How to Elevate Your Nonprofit’s Digital Marketing Strategy – crowdspring Blog

Staying relevant requires constantly evolving your offerings, brand identity, and marketing strategy.

But it takes effort to develop a sophisticated digital strategy for your nonprofit. It can be a resource-intensive process, and nonprofits may hesitate to dramatically change their approach after investing in its initial development.

However, your nonprofit can elevate your digital marketing strategy through small, continuous changes over time. This approach helps keep your marketing strategy up-to-date without requiring your team to re-invent your core processes.

This guide will first explore what digital marketing means for nonprofits before exploring a four-step process nonprofits can use to evaluate and improve their strategy.

What is digital marketing for nonprofits?

Digital marketing includes all the online messages, campaigns, and interactions that promote your organization and brand and expose your nonprofit to an outside audience.

Unlike for-profit organizations, nonprofits need to consider an additional dimension in their marketing strategies: their mission.

A nonprofit’s brand identity should reflect its organization’s core values, such as inclusivity, sustainability, community, and other characteristics representing its unique mission.

Nonprofits should also consider what voice they should adopt when displaying these values.

Some nonprofits may feel a more casual or playful voice will help them connect better with supporters. Others will need a professional voice to encourage trust.

For example, a health-related nonprofit is more likely to succeed with a digital marketing strategy that prioritizes showing its organization as highly knowledgeable and hardworking rather than fun. Work with your team, supporters, and board members to determine how to best shape your voice to fit your nonprofit’s values and mission.

How to elevate your nonprofit’s digital marketing strategy

The digital space is constantly evolving, and your nonprofit’s digital marketing plan should be malleable and adaptable to these new developments. However, remember that one of your best resources for moving forward is data from your past marketing ventures.

To elevate your nonprofit’s digital marketing strategy, use your past campaigns’ information to help create a four-step plan to reach your future goals:

1. Adjust goals based on your data

When planning any new campaign, you should first set a goal for what you want to accomplish. Ensure this goal is specific, measurable, has a set timeline, and is challenging but attainable. By assessing your current operations and reviewing past data, you can create a goal that fits this criterion.

Here is the general process for how most nonprofits review and leverage their data to set digital marketing goals:

After you’ve assessed your data, use the information and data you’ve collected to create an attainable yet impressive goal. You can make your goal realistic based on the data collected from your CRM about which ventures have been successful in the past.

Also, be sure you thoroughly understand your CRM’s features to structure your goals according to your capabilities.

2. Determine opportunities for growth

After thoroughly analyzing your data and market trends, you can begin determining how to adjust your goals and what actions you will take to evolve your nonprofit’s strategy.

For digital marketing specifically, consider potential opportunities to:

3. Try new content strategies

Besides adjusting your software and platforms, you can also develop your digital marketing content strategy. You can optimize your content and offerings by:

Your donors support you because they resonate with your mission and campaign goals. Ensure you center these ideas throughout your marketing materials.

4. Measure success

Whichever changes you implement, ensure you have processes to collect detailed data to measure your success correctly.

Use your CRM’s marketing data collection feature to generate reports related to key metrics, such as click-through rate, total donations, membership signups, and repeat donations.

You should also consider asking your team, donors, volunteers, and board members which marketing techniques were most effective.

Furthermore, you could include a survey on your donation page to ask donors how they found the campaign. Determine which marketing techniques were the most valuable and least effective to determine your strategy in the future.

Your nonprofit’s digital marketing strategy is an essential outreach tool. Finding new ways to elevate it is vital to your continued growth and success. To improve your strategy, analyze your current practices to determine where improvements can be made and set a goal with a specific timeline to see them implemented. From there, measure your success to continue evolving your approach for years to come.