Responses to Questions Posed During the webinar
Unless the blog is developed for a very specific purpose unrelated to official communications (e.g., student blogs for an educational nonprofit), I can't see any reason you would have a blog distinct from your website. In fact, I have encouraged many groups to at the very least, include their most recent posts on the front page of their website, and at the most, make the blog their front page. For some nonprofits, there is no need for anything BUT a blog. After all, the more good, relevant content you provide to your audience, they better.
Read more at: http://www.edbatista.com/2005/05/blogs_are_still.html
There are three good ways to find relevant blogs:
Blogs are great for capturing organizational knowledge as it exists at a specific point in time. For example, a blog might be used to track progress on a project, or to write about a successful fundraising event. A wiki, on the other hand, is meant for capturing time-independent, authoritative information, such as the software documentation or workplace policies. Also, as blogs are often written in a personal voice, they are thus great for documenting opinion and perspective. Wikis are meant to capture knowledge for an entire organization, not just an individual.
Read more at: http://ferret.bemidjistate.edu/~morgan/cgi-bin/blogsandwiki.pl?WikiAndBlog
Blogs are different from message boards, forums, or BBS' in both intent and execution. Blogs are meant to have a singular, personal voice (or, in some situations, voices). They are meant to be more personal and authoritative than forums, which are distributed and democratic in nature. A helpful analogy might be the bulletin board in the break room at work. Often the bulletin board is the place for official announcements by management (the blog), but there is usually another place for staff announcements—a place for garage sale flyers for instance (the forum).
Read more at: http://www.commoncraft.com/archives/000768.html
Forums are a big, unmediated discussion—like a cocktail party. Although anyone can contribute to a wiki, they are not conversations, but are authoritative, official documents. Blogs and forums are for creating discussion. Wikis are for creating documents.
There certainly are reasons a nonprofit might not blog. If the organization doesn't have the resources or someone to drive the effort, an aborted blogging effort might reflect poorly on the organization. Also, lack of content is always a concern, so an organization might not blog if it does not have much to say. Organizations that deal with particularly sensitive issues (a battered women's shelter, for example) might not blog simply due to sensitivity or privacy issues.
A donate page is an easy mechanism for taking donations—it lets internet users donate with a credit card without the hassle of stamps and checkbooks. However, a blog can give an individual a reason to donate, by telling a story or showing a picture. A well-written blog can market your organization much more effectively than a static donate page can.
No. Most companies, organizations, and individuals who blog do not have a full-time resource dedicated to maintaining their blog. In fact, most spend only a few hours a week on their blogs. Time commitment depends on how much research you do before you write, how often you post, and how long your posts are. More important than time, however, is commitment, as a committed blogger can do a lot in an hour a day.
There certainly are. For one, having numerous contributors means a more distributed publishing model, which translates as less burn-out and more content. Also, although a blog is generally written in a singular, personal voice, a bit of a diversity can still be achieved through having multiple authors—as long as everyone is clear on the blog's purpose. A great example of a group weblog is http://www.37signals.com/svn Signal vs. Noise, a software development and design weblog by the 37 Signals company.
Of course, this is absolutely possible. Whether it's a good idea is a different question—you don't want to get dooced. There are lots of weblogs about nonprofits written by individuals in their own time. A great example is http://ext337.org/.
This one is up for debate—after all, some very good blogs are hosted at Blogspot (such as http://tsunamihelp.blogspot.com/). However, by and large having a Blogspot (or Xanga, or MSN Spaces, or Yahoo360) blog is kind of like having a hotmail account—it generally indicates you're a hobbyist or just cannot afford a true blog. Unless you need to keep your blog separate for some reason (perhaps you haven't gotten buy-in from management?), there's no reason to host the blog at a separate address. There are many free and easy-to-install tools available that can work on a variety of servers.
Getting listed in Google can be a challenging, time-consuming task. But as long as you're publishing content on a regular basis and are getting incoming links from other sites, you should be indexed by Google through the natural course of things. Of course, that doesn't mean you will show up on the first page of search results for your intended keywords. "Search engine optimization" is a big, complicated, inexact science. Generally speaking, it's important to use words in your posts that indicate what you want people to search for ("environmental justice" for instance). It's also important to accumulate links from other blogs or websites. Getting incoming links can also be very difficult. I don't recommend link exchanges or explicitly asking others to link to you—this is often frowned upon in the blogging world, where honesty and hard work are highly valued. Links will come with hard work and compelling content.
Read more at: http://thevirtualhandshake.com/blog/2005/01/11/search-engine-optimization-for-your-blog
You can set up anonymous accounts for these individuals, so that when they write no one but your staff will know who wrote what. If they're afraid of grammar or spelling mistakes, review posts before they're published. Many software packages come with different levels of publishing rights built in, so that posts have to be approved first. If their anxiety is derived from other issues—afraid if negative comments, or revealing too much about the organization—show them other nonprofit or business blogs where there is very little negative commenting. Most of all, demonstrate how blogging can benefit an organization.
Depending on geography and level of customization (any extra programming or artwork will probably up the price), probably $50-$100/hr.
Most weblog packages will create RSS feeds automatically. If you are not using a blogging package and want to create one, you can create one from scratch, but this is can be difficult.
Read more at: http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/2175271