David Hartstein’s Post

Struggling to connect with the "right" website visitors? This should help! On Wednesday, we're teaming up with Jordana Merkin for our next Nonprofit Website Office Hours. To say I'm excited is a serious understatement. We're going to cover things like: + How can you instantly connect with the "right" people? + How do you make it easier to understand your mission? + How can you turn more casual visitors into active supporters? + What step-by-step process can you use to dial in your messaging ahead of the year-end push? I got a sneak peek of Jordana's presentation. And it's going to be awesome! (If you know Jordana, this isn't a surprise.) As always during Office Hours, Nickie Bartels and I will also be around to answer any website-related question you're wrestling with. Jordana is sticking around for Q&A, so bring your messaging questions too and we'll get 'em all answered. Hope you can make it! (Link to register is in the comments below.)

There’s no U in BEST PRACTICE. And that’s the problem. Your audience trusts and believes in YOU. There’s a reason they chose to give you their time and attention. If you’re copying that best practice, template or playbook without making it uniquely your own, you’re missing an essential ingredient of what will ultimately make it work: You! Borrow what’s worked for others. But don’t forget to make it yours.

STL friends! The next ImpactUp is happening on 10/10. And it's gonna be a good one! ImpactUp is a FREE virtual event during the day + local meetups happening all over the world at night. This time, the focus is on taking a collective pause + talking about mental health across the social sector. More details here: https://lnkd.in/gyV-nxGi I'm bummed I'll be out of town for this one. But you better believe I'll be at the next one. Huge thanks to Lawrence for coordinating. And We Are For Good for being the brilliant folks behind this movement!

Yesterday I removed 1,801 subscribers from our email list. Here’s the exact process we used in case you need to clean up your list. First, why’d we scrub all of these subscribers? We’ve been introducing a lot more control for our subscribers to get the types of emails they want from us in their inboxes. We only want to send folks the types of resources they’ll find helpful. But a bunch of dormant subscribers who don’t engage with our content make it a lot harder for us to see what’s resonating. It could also start hurting our email deliverability. So here’s what we did. 1. Identified the right audience to unsubscribe For us, these folks ticked a few boxes: + Subscribed to either our Events and Webinars or Website Tips lists + Hadn’t opened an email from us in the last 9 months + Had been subscribed to our list for at least 6 months (Truthfully, I forgot this 6-month rule in our first audience segment and had to retroactively add it later since there were some recent subscribers who hadn’t opened an email yet.) Once we had the audience segment set, we… 2. Sent an initial re-engagement email I sent an email to these folks telling them I’d noticed they hadn’t opened an email from us in a while and offered them the option to update their preferences. A bunch of subscribers did! We also invited them to an upcoming Nonprofit Website Office Hours as a way to re-engage with us and get their website questions answered. 3. Sent a second re-engagement email This time, we only targeted subscribers who got the first email but didn’t open it. I told them we’d be removing them from our list in a week unless they clicked a button in the email. When they clicked, we took them to a page to update their preferences. We also added a tag in our database to prevent them from being unsubscribed. 4. Unsubscribed the rest As promised, we waited a week, then removed the remaining 1,801 subscribers from our list. My plan is to automate this process moving forward. If someone doesn’t open any of our emails for 6 months, they’ll get these two emails and be automatically unsubscribed if they don’t confirm they want to stay subscribed. That way, I won’t have to rely on this being a manual process moving forward. Just wanted to share our whole process in case you’re thinking of cleaning up your own list. If you have any questions or thoughts, let me know. Hope this helps!

Wondering if you should create multiple websites to showcase your different programs, services or events? This is how Nickie Bartels and I think about it.

A confused mind never converts. So let's stop blaming attention spans for our lack of website engagement and focus on the real issue: Unclear messaging that doesn't connect with what your visitors care about. If you want to dial in your website messaging so your visitors "get it" immediately, our next Nonprofit Website Office Hours is for you! On Oct. 9th, we're teaming up with Jordana Merkin to dive deep on how to: + Connect with your ideal website visitors + Show them why they should care + Explain your work so they "get it" and want to learn more Jordana is not only an expert on nonprofit messaging. She's also an all-around wonderful person and a great friend. Hope you'll join us: https://lnkd.in/g289x_vv As always, we'll save plenty of time for Q&A to answer your website-related questions. So bring those too. This one's going to be stellar!

Looking for a simpler way to describe your website's structure? Use family tree terminology. Let's use this common page structure as an example: About >> Our Team >> Jane Doe In this example, Our Team is a subpage of About. And Jane Doe is a subpage of Our Team. You can describe these relationships by saying things like: + About is the PARENT page of Our Team + Jane Doe is a CHILD page of Our Team + Jane Doe is also a GRANDCHILD page of About We use this terminology all the time on our team. It's simple. But also really helpful. Hope it comes in handy!

All launches are special. But this one really pulls at my heartstrings.

Our whole team circles up every few months for a retrospective. And they always start in the same beautiful way. By collectively taking a moment to read over all of the inspiring missions we’ve gotten to support these last few months. It’s so easy to get caught up in the tasks, to-dos and deadlines. All of those WHATS that make up daily life. But through it all, we need to remember the WHY behind it. And for us at Wired Impact, that’s helping incredible orgs use their websites to change the world. How do you make sure you don’t lose sight of your WHY?

Donated website services can be amazing. But can also quickly go sideways. These questions should help! We hear from nonprofits all the time who spend months working with a volunteer, only to be left with a half-finished website. In this week's blog post, Nickie Bartels breaks down how to prevent that from happening to your org. In it, you'll find: + The different ways to build a new site + The most common pitfalls with pro bono website projects + How to avoid these issues by asking very specific questions Link to the full post is in the comments!