SEO isn’t gross. Its reputation has suffered from years of being associated with hacky marketing pitches, but it is an invaluable skill set to draw upon when engaging any community online. SEO best practices these days simply mean writing, organizing and attributing content online that is easily indexed by search engines, so that it can be found by your target audience — the community you’re looking to engage as a community organizer.
Crystal Paradis-Catanzaro
Crystal Paradis-Catanzaro
Crystal Paradis-Catanzaro is a strategic communications professional, working to advance social impact in local communities. She is a micro-homesteader, queer advocate and feminist birder.
WordPress Content Management for Socially-Responsible Businesses
If you’re a business or nonprofit with a social mission, and you’re looking for some help managing your online presence, we just might be a perfect match.
You might need help with content management if…
- If you have a website but people who visit it can never figure out how to find what they’re looking for
- If *you* can never find what you need on your own website
- If you know what you want your website to say, but don’t have time or skills to make the edits yourself
- You want to figure out how to make it easier for website visitors to take an action (share a post, contact you, buy something, book a consultation)
- You want social media to play nice with your website
- You want to come up higher on the search engine / Google results pages (SEO Copywriting can help with that, too)
What is content management?
Content management is managing (editing, publishing, updating, rearranging, freshening up) your content (blog posts, web pages, photos, videos, infographics, memes, sidebars, menu items, forms, etc.) to help you reach more people more effectively online.
Content management is not a thing that non-techie folks are necessarily able to learn intuitively — and even if you are able to add or edit blog posts, you may not know enough about user experience (UX) or search engine optimization (SEO) best practices. That’s where a content manager — like me — comes in.
Okay, what’s WordPress content management?
“WordPress content management” simply means editing, updating and maintaining your website on the WordPress platform. Not sure if your website is on WordPress already? Well, since WordPress is still the most widely-used content management system (or CMS) out there, chances are good that your website is on it.
Why WordPress content management for socially-responsible businesses?
I care about helping teams that are working to create better communities.
Many socially-responsible businesses and organizations have service providing as a top priority, but their digital /online presence might be taking a back seat.
I’ve written before about how search engine optimization is community engagement optimization. If people can’t find you online, they can’t advance your mission.
A robust communications strategy is really important. And, a fair amount of communications strategy can be demonstrated with a really clear website content strategy — and that includes everything from menu structure to clear and compelling calls-to-action.
Therefore, providing WordPress content management for socially-responsible businesses is critical to building better communities.
So, should we work together?
If you’ve ever worked with me before, you know about my commitment to working with socially-responsible, values-aligned organizations and businesses — aka values-centric work. If you’ve seen my Services page, you’ve seen the list of the types of organizations and businesses I will and won’t work with. Socially responsible is a category that encompasses many attributes that my favorite clients share.
So, if you’re part of a socially-responsible business or organization in need of some WordPress content management assistance, I’d love to talk. Since I work freelance, I can typically offer rates lower than agencies — and if all you need is content management (organization, re-organization or optimization of your existing site), you likely don’t need a pricey agency anyway.
Drop me a line, and I’d be happy to give you a free assessment, take a walk outside with you or grab a beverage and talk about your communications and marketing goals and whether I’d be a good fit to help you achieve them.
Tipping promotes inequality, and fosters discrimination and sexual harassment. The roots of tipping in the US can be traced back to the freeing of enslaved people, when change-resistant employers could avoid paying newly freed people an actual wage by making them work for tips. People who work for tips are twice as likely to live in poverty, and can be paid far below minimum wage. People of color are tipped at lower rates than their white colleagues. Workers who rely on tips to make a living experience twice as much sexual harassment. Is this what we meant when we used to say, “Here — for your trouble”?
New Hampshire’s fetal personhood bill is expected to become the latest example of what those who have been following New Hampshire’s reproductive rights policies already know: Governor Sununu consistently steps on women’s bodies to rise in his own political career.
We’re fast approaching Seacoast Outright’s third annual Portsmouth Pride event — and this year our notoriously fun crew is on a serious mission: Paint the Town Rainbow! Hopefully you have already seen the rainbow save the date posters for our Saturday, June 24 event popping up all over town — and that’s just the beginning. The closer we get to the fourth Saturday in June, the more rainbow we hope our city will become.
This blog post was written after a visit to the UN Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, in Geneva, Switzerland in December of 2015. The goal was to collect some of the most easily-digestible information on this massive global crisis, along with resources to make it easy to take action from here in the US.
I chose Medium as the platform, due to its media integration features and built-in audience for timely and topical blogs.
Email Newsletter: Community Events, Retail & Restaurant Highlights, Local Buzz
The #PortsmouthLOVE Letter grew from a popular hashtag that Crystal Paradis coined and popularized in 2012. In July of 2014, the #PortsmouthLOVE Letter was created. It quickly gained a small, local, loyal following who looked forward to the roundup of upcoming events in the Seacoast, as well as local highlights of shops and restaurants, hot tips on specials and local news items and accolades.
Creative Problem-Solving and Productivity Using the Cleese Method
I’ve been able to supercharge my motivation and productivity lately — using a new method that doesn’t involve Evernote (shocking, I know!) or any digital tool at all. It’s a productivity method I gleaned from a talk that John Cleese gave on the subject of creativity some years ago. I’ve used it to decide what types of projects I want to be involved with, to better communicate my approach and to generate new ideas for ongoing projects.
Values-Centric Work: How to be politically and socially active as a professional
“If we leave all the activism to people who do it as a full-time job, we’ll never make the collective impact we need.”
In early 2017, I gave a Pecha Kucha talk. The Pecha Kucha format is a classic win-win for both speakers and audience. The slides advance on a timer (every 20 seconds), totally out of the speaker’s control: if someone plans their talk really well, the timing is impressive; if they’re woefully unprepared, it’s hilarious!
And so, a few months into my recovery from the 2016 election (I worked as a campaign organizer in New Hampshire for the final 6 months of the campaign), I said yes when asked to give a Pecha Kucha Talk. Worst case scenario, it would be at least be hilarious, right?
But the topic I chose was one I took very seriously, because it was something that had been on my mind throughout the election and even more so in the weeks and months that followed, as I searched for my next path. Before joining the campaign, I’d quit my job as Director of Communications at a fast-growing digital marketing agency, for reasons that included a vastly different set of values from my employer.
It was easy to tell myself I wasn’t doing work that supported the NRA. Until a man walked into a club in Orlando and killed 49 people, injuring over 50 others. Once again, dozens of innocent people were dead. Our nation mourned. Vigils were held. Arguments raged. Who is culpable for letting this happen again?
I was. And I didn’t act alone.