How to Elevate Your Nonprofit’s Marketing Today
Stories drive us forward and telling our impact story is an opportunity to build awareness and understanding for philanthropy. Your marketing and communication is a powerful vehicle to build awareness in a massively cost-effective way. To begin elevating your nonprofit’s marketing efforts today, start with these concepts. This article is geared toward nonprofit leaders who are responsible for leading an organization that needs operational and back-end work and who may have waited to focus on external communications and fundraising until after a mission and vision statement have been updated. If you’re looking for tangible ways to up-level your nonprofit’s marketing as a precursor to creating a fundraising plan, begin with communications planning and strategy.
Audit your assets.
Start evaluating what channels and marketing assets you have. Pull data from your website, social media, and email marketing. Give yourself an overview of what communications currently exist or are planned. Which of your communications performed the best for you? Which appeals garnered the most responses? What is the story your marketing and communications is telling your supporters? Does it match up with what you expected?
Plan Your Communications Cadence
Begin planning your communications with a calendar, log, or Kanban style organization system. Free tools include Trello, AirTable and there are others. I’m a proponent of knowing exactly what communications are necessary, given your programs, workload, and audiences. From there, you can take a birds’ eye look and evaluate whether some messages can be combined or whether your segmentation strategy can used to reduce how many times someone is seeing communications from your organization.
Having a communications plan means you can more effectively create content across your channels and keep the goal of getting people to your website (and to the RIGHT content on your website) front and center.
Create a Marketing System
When I talk about a marketing system, I mean having a plan for sharing news that incorporates best practices without overly weighing your team down with extra steps. Most nonprofits need a system that gets results, is easy to replicate, and creates a marketing habit. If your nonprofit is on social media, when was the last time you reintroduced your mission, led with impact, or had a planned month of visibility? All nonprofits benefit from reinvigorating their image, key messages, and brand visibility within their digital platforms. When we work with clients, it’s important to evaluate how much time and attention can be devoted to marketing communications. The best way to help small-medium nonprofits get moving is to systematize their marketing and communications to remove as many boundaries as possible to their success.
You can create a marketing system from scratch using planning tools and adapting your events and program needs and inputting that plan into a shared calendar for your team to see and contribute to. Sustainability is the goal here so your plan should be flexible and accessible. The last thing you want is to set lofty, sophisticated marketing goals and have it be left and forgotten. The measure of success is how much you can improve your organization’s awareness and revenue results by doing sustainable, consistent marketing.
Need more support?
Consulting call - Get real-time, actionable feedback on your existing marketing communications and fundraising plan.
Workshop - Book a workshop where we’ll dive into your up-coming plans and how to maximize your visibility and fundraising through elevated marketing.
1:1 Engagement - Fine tune your communications and marketing to prepare for a campaign, improve visibility, or put a marketing system in place. Contact us for a proposal.
Margaret Perkins Noel helps nonprofits build capacity, including shaping and developing communications and fundraising teams to be more human-centered and integrated.
