Successful nonprofits thrive on strategic marketing. While your activities give you credibility, marketing gives you exposure. Effective marketing amplifies your voice. Even if you are short of staff and resources as a nonprofit, don’t let that stop you from planning your marketing. At the end of this article, you should be able to come up with marketing strategies that speak directly to your needs with the little that you have. 

What is digital marketing for nonprofits? 

Digital marketing for nonprofits involves using online marketing strategies to meet the missions and goals of nonprofits, including sourcing volunteers and donations. Not only can you use digital marketing to create awareness, but you can also solicit donations/funds, recruit volunteers, and promote your services. Below are the steps on how to market your nonprofit in a digital world.

Do a SWOT analysis

Identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities as well as threats. SWOT analysis helps inform the direction of your digital marketing.

Define your marketing goals

Break your organization’s mission and objectives into small but smart obtainable marketing goals. This might involve creating educating content on your programs, spreading it on social media, sending regular email newsletters to volunteers and supporters, and hosting major events that resonate with your objectives.

Segment your audiences

Your audience can’t be the same, nor can they play the same roles. You can segment your audiences through their 

• Demographics (gender, age, religion, etc.).
• Expectation/target (Volunteers, donors)
• Affluence (Politicians, General managers, government workers, etc.)

A CRM (customer relationship manager) can help you do the hard work of segmenting your audience.

Construct your central messages

Your central messages should permeate your campaign. It should be loud enough to be noticed and remembered by your audience.  However, it should be targeted at specific audiences. For example, if your message targets recruiting female undergraduates as volunteers, your central message can be “call out for new female undergraduate volunteers.” 

Create a strategic plan and follow through

Now, you know your audience and the message you want to convey. Before forging ahead, create a strategic plan. Your plan should answer the following four Ws and two Hs questions.

• What do you plan to achieve with the marketing strategy?
• When will you kickstart the marketing strategy?
• Why are you using that specific strategy?
• Who will take charge of its running?
• How much is your budget?
• How does it go along with your organization’s marketing goals?

Track your marketing success

One of the advantages of digital marketing over traditional marketing is the ease of tracking marketing success. Don’t forget that digital marketing is a fusion of email marketing, social media marketing, and website/blog marketing. Your marketing strategies can include one or more of these marketing platforms. Each of these marketing channels has provisions for measurable performance indicators. Performance indicators include email opens, video views, ticket sales, page views, referrals, shares, post reactions, comments, and subscriptions. Some analytic tools have simplified the measurement of your digital marketing performance. These tools include Hubspot, Google Analytics, and inbuilt ones like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. 

Use SEO and SEM

Digital marketing is deeply rooted in search engine optimization and search engine marketing. While SEO helps drive traffic through organic search results, SEO helps attain visibility through paid and organic searches. As a nonprofit, you can make use of keywords to these effects. 

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