When it comes to the world of marketing, every team is challenged to do more with less, especially non-profit organizations. When resources are tight and teams are small, it’s even more important to generate a captivating marketing strategy. And while your organization may not operate for profit, a focused and innovative marketing strategy will help drive awareness and credibility.
How can a non-profit organization take a hold of the digital era of marketing to grow its organization? Ashok (Ash) Gujral, philanthropist and founder of the Gujral Community Fund in San Francisco, California, explains how to promote your non-profit organization with a few simple tips.
Use Social Media to Connect with Supporters
Using the top social media tools like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn will allow you to not only grow your following organically, but it will also provide awareness of your mission, attracting the right people towards it.
Seeing success on social media requires more than just thoughtful and engaging content — it also requires a connection to the right people, notes Ash Gujral. While it may be enticing to get as many followers as possible, it’s not the be all and end all of social media marketing.
Instead of trying to attract as many people as possible, your non-profit organization will find more success in creating a dedicated group of supporters and use online fundraising tools (like Facebook fundraiser) to collect donations and allow their supporters to help raise funds and spread awareness across their personal profiles. Having a focused group of supporters who are loyal to your mission is more beneficial than trying to gain thousands of followers in just a few days.
Be Visually Creative
Developing content marketing for social media is very important for showcasing your non-profit. In other words, using high-quality visuals across your online channels can provide an easy outlook of the organization: how it functions and what the organizational culture looks like. In fact, a recent HubSpot study found that 65% of people are more likely to retain information that is presented in a highly visual way.
Creating visuals, at its core, should focus on images or videos that convey your non-profit’s mission and the positive impact it has on others, notes Ash Gujral. It’s also important to convey visuals of corporate culture, including staff and other volunteers that work behind the scenes, who have benefited from or contributed to the organization’s goals. Visuals can be something as simple as branded image collages, video interviews of staff members or a personal success story, or something as simple as an interactive poll or survey.
Use Email Marketing
Your non-profit is no stranger to email; however, you may only be using it on an as-needed basis to request for volunteers or confirm an online donation, but that’s not enough. Emailing marketing can be a highly powerful tool for non-profit organizations. It’s a personal form of communication that can resonate very well with an audience or individual.
Ash Gujral shares how to leverage email marketing as a non-profit:
- Send a weekly newsletter on the same day of each week that provides your mailing list with updates about your organization, data, and volunteer needs
- Create an email series for new mailing list subscribers that includes a welcome email, and a series of emails that provide dripped information about the organization
- Include personalized subject lines. A personalized subject line inserts a detail relevant to that recipient (this can be their name, occupation, donation type, or other stored personal details)
- Include information on your website informing any new visitors how they can stay in touch by joining your mailing list
While there are certainly more ways to strategize how to successfully promote your non-profit organization, these three tips can get you started. Each technique can be implemented alone and within budget — and Ash Gujral suggests implementing them as soon as possible. Staying connected to the right people, creating engaging content, and distributing that content properly will keep your non-profit successful now and in the future.