dire warning that the nation’s massive obesity crisis will have very serious consequences for essential medical services’.

Instead try the more impactful: ‘Doctors have warned that obesity will have serious consequences for medical services’.

Mark Twain rightly said: ‘When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable.’

5. Prefer verbs over nouns
‘We aim to increase engagement with young people and foster crime reduction’

Overuse of nouns can make your writing feel formal and crowded. Flipping your sentence to make them into verbs can give your writing more pace, while also making it clear.

‘We aim to engage young people and reduce crime’

What charity writing basics do you rely on? Please share them below.

Do you often feel overwhelmed by (unhelpful) feedback flying at you from all corners of your organisation?

If you are regularly finding publications a stress, the problem could be the process rather than the publication that is your problem.

The process of setting strict project plans, timescales and sign-off procedures for your publications is every bit as fundamental as good writing and design if you want to produce great materials.

A solid process ensures everyone knows what is expected of them, who’s in charge of which aspects, and the time frame that everyone is working to.

With a good process, you can avoid soaring costs, missed deadlines, elevated stress levels and, most importantly, an inferior final publication.

Begin by using three key tools to kick off your editorial project:

1. Project plan

This is a document containing the key details of your publication. All stakeholders should have an opportunity to contribute to the plan and to sign it off A solid plan can help reduce arguments and additions once the project gets underway.

Your project plan should answer the following questions:

• Project overview. What are basic details of the project? Who is commissioning it? What’s the budget and overall deadline? How many pages will the publication have and at what word count? Which format will it be in? What kind of paper, or delivery?
• Audience and purpose. Who are you writing for? What do you know about your audience? What do you want your audience to do when they’ve read the publication? What does success look like for this project?
• Approach. Who is going to work on the project? Where are they going to get the necessary information? What might be the barriers to achieving your aims, and how can they be overcome?
• Tone. Should copy be formal or informal? Authoritative? Friendly? Humorous? Is there a style guide you’ll be adhering to?

Consider organising a meeting with all stakeholders to talk through these questions. Bringing them together will make everyone feel part of the project, generating goodwill when you’re looking for information and sign off later.

After the meeting, send your written up project plan for comments and sign off. Make it clear they are welcome to request additions or question points, but now is their opportunity to do so. Set a deadline for feedback, and mention that if stakeholders don’t send comments by then, you will assume they are happy with the plan.

2. Timetable

Alongside your project plan, it is essential to create a realistic timetable. Ask everyone to agree to the timetable, put relevant deadlines in their diaries and commit to meeting them.

For editorial, consider the following key milestones:

• All information gathered
• First draft complete and distributed to relevant stakeholders
• Comments on first draft received from relevant stakeholders
• Second draft complete and distributed
• Comments on second draft received
• Third and final draft complete
• Proofreading complete
• Sign off for print

Design should be timetabled too: allow time for your designer to create concepts for your publication. After the editorial is complete, the designer will need time to put together full drafts of the publication for you to circulate for approval.

Think carefully about how much time to assign to each stage. For example, if 10 people need to comment on your first draft, is that really going to be possible in just one week?

No matter how carefully you plan your timetable, things can go wrong. You may get more critical feedback than expected or design changes may take longer than expected. Ensure you build some flexibility and ‘false’ deadlines into your timetable to give you some breathing space.

3. Sign off triangle

One of the thorniest issues you will face is dealing with feedback from the rest of the organisation. Comments at the wrong time (for example, your boss suggesting an case study for your annual review isn’t right when you’re about to go to print) can send your process off deadline and into chaos.

Prevent this by deciding who should comment on the publication, and at what stage of the process. Remember: you’re the expert communications professional, and while everyone should have a say, it’s vital that you (and perhaps your boss?) make final decisions. Make it clear that endless rounds of drafts and changes can only damage the quality of publications.

Consider an upside down triangle. The widest part at the top represents the first draft. At this stage, the widest range possible of stakeholders should comment on the publication. As the triangle narrows, your feedback loop should narrow too, with far fewer people getting a say at second and third draft stage. By the time you reach signing off for print, only you and minimum other colleagues (your chief executive, for example) should be be involved.

Guest contributor: Jennifer Campbell

What techniques do you use for keeping projects on time and on budget? Please share them below.

But measuring and testing your work will give you an insight into your audience and what works for them that no training resource can provide.

Put very simply, testing involves producing slightly different versions of your marketing material – say a fundraising letter with different headlines – and sending the different versions out to your mailing list. You then see which of the versions is most effective at achieving your aim (in this case to raise money).

You then learn from that ‘winning’ letter, and try to improve upon it next time.

Effective marketing is all about what works for your audiences. Testing allows you to find out from your audiences what works for them without them even knowing that your asking.

Here are some top tips for effectively testing you writing and marketing.

Get over the hump
Getting into the habit of testing can be a struggle at first. You’ve just worked hard to produce a great leaflet or web page, and now you have to produce one or more different versions as well. It may seem like more work at first, but testing will show you what is working and what isn’t for your audiences. That means when you come to write next time, you’ll already know how to get your message across more effectively. Very soon, you’ll find testing becomes a natural part of what you do.

Make sure you measure
Build into your materials a way to record which of the versions is most effective at generating the desired outcome. The return form with your fundraising letter should have a code that tells you to which of the versions they are responding. If your readers have to visit a web page, have a slightly different web address for them to visit for each version. Then measure web hits. If you don’t know (and monitor) which of the versions your audience is responding to, you won’t know which works best.

Test different methods
Effective marketing should use lots of different ways to attract people to your action: for example a leaflet, Facebook, Twitter, an advert in the paper and a seminar. Record which of the methods has the biggest impact, and which works poorly for your audience. Then do more of the effective ones and ditch the poor performing methods.

Test within methods
Once you’ve identified your two or three ‘golden’ methods, test within those methods too. Try different styles of Twitter posts for the same action, or different versions of your web page. Gradually you’ll build a picture of the approach that is most effective at getting your audience to do what you want them to do.

A/B test your email newsletter
Your charity’s email newsletter is a great way to get started in testing, because it’s very easy to do and the results are very rapid. For your next email newsletter, change only the email subject line, leaving the newsletter content exactly the same.

Version A: Super Charity Newsletter March edition

Version B: Latest news from The Super Charity

Send half of your database version A, and the other half version B. Most email programmes will tell you open rates for your emails. After 24 hours, you can find out whether the A or B newsletter was opened most. You’ve just learned what works best for your audience, so use that style from now on. Or even better, test a new subject line style against the best performer.

Test one thing at a time
When testing within marketing methods, it’s vital to change only one thing at a time. Say the headline of a leaflet, with the rest of the leaflet exactly the same. If you change too many things at once, you won’t know which of your tweaks worked best.

Take a gradual improvement approach
Effective testing takes time, so you should regard it as an ongoing process rather than a quick win. On your leaflet, you should test headlines until you stop seeing an improvement. Then keep the headline the same and change something else – the call to action, the picture, the font. Keep testing that until you’ve reached it’s optimum effectiveness, and move onto something else. Over time, you’ll start to produce the ‘perfect’ leaflet because your audience will have told you what works best for each of the elements.

Don’t stop testing
Even when you think you’ve found the perfect fundraising letter or leaflet, you should always try to improve on it. Your best performing material becomes your ‘control’ and you should continually challenge yourself to better the control by trying new things.

Use online tools
The web makes testing quicker and simpler, but you still need a methodical approach. Here are a few useful tools to help you along:

Optimizely – Allows you to create two different versions of a page and automatically forward web visitors to one or other versions at random, and allows you to track which page is most effective. Easy and intuitive to use, and an excellent place to start testing.

Google Website Optimiser – Google will allow you to enter in different versions of each of the elements of your web page – the headline, picture, body copy, call to action, buttons, links – and will automatically ‘jumble’ them for each new visitor to your page. Each visitor essentially sees a different version of your page, build from the many different combinations of your elements. Over time, Google will select the most effective elements to build your ‘golden’ web page. Incredible and addictive stuff, but only works if you have high traffic levels.

Google Adwords – Google’s advertising programme (down the right hand side of web searches) allows you to create very short test adverts. You can produce as many different versions of the advert as you like, and Google will automatically test them against each other, telling you which approach is the most effective. It’s a great tool for testing headlines and calls to action, but it does cost money.

Learn and roll out
Online tools offer you a quick and relatively cheap way to test what is working for your audiences. But you should roll out the results into your offline marketing too. As a general rule, a headline that you’ve tested as effective online will probably be effective offline too. In time, every result you get from any testing should be applied across your materials to create marketing that meets your audiences needs perfectly, and works every time.

How do you test your marketing materials? What tools do you use? Please share them below.

Are you producing your charity newsletter, magazine, website and brochures because that’s what charities do?

It’s surprising but true that many organisations spend huge resources and time creating media, marketing materials and publications without asking before they begin:

What is this supposed to do? What do we want this newsletter to achieve? What do we want people to do when they’ve read it? Donate money? Take an action? Be more engaged? Tell a friend?

Ask yourself: what will success for this publication, web page or marketing piece look like?

If you’re clear what your publication is supposed to be doing, you will naturally be more focussed about what you include, how you write, the language you use and the actions you ask people to take.

Without a clear aim, your publication risks becoming a free-for-all, where anything goes as long as you or your colleagues think it is interesting.

And if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve, you will have no way of measuring the success of your publication. That means you can’t improve it, make it more effective or measure its success against other ways of reaching out to your supporters.

What other part of your organisation would get away with not having to prove what you do works?

The more precise you are with your aims, the better your publications will be.

‘Raising awareness’ is often cited as an aim for charity publications, but challenge yourself to understand what that means.

What’s the point of someone being aware of your organisation, if they don’t do something about it?

So, are you raising awareness so that people donate, take an action, vote in a particular way, change their behaviour, or something else?

These aims might seem implicit, but the more explicitly you state them the more targeted and effective your materials will be.

Charities can use the world’s biggest search engine to give you amazing free information about your audiences, search habits, what to write and how to phrase things.

The Google keywords tool is aimed at advertisers who want to find better ways to target their audiences with the little adverts that appear down the right hand side of search results.

The tool will tell you how many times a certain word or phrase – collectively called a keyword by Google – is searched for in Google globally, as well as in the UK.

The tool also tells you what other keywords like the keyword you’re interested in are searched for, and their search rankings too.

Used intelligently, this amazing gizmo can give you enormous insight into your audiences, what information they want, how they speak and write and how to meet their needs.

Watch my five minute online video first to learn how to use the tool, then read my eight ways charities can use the Google keywords tool to improve their writing, marketing and media.

Pinpoint your audiences
Start with whatever your organisation does, say ‘Meals on Wheels’. The keyword tool will tell you what other things people type in when they’re looking for things like meals on wheels. Perhaps ‘meal delivery’, or ‘reliable meals on wheels’ or ‘cheap meals on wheels’. You’ll start to build a picture of your target audiences, their concerns, needs and wants. The better you know your audiences, the more effective your writing for them will be.

Speak your audiences’ language
More than anywhere else, people type into the Google search box the way they speak. Use the keywords tool to tell you the actual language, words and phrases people use when talking about your subject. Then repeat that language back to them in your webpages, marketing and materials.

Make your web pages Google friendly
Fill your web pages not only with the most popular keyword on your topic (though don’t go overboard), but also with some of the other popular words and phrases. That way, your page will be presented as a result for a broader range of relevant searchers.

Headlines and domain names
Google loves headlines and standfirsts (basically the second headline), and adores your keyword appearing in your domain name (www.cheapmealsonwheels.co.uk). Use the keyword tool to tell you what to call your website or mini-site in the first place, as well as what to write in headlines and standfirsts, to ensure a high ranking in Google search results.

Take it offline
If a keyword or phrase is popular in online search, you can be pretty sure it’ll resonate with your audiences offline too. Use the tool to inform how you write your posters, brochures, emails, leaflets, even your annual report.

Test your current web pages
Put your web page address into the keyword tool, and it will generate a list of other phrases that people search for when they’re looking for the kind of content you have on your page. A perfect list of words and subjects to add to that page, and to your site in general, to make it more search engine friendly.

Create a list of content
Spend a good hour or two following a trail of keywords most relevant to your organisation. ‘Meals on wheels’ might lead to ‘older people’s care’, might lead to ‘winter falls’, might lead to ‘hip replacement’. As long as the phrases still relate to what you do, you have a ready made list of subjects for blogs, web articles, Tweets and Facebook posts that will attract your target audiences.

Test slogans
You’ve come up with a great nifty little phrase or even a single word you’re thinking of using as a slogan, campaign title or even the name of your organisation. Putting it into the keywords tool will tell you what other words people associate with it and the kind of things they’re looking for when they use that phrase. It might bring up some unexpected connections you wouldn’t want.

For more great (and FREE) things to do to improve your charity’s marketing, come to the Small Charities Marketing Summit, London & Manchester, May 2012.

Visit this page NOW to read about discounts and offers on the summit.

www.ngomedia.org.uk/marketingsummit