Kristina Leroux, Community Engagement Manager
Part of my job as community engagement manager is to handle guest posts for this blog. We love sharing what nonprofits are doing and tips from other experts in nonprofit marketing and fundraising.
We receive guest posts in two ways – we reach out to people we know have great stories and insight to share or someone reaches out to us.
Unfortunately, not everyone who reaches out to us has any clue as to what our blog is actually about. For example, I just received an email that said:
Hi Kivi,
Great blog.
My name is Ivy and I am currently working with [leaving out the company as to not embarrass anyone]
I enjoyed your recent article about “Finding Your Trampoline”.
We were hoping we could publish a blog on your site?
I have some ideas I am working on:
* Massive indoor trampoline universe all about jumping high and landing soft & safe.
* Fly through the air and bounce off the walls with interconnected trampolines and padding to land on.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
I am sure Ivy knows a lot about trampolines, but she obviously did not read the article she mentioned, which used trampolines as metaphor. Or read our blog at all. Or understand how to pitch a guest post, period.
I am also sure that Ivy is a Spam-bot, which we get a lot of. Unfortunately, that makes it hard for us to wade through the junk proposals and the legit ones.
Here are a few do’s and don’ts for anyone looking to have a post published here. These are pretty standard rules so think about them whenever you are trying to pitch something.
Do:
Read our blog. You would think this would be a no-brainer, but we get pitches for all kinds of topics that have nothing to do with nonprofits let alone nonprofit marketing or fundraising.
Pitch relevant content our readers can apply to their work as nonprofit communicators. This is pretty straight forward. Share something that’s worked for you or something that didn’t.
Ask to include a link in your bio. We know you want a backlink. And that’s totally fine. We just want quality content that’s useful to our readers.
Don’t:
Sell anything. We don’t accept pure sales or product demo posts. Especially if we’ve never heard of your company before.
Forget a description. Send us a two-three sentence summary letting us know what you want to publish. Multiple ideas are also good so we have more to choose from and a better idea of where you’re coming from.
Be too formal or technical. We are pretty down to earth around here and our readers have come to expect plain-spoken, practical advice.
While we love our expert bloggers like Julia Reich and Tom Ahern, our favorite guest posts are from nonprofit marketers and fundraisers who work on staff at nonprofits, in the trenches day in and day out.
We’d love to hear about what you are doing with your nonprofit communications and how you are doing it.
So send us your pitch! Just don’t mention trampolines…
You can email blog post ideas to Kristina at helpdesk@nonprofitmarketingguide.com.
