Nonprofits don’t need a large budget or expansive team to pull off inventive, smart digital marketing strategies. By creating interesting content for your nonprofit and driving traffic to your site, you can start connecting with more donors and increasing your chances of raising funds for your cause.
As the digital marketing landscape evolves, it’s those nonprofits that can keep up with the latest digital marketing strategies that will reap the benefits. Being mindful of the following concepts could help improve your efforts in 2019.
1. Content Marketing – create meaningful stories
From the story on your nonprofit’s mission statement to your latest social media campaign, content is extremely important as it shapes the personality of your organization.
Thoughtful content and communications strategy can help spread awareness and educate followers, donors, and potential donors. Good quality content helps your nonprofit organization – no matter its size – build and maintain a strong reputation and brand.
When it comes to your social media presence, try to stay active with regular daily or weekly/bi-weekly posts to show that you care about connecting and building relationships with your donors and supporters.
Finally, focus on creating quality and engaging content. Aside from sending a clear message, nonprofits can stand out by creating messaging people actually care about and feel an emotional connection to.
2. Influencers
Other than posting regularly on social media and engaging with typical community members to increase backlinks, you might also want to reach out to influencers who care about your cause. There are several examples of celebrities regularly supporting and posting or sharing messages on social media about causes close to their hearts. An influencer doesn’t necessarily need to be a celebrity. Social media influencers are users with vast networks of people connected to them. These influencers can share your nonprofit’s content on a regular basis to these vast networks and immensely improve your cause’s visibility. Research some people/influencers whose audiences fit your target market and consider contacting related organizations or foundations as well as bloggers and websites to tell them about your non-profit and ask if they’re willing to link to you or share your messages.
3. Google – Grants for nonprofit organizations
Nonprofits and charities can apply for a Google Ad Grant to receive the equivalent of $329 USD per day in advertising credit for Google Ads? That’s more than US$120,000 a year in advertising spend! All of the Grantees must meet certain – strict – criteria in order to qualify for Google Ad Grants and keep that qualification active. Also, it’s important to mention that one of the criteria is having a high-quality website that meets the Ad Grants website policy.
Esquared Consulting can help you with the development or re-development of your website to meet this criterion. We can also help/guide you through the process of applying for the Google Ads Grant.
4. Social strategies, paid search, video marketing
Other than trying to take advantage of the Google Ad Grants for nonprofits, there are also significant opportunities in using Facebook and Twitter for targeting potential donors. By using their hyper-specific targeting tools and boosting posts that have performed successfully previously, non-profits can experiment and refine a relatively inexpensive paid social strategy.
Utilizing impactful video content to build awareness and generate support for your nonprofit’s initiatives should be a top priority as research shows that close to 60% of people who watch non-profit videos go on to make a donation. The most important thing to remember when creating videos is to inspire emotion in viewers by using strong imagery and a meaningful storyline.
5. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly
Many nonprofits in an effort to save money hire inexperienced developers to put together their websites in a budget. As a result, the mobile functionality of their websites is not thought out as well as it should be (or even worse in many cases, it’s not thought out at all). When it comes to mobile, visitors are becoming less tolerant of websites that do not take the mobile journey and experience into account. To provide the necessary information and customer experience, mobile needs to be accounted for (or even prioritized) in the digital journey.
