One of the themes in all of my conversations with nonprofits is the idea of encouraging your supporters to educate and recruit others to your cause. This has always happened, but the web has made it happen so much the more better. People will tell their friends about you if they are excited about what you do. But your job in the nonprofit is to make it easy, to give them the tools to tell the story in the way you want it told, to have compelling photos and media materials that they can use, to easily provide links for others to donate.

I was thinking about this this morning when I received an email from my friend Brian Blum in Israel. Brian is a blogger, among other things, and he just wrote about a hike-a-thon he participated in to benefit an organization called Tsad Kadima, that works with kids with CP.

Not everyone is going to take the time Brian did to write about this, email it to his friends, put it on his blog, etc. He didn’t need any encouragement to do it. But a lot more will do so if you encourage them to, provide them with photos, interviews and quotes, and recognize them as supporters for this kind of work as much as you do for the money they give. Have a look at Brian’s post here.