Whoa, I am totally blown away. 580 of you joined the storytelling webinar that my colleague, Steve Daigneault, and I presented earlier this week in partnership with NTEN and the Ad Council. Thanks so much for joining us!

I’m definitely pumped about writing my next email appeal, and I hope you are, too. Steve and I had a few thoughts that we wanted to share with you coming out of the event, and we also promised we’d answer all the questions we didn’t get to during the webinar itself. Okay! Here goes:

Sharing our number 1 take-away
The big lesson is to make sure you cast the donor as the hero of your emails. Not your organization or your staff or your partners – your donor. Make sure you’re presenting the choice to donate as a meaningful chance to improve the world and a chance to participate in a positive shared story. It may seem counterintuitive, but this approach is more compelling to potential donors than the most vivid, heartbreaking story you have in your organizational collection.

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I just can’t wait until 2 pm EST today, when Steve Daigneault and I will be leading a free webinar on how to avoid common storytelling pitfalls and make stories work in your fundraising appeals.

If you’re interested in joining us and our partners, NTEN and Ad Council, there’s still time to register! Click here to RSVP.

And if you’d like to read our storytelling whitepaper you can download the PDF right now by clicking this link.

Hope to talk with you soon!

In January of last year I wrote up a quick summary on how some of our clients’ end-of-year online fundraising campaigns did vs. the prior year, and I thought it’d be nice to repeat the exercise to see how nonprofits fared in 2011.

The results below come from aggregate data from 14 organizations we work with – a big thanks to them for letting us include their data in this post. These aren’t necessarily the same organizations we included in our write-up last year; this analysis compares two years of data for these 14 groups.

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You might have noticed your Facebook News Feed looking a little different – more posts from people you’re subscribed to (including your friends) and fewer from fan pages. Well, it’s not just you. With the introduction of the “subscribe” feature, Facebook’s news feed has begun favoring posts and activity from subscriptions over posts from fan pages. This means it has become even more difficult to get content from your fan page seen in your followers’ news feeds. So what now?

First of all, this news means that it is more important than ever to post content that your fans will actively engage with by “liking”, commenting or sharing. Your fans’ activity will show up in News Feeds and News Tickers where your posts may not. So continue to ask questions, share images and videos, encourage comments, and post content that people will “like” and share with their friends.

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