Soapbox Engage Blog

Your nonprofit’s major donors weren’t always major donors. They may have started as low-level donors when they first started contributing to your cause, or maybe they jumped in as mid-tier supporters. But even before that, they had to hear about your mission to get inspired to give. They were drawn to your organization because of the cause you represent.

Awareness campaigns help your nonprofit spread the word about your cause, acquire new supporters, and expand your reach even further. However, these campaigns can be very challenging.

Most nonprofits struggle with these campaigns because they seem very open-ended. It can seem like you’re just amping up your nonprofit marketing efforts without a real goal or end game. But that’s not the right approach for these initiatives. Instead, you need to set up parameters to focus your efforts and develop a concrete awareness campaign strategy.

In this guide, we’ll cover four concrete strategies that you can use to run a successful awareness campaign, including:

• Set a specific time frame.
• Define your target audience.
• Provide straightforward next steps.
• Track results against initial goals.

With the right strategy in place, your nonprofit can start new relationships with brand new supporters all around your community and eventually transform them into your next major donors!

1. Set a specific time frame

All good campaign strategic plans start with a specific time frame. Consider, for example, your Giving Tuesday campaign strategy. This campaign leads up to a specific day. You plan every email and message that you will send to your supporters leading up to the day and during the day itself. But afterward, you’ve either reached your goal or you haven’t. Either way, the campaign is over.

Ensure you take a similar approach for your awareness campaign. When setting your campaign timeline, you should make sure to define days and times like:

• When the campaign begins.
• When the campaign ends.
• Benchmark dates to check your progress.

Once you’ve developed these dates, you can go ahead and start filling in the gaps on your calendar. You should make sure you have specific days in mind when you’ll send certain emails to supporters, post specific messages on social media, and schedule events to celebrate the campaign. Once you fill in these gaps, you’ll have a well-developed campaign calendar.

major challenge for awareness campaigns is that they sometimes feel as if they simply go on forever. Since you’re not raising money, how do you know when the target goal has been reached? Setting a specific time frame (along with a measurable goal for your campaign) is the best way to make sure it remains a priority and provides the necessary structure for the campaign.

2. Define your target audience

Once you have defined your time frame for your campaign, you’ll need to also define your target audience. Because awareness campaigns are designed to reach new audiences, you’ll need to define the qualities of those who you want to read your messages.

We recommend reviewing your current donors and targeting an audience that mirrors their characteristics. You already know how to reach your current supporters, so the types of strategies you already use should continue working!

Define the various qualities and characteristics of this target audience, considering data like their:

• Age
• Geographical location
• Communication preferences
• Interests and motivations
• Other nonprofit causes they support

Then, you can use these inferences to craft messages that will appeal to this audience. Feathr’s digital marketing guide explains that for known audiences, you would use segmentation to personalize your outreach. However, you can’t use segmentation for an audience you’ve never met. But when you have inferred information about them, you can still personalize the messages you put out there to appeal to them!

For example, if your audience is primarily college students from a local university, you might infer that other university students will also be intrigued by your mission. In this case, you might choose to use geofencing to make sure the other students at the university encounter your nonprofit ads.

3. Provide straightforward next steps

The goal for your awareness can’t be to “build awareness for your mission.” Rather, it should be a measurable metric that shows that your supporters are engaging with your message and getting involved with your cause.

Once you’ve set this goal, you’ll need to determine the next steps you want supporters to take when they see your message. Make sure these calls to action are simple, easy to follow, and don’t require too much effort or time from your audience. For example, your simple next steps might include:

• Signing up for your organization’s newsletter.
• Following your nonprofit on social media.
• Sharing a social media post with their own friends and family.
• Tagging three of their friends in the comments of your post.

These types of activities are much easier and faster than asking a new supporter to donate, attend an event, or sign up to volunteer. That means people are also much more likely to do the desired action. With simple calls to action, your nonprofit can engage your audience and provide a metric for you to measure success. Plus, it helps your nonprofit gain new avenues to reach out to those new supporters in the future.

4. Track results against initial goals

Fundraisers aren’t the only campaigns for which your nonprofit needs to set concrete goals. Any time you launch a campaign at your organization, you should make sure you have specific goals in mind and specific times set aside to check in on those goals, making adjustments as necessary.

You can measure this progress by tracking your key performance indicators (KPIs). Salsa’s KPI guide provides some examples of metrics to measure around social media — a central platform for many nonprofit awareness campaigns. Some of the KPIs they recommend measuring and tracking include:

• Amplification rate: The ratio of shares per social media post.
• Applause rate: The number of approval actions (likes, comments, reactions, etc.) received on a post compared to the number of followers your nonprofit has.
• Social media conversion rate: The rate of people who click through your social media post to take action for your organization. For example, clicking through to sign up for your newsletter or download your latest annual report.

Set up benchmarks throughout your campaign during which you can check in on your KPIs. Then, you can adjust your strategy to make sure you hit your final goal. For example, if your applause rate is lower than expected, you might reconsider your audience and what might best engage them.

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Once you’ve gained new support and awareness for your cause, your organization should make sure you have systems in place to convert those new audience members. Continue reaching out to them once you’ve captured their attention. Then, you can encourage new supporters to donate to your latest fundraising campaign.

Most importantly, make sure you have a process to help retain those new supporters. Your awareness campaign is only useful for your organization if you gain some new, sustainable support from it. Retain your new supporters and encourage them to continue coming back to give, volunteer, and otherwise become a core contributor to your mission.