What is Cause Blogging?
This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Breaking Down Cause Blogging.”
The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.
Shayla: You are listening to the Shortcut Content podcast and I’m talking with Dave Young, the founder of Shortcut Content. And, Dave, can you explain to us, what is cause blogging?
Dave: Cause blogging, well, it’s really pretty simple. If you’re a 501-c3 or some kind of a non-profit that is spearheading a cause, whether it’s local or national, international, and you’re blogging about that cause, that’s what I consider to be cause blogging. You’re not trying to sell a product. You’re typically not trying to necessarily sell your services. You’re trying to promote your cause. You’re trying to increase awareness and maybe get some support through your cause blogging.
You’re really, in cause blogging, you really have two target audiences, if you will. So if you’re a foundation that helps people, you have the people that you’re trying to help, and if you’re a foundation or some kind of a non-profit, you also typically have an audience of people that you’re trying to get to support the organization by donations or volunteering or other types of services. And very often, the message that you’re sending to each of those constituencies is going to be different.
A good example of that is, think of any kind of non-profit or charity that helps the poor. And the poor, the people that need the help of that charity, have to be reached in different way than the people who are going to be providing the resources, the donations, the money, that are going to fund those types of services. And that may mean that you want to put these messages in different channels. The people that you’re trying to reach to help may not have access to the internet. It all depends on the type of cause that you’re trying to promote.
Maybe it’s helping with children, who knows what it is? But, very often, what you should consider is using a couple of different channels for each of those audiences. So maybe the people that you’re trying to help are reading your blog, but you don’t want to put requests for donations out on your blog, and so maybe those kinds of things belong in a newsletter that only goes to people that you have already a relationship with and you’re comfortable asking them for financial assistance.
Non-profit schools, the same thing, maybe the students that are using the school are a different group of people than the people that are going to endow the school and provide that kind of funding. And you see that going on with higher education all the time. You very rarely see a foundation for a college or university reaching out to the freshman and sophomores asking them for money.
Shayla: Right, that wouldn’t work out too well.
Dave: They’re already asking them for money for tuition. But once you’ve graduated from some place, guess what? The communication suddenly changes and now they see you as a good potential source of income for the foundation.
Shayla: So it seems like that we probably want to brainstorm topics and ideas in two separate ways, right?
Dave: Absolutely, and we have a brainstorm exercise on our site. It will take you about 45 minutes to brainstorm weekly blog topics that will last you well over a year. And if you go through that exercise twice and the first time you go through it with the idea that you’re going to brainstorm content that is appropriate to your end users or the people that you’re trying to help. So if you’re the university, what’s the content that students need to get from you? And then go through the exercise again with the idea of now we’re going to go communicate with alumni and potential donors and what kind of content do we need to write to make them feel comfortable about giving. And they’re two entirely different audiences, and I think the brainstorming sessions should be done completely separate from each other. You may even have different people in your organization that you want to have do them.
Shayla: And that brainstorm exercise is at ShortcutContent.com. There also you’ll find lots of information about what Dave does and if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to him there. Thanks, Dave.
Dave: Thank you.