Understanding the importance of non-profit marketing is key if you want to succeed in gaining traction in the crowded nonprofit space. After all, at a time when there are over 1.5 million registered charities in the US alone, standing out is vital if you want to continue doing your good work.
The term ‘nonprofit marketing’ refers to the tactics and strategies employed by charitable organizations. These strategies focus on sharing their message, gaining donors, and getting support for their cause.
Effective nonprofit marketing aims to:
Nonprofits can also use marketing to enlist volunteers, and promote their fundraisers and online auctions.
Who tends to contribute to your cause? Perhaps your message resonates well with young working professionals who want to donate to a nonprofit that shares their values. On the other hand, your charity may be quite large and well-known. This means that your most likely donors lie among corporations and big businesses.
Whatever the case, you need to know what type of person you are addressing when you create the messaging for your marketing materials. It helps to create donor personas that your team can reference whenever they strategize or brainstorm new campaign ideas.
Here’s an example: Wanda The Working Mom. Wanda has two children and has a job that allows her to care for her kids well. She wants to contribute to a cause that will serve children in underprivileged communities, ideally regarding education and general welfare. She values honest, direct branding; her preferred social platform is Facebook.
With information like this at their fingertips, your fundraising team is far more likely to hit the mark than if they tried to tailor content that speaks to ‘everybody’. This is because generic messaging is not going to grab Wanda’s attention.
Every nonprofit organization has a valid and important reason for existing. Every charitable organization has uplifting, heart-warming stories to tell, from faith-based charities to nonprofits that focus on health care or higher education.
As such, content marketing is a great way to encourage existing and prospective donors to care about your cause and donate time or funds in support thereof.
It comes down to placing your unique mission front and center in a way that people can relate to. Focus on value statements that underpin your cause. There are various platforms on which to do so.
A good place to start is by adding a blog to your charity's website. Here, you can share stories of hope and show how donations make a positive impact. You can also use it to share updates on your events.
To widen your reach, consider pitching content ideas to related industry blogs, newspapers, magazines, and other channels. Bringing awareness to your cause is an excellent way to garner interest in your fundraising events.
One of the most efficient and cost-effective ways to grow your donor base is to reach out and find people in the spaces that they naturally frequent.
These tend to be online platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. With the right approach, these platforms can be invaluable marketing tools for nonprofits and charities of all sizes.
Paid search is a developing marketing space that is constantly changing. This means you either need a savvy marketing person who knows the ins and outs of working with the algorithms, or you should pay for the services of someone who specializes in this particular digital discipline.
You may even find an online practitioner willing to donate their time to your cause.
Advertising on social media is also helpful. By creating authentic, eye-catching ad content, you can catch the attention of potential donors. You can also easily target your ads to ensure that the right audience sees your messages or event promotions.
When you send out emails to your donor base, your goal should always be to deliver a compelling message. However, not everyone responds the same to a certain message. Since your benefactors give to your cause based on an emotional response, it makes sense to personalize your email messaging.
To be effective, each email, whether it’s an invitation to an online auction or a donation appeal, should be relevant and specific to the donor. Emails that are segmented by audience can yield traction rates of up to 6 times higher than general emails.
A good way to pave the way for this kind of fantastic engagement is to set up a preferences center. This enables your subscribers to adjust the type of content they receive by means of a user-friendly widget.
Alternatively, you can segment your donors from the get-go. Ask for their input in this regard during your onboarding process. Or, you could use the demographic information that you’ve collected to create different audience segments.
When new donors are onboarded, always make a point of asking how they learned about your nonprofit. Collating this data over a period of time is likely to provide you with some very valuable insights.
For instance, you may find that word-of-mouth marketing works best for your cause. In this case, you may consider a marketing drive that equips your existing donors with materials that they can distribute.
Another way in which you can use donor feedback is to share newly developed marketing materials with regular, trusted benefactors to see what they think.
After all, these are the people who believe in the work you do. As such, they are well-positioned to provide insight into what works and what doesn’t.
Nonprofit marketing is a very specialized and constantly developing field. However, certain marketing strategies have stood the test of time.
Start by understanding your donor personas and embracing content marketing. Invest in online marketing and segment your email marketing.
Finally, ask for feedback to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing. These guidelines are an excellent start to your nonprofit marketing!
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