Non Profit Organizations

Charity Custom T Shirts: How to Generate Funds for a Nonprofit Organization

Charity organizers with a great need for financial support can use custom T shirts to their advantage. Giving away or selling a shirt can be a real help in making a fundraising project successful. Several methods can be used to incorporate these clothing items into your plans.

Sometimes, custom T shirts can be used as a draw to get people in for the main charity event. If there is an event set to take place in the future, it is important to make people aware of it so that they will come out and take part. You could send out coupons for free shirts that you have designed, to encourage people to attend.

Another way to use this type of shirts as an incentive is to give them out as a reward for qualifying donations. If a person or group gives a certain amount, they get custom T shirts as a thank you. Corporate sponsors might get several shirts for a large donation. This can encourage the corporation to have a contest among employees. The ones who bring in the most donations get T shirts as prizes.

People who participate in an organized fundraising walk, run, or cycling event for charity deserve a thank you, too. You can make up special custom T shirts for the date and location of the event. It is also important to put text on the shirt describing the accomplishment required to get it. It might say something like “I Walked 20 Miles for Cancer Research.”

Auctions are a good way to make money for charities. A popular type is the silent auction. A card describing the prize of a set of custom T shirts that the winner can personally design could be one entry. During the charity event, people come by and write down their bids on the sheet. At the end of the function, the winner is announced.

A regular auction could be used as well. To sell a shirt, you will need to make it something special. You could do the same promotion, where the winning bidder gets to design and have a set of custom T shirts. Another way to go about it would be to get celebrities to sign shirts you have had made up for the charity cause.

Of course, charities can sell their T shirts a bit over cost to bring in funds. Then it is just a matter of finding places to sell them. Anywhere with a party atmosphere is a good place. A carnival or a barbecue festival would be a great place to start. The charity can also go to local clubs for sales.

People who want to give to a charity will look for ways to join in the cause. When you make custom T shirts available to them as a part of your fundraising efforts, people will be excited to help out.

Ron Subs works with Sonic Shack as a public relations consultant, more information about Sonic Shack can be found at http://www.sonicshack.com

The Secrets of Seo for Non Profits

One of the best ways to utilize existing advertising tactics on the internet is to use SEO articles. SEO is the best way to get cheap advertising for your website. If you are a non profit organization, you can see a great return on SEO advertising in a matter of days.

The best part about a non profit organization is that you are giving back to a group or community. You have to heart in the right place, but there just may not be the funds available that you need to spread the word of your organization. If you fall into this category and your marketing budget is very low, you can utilize SEO strategies in order to bring visitors to your site and get the word our about the good work you and your organization are doing.

If you have a great website with excellent content and still no visitors, you will want pay attention to the pagerank you are getting. This will tell you how often your website is showing up on search engines. If it is low, then you know that you have some work to do. SEO can cost money, but there are also ways that you can get SEO results with little money and some effort on your part. You can first have one of your volunteers begins a blog. You can have a blog that will get the message across about what your organization does while giving a first hand experience of one of your volunteers. You can also include content that is relevant to your organization, such as pictures of animals that you have rescued or houses that your have built. This way, there is practically a second site used to bring traffic to the organization’s website. This blog will give your potential donors and new volunteers a reason to trust you and your organization.

Another trick that you can use is linking opportunities. If there is a person out there who has a website and believes in your cause, they will want to be able to link to your site from theirs. You can increase your pagerank this way and also network your site. You can exchange links, or use one way links. One way links are always much more beneficial . Find websites that are likeminded and let them know you would appreciate if they advertised your organization.

Either one of these advertising strategies can bring in more money and volunteers to your website. You can easily work less than an hour a week on either of these strategies in order to get eh word out about your organization. And everyone can help. You can have one person contacting places to do link advertising while another person writes about that week’s account volunteering for you so that you can post it on the blog. It will give anyone who reads it a first hand experience. This is an easy, money-saving advertising campaign that will work.

Jordan Mcpelt is a professional author who specializes in Non Profits and SEO for Non Profits. For more information on Non Profit SEO please visit http://www.grassroots.org

13 Marketing And Advertising Reasons Small Nonprofit Groups Should Use Paid And Unpaid Advertising

To make better use of your nonprofit’s organization’s resources; you need to put all your members on the same track to elicit maximum support from your community. You need to help your members understand why every meeting or event that occurs in front of the public is important. Simply put it is a chance to get the word out and build support for your organization’s causes.

To help move the organization along here are 12 reasons to always make the most of each event.

1. Potential Exposure – your nonprofit organization gets your message out to your immediate area and to

those not specifically concerned with your message.

2. Newspaper Credibility – A widely read and well respected newspaper circulation is usually in the

thousands and sometimes hundred of thousands and gets you great pr in one example when say starting a

nonprofit.

3. Guaranteed Inclusion – when you pay, you know exactly where and when the press release will be

released. This helps you increase the effects of your advertising campaign.

4. Competitive Advertising – If there is competition for your nonprofit mission or dollars you can be

highly visible at another organizations highest visibility time.

5. Branding – Allows your group to differentiate and clearly establish your own brand.

6. Membership Drive – Launch your membership campaign and gain additional members.

7. Newsletter Announcement – perfect timing to announce your nonprofits upcoming scheduled newsletter on a

wider scale.

Near Term Advertising Usage and Benefits

8. Special Target or Related Market Inserts – sometimes a magazine or newspaper has special inserts that

talk to your specific group’s mission or a related market. This will help you reach your targeted market with

an affinity message.

9. Advertiser and In Kind services support demonstrate to your potential or existing advertisers, business

owners, vendor partners ad supporters that they should partner with your organization.

Long Term Usage and Benefits

10. Ongoing Local Exposure – Press releases stay on the local newspapers websites for a long time in most

cases and this means an additional how many eyeballs will read it and get your message.

11. Continued Regional Exposure -once a press release is on the newspaper web site, you get to use it to

market your organization from the prestige of the newspapers’ name.

12. Extended National Exposure – Press releases found half way around the world get read by someone who

lived near your cause but has moved far away. They will still support your nonprofit mission from a far because

they care.

13. Your Nonprofit’s Website – You get to capture a major article and use it on your website to promote

your nonprofit mission which gives your website more credibility with your targeted readers.

So can one press release and advertisement help your nonprofit mission? Can it support all that is listed for a

small fee per eyeball? The answer is an emphatic yes.

Learn more about continuing to build your profitable business model and get a free blog by contacting us at

www.techoss.com

How to Effectively Raise Funds for Non-Profit Groups

As a leader or member of a Non Profit group you know that one of the main goals and responsibilities is to raise funds. As time consuming and unpleasant as this is there is no way of getting around it, your group can not perform its function if it lacks the necessary funding.

Setting up a successful fund raiser can be a difficult task and requires much planning and industry know how. If done incorrectly you will not raise enough funds and may doom your nonprofit group for good. Here are some simple things that you can do in order to guarantee that your fundraising efforts will be a huge success.

One critical thing that you can do is form a business partnership with anyone who is in sales of their own product on or off line. If you ask them to promote their products with a small portion of sales profits going towards your nonprofit group a mutually beneficial relationship can be formed.

The business owner will enjoy a boost in sales from charitable people who will be more tempted to buy their products knowing that a portion will be going to a good cause. Obviously you will benefit by having one additional stream of funding for your nonprofit group.

Another great idea for a successful fund raising event is a type of auction. The first goal is to find appealing items to auction of, this can be anything from appliances to vacation tickets. When looking for these items you can ask local business owners to donate or wealthy members of your community who are active philanthropists.

The other option to a standard auction would be to set up a mini market with business owners selling their wares in booths. Again, the proceeds will be going to funding for your nonprofit organization. There are many resources available online with companies who have specific products that they use for charity and fundraising events. The good thing is that they have been doing this for years so their selection is guaranteed to do well at an event.

If everything goes according to plan and your fundraising event turns out to be a huge success there several things that you can do to increase your cash flow. One form of residual income that can be established is if the vendors continue to sell related products to customers from your event. Your nonprofit can continue to receive proceeds long after the event had been held.

The other more obvious thing that you can do if your event was a success is to turn it into an annual event. The attendees can be invited back each year to support the work of your nonprofit organization.

Finally for long term success in selling fundraising products be sure to closely monitor the individual success of each product. As time goes on you need to swap out poor performing products for ones that better appeal to current trends. This way you can ensure that your fundraising events continue to pull in the same if not more amounts of contributors.

For extra information on Work at Home Opportunities read about Rebate Processing and Rebate Processor jobs.

Brand Effectiveness is Key to Membership Growth

The visibility, awareness and effectiveness of your organization’s brand directly impact your ability to recruit and retain members. If your organization isn’t the first thing member prospects think of when they turn to industry issues, there’s work to be done.

But where to start?

As popular wisdom has it, knowing and admitting you have a problem puts you half way to solving it. In this case, that means doing a little member research to determine how your members and prospective members view your organization through its brand. This can take one of several forms, including a quick poll on your website, a phone survey, an e-mail or electronic survey, or a paper/mail survey.

Regardless of the format, the recipient list should be equal parts members and prospects, to get both perspectives and spot any disconnects between those that know the organization from the inside versus what the brand alone presents to the outside world. The included questions should be formulated so that the responses returned are actionable, and give you some indication of their perceptions of the brand and the organization behind it, based on their actual experience with you, as customers, as members, as industry participants.

Reading the results in a timely fashion is important, as the cyclic nature of non-profit schedules creates peaks and valleys in the brand perception and awareness level, depending upon what time of the year it is, and how high the level of activity involving members is at the time you launch the survey. For organizations that have even more volatile years, it may be necessary to do two sets of surveys at different times of the year and compare the results to get a good reliable read on the level of awareness you can count on.

The results of your survey are one source of data, but there are other sources that while less formal or quantifiable, are just as valid in getting a read on your brand awareness and effectiveness. These include interviews with Board members, committee members, volunteers, chapter presidents or directors, vendors, other related professionals, including members of related associations, and members of ASAE.

Once all this data is collected, it needs to be interpreted accurately so that the actions you take drive your brand efforts in the most effective direction possible. Some items will be readily apparent if the surveys and interviews were constructed correctly.

One good tool you can use to read your results is to retrieve the set of brand characteristics from the marketing archives, and see how many of your responses line up with those characteristics. If your responses, including the open-ended comments, use some of the terms and attributes that make up your organization’s brand, then you’ve got a good solid start on reading your data correctly and rating a good score on your brand effectiveness.

Conversely, if very few or none of the responses include those attributes on the list, there’s a good chance there’s a disconnect between what you’re trying to convey with your brand, and how it’s being perceived by the various populations it’s designed to serve.

Now that you’ve got a read on how well you’re doing, how do you go about improving? The answer is, much as it’s been overused by too many of us in today’s litigious society – it depends. It depends upon what your data tells you, and every case is different. However there are some common scenarios and a few valuable remedies to match them.

Scenario #1 – Our brand registers very low on the surveys for memorability.
Typically this means that your customer base doesn’t remember your brand in response to a question designed to illicit a favorable response unprompted. Your organization isn’t top of mind for them as relates to your products or services, and someone else’s brand is. That could mean that your exposure frequency is too low, they don’t see enough from you to keep memorability high enough.

It could be that a competitor has captured some key emotional connection to the customer that you have not, despite an inferior product or service – they’re not as good, but customers remember them because they’re “out there” more. This can be remedied with some increase in exposure to key audiences – your top buyers should hear more from you in a positive light to reassure them that you offer the product or services that give the best value.

Putting your brand in front of them for positive reasons, like a price discount, a new offer that really saves money, rebate eligibility or other product or service related reason other than to sell them something should go a long way toward remedying this issue. It will boost memorability without seeming like you’re overselling them, a positive cognitive light that will cement the brand in the uppermost memory of the customer.

Scenario #2 – Our brand rates favorably and has high memory retention among customers, but neither do as well among prospects.

Usually, this indicates that your product or service has to be “seen to be believed” – it’s value is best seen at delivery or in the transaction, rather than prior to receiving it. This is a sticky problem that has to do as much with promotional direction and relevance as anything else. Your customers know you and have experienced your value, been satisfied with the product or service upon and after delivery and the reputation of the brand was reinforced positively.

Prospects, on the other hand, only know you by your “public” face – advertising, packaging, direct marketing, sponsorship associations. The brand unfortunately has little carriage by word of mouth, based on the fact that satisfied customers are not waving your flag and passing on the good word to prospects themselves. Prospects only get a read based on what you tell them.

Look to your research and find those key hot buttons of your best customers, and promote those attributes to prospects more heavily. Also, compare your reading on prospects versus customers in other areas of your brand – you may find another disconnect in their perceptions that could cause this effect, and you can remedy both with a shift in your promotional or creative approach to highlight those key elements more heavily. Align your creative with those highest ranking attributes of your best customers, and the prospects should get the best, most relevant perception of your product.

These are just two of the possible outcomes to this type of analysis. Suffice to say that if you’re brand is aligned with your message and your audience, you’ve got a strong package for success.

David Poulos, Chief Consultant at Granite Partners has been offering marketing guidance to firms for over 25 years. Specialties include non-profit marketing and full-scale strategic marketing campaigns. He can be reached at http://www.granite-part.com, or 410-472-4570.