A lot goes into making a nonprofit organization successful. We have donor attractions, fundraising, team collaborations, all with the aim of keeping your nonprofit afloat.
If you are like most nonprofit organizations, you are almost always operating with less. You have smaller teams, tighter budgets, and restricted timelines.
For most, the idea of creating a marketing strategy feels like a task that’s not worth the effort. But if you are keen on attracting supporters, then your focus should shift to growing your online presence.
Digital marketing for nonprofits drives the most change. It’s through marketing that an organization can attract donors, boost funding, engage volunteers, and fulfill its obligations. And since nonprofits are more focused on achieving more with less, raising awareness of what your organization does will boost performance.
In this article, we’ll discuss the value of online marketing to nonprofit brands. We’ll talk about the strategies, benefits, and best practices.
So, let’s dive in!
What is Nonprofit Marketing?
It’s clear that the purpose of nonprofits is to bring change to society. This may be through donations or messages that spread hope in a community.
When it comes to nonprofits, digital marketing strategies are those tactics that attract the relevant audience. They are the processes that are taken to attract donors, engage volunteers, build a robust team, and manage fund drives.
For example, a nonprofit like is focused on supporting sick, hungry, abused, and educational challenged children.
They have set up a website and included a mission statement that encourages people to convert. Additionally, they have call-to-action buttons that are easy to locate. From their marketing strategy, it’s easy for them to raise awareness and receive support for most of their activities.
How Does a Nonprofit Stand to Benefit From Digital Marketing?
Marketing for nonprofits is a broad subject. It isn’t just about funding. It’s about bringing together the data, platforms, technology, media, and devices that drive the most change in an organization.
Here’s how online marketing can benefit nonprofit organizations.
Attracts Funding
Nonprofits rely solely on well-wishers. Without the donations and support from volunteers, it would only be a matter of time before a nonprofit runs out of resources and closes its offices. Nonprofits are all about raising funds and supporting needy causes. And it’s through marketing that an organization can get noticed and receive more funding from online and offline supporters.
Raises Awareness
Digital marketing can open your nonprofit to a global audience. It removes the limitations of time and accessibility while adding convenience and expanded reach. Nonprofit marketing makes it easy for people to hear and spread the word about what you do.
Builds Long-term Donor Memberships
Nonprofit marketing helps in the development of membership programs that ensure the prolonged sustainability of an organization. With marketing, an organization can create a plan that recruits new supporters and reminds return members to contribute to their causes.
Brings in New Manpower
Nonprofits will never run out of the need for volunteers. Take, for instance, an organization like the Red Cross. Their calamity response projects require that they have teams located around the globe at all times.
Without support from volunteers, there would be a slow down in the execution of their mission. But thanks to their marketing efforts, such a nonprofit can receive new manpower all so often. Additionally, the new members can also contribute to most of their fundraising efforts thus boosting their monetary requirements.
Improves Online Visibility
If you want to be seen and heard in a busy environment, you must know how to stand out from the crowd. By creating a robust online presence, you put your nonprofit ahead of your competitors. You also ensure that anyone searching for your targeted keywords will discover your pages first.
Builds Credibility
Credibility can best be achieved by sharing powerful stories of what you have achieved. Or maybe carrying out an email marketing campaign that takes your potential customers through your nonprofit’s journey. There’s so much you can do with digital marketing to gain trust and build loyalty with your supporters.
Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy for Nonprofits in 8 Simple Steps:
For nonprofit marketing to be effective, you need a plan. A plan directs your operations. It is through the details of a plan that you can manage the digital marketing process and declare a starting point and time. In case things need to change midway, your plan will inform most of the restructures.
Define Your Goals
The first step to a successful marketing initiative is knowing your goals. By defining where you want to go, you can develop a digital marketing strategy that gets you there. For example, if your nonprofit is keen on attracting donor funding, these defined goals will direct most of your activities.
Your goals can take many forms, but at the top of the list is brand exposure. For example, you can plan an outreach program to keep in touch with communities. In your guide, you can include ways of involving people, like potential donors, interested in your organization. In this way, you create a platform for building warm connections that can benefit your nonprofit marketing.
As you define your goals, remember to review your mission and vision statement. Reflect on the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing initiatives from the perspective of the S.M.A.R.T goals. Ensure that your goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
If let’s say, the above donor funding was for a cancer support center, here’s how the S.M.A.R.T goal would look like;
See how we put the mission, vision and values statement together. That’s how SMART goals work. They ensure that you have clear objectives for donors, volunteers, stakeholders, and the community.
Know Your Audience
Be clear on the beneficiaries of your cause. For example, if you are fighting for human rights from a political perspective, then the approach you use should differ from helping victims of gender-based grievances.
But in both instances, you will want to establish an emotional connection with the target audience. Conduct research into their interests and lifestyles. Spend your time collecting data that will improve the efficiency of your digital marketing campaigns.
Better still, segment your audience into groups. Creating groups will help you personalize your marketing messages to suit your audience.
Create a Key Message
A key message is those specific terms that help you get noticed. These are keywords that if well used, could be the voice of your nonprofit brand. In digital marketing for nonprofits, keywords are those words that put you ahead of your competitors. It could be a simple phrase like “there when you need us most,” but these terms can get you noticed by big donors.
Spread the Word About Your Campaigns
Creating a marketing campaign and not promoting is like lighting a candle in the dark and hiding it under a table. It may light up a small part of the room, but imagine if you allowed the candle to shine!
Promotion helps you discover, engage, and convert a larger audience that shares your interests and aspirations. But as always, identifying your distribution platforms will boost your performance.
Start by knowing where potential supporters of causes like yours hang out. If social media is where they spend the most time, create a marketing strategy that encourages them to convert from there. As you look for what works, remember to deliver it in the best formats.
Measure Your Results
How much has your nonprofit achieved in the last week, months, or years?
By looking at your metrics, you can determine how well you are meeting your objectives. Your metrics can also inform your gap analysis. If you have been filling gaps left by your competitors, find out if your efforts have attracted more supporters to your site.
Of course, there are many other ways to measure results. For example, if you send out flyers for a , you can ask people to text a particular code to confirm support. Such feedback can tell you what role the flyers played in the success of your fundraising drive.
Monitor Your Progress
This is a long-term strategy for your advertising campaigns. Use calendars and key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress. Think of it as a map showing your current position and where you need to go.
A calendar helps you to stay on course without losing focus, whereas KPIs keep track of employees, donors, beneficiaries, competitors, and marketing performance. Calendars and KPIs are specific to the what and when of your nonprofit’s goals.
What Does a Nonprofit Marketing Strategy Encompass?
While it’s tempting to choose all available marketing strategies for your campaigns, it’s best to take the time to understand what works. You can first select the most relevant aspects as you look to grow your online presence gradually.
Remember that marketing for nonprofits is all about coming up with a plan that invites the most people to support your cause. If you feel that email marketing could further your goals, look for creative ways to develop responsive messages. Always ensure that your efforts deliver short- and long-term support to your nonprofit.
Event Marketing for Nonprofits
Event marketing enables a nonprofit to connect with a community. It’s through such activities that you can build trust and invite more people to support your cause. With regular events, you can garner the support of many participants that help raise funds for your organization.
Here’s an example of a charitable run by Citizen Medical Center, aimed at supporting cancer patients. Event marketing is often described as a surefire way of boosting funding in an organization.
Email Marketing
Both for-profit and nonprofit organizations have benefited a lot from emails. This is due to the fact that emails are convenient for reaching a large group of subscribers.
But in nonprofits, there’s much more you can do with emails. You can nurture and build long-term relationships that guarantee the prolonged continuity of an organization.
It’s through emails that you can send weekly updates of upcoming events in your organization. Emails are also convenient for welcoming newcomers. By nurturing relationships with emails, it becomes easy to send regular donation requests and recruit more volunteers to your team.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
When choosing a channel for your marketing, you do not have to use all social media platforms at once. You can pick two or three platforms where most of your target audience hangs out.
If your research shows that most potential donors hang out on Facebook and Twitter, it would be best to start your marketing campaigns there. Next, you can diversify your digital marketing to other platforms or even mix it with email marketing to reach a larger audience.
Content Marketing
There are various aspects of content marketing you should consider. First, it’s your language. Use simple terms and avoid jargon that could cause people to be less sure of your purpose and advocacy.
Next, is how you structure your content. Always consider your fonts, spacing, and paragraph styles when creating content. Content divided into several sections using different headers is easy to read and understand.
Also, different initiatives respond to particular types of fonts. So, go minimalist on font typefaces. Also, make your content as scannable as possible. Scannable content makes it easy for an audience to find specific information in the shortest time.
As you craft high-quality content, there are also various content types from which to choose. Base your decision on the message you want to convey. The tastes and interests of your audience, and the amount of information you want to share, will also determine your content type.
Essential Tips for Successful Digital Marketing for Nonprofits
To succeed in digital marketing, you need to learn a few tips and tricks for staying on top of the game. As we had said earlier, nonprofit marketing is all about learning to work with less. So, here are a few tactics for managing and attracting the right support to your organization.
Have a Budget
Most of your online marketing activities will cost you money. For example, when carrying out pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, you’ll incur an expense with every click you get. Even something like creating a user’s guide for a funds drive requires capital to implement.
So having a budget is essential for the smooth flow of your activities. For informed decisions, here is how you can create a budget that works:
Track Your Income
Income is the amount of money you have coming in. Donors, fundraisings, and well-wishers can fund it. Tracking income will help in creating a budget that works.
Note Your Spending
Which causes do you want to support? What platforms will you use for your digital marketing campaigns? How long will the projects last? What are your fixed and variable expenses? By answering these questions, you’ll know if your goals fit your income.
Creating a reputable brand involves starting projects you’ll support to the end. So, know your income and amount of spending to avoid leaving projects unfinished, thus affecting your brand’s reputation.
Set a Timeline
Know how long you want your budget to stretch. Set precise dates on when and how everything should flow. For this, you can refer to spending history or researched data and make adjustments accordingly. Remember that budgets complement your marketing efforts, and yours should help identify priorities.
Monitor Your Budget
If not daily, have a weekly or monthly review of your budget. This practice will allow you to stay on track with your goals and discover areas that need change. For example, if you receive additional donations, you can tweak your budget to offer extra support or add more beneficiaries to your projects.
A budget helps you prioritize activities that grow your brand. It will help you stay in control and be confident that you can support your brand to the end.
Personalize Your Brand
When it comes to nonprofit marketing, personalization plays a huge role in how people perceive you. It’s through personalization that you can target specific causes and reach where you are most needed.
For example, in an environment supporting children’s education, you can target one student to sponsor. This way, you get a unique story that can fit into your case studies. By offering customized support, you attract donors interested in helping individual cases.
Boost Your SEM and SEO strategies
Long gone are the days when online marketing was the focus of for-profit companies only. Nowadays, nonprofits are also using digital marketing tools to boost their visibility. Creating websites that rank attracts the right people to their organizations.
To boost the performance of your website, you can use paid or unpaid ads. Unpaid searches can be through search engine optimization (SEO). For this, you need to consider your on-page, off-page, and technical SEO aspects that will help you appear on top of Google, Bing, or Yahoo search results.
Alternatively, consider paid ads through search engine marketing (SEM). Paid ads are a simple way of ranking higher without the extra effort of SEO. Even better, you only pay for ads based on the clicks you get.
But for better efficiency in your internet marketing efforts, use both . Both campaigns can complement each other to ensure long-term success in your online marketing efforts.
Choose Your Colors and Fonts Wisely
Colors reflect the message behind your brand. When choosing a color for your brand, go with the color that supports what you do. The color should be dominant across your online platforms, including your website, email, and social networks.
For example, a nonprofit company supporting compassionate causes can use the color blue. We associate blue with calmness, loyalty, and trust. It reflects a brand that offers stability and support for a good cause. So, if your brand’s mission includes providing humanitarian aid, the color blue is a perfect choice.
An excellent example of this is the website.
Notice how the blue dominates the page? Unicef is an organization focused on humanitarian support for children. Their color and fonts show depth, but also confidence in what they do. Using the color white symbolizes purity, innocence, and safety. As this is an organization benefiting children, the color scheme is an excellent fit.
Another example would be this website from :
The color red symbolizes love and determination. From their color scheme, you can tell that they take a fierce approach to saving children’s lives. Their fonts also show professionalism in enrolling supporters to their cause.
Consider Your Web Design
Your web design directly impacts the reputation of your brand. It’s through web responsiveness that a visitor coming to your page finds a reason to support your causes. To ensure your web design fulfills all your marketing goals, here are several vital factors to heed:
Mobile Responsiveness
There are as many people accessing websites through mobile phones as they do from laptops. For this reason, your mobile responsiveness plays an essential role in where you rank in Google search results.
To ensure you get the most from your marketing efforts, factor in your mobile users. Ensure that any supporter viewing your blog through a mobile device can access every detail as if they were on a computer. Your images, call-to-action-buttons, and text should also be easy to read and clickable from all devices.
Keeping a load is essential for conversions. It allows your viewers to go through your content without interruption. It’s a way of making sure that anyone visiting your page converts in the shortest time.
To keep up with good speeds, ensure that your images are of the right size. If you need to optimize image size, use compression software to convert them–while still maintaining loading speeds.
Next, check poor plugins and software. Uninstall what you don’t need and store only essential applications.
Last, consider web caching. For this, you can use a proxy tool that caches web pages and reduces your computer’s bandwidth.
Hint: I carried out a speed test for Australian Red Cross through PageSpeed Insights by Google and here are the results. Impressive, right?
It is necessary to consider every person likely to visit your page, including those with disabilities. A visually impaired person, for example, should find your website convenient and easy to navigate.
If they need large fonts, make it easy for them to access applications that support this. If they need text to voice translation, create content that is easy to understand in both formats. Accessibility is essential for improving your credibility and attracting a diverse audience to your program.
Consider Your Brand Democracy
Your team plays an essential role in your nonprofit marketing efforts. It is they that spread encouraging words about your initiatives. Your group could also be the only voice you need to hear to upscale your online visibility. Everything they do and say mirrors your support for what you say you do in your organization.
But for your team to deliver the best results, they need an independent voice. Listen to your team. They could be the excellent brainstorming tool you need to discover a responsive angle in your campaigns.
So, how do you build brand democracy?
Stories are captivating. They are great at grabbing the attention of your audience. But for stories to be interesting, they need to be told right.
Good storytelling should start from where it all began – your passion and purpose, and what pushed you to build your brand. Go back to those early days and the challenges you experienced. Describe the excitement of the time, but keep it informative enough to convey your message.
Create an emotional connection with everyone reading or listening to your story. This way, you build trust and improve interactions. Captivating stories are also easy to share. Your audience will enjoy telling your story for you. And with each telling, they will enhance the visibility and viability of your organization.
Want to Build a Strong Online Presence?
There you have it, a complete guide to digital marketing for nonprofits. You will need to take the time to understand what your online marketing strategies entail. And if you get stuck, reach out to our team of experts for everything in digital marketing. We build websites, optimize them, and even manage rankings. Contact us for more information on what we do.
Leave a Reply