Often when nonprofits run into budget constraints, one of the first items they cut back on is their marketing. This is a shame because your nonprofit’s marketing strategy is essential to establishing your brand image and raising funds by informing supporters of upcoming opportunities.
An effective nonprofit marketing strategy is essential to drive donations, recruit volunteers, host successful events, and make a difference in the community.
However, you need to make sure that your marketing strategy is as efficient as possible, meaning you’re making the best use of your available marketing budget. In this guide, we’ll cover four strategies your nonprofit can use to increase your return on investment for your marketing plan:
Cutting your marketing budget right away is generally not recommended. Instead, consider the ways that you can make your marketing budget stretch further and have a bigger impact. This will help you drive growth in your organization rather than accepting stagnation.
Conduct an audience analysis
To effectively reach your audience in your market, you first need to know who they are and how they want to interact with your cause. This means you need to collect data about those supporters and use that information to craft messages and campaigns that will resonate with audience members and promote your goals.
Gather data about your supporters as a part of your audience analysis, then use that data to help craft your nonprofit’s marketing strategy.
NPOInfo’s donor data guide names the following data points as integral for nonprofits to collect from supporters:
Demographic information. Demographics like age, gender, location, and general income level can provide insight into how supporters may feel comfortable getting involved with your organization. For example, a young college student may not have the financial means to give a major donation, but a successful, older business owner may make a good major gift prospect. You would talk to each group in slightly different ways.
Contact information. You’ll need to be able to contact your supporters to market your cause and encourage them to get involved. Ask for both email information and physical addresses. You may even request that they follow your organization on social media. This provides several opportunities to get in touch and therefore several ways to promote your cause.
Giving habits. Understanding supporters’ giving habits will help you time your fundraising asks and your outreach messages. If someone gives a recurring donation on a monthly basis, you might reach out to them and invite them to get involved in other ways to keep engagement levels high.
Interactions. Remember that donations aren’t the only way that supporters can get involved with your organization. Keep an eye on your supporters’ other interactions like time spent volunteering, emails opened, surveys responded to, and advocacy campaigns supported. This provides insight into supporters’ overall engagement with your organization.
We also recommend reviewing your supporters’ interests and motivations. Why are they supporting your cause? What about your mission intrigues them? This way, you can align your messages with their motivations to create a more convincing campaign.
Once you collect all of this important information, you can create supporter segments based on the data. This way, you can personalize information and outreach without having to individually write each message to each supporter. It saves you time while better engaging your audience.
Make the most of your email campaigns
Email campaigns are the bread and butter of nonprofit marketing. They’re incredibly effective because they allow organizations to connect with donors on a personal level, using a platform that they will check every day.
Your organization has likely already used email campaigns to reach your target audience, but certain optimizations can make the messages you’re already sending even more effective. We recommend considering the following email campaign tips:
Craft your messaging based on your audience segments. Consider how your audience will best respond to your message and craft it accordingly. For example, if you’re recruiting volunteers, you might talk about how volunteering with your organization can boost a resume when reaching out to college students.
Use short, impactful subject lines to increase your email open rate. The national average open rate for nonprofit emails is over 25%. This is very good compared to the overall average open rate of 6%. But it can still be improved! Create subject lines that are intriguing and informative.
Brand your emails to your nonprofit organization. Your audience members trust your nonprofit’s branding and including your branding in emails signals that those messages are safe to interact with. So make sure all of your emails accurately represent your visual branding.
Vary the types of emails you send to your supporters. If you only ever send your supporters donation solicitation emails, they’ll likely get bored of your content quickly. Vary the types of emails you send, from solicitations to impact stories and more to keep them engaged.
In addition to sending emails to your supporters, you can take your email campaign a step further. Feathr’s email marketing guide discusses how nonprofits can use email mapping to supplement their email campaigns. According to this guide, email mapping allows nonprofits to use the cookies collected based on supporters’ email addresses and target those audiences with ads for the organization.
Ads appear in the margins of online articles or between posts on social media sites. They help support email campaigns by ensuring your audience comes across your message several times and reminding supporters of upcoming opportunities.
Use retargeting ads to reengage supporters
In the last section, we briefly mentioned how nonprofits can use ads to get in touch with their audience members. Nonprofit ads provide an effective way to lead supporters back to your organization’s website and engage them in your various initiatives.
Retargeting ads specifically allow your nonprofit to reach supporters who have visited your website in the past. When someone visits a specific page on your website, you can retarget ads to follow them on other sites they visit or on their social media feeds.
Make sure your ad specifically references the action you want supporters to take on your website. Consider retargeting supporters based on the conversion page they abandoned. For example, you might retarget visitors to your:
Donation page
Volunteer sign-up page
Event registration page
By landing on these types of pages, supporters have shown genuine interest in participating in your cause, even if they haven’t converted yet. Therefore, they’re qualified prospects who are very likely to engage with your organization in the future.
Make sure the ads you create are eye-catching to draw in these supporters. For example, use gifs or moving images, bright colors, and catchy calls to action that will remind them of their interest in your cause.
Analyze your campaign performance
Once you’ve developed your nonprofit marketing strategy, your nonprofit’s job isn’t over. Sticking to the same strategy year after year is tempting, but there are always iterations and optimizations that can improve it. To maintain your momentum, analyze your various campaigns’ performance and look for opportunities that will improve them.
Some of the engagement metrics you should keep an eye on include:
Click-through rates: Those who click through your ads, emails, and social media posts to engage with your organization’s mission.
Conversion rates: The conversion rate references those who click through to your website and convert on the page they land on, whether that’s by donating, registering for an event, or otherwise engaging with your mission.
Open rates: Your open rates reference those who open your emails and direct messages that you send to your supporters. This can indicate the strength of your subject line.
Goals accomplished: As a part of your marketing strategy, you’ll create goals for the campaign. Keep track of the goals you’ve accomplished and the ones you’ve fallen short of. You might need to adjust these in the future.
You may even collect additional data through A/B testing to help you understand what your audience responds best to. In this case, you’ll test individual variables of your outreach and track the differences in your data. For example, you might test the difference between two email subject lines by sending one to half of your audience and another to the other half. The emails with the higher open rate will be considered the more effective strategy.
Track these types of goals and metrics over time. That way, you can analyze trends associated with the data and make informed decisions to drive your campaigns forward in the future.
Your nonprofit’s marketing strategy is essential for success in your fundraising and engagement among your audience. That why it’s important to make the best use of this strategy and maximize the return on your investment. By targeting specific groups of supporters with emails and ads and tracking your successes and opportunities to improve, your nonprofit will be set up to maximize your campaigns both now and into the future.
About the Author:
This is a guest post contributed by Aidan Augustin at Feathr. Aidan is the co-founder and president of Feathr, an industry-leading software company making digital marketing more accessible to nonprofits and event organizers. Feathr has helped over 800 nonprofits and thousands of events know, grow, and engage their audiences. When he's not steering the ship at Feathr, he's playing strategy games, singing karaoke, or reading books about people who changed the world.