One of the worst mistakes nonprofit organizations make is not operating as a business. We do understand that your main goal is to help, but, if you don’t master some simple business principles like doing market research, creating donor personas, building a brand, or marketing, then you will struggle to find donors or simply fail. Marketing in particular is a skill all charities need to master. If you’re trying to build awareness and increase your donor base this year, here are some marketing tactics that you could try.
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Start an Inbound Marketing Campaign
Inbound marketing is the art of pulling donors to you instead of aggressively marketing your brand. It’s also about keeping your prospective donors engaged and moving them through a funnel that eventually ends with them donating and maybe becoming regular donors.
The first stage in your funnel will be to raise awareness about your charity. If people don’t know about it, then there’s no way for them to give. It’s very important to not come off as promotional in any way at that stage.
You can raise awareness by publishing content that illustrates the problem you’re trying to fix and the people it’s affecting. This content can be posted on YouTube, but it can also be posted across your social media. The minute someone sees your content, you’ll have to guide them through your funnel with additional pieces of relevant content until you give them a clear call to action.
If you want more information on donor funnels, the linked blog post has plenty of useful information. GiveButter teaches the exact steps needed to build a successful donor funnel and a few free tools that you can use to build one. Not only will you know how to pull people in and get them to give money, but they also give tips on how you can turn them into advocates as well.
Start a PPC Campaign
PPC is a tool that a lot of charities are afraid to use because they feel like measuring returns will be difficult. But once you use tracking tools, you can know exactly how many people donated to your cause after following a PPC ad.
If you’re still unsure about PPC, know that Google has a grant program for nonprofit organizations. If your charity is eligible, you could get up to $10,000 in Google AdWords credits per month. You heard us, $10,000. All you need is a Google Ads account, a Google for nonprofits account, and your Google Ads customer ID.
There are some limitations to this program, however. As mentioned, you won’t be able to spend more than $10,000 on ads, but you won’t be able to spend more than $2 per click either. This still gives you tons of space and you shouldn’t have issues finding keywords with cheap bids.
Spy on Other Organizations
We suggest that you start following organizations similar to yours or organizations that target issues that are somewhat related to yours. Look at their newsletter, donor recognition lists, and annual reports and try to make a list of top donors. You should then ask members of your board or people on your staff if they happen to know some of these people. If they do, ask them to contact them and see if you could invite them to your next major event.
Improve Local and Regular SEO
SEO should be a priority for every charity and if you don’t have a solid SEO strategy, you need to start right away.
If you don’t know SEO, you will have to start with an SEO audit of your website. You will then have to apply some corrections so that your site’s SEO is up to par. This could include adding or removing content from your site or blog, improving your copy or navigation, compressing elements to reduce loading times, or starting everything over if things are that bad.
One area charities – especially those that are very local in scope – need to spend more time on is local SEO. The great thing about local SEO is that it’s really simple at its core and much less esoteric than regular SEO.
All you have to do is write a well-written Google My Business profile, make sure that your contact information is consistent everywhere you have control over it, and try to get visibility locally. Visibility will turn to mentions of your charity, which will help improve its position in the local search pack. Reviews are also extremely important, so you have to make sure that you preserve your brand.
Conclusion
These are all tactics that you have to use as a non-profit if you want to survive. The good part about all of these methods is that they are affordable, so you don’t have to worry about eating into your budget.