What can you learn from Beyoncé's blog?

Last year, Beyoncé started a Tumblr. It is low on text, but full of photos of her, her family, and her adventures.

This is an amazing analysis of Beyoncé's blog and why it is so compelling (which I recommend reading even if you aren't a Beyoncé fan). What struck me about it in particular was that nonprofits could take away two useful insights from this analysis:

• The blog is authentic. You can tell that many of the photos are taken by the legend herself. It is clearly her, her family, her life, even her handwriting. 

What is your organization's blog like? For example, if you have entries written by volunteers, is it clear they are written by them, or does someone take their words and make them sound "better," sanitizing them in the process? Even photos that aren't that great lend authenticity—they say "this photo was taken by a volunteer, we don't spend your money on slick photos, but this picture captures what we do regardless."

• The blog is intimate. As a stark contrast to the heavily made-up, stylist-influenced, Photoshopped pictures of Beyoncé that one can find in magazines, here she shows a much more natural side. In many photos she's wearing little or no makeup, and lots of photos feature her doing something wacky. There are lots of pictures of her family in remote locations that are very private. This drives the viewer to feel a connection to the star. 

In order to get people to care about and, ultimately and especially, donate to your organization, they need to feel connected to it. In particular they need to feel a connection to the work. Can you use photos (or video!) that make people feel like they are there at the zoo seeing the new baby gorilla being born? That they are there with you working with kids in Central America?

Know the important difference for online writing

A post on Slate recently shared that many visitors of web pages don't scroll at all in order to see all of the content.  So something to keep in mind when you're writing for the web is that you should put your most important stuff up top.  Make it compelling enough that people will want to scroll down to keep reading!

Network For Good echoes this idea, and takes the readability concept further:

"Eye-tracking studies show that readers scan text first to see if the article is relevant to them. They typically skim the top of the page—skipping the parts that require scrolling to reach—plus any headings, images, and bold-faced terms. Effective Web pages are easy to scan quickly and pick out the main points. Put your most important information at the beginning of your article. Expand on that info with eye-grabbing elements like bold-faced subheads, captioned images, and bulleted lists."

The Network For Good article has other good points, like:

• make sure your headline makes it clear what the article is about,
• break up big blocks of text, and 
• use bulleted or numbered lists. 

As ever, our job as communicators is to make it easy on our readers.  Attention spans are even smaller on the internet.  And if your readers don't read, they won't get a chance to be affected by your compelling copy, and then they won't donate!