Kivi Leroux Miller

Kivi Leroux Miller talks with FundRaising Success about her book, "Content Marketing for Nonprofits," and what the concept of content marketing means for fundraisers.

Compelling profiles —of constituents, volunteers or donors — are powerful tools that a nonprofit can use to motivate donors and other supporters by illuminating its mission, demonstrating success and providing public recognition.

Unfortunately, a lot of these profiles — which appear in newsletters, on Web sites, and in PR/marketing materials and annual reports, among other places — are just boring and fall victim to what Kivi Leroux Miller calls the "tedious bio syndrome." Here, she recommends steps organizations can take to create powerful profiles that go to work for their causes.

Face it … not everyone cares about your cause — and there’s not much you can do about it.

"There are always going to be people that are more interested in shoe shopping than what you have to say," says Kivi Leroux Miller.

In the webinar "Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps, and Tales" last month, Kivi Leroux Miller, founder of EcoScribe Communications and keeper of the Nonprofit Marketing Guide, covered blogging inside and out, including information about the types of blogs nonprofits can create and questions organizations should ask themselves to make sure a blog is right for them.

Most nonprofit newsletters are boring. I subscribe to about 20 of them, and only one or two are interesting enough to regularly skim. Most are full of cookie-cutter human-interest stories that elicit little more than a yawn. This got me thinking, is this sample representative? If so, yikes! Newsletters are an important way that we cultivate relationships with donors. If we’re generally dull and needy in those communications, our audience will lose interest. And that ultimately spells financial heartbreak for us. So what’s a nonprofit to do? How do we take our newsletters from snoring to soaring? Looking for an easy answer