Nonprofits have a lot on their plates. Between managing donations, recruiting volunteers, and providing crucial services, marketing efforts often fall by the wayside. But what if we told you that marketing your nonprofit could help drive contributions, engage volunteers, and expand your reach to those in need? Let’s talk about the importance of marketing for nonprofits.
Whether your nonprofit’s cause is animal welfare or cancer research, there are two main benefits to marketing that apply to most (if not all) nonprofit organizations.
Marketing Raises Awareness
Marketing helps spread the word about who you are and what your organization does. This can help you attract volunteers who may be interested in your cause and want to help. It can also inform those in need of your services, so that they can reach out for assistance.
Marketing Drives Donations
The more people who are aware of your cause, the more people who will want to provide financial resources to help your organization thrive. Fundraising is an essential element of any nonprofit’s success, and marketing can be an effective way of informing the public of fundraising events, or just encouraging regular donations.
Nonprofit marketing can look pretty similar to for-profit marketing, but with a few key differences, including your audience and the resources available to you. Here are some things you should consider when developing a marketing strategy.
Understand Your Audience
The best marketing strategies will often use a blend of marketing channels to promote a message, but if resources are spread thin, it’s important to prioritize the channels that will be most effective. Think about who you’re trying to reach: College-age volunteers? Older donors? People in need of your services? Then consider the best ways to reach those people. Many nonprofits engage in email marketing to stay top-of-mind, for example, but if you’re trying to reach a younger audience, social media might be a better approach.
Take Advantage of Free Resources
You might think that marketing simply isn’t affordable for a nonprofit, but there are many free (or discounted) resources out there that you can take advantage of. Here are just a few:
Email Marketing – If you’re interested in email marketing, Mailchimp has a free tier that allows users to send up to 1,000 emails per month. Their interface makes it easy to create sleek, professional newsletters that you can send to up to 500 subscribers.
PPC Advertising – Google Ad Grants provides qualifying nonprofits with up to $10,000 in ad value to advertise on Google.com. To be eligible, you must be a nonprofit in good standing and maintain a CTR of at least 5%. This program is a powerful way to promote your nonprofit to Google’s users.
Social Media Marketing – Canva makes it easy to create impressive graphics and edit photos for social media posts. It’s beginner friendly, so novice graphic designers needn’t worry. While there is a paid version of Canva, the free version offers plenty of powerful tools for an organization on a budget.
Analyze and Optimize Performance
Once you’ve launched your marketing campaigns, the work isn’t over; now is the time to analyze performance and refine your approach over time. What’s working? What’s not? For example, if people are only opening some of your newsletters, consider why that is. Do subject lines with emojis or CTAs tend to encourage more interactions? Or, as another example, perhaps certain search ads in your Google Grant account aren’t doing so well compared to others. Why is that? Compare the messaging, analyze the keywords, take a look at the landing page… any or all of these things could be impacting performance. When it comes to marketing, the name of the game is optimization.
Here at Relevance Advisors, one of our Core Ideas is Pay It Forward, a value that we uphold - in part - by donating time and resources to nonprofits through the Intern SEO Audit Program. Interns at our agency are given the opportunity to work with a nonprofit of their choice and develop a free SEO audit, which is presented to the nonprofit at the conclusion of the internship. In developing this audit, our interns learn valuable digital marketing skills, while also helping nonprofits raise awareness, recruit volunteers, and drive donations.
Learn more about our Digital Marketing Internship.
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Are you a nonprofit looking to improve your marketing efforts? Our team of experts at Relevance Advisors is here to help. Reach out today to learn more about our services.
