Nonprofit Marketing Best Practices for Your Organization

It can be difficult for people to get their head around the concept of nonprofit marketing. Even if you’re already using texting software for nonprofits, or various other channels to communicate with your sponsors, backers, and volunteers, building (and implementing) a comprehensive marketing plan can be daunting.

After all, marketing is something we typically associate with “for-profit” companies. When someone mentions the term “marketing” we often envision billboards, television ads, and social media campaigns focused on “driving sales”.

However, marketing for charities and non-profit organizations is crucial, too. You still need to raise awareness of your cause, earn the trust and loyalty of supporters, and drive action from community members. So, how do you master nonprofit marketing?

Understanding Nonprofit Marketing: The Basics

Nonprofit marketing isn’t all that different from “for-profit marketing”. It encompasses all of the strategies nonprofit organizations use to promote their cause, attract donations, raise awareness, and recruit volunteers.

Just like for-profit corporations, marketing for nonprofits can include the use of various channels and tactics. For instance, you might combine SMS marketing strategies with social media campaigns, content marketing, and offline events and experiences.

The whole point of a nonprofit marketing strategy is to help charitable institutions connect with, and activate their supporters - so they can grow and thrive over time.

However, nonprofit marketing can be more challenging than for-profit promotion too. Causes and ideas are harder to “sell” to an audience than products and services. Plus, many nonprofit organizations have limited marketing budgets and resources.

Fortunately, if you can develop and implement the right mission-led strategy, the results can be phenomenal - your marketing efforts could even help you to change the world.

The Benefits of Marketing for Nonprofits

It’s sometimes easy to overlook the benefits of a nonprofit marketing strategy. Some charitable institutions assume that backers who share their values and vision will seek them out automatically, seeking ways to contribute.

However, marketing is the key to amplifying your voice. Social media strategies, storytelling methods, and effective SMS campaigns help you to connect with relevant community members, convincing them to support your cause.

Nonprofit marketing:

• Builds awareness: Marketing ensures like-minded individuals know your organization, its mission, and its values so that they can become active supporters. The right campaigns can increase the visibility of your brand, and help backers to understand why they should be donating or volunteering.
• Enhances fundraising: A strong marketing strategy delivered across channels can help you to collect more donations. You can communicate your goals to a wide range of customers who might be willing to either make one-time donations, or even use a text-to-join feature to make monthly contributions.
• Attracts volunteers: Even if backers can’t afford to financially support your cause, they can help you in other ways. Marketing messages can encourage volunteers to join your team, giving you access to crucial personnel for events and fundraisers.

Beyond all that, investing in a nonprofit marketing strategy can also help to improve the experience your community has with your brand. It enhances your nonprofit communications efforts, ensuring you can keep supporters and volunteers educated and informed.

It also gives you an intuitive way to inspire your community, giving them insights into the various ways they can have a positive impact on the world by partnering with your organization.

Effective Nonprofit Marketing Ideas and Strategies

There’s no single way to approach marketing for NGOs and nonprofits. The strategies you explore will usually depend on your budget, resources, and the audience you want to reach.

For instance, a local religious group might use text messaging for churches and offline events to connect with local supporters, while a global organization experiments with various digital marketing campaigns.

Let’s take a closer look at just some of the nonprofit marketing ideas and options you can explore, to improve your organization’s reach.

Offline Marketing for Nonprofits: Ideas for Local Groups

Digital marketing strategies are the best way for nonprofits to reach the widest audience possible with their marketing messages. However, offline advertising can be a cost-effective option if you’re a smaller group, such as a local NGO or charity.

SMS marketing is probably the best type of nonprofit marketing to consider for “offline” advertising. SMS messages benefit from an incredibly high open and engagement rate, and ensure you can reach your audience wherever they are.

With a simple SMS platform, you can easily learn how to send blast text messages to entire groups of supporters, or run highly personalized campaigns.

You could even use intelligent solutions to send customized messages to specific customers, based on specific factors, for instance, you could segment your audience into different groups based on their location, previous involvement with fundraisers and more.

Other Offline Nonprofit Marketing Ideas

Aside from experimenting with SMS blast campaigns, and MMS, there are various other offline nonprofit marketing strategies you can consider, such as:

• Flyers and leaflets: Flyers and leaflets, strategically distributed throughout your local area, are ideal for disseminating information about your organization, and showing supporters how they can get involved. You can even combine this strategy with digital marketing efforts, by adding QR codes to your printed materials.
• Radio and TV advertising: Although it can be difficult for a nonprofit to find the funding for a traditional TV ad, local television channels and radio networks can offer an affordable way to connect with new backers and volunteers.
• Offline Events: Running offline events is another great way for nonprofits to enhance their donor engagement strategies, and attract new supporters to their network. You could even consider collaborating with other companies, local celebrities, and thought leaders to enhance your reach.

The great thing about all of these offline strategies is that it’s relatively easy to combine them with your digital marketing efforts, as your organization starts to grow. Combining offline and online marketing can be a great way to boost the ROI of your promotional efforts.

Digital Nonprofit Marketing Strategies: Boosting Reach

Ultimately, investing in digital marketing strategies is the most effective way for nonprofits to expand their reach and attract backers from various locations. Once again, you can explore multiple nonprofit marketing ideas, depending on your goals and budget.

Some of the best options include:

Website Marketing: SEO and PPC

Your website is one of your most valuable assets as a nonprofit. It’s where people can learn all about your cause, accomplishments, and mission. It’s also where potential customers can ask questions (24/7 if you’re using AI-powered customer service tools), and make donations.

When developing your website, it’s essential to ensure that it’s easy-to-use, mobile friendly, and packed with engaging, relevant, and informative content. However, you should also be thinking about your website marketing strategies.

For instance, nonprofit marketing teams can leverage search engine optimization strategies, creating content (such as news reports and blogs), that feature specific keywords and other elements that make your website more visible to consumers using search engines.

Organizations like the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), for instance, publish content about climate change, and ecosystem preservation, to make their site more visible to potential supporters online. Even the images on the WWF website boost visibility with descriptive alt-tags, and social media sharing options.

If your organization has a slightly higher marketing budget, consider “PPC” or “Pay per Click” strategies. These strategies revolve around creating targeted advertisements for social media platforms and search engines that drive traffic and supporters for your website.

PPC campaigns even allow you to target specific types of customers. For instance, an animal welfare organization could use Facebook ads to specifically target potential supporters who have pets, or follow other companies focused on animal products.

Combining SEO and paid advertising allows you to drive awareness, increase website traffic, and boost donations. It can even help you to strengthen relationships with backers over time, ensuring your organization stays top-of-mind with supporters.

Content Marketing and Digital Storytelling

We’ve already briefly mentioned content marketing in our website-based nonprofit marketing methods section. However, content marketing isn’t just about creating blogs and articles. The content you create for your website, and other channels, can help you demonstrate thought leadership, and strengthen relationships with potential supporters.

You could experiment with:

• Informative content: Keep potential and existing backers informed about your cause with infographics, ebooks, and news reports. For example, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society regularly publishes articles about MS symptoms, issues, treatment options, and tips for managing the condition.
• Authentic stories: Authentic stories, showcasing how your work has benefitted people or communities, helps demonstrate your value to supporters. Use both written and video-based stories to connect with community members on an emotional level.
• Thought leadership content: Thought leadership content helps you earn trust as a nonprofit. You can share insights into trends related to your cause, or discuss news reports. For instance, the British Heart Foundation regularly shares its thoughts on the latest research and initiatives related to heart health.

The key to effective content marketing is developing valuable, engaging content, and distributing it across multiple channels. Don’t just rely on your website to draw in leads. Send bulk SMS and email messages to subscribers linking back to your blogs.

Publish links to your content on social media, or create content for relevant industry publications, forums, and associations.

Video Marketing: Telling Your Story Through Visuals

Video marketing is technically another form of content marketing - but it’s well worth considering in a comprehensive nonprofit marketing strategy.

Video gives you an incredible way to connect with audiences on an emotional level, and show them the impact of your work. You don’t necessarily need a huge production team either. You can create short-form videos with a smartphone, sharing insights into community stories, volunteer experiences, or behind-the-scenes work.

Then, you can share these stories across social media channels like TikTok or Instagram, or even send them straight to potential and existing backers with RCS.

You can also craft engaging videos for channels like YouTube, or share in-depth videos on your website, in blogs, news reports, and on volunteer pages.

For instance, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals regularly shares videos across channels highlighting the work they do in animal shelters. These videos often include CTAs that encourage donors and volunteers to get involved.

You can combine video with your SMS strategy too. For instance, with professional text signatures, you can add a link to an ad or video to your messages, encouraging contacts to get involved with your cause at the end of each message.

Social Media Marketing: Engaging Communities

Social media is another incredible resource for organizations investing in marketing for nonprofits. It allows you to connect with backers, build a community around your mission, and spread awareness.

Plus, you can combine social media with other marketing methods. For instance, your social media strategies could encourage backers to share their contact details with you, so you can continue to connect with them over time using SMS lead nurturing campaigns.

When you’re developing a social media nonprofit marketing strategy, focus on:

• Choosing the right channels: Research your audience to find the channels they most commonly use, such as Instagram or Facebook. Try to identify the kind of content they interact with most often too.
• Experiment with content: Explore a range of content types, from text-based posts that link backers to landing pages, to videos, photographs, and even text-to-vote polls that encourage active audience engagement.
• Foster community activity: Actively engage with your followers by responding to messages and comments as quickly as possible. You could even use AI for customer experience to create bots that can respond to queries 24/7.

Remember to track the results of your efforts across channels so you can consistently improve the impact of your campaigns over time.

Email and Mobile Marketing

We already mentioned SMS marketing strategies above in our list of offline nonprofit marketing ideas. But if you want a convenient way to expand reach and engagement, one of the best strategies you can use is to combine both mobile and digital marketing strategies.

With seamless SMS integrations for your CRM systems and email marketing platforms, you can create comprehensive, personalized campaigns that resonate with specific audience segments - from potential backers, to existing supporters.

Combining SMS, email, and even other digital messaging methods like WhatsApp, or RCS messaging, means you’re more likely to reach your audience anywhere, and keep them engaged.

Quick tips to keep in mind when implementing this type of nonprofit marketing strategy include:

• Personalize everything: Segment your contact lists based on demographics, interests, and even previous donations. This will help you to deliver more relevant and impactful messages across channels.
• Track results: After you send mass text or email messages to contacts, track open rates, click-through rates, and unsubscribe rates. This should help you to double-down on strategies that really work.
• Remember compliance: Always obtain consent to contact your customers through email, or group texting solutions. Additionally, make sure you’re keeping sensitive data secured, and protected.

Creating a Nonprofit Marketing Strategy: Step by Step

Now you know some of the best methods you can use for nonprofit marketing - but before you dive in, you still need a comprehensive strategy. Here are the steps you’ll need to follow when investing in marketing for nonprofits.

Step 1: Define Clear Goals

First, decide what you want to accomplish with your nonprofit marketing efforts. Do you want to attract new supporters or volunteers to your cause? Do you need to raise awareness of a specific issue, or are you trying to attract attendees to an event?

Define specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives for every marketing strategy you implement. This will help decide on the types of marketing methods to use, and ensure you can track your progress.

Step 2: Understand Your Audience

Next, develop a deeper understanding of your target audience. You may have numerous audiences you want to reach when investing in marketing for charities, such as existing supporters, volunteers, or new “leads”.

Create a “user persona” for each type of audience you want to reach, identifying demographic details (like age, locations, and interests), and psychographic characteristics - like their motivations and values. These personas should help you to develop more relevant, personalized marketing messages.

If you have a limited amount of information about your audience to begin with, consider designing targeted surveys or conducting focus groups to collect more information.

Step 3: Craft Core Messages

Whether you’re exploring conversational marketing examples, SMS advertising strategies or social media campaigns, developing a strong set of core “messages” will ensure that you build a stronger connection with your target audience.

The central messages you use for nonprofit marketing campaigns should always draw attention to your values, beliefs, and mission. They should engage and inspire your potential backers and community members, and drive them towards specific outcomes.

For instance, if your overall goal is to earn more donations from backers, your messages might focus on highlighting how your efforts are helping communities, and end with a call-to-action encouraging backers to sign up to make monthly donations.

Step 4: Share Your Messages on Multiple Channels

Once you’ve identified your goals, target audience, and core messages, it’s time to start distributing content. As mentioned above, the channels you use will vary depending on your objectives, budget, and target audience.

However, there’s a good chance you’ll want to experiment with an omnichannel strategy. This means connecting with potential audience members through your website and native content, your social media profiles, and on external channels (like publication websites).

You may also want to learn how to send mass texts to potential backers, automate emails to supporters, and launch offline marketing experiences.

Step 5: Constantly Optimize

Once you’ve started delivering your message to potential supporters, the work doesn’t end. The key to successful nonprofit marketing is constantly gathering insights, and using data to fine-tune your strategies.

Analyze the data from your email, SMS, social media, and website marketing strategies, as well as offline efforts. Ask yourself whether you achieved the goal you set - and if not, what went wrong? Look for ways to constantly improve your outcomes, and remember to pay attention to the feedback given by your supporters.

Nonprofit Marketing Best Practices: Top Tips

At this stage, you should be almost ready to dive into your own marketing strategy. However, before you jump in, we have a few more nonprofit marketing best practices to share:

Make Personalization a Priority

People today aren’t just looking for personalization in customer service. They expect every interaction they have with a company or organization to be relevant to their needs and interests. Personalization is particularly important for nonprofits, who often need to maintain communications with a range of different backers, donors, and potential leads.

Investing in personalization is a great way to ensure that you strengthen relationships with every member of your community, earning trust and loyalty. Plus, personalization can help to boost your message open rates, and improve the ROI of your marketing campaigns.

While personalization at scale can be complicated, technology can help. AI-powered solutions can help you deliver more personalized experiences to supports across multiple channels. CRM tools can ensure you can segment your audience and create more relevant marketing campaigns. Some messaging platforms, like Clerk Chat, even come with dynamic cohorts that you can use to track up-to-date details about all of your contacts.

Go beyond simply referring to each contact by their name. Make sure every message and campaign is specific to the group or individual you want to reach.

Experiment with Different Media and Channels

With a limited nonprofit marketing budget, you might need to start small with your promotional efforts. However, over time, you should be branching out into new forms of content and marketing channels.

For example, you might start by creating a user-friendly website where backers can learn all about your cause, then promote that website through certain social media channels. You could start experimenting with SMS and email marketing as you attract more interest from potential backers (and contact details).

Alternatively, when you’re creating marketing materials, you might begin by focusing on text-based blogs and articles, then expand into the world of videos, podcasts, infographics, and even interactive guides.

The more you experiment, the more your visibility will grow, and the more you’ll engage potential community members.

Prioritize Continuous Stakeholder Engagement

Although your initial goal for a nonprofit marketing campaign might be to attract new donors and volunteers, it’s essential to ensure you continue to engage your backers after they’ve decided to support your organization.

Don’t forget all about the people that actually help you reach your charitable goals. Make sure you’re “sustaining” relationships with these individuals and groups. Small organizations could start by using a personal phone for business messages that keep donors and backers informed about their latest achievements and projects.

Over time, you could create comprehensive content campaigns for existing donors. For instance, you might design volunteer guides or share videos introducing volunteers to tips on raising funds for your cause.

Additionally, make sure you’re gathering feedback from your supporters, asking for their direct insights into improving your marketing strategies or events.

Remember Privacy, Security, and Trust

All kinds of consumers, donors, and backers are becoming increasingly concerned about how their data is stored and used. If you want to maintain the trust of your supporters, you’ll need a comprehensive strategy for protecting their privacy.

Make sure you’re upfront about your data collection policies, and invest in secure systems for communication - like SMS tools that offer end-to-end encryption. Make sure you’re adhering to compliance guidelines too. For instance, you might need to use an SMS archiving solution to securely store conversations for future audits.

Transparency with donors is crucial too. When you’re connecting with new and existing backers, share genuine insights into how you’re using the contributions they’re giving you. If you face challenges, either with fundraising efforts, or security problems, inform your backers immediately, and apologize for any mistakes you might have made.

Maintain Consistency

Finally, just because it’s important to experiment with different nonprofit marketing strategies and methods, doesn’t mean you should overlook the importance of consistency. Your organization’s tone of voice, core messaging strategy, and mission should remain consistent across all channels and campaigns.

Even if you decide to update certain parts of your communications plan (such as learning how to text from a different number to align your mobile-based communications), make sure you’re maintaining a cohesive experience for your community.

There are various ways you can boost your chances of preserving consistency. Creating brand guidelines that outline the tone of voice, language, and messaging channels your team members should be using can be extremely helpful.

You could even consider creating templates for SMS messages, social media campaigns, videos, and articles. This could make it easier for volunteers and new backers to preserve your brand’s identity when they’re helping promote your cause.

Transform Marketing for NGOs and Nonprofits with Clerk Chat

Effective nonprofit marketing is crucial to growth as a charitable or not-for-profit organization. The right strategy ensures you can raise awareness of your cause, attract donations, and recruit volunteers. Although there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for success, taking a proactive approach to building the right marketing plan can turbocharge results.

The right technology can also make a huge difference, allowing you to align marketing strategies among multiple channels, monitor metrics, and make data-driven decisions.

Clerk Chat, a world-leading conversational messaging platform, gives nonprofit organizations all the tools they need to build stronger relationships with leads and backers.

Whether you’re sharing valuable information with existing volunteers over text, nurturing new donors, or just trying to increase engagement, Clerk Chat can help. With our conversational AI tools, omnichannel marketing solutions, and in-depth reports, you can improve the return on investment from your marketing strategies, and accelerate towards your goals.

Learn how you can take your nonprofit marketing strategy to the next level with Clerk Chat today.