What is digital marketing? It’s the act of promoting brands to connect with prospects through the internet. This marketing enables non-profits to share important resources with a broad audience.
Nonprofits fully rely on well-wishers to help them achieve their goals. Without their donations, it would be a matter of time before the organization runs out of resources.
Non-profit organizations are about raising funds to support the needy in society. And it’s through marketing that they get noticed. This often results in more funding.
Digital Marketing Ideas for Non-profit Organizations
A lot goes into running a successful nonprofit organization. There are donor attractions, fundraisings, and team collaborations. They all play an important role in keeping nonprofits afloat.
Many nonprofits operate on a limited budget. For that reason, you should take advantage of digital marketing and put a lot of effort into it. If you’re attracting donors, then growing your online presence should be prioritized.
Let’s look at some of the top digital marketing ideas for nonprofits to maximize their online reach!
Top 8 Digital Marketing Ideas for Nonprofits
1. Save Time With Automation
Of the digital outreach tools, email marketing has one of the best returns on investment. But to boost your ROI, you’d have to set up automation. Apart from helping you woo donors, automation also saves you time.
Ensure that those that sign up for the email newsletter receive a welcome letter. The letter must contain calls to action that seamlessly transfer into offering services. People can benefit from the offers by your agency.
They’d also appreciate being more informed before financially underwriting your important work. Some of the automated emails should also have links to follow your social media pages.
2. Use of Social Media
Keep in mind that the use of social media has both advantages and disadvantages. Also, gaining more followers on your social media profiles isn’t the ultimate goal.
Followers become more beneficial if they’re engaged in spreading your message. Engaged followers share your posts with others who are likely to donate.
To build awareness, ensure you communicate meaningful messages on social media. You can also implement the following practices to ensure social media growth:
The posts must be visually appealing. Especially on Instagram and Facebook. Consider sticking to a color palette that matches your organization’s colors. This helps to avoid mismatched images. You should also integrate high-quality photos with visually appealing text posts.
You must also have a unique angle. With many accounts filling up feeds, why should anyone follow you? You need to have a unique angle that points out your principles to followers. Do this by sharing behind the scene looks on your stories on Instagram, for instance. You can also use humor to push your messages. Or, bring in an expert to boost your authority.
Share videos. Social media posts with videos get more views compared to static posts. When using videos, remember that the viewer’s attention span is short. Shorter videos with highlights are a great addition to nonprofits’ digital marketing. Find applications like biteable to help you create high-quality video content.
3. Inspire the Next Generation
Nonprofits need to ensure that they have donors in the future. With the older people at risk of Covid-19 complications, there has been a drop in their volunteer base. It’s for that reason that nonprofits have to take their digital outreach to the younger adults.
When looking for investors, most nonprofits overlook the younger generation. This is quite unfortunate. Young people may not help financially like the older and wealthier generation. But they can still provide resources through volunteer efforts and social media influence.
Knowing how to attract young donors enables you to build long-lasting relationships. These adults can be regular contributors in the future when their accounts grow. Also, you’ll be acquiring valuable volunteers who know how to reach out to their peers
4. Analyze Your Marketing Performance
Chances are that your marketing won’t perform well at the beginning. Which is alright. Routine reporting and analysis will enable you to know what’s working and what needs to change.
Make sure you measure performance indicators for every one of your marketing channels. This will serve to ensure that you stay aligned with your goals. Tools like Google Analytics will also help in tracking your performance indicators.
Knowing what to measure before marketing for nonprofits enables you to know what to look for. You’ll also be able to determine the success and impact of your strategies, and where to improve.
5. Use of Nonprofit’s Website
To boost your marketing, ensure your brand has a website. It includes critical information and serves as a digital home base for nonprofits. It shows visitors what you stand for and how they can participate and help.
It also houses critical assets like your social media streams, event information. Lastly, a non-profit website serves to intrigue, inspire, and engage the audience.
6. Use of SEO
We can begin by asking a clear question. What is SEO? It’s an acronym for search engine optimization. It’s the process of getting free, organic, or natural results in search engines. It helps to boost your website’s position on search results pages.
Nonprofits need SEO to increase the visibility of their sites in search engines. Otherwise, how will people find your website if you don’t appear on Google? Spending time on SEO marketing makes sure that you appear on the first page of your results.
So what is SEO marketing? It’s a digital marketing strategy that pivots your site’s presence in search engines.
Bonus Read: SEO Salary in India in 2022
SEO comes in many forms. It starts from improving your site’s load time to starting a blog to taking care of broken links. It optimizes your site which makes it user-friendly and readable for search engines. You don’t need to wait until you have an all-knowing SEO expert to improve your visibility. The following can help you to begin working on your SEO:
a. Ensure the website is mobile-friendly
Presently, a lot of Google’s organic search traffic comes from mobile devices. So nonprofits must test their websites to see how they perform on mobile phones.
b. Get a free SEO audit
You must have a clear understanding of where your website stands in terms of SEO. An audit helps you to uncover the areas that need improvement. It also helps you to craft specific plans of action.
c. Update relevant content on your website
Carry out a spring clean-up of your website. You should also go through the site and delete outdated information. Because it can drag down the organization. You can then replace the old information with new content.
d. Regularly update your content
It is in fact considered one of the best indicators of a website’s relevancy. Thus, nonprofits need to audit their content on a set schedule and update it regularly.
e. Update metadata
Every webpage has space between the <head> tag to insert metadata. This is information about the contents of your webpage. It’s important that nonprofits review and update metadata as the website changes over time.
f. Ensure your website is link-worthy
An authoritative webpage that has rich content is likely to attract links from other websites. This plays a vital role in improving your search engine optimization. As such, nonprofits must improve their site’s authority and credibility by adding relevant links.
g. Use of alt tags
You must ensure that your images and videos are described using alt tags or alternative text descriptions. This makes it easy for visitors to locate your page.
7. Plan New Virtual Events and Ensure You Meet Your Goals
Nonprofits moved their fundraising events online as the world struggled with the pandemic. Unfortunately, some of them found it difficult to host online events.
The following tips will help you in successfully hosting an online event:
- Be clear on your goal and make plans before you begin organizing a live-streamed event. For instance, why do you want to host a virtual event? Is it to engage your audience or to promote a partnership?
- Choose one of the social media platforms for the event. Is it Facebook, Instagram, or Zoom?
- After selecting the platform, specify your theme, which should be informed by your goal.
- Think of a format that will work best for the chosen theme and plan your agenda.
- Develop a communication plan to make sure you capitalize on the potential of live streaming.
- Choose calls to action which can be to sign a petition or donate.
- Engage your audience. This should be done by capturing the audience’s attention right from the beginning.
- Use live streaming to do online fundraising. You can add a link to the donation page in the caption. Or, in the comments.
- They say anything that can go wrong will go wrong, especially, with technology. So test all that needs to get tested and get prepared for any kind of scenario during the live stream.
- Post-event communication is an important part of event management in online events as it is in in-person events. Reach out to your audience and supporters to express your appreciation. You can write personalized thank you emails.
8. Use of PPC Advertising
Utilizing PPC campaigns is an important advertising technique for nonprofits. And what is PPC? It’s an acronym for pay-per-click. It’s an internet marketing advertising strategy where you pay a fee every time their ad is clicked on.
A PPC campaign appears at the top of a search result. It looks like a small green ad indicator at the top or bottom of a search results page.
Bonus Read: Digital Marketing Tips for eCommerce Brands
PPC services help in strengthening a nonprofit’s leads. This helps to increase profits, participation, and funding. It helps nonprofits to reach their goals by creating the impact needed to reach success. The utilization of PPC marketing enables you to:
- Achieve your marketing goals
- Have a ton of data and information at your fingertips
- Work well with other marketing channels
- It ensures that your results are measurable and trackable
- Provides you with countless targeting opportunities and options
Conclusion
There are many guides to digital marketing. Most of them, however, begin with the assumption that an organization wants to grow at any cost. But that is never the case for nonprofits.
That’s because they are bound by their values and budget restraints. They are also bound by the need to show progress towards their mission.
Generally, digital marketing is less expensive compared to traditional marketing tactics. And, marketers in nonprofit organizations are more focused on social causes than financial gain. Implementing digital marketing strategies will be important to the growth of any organization.
