Why Blog Now? Addressing the Elephant in the Room

Why Blog Now? We have our reasons. And we want to share them with you.

 Reason: Contribute Something Valuable

There are more than 100 million public blogs out there – what could we possibly have to add to a conversation already crammed with a deafening 100 million voices? For the answer to that question, we turned to our clients. In a series of surveys, we asked them what questions weren’t being answered in their online conversations. The most striking responses came from our friends in the nonprofit world, who said they needed a resource to distill the social media conversation down to the tools that would help them save money and time. So, we set out to answer that question: what are the best tools and strategies to make social media work efficiently and effectively for social good?

Reason: Be a Found Resource

We knew we wanted to be a resource for causes looking to make social media work for social good, but being a resource implies being found. No matter how well you answer your audience’s question, if they can’t find you when they’re asking it, you've lost them. Search engines love fresh, focused content, and we realized that by integrating our blog and our new website to create a “blogsite,” we’d have an opportunity to satisfy search engines’ cravings for relevance. Our search engine optimization began with the following:

1. We used surveys of our clients and friends to develop a targeted keyword list.
2. We created a blog that will allow us to deliver fresh, focused, sharable content regularly.
3. We developed our website with a content management system (CMS), so that new content wasn’t exclusive to our blog.

Our “blogsite” means that we'll have a chance at being heard in the 150M+ blog conversation. More importantly, we organized our search engine optimization around our audience so that we (hopefully) won't just be found – we’ll be found by the right people. 

Reason: An Opportunity to Listen

Creating a website and blog starts and ends with listening. We began by listening for an unanswered question from our clients. We built our blog around answering that question. But in order to continue listening without the formal surveys and questionnaires, we needed to provide an opportunity for user generated content on our website, and a blog that integrates comments and social media gave us that opportunity. We get to throw thoughts and suggestions out there and readers have a chance to ask questions, comment, and challenge us. Social media are perhaps the best places to listen, so we’ve provided tools like the “like” buttons, and we’re welcoming continued conversation on Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, or all of the above. Bottom line is, we wanted to hear from you, and we hope we’ve created a space for it.

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