Content and Curation for Nonprofits

Learn with pictures what makes content share-worthy, and even viral.

Great, informative post by Navneet Kaushal on the do's and don'ts of content curation & some of the best tools out there to curate content to your website and social networks.

Be brave and do it yourself!

very like

YOUR #roadmap  thanks @Scoop.it

We advocate persona-fication--persona development--to better identify and understand your audience.  Here's a great article on content strategy that speaks to the value of personas.  Students sometimes struggle with understanding why a 'made-up person' is going to be of any value, particularly since we all have inherent cognitive biases that color our judgment.  

There is no doubt that bias will influence persona development.  But everyone has developed a persona whether they admit it or not--it's living in their brain as the assumption of who they are marketing too.  Too often the lack of articulation increases the bias, not decreases it.  Benefits of creating a persona publicly is to compare them with others in the team AND the audience, in other words to expose your bias.   Qualitative researchers keep a journal during data collection and analysis for this very reason--the journal chronicles the researcher's perspective to bring potential biases to light.  It is exactly when the marketing team has little in common with the audience who uses a product that creating a persona has value for two reasons: 1) you test the persona in the market against real people and 2) you can (although not all do) externalize yourself from the persona--step aside and have a dialogue, much in the gestalt therapy fashion,.  When done with proper guidance (i.e. someone who is trained in this kind of stuff), these approaches can provide new and often startling perspectives.  

Personas don't always work.  Nothing is foolproof.  The 'right' persona doesn't guarantee that your product is any good or that your messaging is very salient or sticky.  There are other skills required besides persona development.  Going through a persona development exercise, however, is likely to have gotten you closer than you would have otherwise.