Madera Group

Our good friends at Network for Good offers us their view into the crystal ball of online fundraising in 2010 in this good article about upcoming trends for the year.  Here’s the high level summary:

The Madera Group partnered with Strategen Consulting to co-host a special fundraiser celebrating Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner’s first year in the California State Assembly and to support her re-election in 2010.  More than 100 friends and supporters gathered at the David Brower Center last Friday evening to honor Nancy’s hard work and success in passing several key bills through the legislature.

Gilbert Bendix, a friend and neighbor of the Madera Group, truly embodies the spirit of giving.  Gil, a soft-spoken 85-year-old, has been giving to charitable organizations for years, including Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders, Food Bank of Contra Costa and Solano and MBIRA, a non-profit organization that preserves and promotes Zimbabwean music.

Mobile Commons reported in mid-August on an article in Mobile Marketer that looked at how mobile technology was being used to help pass health care reform legislation. Labor unions, large national advocacy groups, small local non-profits, and faith-based community organizations are using mobile to reach out to their supporters around the issue of health care reform.

This time of year is my favorite. I love watching the children in my life begin a new year at school, seeing the apples start to fall from the trees on our street, and getting busy at The Madera Group!

The majority of our clients have begun year-end fundraising campaigns — the last and most important financial push of the year.

As the year-end fundraising seasons kicks off, Madera Group client Diabetes Hands Foundation (DHF) has launched a video campaign to raise $15,000 by the end of September. The videos feature the voices of those affected by the disease, while at the same time demonstrate the creative appeal and effect that personalized narratives provide to help raise awareness about diabetes.

It’s been an exciting four months since The Madera Group moved into the new David Brower Center in downtown Berkeley. We joined over 20 other public benefit organizations as anchor tenants in the green building, which has a high-tech and ecologically sustainable design.

Allyson Kapin has a great post on Frogloop, Care2’s nonprofit online marketing blog on 10 Tools and Strategies to Market Your Nonprofit on a Shoe-String Budget.  She writes: “If your nonprofit is not taking advantage of free tools like Add This, a widget that encourages users to share your organizations articles or web pages on the most popular social networks or branded toolbars like FreeCause, then your nonprofit is missing out on some big marketing opportunities.”

I liked Matt Wilson’s article in the July edition of the NTEN e-newsletter on the State of Mobile Advocacy, having written on this subject myself. Matt works for Mobile Commons, one of the vendors innovating with mobile advocacy. He writes: “There are now several vendors working in the nonprofit sector who have built target-matching applications for voice calls, similar to the district-matching features in the online advocacy arena. This is allowing organizations to connect their constituents directly to the phone lines of Congressional offices, skipping the Capitol Switchboard. This leads to longer average call times, as advocates are more likely to abandon the call when they are connected to the switchboard.”

Success in social marketing and fundraising means making our clients visible in a crowded online marketplace. Our agency works with clients to develop a strategy that not only uses social networks, but also persuades others to pass the word on. That means creating inspiring and thoughtful messages that work for both email inboxes and social networking sites. It means telling a story that communicates the meaning of the work we are describing, and showing the results that come from it.