Marketing and PR

As a bittersweet moment, this is my last post on this blog, for I'm leaving Aspiration to start my PhD in Nonprofit Leadership at the University of San Diego. I'll be hosting future Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants on my new Nonprofit Leadership 601 blog.

Thanks to all those who provided blog submissions this week!

I am excited to announce that Aspiration just completed its first ever brochure!!

Ok, some of you may be wondering--why is it that we've been around for five years but didn't complete a brochure until now?

I don't want to give too many excuses other than we are unique and do the majority of our messaging electronically. However, we also wanted to be sure that we put the right messaging into our brochure.

Our tri-fold brochure is broken up into our three programs.

1. Our events--"We connect Nonprofit Technology Communities."

The blog carnival is here again. Although this week was an open call for posts, I noticed a theme--all the posts relate to planning for 2007. Hopefully through this advice, we can all become better nonprofits in 2007.

1. Gene Tagaki of the Nonprofit Law blog discusses the, "IRS Exempt Organizations Division 2007 Priorities," in his post.

2. Alan at the California Association of Nonprofits shares the, "2007 mileage reimbursement rates set forth by the IRS," in his Nonprofit Accounting Bootcamp blog.

3. Nancy Swartz of the Getting Attention blog, discusses the importance of putting your tag line in your e-mail signature, in her "Your World, Your Chance to Make it Better," blog post.

4. "Cause related marketing comes of age," in Paul Jones's cause related marking blog.

5. Tracy of Frequence Inc. blog entry shares about the, "Top Ten Ways to Prevent Employee Theft in your Organization."

6. Holly at the NTEN Connect blog post is called, "Protect Your .org."

7. Jeff of the Donor Power Blog, shares with us how to focus on our donors and not ourselves in his, "The Invisible Donor" blog post.

The Bamboo Project will be hosting next week's Blog Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants.

Another question that came up during my presentation at Craigslist boot camp was, "How do I find those event planning templates that you talk about during your 10 Nonprofit Operations Success Steps?" Well here they are...

Aspiration has become fairly well known in the nonprofit tech world for our unique event planning and facilitation methods. I think it helps that we have Allen Gunn a super and amazing facilitator leading our organization. (I'm not biased, really I'm not :) Anyway, we have created a set of event planning templates and materials so we can easily replicate our events. Nonprofits and Foundations even hire us to plan and facilitate events for them and its a lot of fun since we have streamlined the process.

  <p class="MsoNormal">It must be Fundraising mailing time!&nbsp; I&rsquo;ve received several questions this past month about the dreaded bulk mailing process.&nbsp; A couple of years ago I discovered the software www.Postagesaver.com.&nbsp; It literally saved me time and money for my organization. For $25 you can download this software, then easily upload your mailing list (from excel) into it and it creates a sorting guide as well as prints out the necessary forms for the post office.&nbsp; </p>  

I recently revised Aspiration's communications plan.  During this process I found Cause Communication's "Communications Toolkit: A guide to navigating communications for the nonprofit world" to be a very helpful resource. I ordered my free copy of the book/binder on Cause Communication's website. www.causecommunications.org