Nonprofit Reputation Management (Online)

Online reputation management is a critical component of an organization’s success. A nonprofit’s online reputation serves as a trust factor, a validator, and social proof. Nonprofit reputation management consists of consideration for content such as reviews, testimonials, stories, articles, social posts, and more. Your nonprofit’s reputation will determine how your organization is represented and presented online. It will also determine the likelihood of discovery, interaction, conversion, and engagement. Above all, if reputation management isn’t near the top of your priority list, now is the time to dedicate some time to it.

What is Online Reputation Management

Reputation management for nonprofits is about building trust and maintaining trust levels. Online reputation management just means that you actively build and monitor trust online. Building trust online, believe it or not, starts with collecting feedback. At Proofpact, we like to use the word stories. We do, however, include an element of reputation management in our toolset. The element we provide is “experience” monitoring (positive or negative). We start by asking the storyteller to share if they had a positive or negative experience. This starts the storytelling process in Proofpact. However, ask for feedback without positive and negative delineation. It is worth it if you can not note the experience had.

How to Manage a Nonprofit’s Online Reputation

One of the most common suggestions relating to online reputation management for nonprofits is to be proactive when asking for feedback (or stories). In other words, ask for feedback often. If you want to learn how to interactively collect stories, take a look at How Your Nonprofit Can Interactively Collect Stories. The point is when you ask for feedback you show that you care. It is immediately understood that someone is listening or wants to hear how things are going. If you do not request feedback, it may come across as though you do not care.

Generally speaking, people don’t think to leave positive feedback after a positive experience if you do not ask. However, the first thing they will do if they have a negative experience is to find someplace to get it off their chest. If you do not have a platform that will accept this feedback and ask for it upfront, they will leave feedback on a public platform for sure.

How to Protect Your Nonprofit’s Online Reputation

As mentioned above, be proactive in your feedback requests or story collection. Asking for feedback or a story after an interaction with your organization is had helps prevent unwanted content from going public. This unwanted, negative content normally comes in the form of reviews. Depending on the size of your organization, this could also be news articles, forums, podcasts, radio, and YouTube videos. As simple as it may sound, having an ear to the ground and soliciting immediate feedback can help prevent a lot of negativity. Negative experience remediation is key here but that is a topic for another discussion.

Other Tools for Monitoring a Nonprofit’s Online Reputation

Monitoring your online reputation is a great way to understand at a glance what is being said about your nonprofit organization online. To monitor the web for your nonprofit’s name you can set up Google Alerts. Google Alerts will send email alerts notifying you of brand mentions online, anywhere. Guidelines are available for email frequency and various other items.

Another tool to monitor your reputation and SEO is ahrefs. Every marketer knows the role that backlinks play in boosting SEO. Well, when you monitor brand mentions you can find the mentions that do not link to you and request that they do (if they are positive mentions). Monitor backlinks, audit your website, track keywords, and more!

How Proofpact Helps with Nonprofit Reputation Management

Proofpact is your ear to the ground. When your nonprofit plugs Proofpact in, it becomes an interactive collection point. It helps with nonprofit reputation management by providing a timely feedback mechanism. It also helps by providing visually interactive graphs and charts fueled by experience data. This data is gathered and extracted from stories your nonprofit organization receives.

Proofpact starts the story collection process by asking the storyteller how their experience was. We do this for numerous reasons but one of those reasons is to ensure that a nonprofit can easily monitor positive and negative experiences. We do not have a public ranking or rating system but we do provide this data (and more) to nonprofits.

Here is a look at the Proofpact “Reputation Dashboard”.

Here you can see the interactive graphs and charts. By interactive, we mean hover states and clicks provide additional data and insight.

Suggestions for Nonprofits Looking for Reviews

Your organization may find reviews favorable for the SEO value. However, if you are wanting stories you need to ask for stories. It is unlikely that your organization will receive stories when you point supporters and beneficiaries to a review platform. This turns them into a critic when they have to “rate your nonprofit” on a scale of 1-5. However, if you are doing so, I would suggest one thing. Start by using Proofpact to ask for a story and then direct them to your review platforms of choice. You can set up engagement routes that do such things within Proofpact. Engagement routes let you define the content shown to cohorts based on their experience. This is really helpful for things like when to show a survey, sign up form, or link to a review site.

Proofpact is built for nonprofits and nonprofit marketing. We understand nonprofit digital UI/UX and design creative and optimized ways for nonprofits to collect stories. We even have tools and simple strategies for your nonprofit to collect stories at in-person events. Our hosted or embeddable plug-and-play story collection forms are present when stories are the freshest. We also provide experience monitoring and as you saw above it fits nicely with your community’s stories.