Is creating a successful nonprofit marketing plan one of your New Year’s resolutions? This guide is just what you need to make a smarter plan to engage with donors and stick to it.
Start your Annual Report now (We mean right now!) Annual Report season starts in December (sometimes even earlier) so stakeholders receive great news prior to resetting your fiscal year. To stay motivated, prepare a content outline and engage your development team as soon as possible. You’ll get your report out the door on schedule and you can reference prior year success stories to motivate your current year plan, even including some highlights as motivation to engage with stakeholders.
Share your 2016 achievements. Your donors and stakeholders will want to see how your organization performed over the year. Try creating an annual report or adding new, engaging new infographics to your annual report and social media channels to illustrate your growth, insights, and successes. This type of content is digestible and shareable, so readers can easily share it with their network. Translation: a wider reach to target even more potential donors and advocates.
Stay relevant. New trends and expectations emerge every year, so it’s important to keep your content relevant. To keep your audience engaged, ensure your overall site (including donation forms) are mobile-responsive. Mobile giving increased 45% between 2014 and 2015, so your donation experience needs to be friendly and simple. This goes for other digital channels as well. For nonprofits, social media is growing 3x faster than email. Harness the power of your Facebook and Twitter pages to share emotional stories about your organization to spark donations and advocacy.
Allow opportunity for feedback. Do you really know how your donors – or employees – feel about your organization? Consider creating a survey or focus group to gauge where you stand and how you can improve in the future. In addition to the standard demographic questions, ask questions like, “What can we do better?” and “Why did you decide to donate to our organization?” Lastly, don’t request this feedback as a means to serve the needs of your organization; communicate this task by asking your audience to share what they need from your organization.
Embrace personalization. Now’s the time to put your audience’s feedback to work. With today’s technology, it is easier than ever to capture data about your audience and address them accordingly. Use your social analytics and website data to learn more about the people you talk to. What kind of content performs best? What’s the demographic breakdown? When are they online? Where do most of your online donations come from? All of this (mostly free) data is at your fingertips for smarter nonprofit marketing in 2017.
Ready to kick start your nonprofit marketing strategy?
Get in touch and we’ll help you figure out your 2017 plan.
