Soapbox Engage Blog

As a busy development professional, you have a lot to do, a shoestring budget, and not a lot of time to do it all. We know the internet is overflowing with nonprofit marketing strategies and quick tips to increase your reach, and it can be challenging to narrow it down to the must-know information.

What you need most is easy, efficient, and effective online marketing solutions that you can put in place for your nonprofit now. We have good news: you’re likely already doing half of it!

The other half is summed up in one word: cohesion. An easy and effective nonprofit marketing strategy works cohesively with your donor relationships, fundraising, and organizational goals to reach new supporters, increase donations, and strengthen your nonprofit’s awareness in the community. We promise it’s easier than it sounds, and this article will help you accomplish it!

To give you a good grasp of the fundamentals of nonprofit marketing, we’ll walk through the following:

• What Is A Nonprofit Marketing Strategy?
• The Importance of Your Nonprofit’s Marketing Strategy
• Essential Nonprofit Marketing Channels and Assets
• How To Build Your Nonprofit Marketing Strategy

Your organization likely already has everything it needs to thrive. You just need to learn to allocate your resources in impactful ways that amplify your reach. Let’s kick things off with a breakdown of the fundamentals.

What Is A Nonprofit Marketing Strategy?

A marketing strategy is your battle plan to put your organization’s goals into action. It’s a roadmap of how and when you’ll engage donors, fundraise, and everything else.

Getting Attention’s complete guide to nonprofit marketing explains that organizations create a thorough plan to allocate their marketing team’s time and budget appropriately. This document outlines essentials, such as “your core mission, tone, target audience, preferred marketing channels, and branding.” In turn, you can expand your reach to engage new supporters and retain existing ones.

The Importance of Your Nonprofit’s Marketing Strategy

Why come up with a strategy? Why not pick up a few social media accounts and send some emails?

There are three very important reasons you’ll want to create a thorough plan for your outreach:

1. Fundraising: The more people who know about your organization, the more likely you are to receive donations. A nonprofit marketing strategy will increase your pool of prospects and ensure you contact them at the right times (and in the right ways).


2. Consistency: When you prepare a plan and the right tools to help you accomplish that plan, you’ll be able to keep your donors engaged with your nonprofit’s mission. Instead of contacting supporters sporadically, you can create a schedule and establish a reputation of consistency.


3. Brand awareness: A brand is composed of all your organization’s work, interactions, and products. Each component works together to create your nonprofit’s identity. Whether you’ve cultivated it or not, your nonprofit has a brand. Your nonprofit’s marketing strategy uses and strengthens brand awareness, which in turn strengthens your reputation and overall impact!

Donors want to see a consistent mission and a focus on the cause. In turn, they’re more likely to trust your team as a responsible steward of their donations. In other words, don’t skimp on creating a strong outreach plan.

Essential Nonprofit Marketing Channels and Assets

Between email, social media, and direct mail campaigns, the list of marketing channels keeps growing longer as technology advances. It can be overwhelming to keep up. Beyond that, it can be overwhelming to pick the right tools and strategies that will actually be beneficial.

Rather than sporadically using countless tools and strategies, thin your tool list and hone in on a few specific methods that you can use effectively to strengthen your nonprofit’s brand. After all, a marketing tool can only help you if you use it to its fullest potential.

Chances are, you’re already using one or more of the tools we’ll recommend. Let’s explore tips to use each of them while also showing you how they can work cohesively in your nonprofit marketing strategy.

Your Website

Your website is your home base. It’s the driving force of your digital presence and serves as supporters’ go-to digital resource when they want to get involved. Right now, you probably use it to describe who you are, what your organization does, and how people can participate in your mission. But what if you could make it more interactive?

To make your website the absolute best it can be, here’s what we recommend:

• Create helpful content. Think through why someone would search for your cause online. Maybe they want to donate, volunteer, attend an event, or read up on your work. Then, create content that serves those needs. Create a donation form, an events page, a volunteer opportunities page, and other helpful content. You can also launch a blog to share educational articles.


• Optimize your forms. Forms help you collect passive leads to increase your marketing pool. Integrating a form page on your website lets interested potential donors tell you they want to know more about or how they’d like to get involved. To make your forms attractive and engaging, limit the number of fields, and leverage Soapbox Exchange’s Forms feature to customize your form to match your organization’s branding and website’s style.


• Design for mobile users. An awful lot of users will encounter your website on mobile devices. In fact, Nonprofits Source's fundraising research page explains 1 in 4 donors discovers nonprofits they were previously unaware of using their phones, and nonprofits using mobile-responsive design increase donations by 126% on average. Knowing this, you should take extra steps to improve your site’s mobile experience. Use a mobile-responsive layout that’ll adjust to any screen size. Then, use large, easy-to-read fonts and buttons.

Once you’ve updated your site, go the extra mile by incorporating it into your nonprofit marketing materials. Link to it in social media posts and emails, and implement search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to drive traffic.

Google Ads

With your website up and running, you can use Google Ads to increase visibility for all the great content you’ve created. While paid ads may initially seem out of reach, they actually have an incredibly high ROI. According to the same Nonprofits Source statistics page, return on ad spend was highest for search ads, generating an incredible $3.72 for every dollar spent in 2021.

Using Google Ads, you can amplify your site’s most important pages on search engine results pages for relevant keywords. For example, let’s say your nonprofit aims to combat childhood hunger and wants to increase donations. You might create ads to target different supporters or areas of your mission. Here are a few examples of keywords you might target:

• Donations: “Donate to end child hunger” and “give to child hunger relief”
• Volunteering: “Volunteer for child hunger,” “food bank volunteer opportunities,” and “volunteer for child nutrition”
• Services: “Child hunger support,” “food insecurity resources,” and “meal programs near me”

From here, you’ll craft persuasive ads that drive users to the appropriate page on your site. For example, fundraising ads should drive donors to your donation form, while volunteer ads should drive volunteers to your volunteer page. You can even leverage targeting features such as geotargeting to narrow your audience.

Best of all, you don’t even need to pay outright for Google Ads. Instead, you can complete the Google Ad Grant application to receive $10,000 in free advertising credits every month. If eligible, you can drive users to take meaningful actions by increasing your site’s visibility.

Social Media

Between Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, social media puts nonprofits in touch with philanthropic individuals across the globe. As a vital part of your nonprofit marketing strategy, your social media accounts function as your up-to-date source for news and current events related to your organization. You want to bring subscribers into your everyday activities and cultivate donor engagement.

Think of it as your digital bulletin board to share everything your team is doing. These platforms lend themselves well to sharing event invitations, recent community work, videos, images, and so on.

If your newsletter features educational topics, highlight those on your social media as a teaser to spark email subscription interest. Use Twitter and Instagram hashtags to share your virtual fundraising event online.

You don’t have to be the only one creating content, either! Diversify your posts and lighten your workload by calling for stories, images, and videos from your volunteers, beneficiaries, event attendees, and donors. We’ll explore word-of-mouth marketing a bit later.

Email

Regular email contact is another way to connect with donors and share how to participate in your mission. To strengthen your email marketing strategy, include invitations on your website to subscribe to your mailing list and add social media buttons to your emails to encourage readers to follow you.

If your organization uses Salesforce, create automated emails to help streamline your email marketing strategy! Create thank-you emails that send automatically after every donation. Set up an “introduction” email series that automatically goes out to any new volunteer or supporter.

As long as your organization leverages a database like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, you can have automatic email campaigns for almost anything!

Video

Without question, video captures people’s attention. Compelling visual elements and graphics help individuals retain 55% more information. Because of visual content’s immense power, 71% of marketers rate visual marketing as ‘Very Important’ or ‘Important,’ while 19% say their strategy is nothing without it.

Knowing this, you can use video to express your mission and market your fundraising goals more effectively. For example, you can:

• Embed short promotional content on your website or share it through social media to increase donor interaction.
• Share long-form video updates to educate your audience on important topics (instead of hoping they’ll read long-form written content).
• Use infographics to share powerful statistics related to your cause and put them in a digestible format.

Luckily, you don’t need heavy equipment and technical know-how to put a great video campaign together. All you really need is a smartphone, editing software, and a vision. For inspiration, we discussed Vimeo’s Create feature in a previous blog, allowing you to combine short clips to make promotional videos without complicated software or expensive editing crews.

Word-of-Mouth

Don’t forget about one of your most important assets: your current supporters. These individuals are the driving force behind your cause. They support your work because they believe in it and want to see your team succeed. Their passion will shine through when promoting your cause to others, inspiring others to get involved.

In fact, Double the Donation’s nonprofit marketing guide explains that 88% of people highly trust a brand when a loved one recommends it. That’s thanks to the power of social proof, which is the concept that people conform to others’ behaviors. That makes your prospects likelier to respond well when someone they know speaks positively about your organization.

This type of nonprofit marketing relies on a cumulation of various platforms. Encourage supporters to reach out via:

• Phone call or in person. When someone speaks about something they’re passionate about, that passion will shine through more easily. Encourage your supporters to ring up their friends to invite them to one of your upcoming events or bring it up in casual conversation.


• Social media. Your social media outreach isn’t limited to your nonprofit’s accounts. Encourage users to post about your cause and share their peer-to-peer campaigns online. It can be as simple as having people share your organization’s official social media posts.


• Nonprofit eCards. Promoting a cause can be invigorating when you have the right resources. Get crafty by creating charity eCards that explain your cause. Then, encourage your donors and volunteers to send them to their loved ones to spread the word. They can even challenge their friends and families to give to your cause or take another action.

Peer referrals can take your nonprofit marketing up a notch. So, when crafting your strategy, don’t forget about the vital role your supporters play. That way, you can transform it into a team effort.

How to Build Your Nonprofit Marketing Strategy

You’ve heard about what a good nonprofit marketing strategy is, and it sounds like it promises a lot. But we swear it’s not that hard to put together. Here are our five easy steps to building your nonprofit’s marketing strategy (on any size budget, too)!

As you get started, we recommend conducting a communications audit. That way, you’ll understand where your current nonprofit marketing strategy stands and can make educated decisions to improve what you’ve already built.

1) Determine Your Message.

Before we start talking about audiences, email lists, and social media strategies, we need to get to the core of your organization. What’s your nonprofit’s mission?

Have you practiced the shortest possible answer to that question? The first step in any nonprofit marketing strategy is to come up with your elevator pitch, a boiled-down statement of your organization’s mission and how you’ll get there.

This elevator pitch, or core message, is the foundation of all of your marketing work. From here, you’ll simply tweak your message to fit each audience, including donors, board members, volunteers, and beneficiaries. Your core mission and vision should always remain the same.

2) Identify Your Audience.

Your audience matters. Think about it, you probably wouldn’t say the exact same thing to ALL your donors, volunteers, sponsors, and potential supporters, right? You want them to take different actions to support your work, which requires you to present your mission slightly differently to each group.

An intuitive nonprofit marketer will change little things about their key message to spark enthusiasm and encourage action from different groups in different ways!

Different groups of people give differently and are interested in supporting different missions. For your marketing strategy to work the best, you want to create two specific audience categories. Split them based on:

• Demographics such as age, ethnicity, location, socioeconomic status, topics of interest, and so on
• Relationship to your organization such as donors, lapsed donors, future or interested supporters, volunteers, event attendees, and so on

You should notice some cross-over between the two categories—that’s good! From here, you can use your CRM to organize this information.

3) Prepare Your CRM.

As we just mentioned, the best way to make your nonprofit marketing lists is with a powerful, searchable database. Every Soapbox Engage app grabs essential data from donor interactions, including donations, event ticket sales, and form submissions. The app will send it directly to Salesforce, which means you don’t have to transfer that information manually AND everything remains organized!

You’ll want to perform routine checks to see if your nonprofit marketing strategy is going according to plan. Also called a CRM or donor management software, your donor database will help you track the success of your marketing and fundraising strategies.

Your database should handle incoming data while you’re working on your virtual fundraisers and online marketing pushes. Before setting your marketing and fundraising plans in motion, ensure your database is ready to handle all the data you’ll throw its way.

4) Build A Measurable Strategy.

Now that you’ve defined the foundational elements of your nonprofit marketing strategy, let’s shift to creating a measurable plan to share with your whole team. Your team and board of directors need to know how you’ll market your fundraisers and other initiatives, so they can understand their exact roles in promoting your mission.

We adapted these questions from the SMART goals model to help you take a broad goal like “bring in more donations” and make it a robust and specific marketing strategy:

• What is my fundraising or marketing goal? What marketing tools and strategies do I need to achieve it?
• How will I use each tool or strategy, and why is each one effective for reaching my goal?
• How can this strategy tie into the other marketing tools I’m currently using?
• What audience does this tool or marketing goal reach?
• When will I put this strategy into action? For how long?
• How much will this strategy cost in time and money?
• Who at the organization will implement this strategy?
• How will I track the success of my strategy?

Another method for finding the answers to these questions is to make a list of tasks your strategy will accomplish over the year. Under each month, write out what tools and tactics you’ll employ to achieve your goal.

5) Set A Budget.

Nonprofits often don’t allocate enough funds to marketing. After all, you want most of your funds to go toward actually completing your work. However, sometimes you need to spend money to earn even more money!

Estimate the cost of implementing your nonprofit marketing strategy, and allocate funds accordingly. While there’s no set rule, you can use a few methods to do so, such as allocating 5% to 15% of your total budget to essential outreach activities like marketing and fundraising. Alternatively, allocate a set dollar amount based on past expenditures.

In any case, you must establish a detailed budget to ensure you’re not overspending as you wait to see a positive ROI. And remember, you can apply for grants (like the Google Ad Grant) to alleviate expenses. This will help you tap into more expensive channels like paid ads.

Final Thoughts

At this point, you’re ready to develop content that speaks to your target audiences and reflects your nonprofit's mission. Ensure you have systems in place to monitor results and make adjustments as you go. Figure out what’s working and what can be improved to increase your reach. In no time, you’ll inspire more people to jump on board with your cause.

While creating a robust marketing strategy is important, it doesn’t have to be complicated. By integrating strong apps to automate donations and events promotion with a great database to power it all, Soapbox Exchange is here for you to succeed in your marketing planning and execution.

As you get started, here are three more resources to help you enhance your nonprofit’s marketing strategy:

• Building Your Nonprofit Development Department: A development department is responsible for spearheading all the fundraising efforts for your nonprofit. Whether you’re putting together your first development department or looking to expand an existing one, this blog post will help you assess your current fundraising needs so you can build the right team of experts!
• Top Video Streaming Services for Virtual Fundraising: Virtual fundraising events might be the feature of 2020, but they probably aren’t going anywhere after the COVID-19 pandemic is finally over. This blog is your one-stop comparison guide of all the major video streaming platforms so you can choose the tool that best fits your upcoming virtual fundraising event!
• Write A Fundraising Plan That Converts More Donors: Does your nonprofit have a true fundraising plan? It’s not enough to just ask everyone you know for a donation. That may work at the beginning, but it’s not a sustainable fundraising strategy. This blog will help you create a fundraising plan that will actually help you convert more donors!