6 Marketing Strategies Every Nonprofit Should Implement

Whether you have a new nonprofit striving to grow as an organization, or your goal is to expand the organization’s influence even further, marketing is a huge part of your journey. Planning for nonprofits can be extremely challenging since it captures all sorts of things including stewardship, general marketing, and fundraising.

All these might require a separate plan but in the end, they are all connected in one thing – marketing. For your strategy to work, it must consider all these elements at the same time. It is only by using the necessary tools and combining different strategies that you can achieve positive results with marketing.

Perks of Successful Nonprofit Marketing

If you do it right, your marketing strategy can do wonders for the nonprofit organization. Some of the areas where you can truly succeed include:

• Expanded online presence
• Improved relations with your supporters
• More engagement and motivation in supporters
• Widened reach and more conversions

Now that you know how far this can take you, let’s take a look at some useful strategies for you to implement.

Winning strategies for your nonprofit organization

1.  Hire a marketing agency

Probably the most obvious solution to your problems and yet, something that few nonprofits go for. Some believe that this is too costly, others don’t think that the results will be worth it. However, this is not the case if you choose the right nonprofit marketing agency to assist you.

According to ElevationWeb: “your nonprofit’s marketing needs are as unique as your mission”. This company exists to help nonprofits grow and achieve their missions. With the assistance of experts and professionals, you can achieve amazing things for your organization.

From social media to newsletter and custom email templates, SEO services, and Google Adwords management, the agency takes over everything that’s digital marketing-related. They will also sustain the website, manage the content and integrations, and ensure that everything runs smoothly.

Unless you have a website specialist on board, you’ll have many issues with the site, sales, communication, hosting, and even security. Hiring an agency like this one will place your nonprofit at the highest standard for quality, security, and online presence.

Source: https://www.elevationweb.org/nonprofit-digital-marketing-agency/

Lastly, you can use Elevation to create your website. If you are a nonprofit organization just starting or need to improve your website, they have amazing experts to work on your visual design, UX design, and content strategy.

2.  Work on improving your current relations

Instead of just focusing on attracting new leads and conversions, you should put your greatest focus on improving the ones you already have. Cold marketing outreach might work for some businesses, but when you’re managing a nonprofit, you need to focus on strengthening the relations you already have.

Who helped you build the organization from the ground up? Who were your donors in the past? These are the people you already managed to capture with your strategies, but you can’t expect them to remain engaged just out of loyalty.

If you want people to remain interested in your nonprofit, you need to find new ways to impress them.  Create extensive profiles of past donors and interested parties, their actions and purchases, donations, and past communication. If you're handling a big nonprofit, there’s a simple solution – you can use a CRM to collect all this data for you neatly and turn it into a report.

Whether you choose to use software or do it manually, keeping your current relations intact depends on how much time and effort you dedicate to it. A good idea is to segment your current supporters based on their similarities and interests and tailor your marketing strategies to meet their needs.

Seeing how these people represent your nonprofit’s target audience, you’ll be basically providing amazing solutions for other potential leads, all whilst keeping the current ones happy and loyal.

3.  Switch to hyper-personalization

Hyper personalization is quite the trend these days. More and more companies switch to a more customized, personalized marketing strategy for the amazing results it provides. For years now, businesses have been reporting tremendous success due to personalization. People trust and invest in a company that offers them personalized services.

With that in mind, hyper-personalization should take part in your strategy these days. If you make people see that you're working out for their comfort, they'll be more likely to put their trust and money into your nonprofit organization.

But, what is hyper-personalization, really?

Hyper personalization is a thing of the future. Why? It's because it uses AI technology to provide a more personalized experience for your target audience. AI technology monitors and traces people's behavior and helps you adjust your strategies to meet their expectations.

Compared to traditional personalization, hyper-personalization is far more advanced and captures tons of information that you wouldn't get otherwise. Personalization uses data acquired through orders made, messages sent by leads, etc. 

Hyper personalization, on the other hand, tracks real-time data such as activity on people's social media accounts related to your organization, behaviors of leads and customers, etc.

4.  Get your current supporters involved in the process

The strongest tool nonprofits have at their disposal are the current supporters. Word of mouth is the best way to gain new supporters. People are far more likely to trust the praise of their friends and acquaintances than your words in an ad campaign on your website.

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/4TDl2qOJWCc

This is why you should aim to leverage the influence of your supporters at any point. By getting them involved in your strategy, you can spread your reach to their friends, family, and even the people who follow them on social media.

Here are some tips that can help you achieve this:

• Host a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign

This is an amazing opportunity to get people involved in your marketing and fundraising strategies. Such campaigns require that your supporters reach out to their networks to raise money on behalf of the nonprofit organization. To make this happen, you need to promote your campaign across different channels and use personalization to encourage supporters to do the same.

• Encourage supporters to extend the stewardship event invitations

People who already believe and are part of your nonprofit will be most likely to bring their family and friends to your hosted events. Hosting such events is a great way to attract and convert people with similar interests and widen your reach. Next time when you host an event, include a +1 or more people option in your registration form.

Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/hawLFtFv6xk

5.  Expand your online presence

The digital world has completely transformed marketing. Today, we have the chance at a reach wider than ever. Compared to the past where you had to use word of mouth and ads in magazines, nowadays you can attract people from across the globe to join your nonprofit organization.

Your online presence is the best way to widen your reach.

For starters, you may want to expand your online presence through more platforms. Starting with social media to fundraising pages to nonprofit forums, there are endless opportunities for you to widen your reach.

In addition to consistent posting and quality content across different sites and platforms, you can create newsletters and great email campaigns, pay for advertisements on social media, and create virtual events that everyone can attend.

6.  Work on your CRO

If you manage to attract enough leads to your pages, chances are that customer conversion will happen. However, such methods ignore one big and vital group of people – the leads that you’ve already attracted via other marketing methods.

To turn those people into supporters, you need to put conversion rate optimization into play.

CRO is the process of changing your site and online presence to convince visitors to take your desired action. This can include everything from signing up for newsletters to making purchases or donations.

The concept sounds pretty straightforward, but it requires a lot of time and effort. Unless you’ve done this before, you’ll probably need to change the entire site to optimize the content for conversions.

There are a few main pages that you should be targeting when you start:

• Homepage: this is the first thing that most visitors see, so you want it to make an amazing first impression
• About page: this is where they read about your organization, so you must make it as clear and impressive as possible
• Fundraising and pricing: such pages are most often the last thing that visitors see before they take the desired action. They need to be clear, honest, and enticing

Wrapping up

Thanks to technology and marketing tools, spreading the word around for your nonprofit is more possible than ever. With the right tools and strategies, you can attract a much wider audience and create viral posts that will grow the organization.

This can only work if you put effort into it, as well as include your supporters. From video marketing and online presence to events and fundraising campaigns, your hands will be full with a great marketing strategy. But, it will be worth it in the end.

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