This is a guest post by our colleague Darren Barefoot. It’s adapted from The Noble Arsonist, a free e-book about NGO communications.

To stand out online, you’ve got to be remarkable.

In 2013, that seems like a truism, but too few campaigners take it to heart. Stuff that succeeds on the web does so because it is literally remarkable—worthy of being remarked upon. Whether it’s a brilliant marketing campaign for vitamin water or yet another hilarious cat video, nobody shares the ordinary.

It’s an exceptionally noisy marketplace. NGOs compete with each other, and every other product, service, campaign and idea in the world for attention. We have smaller budgets than vitamin water vendors, but fortunately it’s possible to devise exceptional online campaigns without spending a million dollars.

If you’re an NGO with a story to tell, where do you start? There are plenty of consultants out there who want to sell you The Processtm, which will guarantee you extraordinary viral growth and exposure to engaged, deep-pocketed new audiences. Don’t believe them.

Web marketing is, at best, 12 or 15 years old. We are all still throwing spaghetti at the wall to see if it sticks. When it comes to creating a remarkable campaign, we need to humbly accept the reality that, in Seth Godin’s words, “safe is risky and risky is safe.” We need to see our work as a marathon, not a sprint, and know that this time we may only hit a single, but the next time we can hit a homerun.

With those caveats in mind, here are seven tricks we rely on when developing exceptional campaigns. Around our office, we call these “remarkables.”

Make more of what the web loves

At the moment, the web loves animated GIFs, supercuts and Macklemore. Last year, it loved Instagram filters, zombies and Ryan Gosling. The web should be a rich source of inspiration for building outstanding campaigns. If, for example, millions of web users liked a particular advertising campaign, can you make a video that emulates, riffs on or satirizes that ad? That’s what students at Brigham Young University did. They created a charming, note-perfect take-off of the wildly popular Old Spice YouTube ads. Their student-made ad for a university library has gathered more than three million views: