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In early April, the T4T staff attended the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference in Atlanta. We learned a lot over the three days and look forward to sharing some of it with you in the upcoming months.

Note: This article is adapted from Tirza Hollenhorst and Mark Sutton’s session at the NTC on April 9, 2010. Tirza is the Online Community Architect for ifPeople and Mark is the Vice President at Artez Interactive.

Limited staff and time means making the staff you have as efficient and effective as possible. How’s that accomplished? Clarify your strategy, invest in automation and get help from everyone. What follows is a list of 25 practical ways to increase communications capacity. The ideas listed cover technology, training, templates and more. Tirza and Mark separated the ideas into three buckets: Strategy, Process Automation, and Make Communication Part of Everyone’s Job.

Strategy

1. Define your goals. Specifically, create a communication strategy that includes a timeline of 18 months to 3 years.
2. Define your audiences. Who are you trying to reach? Creating personas for different groups helps define your target audiences. For example, the Best Buy Corporation used personas to define their target markets in 2005: “Barry” represented wealthy professional men who could afford the nicest products and services while “Buzz” represented the younger tech enthusiasts.
3. Go to where your audience is. Address their aspirations while speaking their language. Email is just fine if your audience hasn’t switched to Facebook, etc.
4. Clarify key messages. What’s your elevator pitch? Consider the context for your different messages. The speech you give to the Rotary Club might not be the same you give to the high school class.
5. Research your key words. How are people finding you online? Checkout Google’s webmaster tools.
6. Listen. More conversation, less broadcasting. Have you set up Google Alerts yet? It’ll help you monitor what others are saying.
7. Build your social database. Email list, Facebook friends, Twitter followers, etc.

Process Automation

8. Stop entering data! Forms within Google Docs integrate with Excel to save a ton of time. Read about it here: Introduction to Google Forms.
9. Use an RSS reader. One reader will help you keep track of news from a variety of sites. Search for “RSS reader” on the web and you’ll find a ton of free options.

vCross post. Post your submissions to more than one discussion list or website at a time. Read something interesting that someone else wrote? Help that person out by sharing it.

10. Schedule tweets. Not sitting at your computer all day? You can schedule your tweets so it seems as if you are. This helps keep the news going and your audience hasn’t wondered where you’ve gone.

Make Communications Part of Everyone's Job

12. Create a Communications Calendar. Get in a rhythm of posting online. This can be shared by everyone in the organization.
13. Create and use templates. Ever notice that our T4T class announcement emails have the same look and feel? I use a template.
14. Create a central information bank (Google Docs is great). This is especially useful if you’re not all on the same network. Use it to store stories, stats, photos, etc.
15. Teach your staff “writing for the web.” It’s not the same as your high school grammar class. Make it conversational, direct, informal, and skimmable (yes, that may be a new word).
16. Be deliberate about what tools you use. If you don’t have the staff and time, then don’t waste your time by trying to be on every social network site along with your website along with email…you get the idea.
17. Get more people participating. A person doesn’t have to have “communications” as part of their job title to communicate. At a former job I held, we shared duties for posting to the organization’s blog. Didn’t matter what our official titles were. We all took a turn.
18. Use checklists. Think like hospitals and airlines. This will maintain standards, document processes, decrease confusion, and enforce quality. And you won’t forget to deploy the landing gear.
19. Identify guest bloggers (or even just start a blog). Have a few regular volunteers? Ask them to write.
20. Include “digital natives” on staff. Those are the people for whom digital technologies already existed when they were born (as opposed to a “digital immigrant” who had to learn it later).
21. Interns, interns, interns. Look on Craigslist or local universities.
22. Expand beyond text. Take the Pink Glove Dance, for example.
23. Include all of your supporters as content generators. Heck, it’s often more interesting to read content from guest posters anyhow.
24. Test, measure, and adjust. Cut it out if it doesn’t work. The risk of failure has never been lower.
25. Have fun and be creative. Here’s one example: xtranormal