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Use these tools and resources to increase your online presence and amplify your impact among your followers.
In the digital age, non-profit organizations, like all businesses, need to do online marketing to succeed. This ranges from attracting potential supporters, organizing non-profit fundraising, maintaining supporter engagement, and much more. But the marketing of a non-profit organization can differ from the marketing of a for-profit business. Instead of trying to increase sales, non-profit organizations need digital marketing to raise awareness, funds, and participation.
Digital marketing, with its countless channels and tools, is crucial for the success of a non-profit organization. Once you know what resources exist and how to use them effectively, you can use digital marketing to increase your positive impact in the real world.
Why Non-Profit Marketing Can Be Challenging
Even if you’re on top of your online marketing from day one, this aspect of running a non-profit organization can be challenging. The success of digital marketing as a non-profit organization begins by understanding what you’re up against, so you can overcome challenges such as:
Small Marketing Budgets: As non-profit organizations tend to allocate as much of their budget as possible to the cause they support, it can be difficult to dedicate a portion of that money to marketing.
Inexperienced Marketing Staff: Much of the work of non-profit organizations is done voluntarily or by a small staff of people who handle various tasks. This means that knowledge of marketing strategies will be scarce or non-existent for many non-profit organizations.
Difficulty with Outreach: Largely due to the two previous challenges, it can be difficult to reach your audience as a non-profit organization. And it doesn’t help that the audience of a non-profit organization is often not a specific demographic group. This makes the task of generating contacts with interested people even more difficult.
Inconsistent Collaborators and Strategy: Since much of the staff of a non-profit organization may exist in the form of volunteers or employees who work for a comparatively low salary, there may be high turnover, inconsistent workflow and results, and lack of experience. It can also mean that strategies are inconsistent due to the necessary lack of communication and unpredictability of results.
Low Audience Engagement and Retention: It’s hard to work in a non-profit organization, but it’s also hard to maintain it. With everything else that happens in their lives, commitment to non-profit organizations is not usually a priority for the average person, even if they have a great interest in the cause. This creates a constant battle to retain customers.
By being aware of these common problems, non-profit organizations can create a plan that succeeds despite them.
Benefits of Digital Marketing for Non-Profit Organizations
As a non-profit organization, digital marketing offers various potential advantages. From your landing page to your email marketing initiatives, every little detail counts.
Non-profit marketing provides an opportunity to spread the word about your cause, and awareness is a crucial part of creating change. Digital marketing for non-profit organizations helps you broaden your overall reach, allowing you to forge valuable relationships with people who care about your cause and want to help.
For newer non-profit organizations, non-profit marketing can also assist you in establishing yourself as a credible organization. This can even lead to building relationships with potential donors, which is one of the keys to success for non-profit organizations.
Creating a Marketing Plan for a Non-Profit Organization
Before you dive in, you should create a digital marketing plan for your non-profit organization, just like any other business or for-profit company would. It’s an important part of a business plan that helps you utilize all your resources, including your time, energy, staff, and budget, appropriately. First and foremost, it’s important to understand how digital marketing works as a process. In its simplest form, digital marketing involves 5 key steps, each of which should be covered in your plan.
1. Define Your Digital Marketing Objectives
The first step of any marketing plan is to define your objectives. What specifically do you hope to achieve with your digital marketing initiatives? Set your objectives carefully: they should be SMART objectives, which means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timely, rather than abstract or unreasonable.
Continuously measuring your results against your objectives will help give coherence and direction to your initiatives. As necessary, you can adjust your objectives to more realistically reflect what can be done and which methods work best for your organization. While it’s important to have initial objectives, it’s hard to know for sure which strategies and expectations will be most effective until you’ve actively started employing them.
2. Understand Your Audience
The purpose of marketing is to connect with your target audience and engage them. The best way to do this is to know who your audience is and understand important things about them, such as their concerns, desires, and pain points. It’s crucial that you research your audience and learn everything you can about them. Use that information to determine the best way to reach them. There are several tactics you can use to find your target audience, such as:
- Review what you know about your current audience.
- Conduct a survey or ask for their opinion.
- Research the audience of similar organizations.
- Identify demographic information.
- Consider who will benefit from your initiatives.
3. Refine Your Message
With your objectives and audience in mind, you can start crafting the message you want to send with your marketing materials. Take the necessary time to refine that message, so it’s suitable for your audience while still supporting your objectives. Whatever your message is, it should be clear, appealing, and memorable to your audience.
Like your objectives, your message should be open to revision, to remain relevant as your initiatives evolve. It’s vital that your organization’s message matches its actions, and that it’s promoted consistently at all levels of the organization.
You can have one message or several, depending on your objectives and the scope of your projects. It may be helpful for your initial message to be simple. This will give both your organization and your audience a clear idea of what you intend and where you want to go. You can always expand your message as your organization gains more experience and develops its identity.
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