Thanks to everyone who attended the Causes August Webinar, Growing your Cause.  In case you missed it, or if you just want a review, here’s a summary of what we went over.

Building a community on your cause is the first step in any successful campaign.  A community that is strong in numbers as well as educated about your issue will be much more likely to get involved during your fundraising and advocacy activities.  Community strengthening also identifies leaders who can be the leading force in your campaigns.

Let’s break recruiting down into three sections: First Steps, Using the Cause, Promoting the Cause.

First Steps:

• Invite your network and tell them why the cause is important
• Encourage board members and active supporters to get involved
• Highlight the cause in your newsletter or on your website

Using the Cause:

• Utilize stream (when something you do gets featured in the Facebook newsfeed).  You can post to your wall about the cause or set your status message with information and a link.  This goes out into the newsfeeds of your whole network, letting even more people know about the cause.
• Make your cause compelling.  Pay particular attention to the cause image, title, mission and positions.
• Use the features on the cause to encourage recruitment.  Customize your Welcome Note, post announcements, post media to the media board and set up a donor match based on recruitment.

Promoting the cause:

• Don’t think of the cause as something that lives online by itself.  Use offline tactics to promote it as well!
• Email your friends
• Put a link to the cause in your email signature
• Throw an event and sign people up for the cause or hand out “business cards” for the cause
• Send out press releases and encourage local news coverage
• Get your coworkers involved
• Word of mouth – tell everyone you know!

Once you’ve worked on recruiting and built your cause up to a size that can stand with you on your campaigns, you’ll be all set to start fundraising or start a petition.  The important part of using Causes well is having a strategy and sequencing your actions to be sure that you can accomplish your goals.  As always, if you have any questions about your cause or how to go about starting your campaign, you can get in touch with Susan and Sarah at partner@causes.com.  You can also download the Webinar and find more information about growing your cause on the Nonprofit Resources page.

Next Nonprofit Webinar

Date: Wednesday, September 9

Time: 11am PDT / 2pm EDT

Topic: Getting Started on Causes: Setting up a cause and your Nonprofit Profile