A Path to Sustainability: Digital Marketing for Nonprofits
Marketing challenges for nonprofit organizations are familiar territory to their leaders. When moving a mission-driven organization ahead, spending on marketing outreach becomes an inescapable necessity in order to continue spreading awareness, cultivating relationships, and fundraising for viability.
It’s crucial for tax exempt organizations and nonprofits to evaluate how an investment in digital marketing and automation can support the longevity of their organization.
In this article, we discuss how digital marketing gives nonprofits a path to sustained impact.
Engage and motivate members through social media
If you ask anyone involved with a mission-driven organization, “What’s your most valuable resource?” They often have the same answer: the people. Whether it’s a cancer research organization or an association of engineers investigating renewable energy, people do the work of driving an organization’s mission forward. As one of the most direct ways to engage and motivate people to take action, social media has grown into an essential fundraising pathway.
Most people peruse social media on their phone, so you have the opportunity to put your message right at their fingertips, making it simple for them to take action. Organic promotion on social media is modern day word-of-mouth marketing, and it’s just as influential to fundraising and donations as cultivating real-world relationships. According to a Global Trends in Giving Report, social media is the method that most inspires 29% of online donors to give.
The need to post on social media is apparent, but what to post on social media is less obvious. While organic promotion is free, it takes time and effort to do well. For nonprofits building their social media presence, posts making people aware of your organization and educating them on your mission, work, and results are helpful. For a more established social presence, a long-term strategy, planning, and scheduling are essential.
Since individuals can immediately react to posts on social media, it’s important to include an easy method for them to take action. Including CTAs with direct links to webpages is a simple, effective way to capitalize on this ability.
4 ways nonprofits can leverage social media
- Utilize national awareness days and months. Giving Tuesday is a national day dedicated to encouraging people to donate and volunteer with causes they’re passionate about.
- Analyze the effectiveness of campaigns. Each social platform has tracking tools built-in, allowing you to see performance, and CRM platforms enable the ability to evaluate ROI.
- Consistency keeps you top-of-mind. Posting on a regular basis conveys an active organization and makes you available when people are ready to take action.
- Reduce roadblocks to action. Give people the ability to register, commit, or donate at their fingertips by including CTAs and links with every post.
The bottom line is that posting on social media makes a nonprofit organization more accessible to a broad audience, making it easier to discover, understand its impact, and take action to join, volunteer, or donate. Consistently posting on social media is an effective way to consistently grow membership and fundraising numbers.
Amplify your reach with paid advertising
Nonprofit and tax exempt organizations often have reservations about paid advertising on search engines (PPC) and social media (PPM): it’s challenging to determine their effectiveness, they can be a money pit, and there’s no guarantee on ROI. However, PPC and PPM actually provide extensive control over and insight into your spending.
The reality is that for nonprofits without a high level of digital maturity, the advertising setup process can seem nebulous and daunting. The learning curve is worth the benefit of modernizing and extending outreach. With digital advertising, nonprofits gain:
- The ability to hone in on a particular audience with control over who sees your ads and where they’re seen
- Connection with people seeking organizations like yours through sponsored search results
- Omnipresence and brand recognition to stay top-of-mind when a person is ready to take action
Consider PPC as a method of augmenting your current paid advertising. Most organizations already spend on traditional outreach like mailers and print ads. Organizations can test the waters with PPC by running digital ads in tandem with physical outreach campaigns with the added benefit of being able to track performance. Nonprofits who allot portions of their annual budget into PPC can analyze how ads influence website performance, membership, and fundraising.
Advertising on social media platforms can also be beneficial when you have an understanding of your audience. To spend your budget wisely, you should advertise on platforms that align your mission with your members. It’s more effective for national federations, associations, and other professional groups to find potential members on LinkedIn where you can target job types and positions. For organizations that want to cast a wider net and reach a broader audience, Facebook may be the better choice since it has over 2 billion daily active users.
With the ability to throttle budget up or down as needed, evaluate campaign performance, and visualize insights, digital advertising is a powerful tool nonprofits can utilize to strategically spread their marketing budget.
Stay nimble with automation
Copy: Mission-driven organizations have always needed to stay flexible to manage the ebb and flow of members, volunteers, employees, and funds. When times are tight, organizations are often left with an ultimatum: put in extra hours or reduce outreach. It’s not always practical to ask employees or volunteers to help with outreach either. Using an email automation system requires a certain level of technical understanding and digital skills.
The need to incorporate email fundraising campaigns into your outreach and funding strategy, is clear as Double the Donation reports that “48% of donors say that regular email communications are most likely to keep them engaged and inspire repeat donations[.]” This makes the case for maintaining and even expanding outreach.
Many organizations are familiar with basic automation tools like MailChimp to send monthly newsletters to a list of email addresses. While these apps make it simple to get your message out, they don’t provide the same level of automation and capabilities as CRM platforms like HubSpot. The value of CRM platforms is apparent for businesses, but they are often underutilized in the nonprofit sector.
A CRM platform can provide comprehensive automation as well as enable you to view performance and receive easily understandable insights. Software like HubSpot has tools to create fully trackable campaigns for fundraising, donations, and events. This gives you valuable information on the ROI of your marketing efforts.
CRM platforms provide better:
- Tracking – With tools to create a great looking landing page for an event or fundraiser, emails and social posts can be easily linked so you can track performance.
- Scheduling – Whether posting a landing page, sending an email, or posting to social media, CRM platforms enable you to schedule multiple posts to a variety of platforms weeks and months in advance.
- Training – While already having a user-friendly interface that’s simple to use, many platforms have training like HubSpot Academy so anyone can easily upskill and learn how to use them.
- Management – By consolidating your outreach into a CRM platform, you enable your organization to spend less time on administrative overhead and more time driving your mission ahead with impactful work.
The heightened level of automation provided by CRM platforms helps organizations build resilience, consistency, and sustainability into outreach while also providing unprecedented control. With the ability to evaluate ROI on your outreach efforts, it makes finding the important information for your annual report a much simpler process.
Conclusion: The digital marketing automation imperative for nonprofits
Digital marketing, paid advertising, and a CRM platform may not be the most exciting consideration for your budget, but they may be the most transformational. With the ability to consistently deliver your message across social, email, and ads, organizations can reap unprecedented benefits.
Want to explore the possibilities of digital marketing with an agency that has years of experience with nonprofits? Then, contact us today!
