How To Promote Your Nonprofit
Marketing your nonprofit isn’t all that different from promoting a for-profit business. Many of the key pillars of your promotional efforts are the same as you would find in a corporate marketing plan. Some marketing approaches will need to be adapted to the nonprofit space but it isn’t as giant of a leap as some would have you believe. To get you started quickly we’ll cover how to create a strong and compelling brand message, considerations for an effective and well-designed website, and how to make the most of promotional channels like social media, paid advertising, and email marketing.
Brand Messaging
Articulate Your Message
Before you grab a megaphone and start shouting from the nearest hilltop about the virtues of your nonprofit you need to be clear on exactly what message you want to convey. In the for-profit world the question we often ask during our brand development workshops is, “What is your company’s purpose beyond making money?” It is a question that cuts to the chase of what change your organization is trying to create in the world outside of just turning a profit.
When we ask this question of business leaders we typically get puzzled stares, especially from the Head of Finance. A business exists to make money. “What other purpose could it possibly have?”, they ask. Well, as a nonprofit you are way ahead on answering this question. Your organization was founded on the principle of purpose. You no doubt have a Mission, Vision, and Purpose statement already in place. And even if you haven’t yet written it down, it won’t take much to craft one.
Here are a few tips you can use to help articulate your brand:
Survey your donors on why they choose to support you. Sometimes your donors will do a better job of articulating the emotional appeal of your nonprofit better than you. They also work as a great filter. Regardless of what you’ve told them about your mission, how they answer this one question will tell you what really matters to them.
Volunteers give you one of their most precious resources, their time. Having worked with your organization closely, they will know your organization intimately and will have some great insights for articulating your brand. Be sure to engage them when crafting messaging. Ask them questions like “How would you explain to a friend or family member what we do?” and “Why do you choose to spend your time helping with our mission?”.
Board members are designated community brand ambassadors for your nonprofit. Making sure they are on message will be hugely important. Start by asking them the same clarifying questions you ask donors and volunteers. Involving them early will make it easier to ask them to adjust their messaging later.
The key here is to be clear on what message you want people to hear when you are promoting your nonprofit. What challenge are you working to solve? Who are the beneficiaries of your efforts? What will the world look like when you succeed? Why does it matter? Answer these questions clearly and people will rally around your movement. Don’t forget to collect basic demographic information if you can. It will become incredibly valuable when you start your promotional outreach.
Repetition, Repetition, Repetition
Repetition is key when delivering brand messaging. Being so involved in your mission every day, this may feel weird to you — but it won’t for your audiences. An old marketing axiom is that it takes up to nine separate interactions with your brand before someone remembers your message. Now imagine if every interaction in that chain was different than the last. To prevent this confusion and deliver your message consistently it’s best to craft an elevator pitch that hits the key points you want to convey.
We find that having a canned pitch of varying lengths will help unpack the message in different interactions. We often craft a 30-second pitch for quick conversations, a two-minute pitch for slightly longer conversations, and a five-minute full pitch to be used as an opening for presentations or other organized talks. Once you have these you can train staff, volunteers, and board members to hit the same communication points making for far more effective message delivery.
Segment Your Audience
Keep in mind that while the key points of your brand messaging won’t change much for different audiences, the benefits of supporting your mission can vary widely. It is best to segment the audiences and craft specific benefits and calls to action (Know as CTAs) for each. For example, your donors will want to hear how their contributions will be used to solve a problem they care deeply about. It is best to focus on this benefit in communications with them. For your volunteers, you will need to articulate why your cause is a worthwhile investment for their time and what benefit they might receive by volunteering.
Be sure to segment your communications and personalize the messaging for each audience. You’ll also need to ensure that your communications are capable of being segmented. For example, your email database should be able to easily handle targeted pushes to specific segments of your audience. Perhaps you want to re-engage past donors who lapsed last year— the easier that list is to generate, the more likely you are to do it and reap the benefits.
Your Website
Now that you have your message well-articulated and your audience segmented, it’s time to put this foundational work to use on your website. Your website is the most important piece of marketing collateral you have and will be the first stop for your donors and volunteers when they want to learn more about you. Make sure it does a great job of delivering the message you want, addresses each of your audiences, and urges your different audiences to take action.
How To Structure Your Website Content
Website messaging tends to follow a standard structure that holds true whether you are marketing a for-profit business or promoting a nonprofit. Information hierarchies on websites are typically shaped like a pyramid. Short key messages need to appear at the top of the page or what we call “above the fold.” As the user scrolls through the page, more messaging depth is provided, with even more detailed information being given on additional pages beyond the homepage. The deeper you go, the more information is provided.
Build a Path For Each Audience Segment
After doing the early work to understand the different audiences you serve, you understand that one message doesn’t fit all. The homepage itself should provide clear paths for each of your segmented audiences to take an action you want, or what we call a conversion. Volunteers should see a message related to getting involved that leads to a page where they can sign up. Donors should see messaging explaining how important their gift is to your mission followed by a clear call to action to give that leads to a payment gateway. Your website’s job is to address each segment and push them towards the content that best serves their needs.
Promoting Your Nonprofit
With your messaging tightened up, your website ready to serve your different audiences, you need to bring in new visitors. Remember what I said about repetition? Well promotion is where you deliver your well-articulated message the six to nine times it will take to get noticed. Don’t make the mistake of thinking a single Facebook post will be enough. A continuous conversation with your potential donors and volunteers will be needed to deliver on your mission. Everything we’ve talked about until this point has been homework to get you ready to promote your nonprofit.
Segmentation Saves You Money
Segmentation will play a huge role here as well. You will use your clearly defined audiences to create audience segments in the most popular advertising platforms, from Facebook to Twitter. Are your volunteers mostly retirees looking for opportunities to better participate in their local community? You can segment them by age and location. Are your donors mostly from a certain income bracket or alumni from a particular school? You can segment for that audience as well. Segmentation allows you to prioritize your limited advertising budget and deliver a message that is highly customized.
It would be impossible to cover every promotional activity you could do in a single post. So we will look at the top promotional activities you should consider including social media, Google Advertising, and email marketing.
Facebook Advertising Has Unbeatable Reach
For effective promotion, you’ll want a big audience. At the moment, no social site is larger than Facebook so it is where you’ll want to start. The good news is that Facebook offers incredible opportunities for audience segmentation. Remember all that data you gathered when crafting your messaging? Now it’s time to put it to use. Leverage the insights you gained earlier to target your audience across different demographics and interests. The platform itself is also adept at learning which users are most likely to respond to your outreach as your campaign starts to serve ads and receive clicks and conversions. The trick is to make sure you give it enough data to learn what works. While how much you need to spend in order to have confidence in your results varies, we suggest no less than $1,000 in ad spend (and usually more depending on the type of result you’re testing for) on a given test. This is money well-spent however as these learnings can later be applied to larger campaigns.
Another great feature is the Donate button. Adding it to your Facebook page gives your page visitors a chance to gift money directly to your nonprofit from inside Facebook. Keep in mind that your organization must be enrolled with Facebook Payments before visitors can donate through Facebook. Like all social channels it is also a great way to share success stories of those you are helping and give a glimpse at what volunteering at your organization is like.
Tell Your Story Visually on Instagram
Instagram has more than 1 billion users — beating Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok — and is a powerful tool for nonprofits wanting to connect to a wider audience. This is especially true if you are trying to reach its most avid users, people between 18-29 years old.
Like any social media platform, however, it's important to know how to leverage it most effectively. Simply taking the same approach as you would on Facebook or Twitter won’t work. Instagram is all about visual content so if your nonprofit’s story is best told through photos, consider using Instagram. For example, before and after photos, personalized profiles of the people you help, or photos of the wildlife you are protecting.
A few quick tips to get started on Instagram:
Instagram offers two account types — business and personal profiles. When creating an account for your nonprofit, you should choose a business profile over a personal one. This will allow you to add “Nonprofit” to your bio and grant you access to more advanced analytics and improved ad campaign management, as well as enable you to add contact information to your page. If you have already set up your account but made the mistake of creating a personal account don’t worry, you can switch it to a business account at any time.
You’ll also be able to add a special Donation sticker to Stories and Live videos and a “Donate” button to your profile once you connect your profile with your verified Facebook Page approved for Charitable Giving Tools, which will let users go directly from your content to a donation page.
Looking for inspiration? Take a look at Doctors Without Boards, The New York Public Library, and St. Baldrick’s Foundation. Each does a great job delivering a highly personal message through visual communication.
Post to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Others
Needless to say you should have profiles across the most popular social media platforms. Make it a habit to post content to all your channels regularly. Prioritize the channels that your audience engages with the most, and focus extra on developing a unique voice for those channels. Twitter can be an effective way to engage in conversation with your community. LinkedIn lets you set up a company page for your nonprofit and even create groups that people can join. If this feels like an overwhelming amount of channels to manage think about setting up a social media aggregation platform that will allow you to post to multiple sites at once. We recommend Buffer because it is powerful and easy to use and also because of how much it values transparency.
Take Advantage of The Google Ad Grants Program on Google Ads
Google Ads is an advertising network that offers a number of ways to promote your nonprofit online. There are varied programs you could potentially use on Google Ads including YouTube video ads, highly visual Display ads, and even text ads inside of Gmail. However, one offering stands out above the rest, Google search ads.
Google search ads are the text ads you see on search result pages, usually taking up the top three and bottom three positions. These ads are based on a keyword auction where advertisers try to outbid one another for the coveted top of page results. Advertisers only pay when one of their ads is clicked. Highly sought after search terms can go for tens and sometimes hundreds of dollars. That won’t matter to you because Google offers a program called Google Ad Grants so that your nonprofit can use a $10,000 grant every month to advertise for free. Some restrictions do apply and it takes some effort to stay in compliance with their rules. However, where else are you going to get $10,000 in free monthly advertising on the world’s most popular advertising platform. It will be worth the effort.
Build Community With Email Marketing
Your email list will be one of your most valuable marketing assets. Having a ready-made audience to market to is far better than trying to drum up interest every time you want to promote the good work you are doing. It’s also one of the most cost-effective means for promoting your nonprofit. In effect you are building your tribe, those people who are really engaged in what you are doing. It’s important to be mindful of best practices when doing email marketing. This is a pretty large topic but we’ll hit some key points here including opt-ins, welcome emails, avoiding the spam folder, and starting a newsletter.
First and foremost, make sure that everyone you have on your list has opted in to receive your messages. This means that they have explicitly signed up to receive your email communications. This is typically done by filling out a form on your website. Even better is if you have double opted them in, meaning you not only had them provide their email address to you but you also sent a confirmation email that they then clicked on to confirm they are interested in getting your emails. It sounds like a lot to do, but it helps with email performance metrics such as delivery, open rates, and clickthrough rates — all of which help you stay in good standing with your provider. Plus, some email service providers won’t even let you use their service unless you’ve used double opt-in.
Another best practice is to have an automated “Welcome” email that is sent as soon as someone signs up. It’s an opportunity to reaffirm why they have subscribed to your list. You could provide them with a copy of your previous newsletter or a list of valuable links to online resources related to your cause. Remember, you are building a community and not just an email list. When someone joins your community you should welcome them. For a great example, sign up for Patagonia’s email list and see the email you get.
Another pitfall in email marketing is ending up in the spam folder. There are numerous ways for this to happen including getting too many complaints, not providing an unsubscribe link, or sending email so frequently that people stop opening them and Gmail starts automatically moving them to the promotions folder. This is a big topic and we suggest you check out this list of twelve reasons why emails go to spam.
The easiest way to get started with a consistent email marketing program is with a newsletter. It makes for a compelling reason for people to sign up for your list. It’s also a great way to keep your community informed about upcoming events, fundraising activities, or volunteer opportunities. One pitfall we see people fall into is committing to a newsletter with no real plan for the content it will contain. While it is relatively easy to create an email newsletter template and start building a list, it can be hard to fill each issue with valuable content. Before kicking off your newsletter start outlining the different types of content that might go in each issue. The amount of content you think you can generate will also dictate whether you will put out a weekly, monthly or quarterly email newsletter. Finally, commit to an appropriate publishing schedule and start sending.
Get Started Now
There are many ways to promote your nonprofit. The strategies and tactics you employ will not be much different than a for profit business so drawing inspiration from examples wherever you find them. We’ve only touched on a few key initiatives here but if you follow the recommendations above you will be well on your way to effectively promoting your nonprofit.
Looking for help in promoting your nonprofit? We help organizations like yours increase donations, drive volunteerism, and more. Let’s talk.