Soapbox Engage Blog

With many of us still packing up the holiday lights and cleaning up after New Years bashes, we were impressed to see the good folks over at the Nonprofit Marketing Guide arriving into 2012 all bright eyed and bushy tailed with the release of the 2012 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report.

Not a bad way to get a jump on the new year!

A couple of the findings caught our eye. As folks doing web development for nonprofits, we were happy to see organizations rank their website as their most important tool. Job security and all that, you know!

Their website was followed closely in importance by Email Marketing / E-Newsletter. That Iowa-Republican-caucus-like close second is not surprising when you see that 78% of nonprofits say they'll email supporters at least monthly in 2012.

That's a lot of emails - and, for anyone who has priced mass email services, those mass emails ain't cheap. So, again, it's not surprising that the list of what scares folks when it comes to nonprofit marketing in 2012 includes some big, juicy orange words revolving around having enough resources and funding to pull off all of this marking stuff.

That leads us at PICnet to ponder a simple question for our own nonprofit technology sector:

Can we do better?

As 2012 dawns and more and more nonprofits move away from traditional mailings to engage in regular email marketing campaigns, can our industry innovate to keep pace by developing new, more cost effective ways of delivering those services and do so in ways that more tightly tracks outcomes tied to individual recipients rather than dubious metrics like open rates?

For those lovers of nonprofits who are convinced that technology can supercharge their missions to make more flowers bloom, more hungry folk fed, more truth shine, and more peace reign, we should finish putting away our holiday lights and cleaning up after the New Year's bashes. There's a world that needs changing and it shouldn't cost an arm and a leg to do it.