Soapbox Engage Blog

Your nonprofit’s marketing strategy has likely shifted over the years as communication channels rise and fall in popularity. While many nonprofits still rely on traditional mail and even direct response television ads, most professionals have been aware of the benefits of online marketing for several years now.

Digital marketing can dramatically improve your ability to draw attention to your online supporter engagement opportunities, such as donating online, attending virtual events, and subscribing to your email newsletter. Of course, the rise of digital marketing means there are now more nonprofits competing to get noticed online than ever before.

To stand out from the crowd, your organization will need to take deliberate steps to forge a cohesive and strategic online marketing plan. This guide will walk through the four steps nonprofits should take when creating their digital marketing strategy, including how to:

Table of Contents

1. Assess your current strategy.
2. Determine and invest in necessary tools.
3. Execute your strategy.
4. Analyze results.

Launching a new marketing strategy will be a time and resource-intensive undertaking. To ensure your organization completes this process successfully, consider hiring a nonprofit consulting firm. Nonprofit marketing consultants can assist your organization with every step of your strategy’s development, provide an outside and professional perspective, and alleviate the workload to allow your staff to continue focusing on your mission.

1. Assess your current strategy.

Before launching a new digital marketing plan, your nonprofit will need to take inventory of its current practices, goals, assets, and other relevant factors. DNL OmniMedia’s guide to nonprofit digital strategy refers to this as the identification stage. The purpose of this initial step is to identify aspects of your current marketing strategy that could be improved on.

During the identification phase, you’ll complete three steps:

1. Determine goals. When determining their digital marketing strategy’s goal, most nonprofits start with broad goals such as wanting to increase online donations or seeking to establish an online presence. Use these broad statements as a starting point to then create a more specific, achievable goal. Try asking questions about gaps in your current approach, analyzing your current data, speaking with stakeholders, and determining how your goals fit into your long-term strategy.
2. Examine online audience and brand. Assess your target audience, your current brand image, and what impression that brand image leaves on your audience. Analyze data from past campaigns and digital marketing strategies that were particularly effective or ineffective at gathering support. Noting past successes and failures will help you identify opportunities and challenges for engaging your audience.
3. Define constraints. Your nonprofit does not have infinite resources. Early on in your planning process, take note of limitations such as your budget, technological constraints, competing priorities, and stakeholder reservations. Use these factors when determining the scope and timeline of your marketing strategy development process.

Knowing where your nonprofit currently stands in regards to digital marketing will allow you to leverage the resources you already have and identify specific areas of improvement. From there, you can begin outlining concrete plans to achieve your marketing goals.

2. Determine and invest in necessary tools.

After taking inventory of your current resources, your nonprofit can begin researching what other tools you’ll need to invest in. For a digital marketing strategy, your organization will primarily look to software providers that can improve the functionality of the following channels:

• Your website. Your nonprofit’s website is the face of your organization and hosts essential functions, including the ability to donate, volunteer, and generally learn more about your mission. Ensure that your CMS is flexible, scalable, and can integrate with other core software, such as your CRM.
• Social media channels. Managing multiple social media accounts can easily be a full time job. Your organization will need to consider how you will create and adjust content to succeed on each platform, how often you’ll post, and measure your overall engagement rates to adjust your strategy on a platform-by-platform basis. To streamline the process, consider investing in a social media management tool.
• Email marketing. Many nonprofits will leverage their CRM’s communication tools or invest in popular third-party applications, such as MailChimp, to manage their email marketing. To make your messages as effective as possible, ensure that your email tools are integrated with your donor database. This allows you to leverage existing supporter contact information and reach out to audience segments that you’ve already created.
• Digital advertising. Has your nonprofit taken out any online ads to promote your organization? For nonprofits, applying for the Google Ad Grant can be a worthwhile avenue to increase traffic to specific, keyword-targeted pages. Double the Donation’s guide to the Google Ad Grant advises nonprofits to partner with an agency that specializes in this type of digital advertising. Doing so ensures that your nonprofit will be prepared when applying for the grant and that the rewarded funds will be leveraged to their fullest potential.

Additionally, consider other software applications your nonprofit can invest in to facilitate digital campaigns. Specifically, peer-to-peer fundraising and crowdfunding platforms are often core parts of many nonprofits’ digital outreach strategies.

3. Execute your strategy.

Once your organization has invested in the necessary tools, it’s time to bring them together to begin executing your strategy. Specifically, this will mean integrating your various software solutions into one, cohesive system.

Connecting all of your platforms will allow your organization to more effectively manage and collect data. For example, in an integrated system, if a supporter registers for an event using a form connected to your event management software, that data will smoothly flow through to their donor profile. Then, in future communications, you can reference their past event attendance using your messaging tools.

An integrated system keeps your campaigns focused. Your digital strategy will likely be multi-faceted, including events, emotional story-driven messages, research-backed annual reports, and online social-media driven fundraisers. Keeping track of these diverse elements through an integrated system will allow you to more precisely determine whether you’ve achieved your marketing campaign goals.

4. Analyze results.

Keeping your digital marketing plan up-to-date is an ongoing process, and you will need to continually collect data to help inform your strategy. Specifically, nonprofits should take note of key metrics related both to their primary marketing goal and other data that may be relevant for secondary objectives. For example, your nonprofit may primarily be focused on increasing online donations but still want to keep your volunteer program going strong with new sign-ups.

Here are a few metrics that can give your nonprofit an overarching picture of your digital marketing strategy’s success:

• Total traffic. How many people are visiting your website? Which pages are your most popular? Take note of both total and recurring visitors to assess your overall traffic. If your nonprofit recently took out new digital advertisements or launched a social media awareness campaign, your total traffic can be an indicator of their overall success.
• New donation rates. Have your total online donations gone up? What is the average donation amount and has it increased or decreased? In some cases, nonprofits reaching out to new online audiences may see the total amount of donors increase but note that many of them give in small quantities. Tracking donation rates can also help your nonprofit evalue your monthly giving program and what steps are needed to turn one-time donors into recurring donors.
• Clickthrough rates. When your nonprofit sends an email to supporters with a link to your website, how many of them actually open the email and clickthrough to the landing page? Monitoring clickthrough rates can help you understand how people are engaging with a variety of marketing strategies, such as using different subject lines in email, how different social media sites compare, or if one landing page results in more clicks than another.

These metrics are a starting point, and your nonprofit should narrow your focus further based on your unique ongoing priorities. For example, a nonprofit interested in building out their recurring giving program might focus more on how marketing impacts donor retention than on attracting new donors.

Cohesive digital marketing requires understanding your audience, your organization, and the multiple software solutions in which your nonprofit may need to invest. Begin planning your marketing strategy by first assessing your current practices and identifying shortfalls. From there, determine how your new approach will overcome these challenges and research tools that will help you do so. From there, you can begin executing your strategy to reach your donors in a strategic, cohesive manner.

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Carl Diesing, Managing Director, DNL OmniMedia

Carl co-founded DNL OmniMedia in 2006 and has grown the team to accommodate clients with on-going web development projects. Together DNL OmniMedia has worked with over 100 organizations to assist them with accomplishing their online goals. As Managing Director of DNL OmniMedia, Carl works with nonprofits and their technology to foster fundraising, create awareness, cure disease, and solve social issues. Carl lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife Sarah and their two children Charlie and Evelyn.