Madera Group

Building an Organizational Blog: Seven Tips for Success

Posted by Michael Stein, Senior Internet Strategist on July 16, 2007

As a professional Internet strategist I read articles, keep up on my blog feeds, and subscribe to listservs to stay current on trends with blogging, analytics, viral marketing and Web 2.0. But I learn the most about blogging by building blogs for organizations. There’s nothing quite as tangible as having to figure out the most basic issues with blogging, such as getting staff involved, or engaging your organization’s most active constituency.

I’ve recently had two positive experiences building organizational blogs, one for a women’s environmental health nonprofit that fights breast cancer, and another for my son’s preschool. Both had unique challenges. In each case, choosing Typepad as the blog publishing platform was the easy part. The harder part was getting staff involved, navigating the complex social ecology of the organization, and getting creative with marketing.

There were a lot of lessons learned from both of these other work clients:

• Define a mission for your blog. A blog mission statement can help staff regularly reframe who the blog is for, and what role it plays in the larger organizational context. A blog mission statement can also help define your blog participation goals both for publishing and readership.

• Understand the constituency that will publish your blog and the constituency that will read your blog. More often than not, there’s a good deal of overlap between these two groups. This is particularly true of community blogs where you’re counting on community participation to post content on the blog. At nonprofits the audiences might be staff, board, super-volunteers, occasional volunteers, donors, and other supporters. The natural audience for reading and reacting to your blog content is the community itself. Often the core audience for a blog is “close” to the organization itself, and may not need a wider audience to be successful. Concentrate on your core constituency first, since they’re your base to build on.

• Blog know-how is still emerging. In any organization that is adopting blogging as a publishing channel, the percentage of people who know how to blog or are interested in learning how to blog is usually low, much lower than you can even imagine. In spite of all the hype about blogs in the media and online, in the real world only 20% of Internet users read blogs regularly, and under 3% do any kind of blog publishing. It’s important to scale your project expectations to match this reality, and to allocate human and budget resources accordingly.

• Expect to have to train people one-by-one in an organization to use blogs for publishing. I personally train my clients to blog, either in person, on the phone, or with “cheat sheets” of instructions. Sitting down with someone next a computer to teach them blogging is a rewarding experience, and creates a new social relationship with technology through the conversation that ensues with the person you’re training. More importantly it allows you to strategize about how blogging can serve their needs.

• Blog marketing depends on other marketing channels. Blogging is a powerful publishing channel but it’s very Web-centric. For blogging to be successful, you have to market it through other Internet channels such as email messaging and group email lists. Bringing stakeholders into the blog building process is empowering, and aligns the blog with the organization’s daily flow of activity.

• Print is still a powerful tool to market a blog. Blogs are still competing for eyeballs with the print medium. For nonprofits, a flyer, postcard or print newsletter can draw needed attention to a blog.

• The top reason people read blogs are content relevance and new content. It’s critical to set up a realistic process and timeline for blog publishing that aligns with the organization’s current programmatic goals. Have the program staff at your organization be the driving force for blog publishing, and create an editorial process that injects their input on a regular basis.