March 2009 Newsletter
Nonprofit Neighborhood
Recent Product Enhancement
New Meetings and Events Software Module Features
- Allow a member to purchase multiple seats for a meeting and in addition, limit how many seats they can purchase.
- See the payments for a member's paid meetings in their record.
- Public calendar now detects whether a member has already registered for a meeting before, and give them a chance to cancel reserving additional seats - or prevent them from reserving additonal seats, if there's a per-member limit and they've reached it or would exceed it .
- Public calendar now shows the number of reservations for unpaid meetings, if it is greater than 1, in the cart, thank you page, and confirmation email.
For more information on these new features, click here
New Clients
Minnesota Universal Health Care Coalition - MUHCC, a 501c4 nonprofit, is a coalition of 15 organizations and hundreds of individuals committed to making quality health care in Minnesota affordable, accessible, and guaranteed, regardless of income, employment or health status. MUHCC is dedicated to establishing comprehensive single-payer health care for all Minnesotans through advocacy, education, lobbying, and community organizing. MUHCC is a chief sponsor of the /Campaign for the Minnesota Health Plan/, a single-payer, single plan for all Minnesota residents.
HIRE Minnesota campaign - The HIRE (Healthcare, Infrastructure, Renewable Energy) Minnesota campaign began in late fall of 2008. Their goals are to create living wage jobs with benefits for communities of color, to jumpstart the economy with investments in infrastructure and green industries and to ease the climate crisis to ensure healthier communities. HIRE Minnesota deeply believes its success will depend on everyone working together for common goals. According to Alessandra Williams, HIRE Minnesota Coordinator, "We look forward to utilizing The Databank to adequately manage our volunteers, events, and to send Action Alerts. Most importantly, the new Databank will enable us to have efficient management of our supporter’s information to promote our April 20, 2009 Rally to the Capitol, where we hope to gather thousands to strengthen and solidify our voices.
Tip du Jour
Twitter and your Databank
Do you or your organization have a Twitter account? What is Twitter? You can promote your Databank events, action alerts, etc. using "Tweets" on Twitter. A Tweet is a 140 character message that people who "follow" you can view and reply to. Simply type your Tweet as a short message explaining what you want the reader to do and include a link to your event sign up or action alert page. Because there is a 140 character limit, we recommend using Tiny URL or Bit.ly if you are going to include a link in your Tweet. An example of a Tweet would be: Tell your senator to support XY Bill: http://tinyurl.com/cwt57t.You can even encourage your supporters to Tweet for you. They can use a message similar to the one above, but they would want to add a @[your Twitter name here] to the end, which will point to your Twitter profile. Follow thedatabank on Twitter now.
Featured Resource
Social Network Appends with Rapleaf
thedatabank recently partnered with Rapleaf to provide you with Social Network Append service. What is a Social Network Append? A Social Network Append takes a list of email contacts and finds information about those contacts including: demographics, pyschographics/interests, number of friends, and their "social web footprint." This information can help you better target certain supporters who may have a broad social network with whom they can spread the word. Read about Rapleaf's study of Social Network Users vs. Age. Clients can now order a Social Network Append or any other data processing services right in their Databank by going to Setup -> Data Services.
Karen's Blog
Adventures in Social Networking
Our Tip du jour is about social network appends, and of course we had to test it out by running the service on our own database. I found out that LinkedIn was the most popular network among folks on our house list. In fact, more than 20% of our clients have LinkedIn profiles connected with their professional email address.
Naturally, I joined LinkedIn. Here's my profile. Next I exported an email list of my clients from our Databank, imported it into LinkedIn, sent an invitation to connect, and voila...10 minutes later I already had some links.
I'm still trying to learn how nonprofit organizations might use the social network append data. Here are my thoughts so far:
- Find out which network(s) are most popular among your members or target audiences you want to cultivate, so you know where to focus your energy. Most of the social networks allow you to create an organization page. For an example of this, look up NTEN on Facebook and Twitter.
- Identify supporters who have large numbers of friends, and ask them to help you to reach new people. You could invite them to post a link for you which their friends can view, to challenge their network to match their donation, or include a badge or sticker for your organization on their profile.
- Find out who your VIPs know, then ask for an introduction to a major donor prospect or policy maker. Or, use social network profiles to research major donors/prospects. The social network append will get you links to all the profiles, and you can often see quite a bit of information that they have made public, even without being "friends." Once you do link with someone, of course you get a lot more.
- Deepen your relationship with key supporters and get to know them in a whole new way. I'm also on Facebook (which tends to be much more personal than LinkedIn, and therefore it's not my preferred way of connecting with clients). I can't believe all the crazy stuff I find out about people on there. Give people a venue, and they will tell you what you didn't think to ask.
Come visit me on LinkedIn, or talk to me on the old-fashioned telephone, and tell me how you would use the social network append information.
Karen
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