Did you know it takes 18-20 points of contact to reach a new donor for the first time? For nonprofits, developing an effective multichannel marketing plan is key to spreading awareness, engaging new prospects, and deepening donor relationships. However, a lot goes into crafting the perfect strategy for your organization, from setting goals to your marketing data.
In this comprehensive nonprofit marketing guide, we’ll walk through everything you need to know to refine your marketing efforts. Here’s what we’ll cover:
At Getting Attention, we empower nonprofits to expand their nonprofit marketing capabilities with the Google Ad Grant. While we’ll explore that channel a bit more later, know that it’s a powerful addition to any nonprofit’s toolkit.
Regardless of your nonprofit’s size, budget, or staff resources, taking the time to optimize your current marketing strategy can go a long way toward securing more support for your mission.
What is Nonprofit Marketing?
Nonprofit marketing encompasses the diverse strategies and channels that nonprofits use to promote their causes, secure donations, attract new supporters, and retain existing ones. Effective nonprofit marketing amplifies the organization’s mission and fosters meaningful audience engagement.
Organizations often create nonprofit marketing plans to allocate their budgets, time, and efforts efficiently. This plan typically outlines the core mission, tone, target audience, preferred marketing channels, and branding elements, ensuring a cohesive approach to reaching supporters.
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
There are two main approaches to nonprofit marketing:
- Inbound marketing refers to methods of attracting prospective supporters’ attention through unpaid promotion or content production. Commonly, this includes search engine optimization (SEO), blogging, and organic social media posts. SEO, in particular, helps your content rank highly on search engine results pages, making it easier for potential supporters to find your nonprofit online. It’s especially useful for organizations that sell programming or services.
- Outbound marketing, often referred to as “advertising,” relies on paid media to reach potential supporters. You might use Google Ads, social media ads, radio ads, or any other paid outlet to promote your mission.
While inbound marketing attracts potential supporters whose interests align with your mission, outbound marketing can extend your nonprofit’s reach to people who might not otherwise encounter your cause. Finding the perfect balance between inbound and outbound channels enables you to cast a wider net and reach more prospects.
Benefits of Nonprofit Marketing
A thoughtful and comprehensive nonprofit marketing plan allows your nonprofit to:
- Boost awareness. Effective nonprofit marketing increases mission awareness, ensuring more people understand your goals, why they matter, and the work you’re doing to achieve them. This heightened visibility can attract new supporters.
- Increasing funds. By spreading cause awareness, you’ll naturally receive more donations from people who believe in your mission. Strategic marketing campaigns can highlight specific needs and inspire generosity.
- Cultivate long-term relationships. Successful marketing builds lasting relationships with donors, leading to more recurring donations and more revenue. According to Nonprofits Source, the average monthly online donation is $52 (totaling $624 per year), compared to an average one-time gift of $128. Consistent engagement nurtures loyalty.
- Attract all types of support. In addition to securing more donations, marketing can enhance volunteer recruitment, event participation, membership signups, and other forms of engagement.
- Promote your services to beneficiaries. With a comprehensive nonprofit marketing strategy, you can effectively promote services to beneficiaries. Plus, understanding your nonprofit’s services can inspire your supporters to give.
- Sell your services, merchandise, and programs. Many nonprofits and associations also sell services, merchandise, and programming, like professional development certifications and training. Get these opportunities in front of prospective customers to raise more money.
Overall, marketing impacts every area of your organization, making it essential for achieving your mission and inciting real change in your community.
Nonprofit Marketing Challenges
Effective outreach doesn’t come without its challenges. By understanding common obstacles nonprofits face, you can plan ahead and minimize potential difficulties further down the road:
- Establishing trustworthiness. Many people contribute to nonprofits to make a difference in the world. To inspire potential donors, assure them that your organization is legitimate and worthy of their financial support.
- Communicating your mission. Nonprofits must communicate their mission and values to capture potential donors’ interest. This can be particularly challenging if your mission involves complex social issues.
- Selling products and services. Many nonprofits offer products or services as part of their mission or as a means of fundraising. Marketing these offerings requires a clear value proposition and effective promotional strategies to get them in front of customers.
- Working on a limited budget. Even with a well-defined mission and compelling story, budget constraints may hinder your marketing efforts. This can limit your advertising options through paid outlets and necessitate creative, cost-effective strategies.
- Appealing to different demographics. Your potential supporters have varying preferences and interests. For example, older donors might prefer traditional print outreach methods while younger audiences might lean toward text or social media. Tailoring your messages to resonate with diverse audiences can be challenging but is crucial for broadening your support base.
Fortunately, your organization can overcome all of these challenges by laying a solid foundation with your nonprofit marketing plan and following the best practices we’ll explore later on in this guide.
How Much Do Nonprofits Spend on Marketing?
While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to how much an organization should allocate for marketing, there are several methods you can use to create an effective budget:
- The percent method. Allocate 5% to 15% of your total budget to marketing, communications, and fundraising. Many organizations group these essential activities together as a single line item in their budget. This method makes it easy to scale your nonprofit marketing budget as your organization grows.
- The dollar method. Choose a set dollar amount for marketing, communications, and fundraising based on past expenditures. This method eliminates guesswork and makes spending expectations clear.
- The incremental method. To avoid starting from scratch, take the current period’s budget and revenue into account. Then, adjust each line item by incremental amounts to create your next budget.
Nonprofits may cut marketing when resources are tight, but promoting your mission is essential for staying connected with donors and driving gifts to stay operational. Instead, opt for low-cost communication channels or apply for a grant.
Whether you’re facing budgetary constraints or simply want to reduce costs, explore our guide to applying for Google Ad Grants to tap into free advertising money.
5 Steps to Create a Nonprofit Marketing Strategy
Crafting an organized nonprofit marketing strategy connects you with supporters and beneficiaries. Your strategy should outline all the information you need to meet your audience’s needs and spread awareness.
If you partner with an external agency, they will guide you through these steps. Be sure to choose professionals experienced in your sector who understand your mission. For example, churches should hire agencies that specialize in religious organizations, as they understand the unique challenges and opportunities faith-based groups face. They can tailor messaging, outreach strategies, and campaigns that resonate with the church’s congregation and community, helping to grow the organization’s ministry.
1. Perform a Marketing Audit.
Start by getting a sense of your current marketing capabilities and available resources. That way, you can start thinking about the changes you’ll need to make.
Gather past outreach materials and campaign metrics to conduct an audit on your most recent outreach efforts. A nonprofit marketing audit often consists of conducting a SWOT analysis, which stands for:
- Strengths. List any areas where your nonprofit excels compared to competitors. For example, you may have unique services, strong brand awareness, or an incredibly loyal supporter base.
- Weaknesses. List anything that hinders you from achieving your nonprofit marketing goals, such as a limited budget or a poor digital presence.
- Opportunities. Include any external factors that give you an advantage over competitors. For instance, your mission could be prevalent in the news or you might have a strong pipeline of corporate sponsors.
- Threats. This includes any external factors out of your control that negatively impact your nonprofit. These factors could be anything from unfavorable media coverage to shifting government regulations.
Analyze your results and create a plan for playing to your strengths, overcoming any weaknesses, increasing your opportunities, and mitigating any threats.
2. Define Your Marketing Goals.
Your nonprofit marketing strategy should support your overall goals. Are you trying to raise funds? Encourage volunteering? Garner fundraising event registrations? Every marketing campaign needs a concrete goal and target action to be successful.
When outlining your nonprofit marketing strategy goals, use the SMART method:
- Specific. Define the exact goal your nonprofit is aiming to achieve and identify how achieving it will support your mission.
- Measurable. Your goal should have key performance indicators (KPIs) attached to evaluate progress.
- Attainable. Given your organization’s current standing (e.g., time, money, expertise), choose a goal that you can realistically achieve.
- Relevant. Your chosen goal should contribute to your organization’s overall success. For example, increasing volunteer registrations clearly impacts your organization more than reaching a certain number of likes on an Instagram post.
- Time-based. Provide a realistic deadline for achieving your goal. Then, create milestones along the way.
From here, list your goals by priority. Clear nonprofit marketing goals will power greater outcomes for your cause.
Examples of SMART Goals
The best way to understand the SMART framework is to explore examples:
- Increase sales of educational curriculum by 25% over the next 12 months by implementing targeted marketing campaigns, including SEO and social media promotions. Track the number of units sold each month, and leverage partnerships with schools and educational organizations to reach a broader audience.
- Boost volunteer sign-ups by 10% by the end of the year via targeted outreach campaigns and improving our volunteer management strategies to enhance program delivery.
- Gain 50 new monthly donors within the next quarter by leveraging existing donor engagement strategies and personalized outreach.
- Double the number of participants in our annual fundraising event by leveraging Google Ads, SEO strategies, and community partners to encourage registrations.
These goals start with a core objective and build out the details. From promoting events to selling programming, effective nonprofit marketing can help you increase visibility and drive action. You just need SMART goals and technology to track your progress.
3. Understand Your Audiences.
Focus your nonprofit marketing strategy on who you’re trying to reach. Outline your nonprofit’s current and target audience. For example, if your nonprofit sells religious curricula to churches, your target audience would include church leaders, educators, and parents. Or, let’s say your parks and recreation association wants to sell summer camp registrations. Your audience would primarily be parents and guardians looking for engaging educational summer activities for their children.
Segment your audience members according to characteristics such as:
- Supporter type, including first-time donor, recurring donor, major donor, customer, volunteer, or corporate partner.
- Preferred communication method, like email or direct mail.
- Demographic data, including age group, geographical location, and education level.
When you understand who your supporters are, you’ll ensure content aligns with their needs, preferences, and interests, making them more likely to engage. In fact, segmenting digital campaigns produces up to 760% more revenue!
Remember, the goal of segmentation is to ensure your communications are targeted, so understand each group’s needs to create content catered to them. This might involve planning new events, writing new blog content, or trying new media formats like video.
4. Create and Share A Compelling Message.
There are hundreds of ads and messages online, all competing for your supporters’ attention. To make your messages stand out from the crowd, use the CRAM rule to bring your powerful marketing ideas to fruition and connect with supporters. Your communications should be:
- Connected to a cause. Link your nonprofit’s mission with something your audience cares about.
- Rewarding. Readers should feel fulfilled or inspired reading your message.
- Actionable. Include a clear call to action to outline readers’ next steps, whether that’s donating, volunteering, registering for an event, or something else.
- Memorable. Use storytelling and statistics to leave a lasting impression on your readers.
Plan out the tone of your message, specific calls to action you’ll use, and any visual branding elements. Then, choose your nonprofit marketing channels and start sharing your outreach.
5. Track Results and Make Adjustments.
Every nonprofit marketing strategy needs a way to measure performance, so you’ll be able to identify your areas of strength and areas for improvement. Here are some examples of KPIs for different channels you might track:
- Click-through rate (CTR) for Google Ads
- Email opens for email marketing
- Video views or likes for video marketing
- Likes, shares, and comments on social media
- Page views or time on site for your website
- Number of downloads for content marketing
Data is the backbone of your nonprofit marketing efforts. It ensures your campaigns perform well, provides insights for future improvements, and serves as a valuable resource for supporters interested in your impact.
Types of Nonprofit Marketing Channels
The specific nonprofit marketing channels you use are critical to reaching your donors and meeting new prospects. While you don’t need to leverage every platform, a multichannel marketing approach allows you to connect with as many supporters as possible.
Let’s walk through some of the most popular channels that can catapult your nonprofit marketing efforts forward.
Search Ads
To enhance marketing results, many nonprofits leverage Google Ads, a platform where organizations display advertisements promoting their services, initiatives, and educational content. Google places these ads at the top of search engine result pages to expand each organization’s online presence.
Many nonprofits apply for the Google Ad Grant, a technology grant that provides nonprofits with $10,000 in monthly ad credits. These credits can be used to bid on valuable keywords their prospects are searching online and promote their website content with Google Ads.
The best part? Any eligible nonprofit that complies with Google guidelines can leverage this grant. For example, if your church is eligible, you can apply for and receive the Google Ad Grant. It automatically reactivates every month, too. As long as you comply with the program’s rules, you’ll add up to $120,000 to your nonprofit marketing budget each year.
It’s up to you to choose the
right keywords related to your mission. For example, the
Literacy Empowerment Foundation provides books and other educational resources to children, families, and teachers in need. To help reach their target audience, our advertising experts created a Google Ad campaign targeting terms like “free books for kids.”
However, a lot goes into determining your nonprofit’s eligibility, applying, and making the most of the program. That’s where an expert Google Grants agency can step in.
The specialists at Getting Attention will champion your cause at every turn. We’ll learn about your specific nonprofit marketing goals and manage the entire Google Grant process, allowing you to focus on your mission with confidence that your Google Ads are in expert hands.
Nonprofit Advertising
While people commonly interchange “advertising” and “marketing,” nonprofit advertising is actually a specific subset of nonprofit marketing that refers to using paid channels to promote your mission. Some of the most common nonprofit advertising channels include:
- Search ads (like Google Ads)
- Radio and TV ads
- Social media ads
- Influencer advertising
Advertising can amplify your content to a broader audience, even those who aren’t actively researching nonprofits. With a strategic approach, outbound marketing is achievable, even on a limited budget!
Similar to Google, there are many other advertising platforms with free or discounted options for nonprofits. Explore our full list of nonprofit advertising examples to get a sense of how similar nonprofits tap into paid ads without spending too much.
Website
Your website not only hosts valuable information about your organization but also provides engagement opportunities like online giving, event registration, and more. It’s often the first place prospects go to learn about your mission and where long-term supporters go to show support.
To maximize site traffic, implement SEO strategies. Optimizing your website for search engines helps attract attention to initiatives like your revenue-generating programming. When updating your nonprofit website, try these SEO practices:
- Keyword Research: With tools like Google Keyword Planner, identify relevant keywords your target audience uses when searching for information related to your cause. Use these keywords naturally in your content, headers, and meta descriptions.
- Quality Content: Create high-quality, informative content that addresses your audience’s needs and interests. This can include blog posts, service pages, mission updates, and educational resources.
- Technical Improvements: Ensure your website has an optimal user experience (UX) and can be easily crawled by search engines. Take steps like optimizing site speed, using mobile-responsive design, securing your site with HTTPS, and eliminating broken links.
- Backlinks: Encourage reputable websites to link back to your content. Backlinks from trusted sources can boost your site’s credibility in the eyes of different search engines.
Sometimes nonprofits create blogs to drive traffic and post meaningful content about their organizations. This is also a great way to cultivate a community and act as a go-to resource for supporters. Consider blogging about nonprofit industry trends, mission updates, and your nonprofit’s recent events or campaigns.
Using A Digital Marketing Agency
To maximize your website’s potential, turn to a dedicated SEO agency that understands organic digital marketing channels. Nexus Marketing, for instance, helps nonprofits and associations increase revenue by selling their programming, products, and services.
Their value-add marketing services include:
- Keyword-optimized content creation to showcase your services, products, and thought leadership
- Technical SEO improvements to improve aspects of your website like crawlability and mobile-friendliness
- Off-site link-building strategy development to establish your brand’s authority
- Video production services to showcase your revenue-generating services, programs, and products and add valuable multimedia content to your site
- Email marketing campaigns to guide visitors through their journey and drive traffic to key pages on your website
With 10+ years of experience in SEO for mission-driven organizations, Nexus Marketing will help attract and convert your target audience into customers. They can help you strengthen your website and reach your target audiences through search engines, high-visibility webinars, and promotion through their trusted partners in the industry.
Nonprofit Email Marketing
Email is a reliable channel for nonprofit marketers, allowing them to connect with all types of supporters, from first-time donors to those who have been giving regularly for years.
Some impactful ways to leverage email marketing for nonprofits include:
- Create a regular newsletter. Provide supporters with updates about your organization, the latest industry news, success stories from your programs, supporter spotlights, volunteer opportunities, and anything else going on at your nonprofit.
- Send monthly emails about donation needs and opportunities to increase donor value over time. Tailor requests to ask each donor for a reasonable upgrade from their last gift. For example, if a supporter gave $25 last month, request $30 instead of $100. Also, remove recurring donors from your monthly request list since they are already giving regularly.
- Create intriguing subject lines. Tease content inside to give readers a reason to click, and make sure each subject line is the right length. If it’s too long, it’ll get cut off. If it’s too short, you won’t provide enough value. For context, subject lines of 61-70 characters have the highest open rates.
- Follow up with appreciation emails. When a supporter donates, signs up to volunteer, or shows some other form of support, you should automatically send out a thank you email. Personalize these emails to address each supporter by name and reference their specific contribution.
On average, email generates $36 for every $1 spent. This high ROI makes it clear that this nonprofit marketing channel is worth investing in.
Word-of-Mouth Nonprofit Marketing
When your volunteers and donors feel strongly about your cause, they’ll want to share your important work with friends and family members who may be interested in supporting your nonprofit, too!
Peer-to-peer outreach can be incredibly powerful. In fact, 88% of consumers trust recommendations from loved ones over any other type of marketing. Encourage your supporters to reach out to their personal networks, post online about your cause, and share your organization’s social media posts to spread the word.
One powerful way to encourage peer-to-peer referrals is nonprofit eCards. They’re an easy and interactive way to broadcast your mission, activities, and successes.
Create designs for every occasion to encourage referrals year-round. Here are just a few ideas to get started:
- Birthday fundraising eCards that encourage supporters to give in a loved one’s name as a way to wish them a happy birthday.
- Holiday eCards to spread some holiday cheer during special times throughout the year.
- Thank-you eCards to help supporters express their gratitude.
- Tribute eCards for individuals to give in honor of their loved ones.
- Mission awareness eCards to call attention to your work during a cause awareness campaign.
- Event invitation eCards to help supporters invite their loved ones to one of your nonprofit events.
Once you design your nonprofit eCards, you can offer them for free, sell them for a set price, or give them in exchange for donations. No matter what, people will be excited to browse your collection and share a cause that’s close to their hearts.
Social Media Marketing for Nonprofits
By 2027, the global number of social media users is expected to skyrocket to 6 billion. Social media’s rising prevalence makes it one of the most viable channels for marketing your mission.
Not only is social media affordable, but it’s also a key way to connect with supporters on a deeper level. You can engage with followers, encourage them to comment or repost content, and build a brand personality that they enjoy interacting with.
Here are tips to leverage social media in your nonprofit marketing strategy:
- Share news about your organization and cause.
- Boost brand awareness and recognition.
- Post calls to action for online gifts, event registrations, and volunteer signups.
- Post about your committed donors, employees, and volunteers.
- Create accounts on sites where your supporters are most active, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), or LinkedIn.
Whether you use TikTok for connecting with younger generations or Facebook for its long-form posts and its fundraising features, social media is a channel worth optimizing for your nonprofit marketing.
Direct Mail Marketing
While email marketing response rates are typically 1%, direct mail response rates hover around 9%, making it a highly valuable and personalized marketing channel.
For nonprofits, direct mail marketing and fundraising involve writing, printing, and sending out hard copy requests for funds, event invitations, or thank-you letters to your passionate supporters. These letters arrive in your supporters’ mailboxes and provide a tangible connection to your organization—especially when compared to opening an email.
Use these tips to inspire action with direct mail:
- Lean on storytelling. Perhaps the most unique aspect of direct mail is its personal touch. This is a key opportunity to connect with donors through storytelling. For example, you could describe the story of a family your nonprofit helped to get readers eager to give. After all, people remember stories 22 times more than facts alone.
- Use compelling visuals. Weave your visual and written elements together to break up blocks of text and support your call to action. This applies to everything from your letters to your fundraising flyers. Whether you use photos of real people or graphics to illustrate different points, the visuals you choose should be reinforce your messaging.
- Combine direct mail with digital marketing. Enhance your direct mail marketing by conducting it alongside your digital marketing efforts. Be sure to include easy ways for direct mail readers to connect online by including a QR code to your donation page or adding social media details to encourage engagement on various platforms.
As long as it aligns with recipients’ communication preferences, direct mail can both benefit your nonprofit and show donors that you care. Consider partnering with a direct mail marketing company to facilitate the process of writing and sending your letters.
Nonprofit Video Marketing
From short videos on TikTok to longer content on YouTube, many nonprofits have found success in using this form of media to promote campaigns, events, and their mission in general.
Here are some reasons why video marketing for nonprofits is so valuable:
- Inspirational. Well-edited videos, supplemented with evocative music, do really well when it comes to appealing to viewers’ emotions.
- Shareable. 51% of people are more likely to share videos than any other marketing content, including social media and blog posts.
- Entertaining. According to DataReportal, watching videos is one of the top online activities among working-age internet users around the world, with 92.8% watching online videos every week.
You can incorporate video marketing across your nonprofit website, in social media posts, and in email content. For instance, you can send an event invitation with a video teaser or record a video featuring someone your nonprofit has helped to show donors how much their donations make an impact.
Bonus Tip: Because of their file format, videos can potentially slow down a website. When publishing videos to your website, turn off auto-play to minimize any slowdowns!
Content Marketing for Nonprofits
Content marketing is all about creating valuable and promotable nonprofit content to build your nonprofit’s reputation. While this content will likely live on your website, you can also create specific content for emails or host a downloadable gated resource.
Common types of content you might create include:
- Educational content about your mission, cause, and industry trends.
- SEO blog content to get your online content ranking higher in search engines.
- Easily shareable content that encourages your audience to send it along to their friends.
- Content that is easily reusable, like attaching a downloadable resource to an email message.
Plus, your content marketing materials can be used for other nonprofit marketing efforts, whether you promote it via email, Google Ads, or social media. Consider creating a dedicated team focused on content copywriting.
Text Message Marketing
With a 99% open rate and 90% read rate within just three minutes of sending, text message marketing is one of the best ways to promote a campaign and reach your audience where they already are.
To use text marketing, consider investing in a comprehensive text-to-give tool. Tatango’s nonprofit text messaging guide recommends looking for a text messaging provider with the following features:
- A2P (Application to Person) messaging. This feature allows you to send a single message to hundreds or thousands of supporters at once, saving your nonprofit time.
- Ability to handle fast messaging speeds. A provider with a high message-per-second rate will ensure that your campaign reminders reach supporters moments after you send them.
- Security for your campaigns. Your text messaging provider should come with security measures like two-factor authentication, secure sending, and automated logout to protect sensitive data.
- Subscriber segmentation. Divide your contact list into subgroups based on characteristics such as recency of opting into your text messaging campaign, donation frequency, and average giving amount.
With a secure and user-friendly text messaging platform, your nonprofit can confidently deliver a high ROI, engage supporters year-round, and leverage contextual giving.
Contextual giving occurs when a donor gives the moment they’re inspired. For example, someone at a fundraising event might see a text-to-give number on signage and decide to give immediately. Without this option, they might delay until home, reducing the likelihood of completing the donation.
Nonprofit Marketing Best Practices to Follow
Your nonprofit marketing strategy encompasses several moving components, from crafting your messaging to picking the channels you use. Let’s explore general best practices that can help you hone your marketing efforts:
Optimize Your Website for Search
Your nonprofit’s website is the hub of its digital marketing efforts. Optimize it for search engines to ensure potential supporters, customers, and beneficiaries can find it.
While your content is incredibly important, technical SEO lays the foundation for how search engines crawl, index, and rank your site. Let’s explore a few technical improvements to ensure your website can be found and indexed:
- Remove broken links. Broken links are hyperlinks that lead to non-existent web pages, typically due to them being removed from the site. Regularly audit your website and fix broken links to ensure seamless navigation and make it easy for search engines to crawl your content.
- Avoid redirect chains. Redirect chains occur when a URL redirects to another URL which then redirects to yet another URL. This creates a sequence that can slow down your site and confuse search engines. Ensure that each URL points directly to its final destination without unnecessary intermediate redirects.
- Improve site speed. A fast-loading website provides a better user experience, so search engines use speed as a ranking factor. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify issues slowing down your site. To decrease loading times, compress and properly size images, enable browser caching, and minimize CSS.
- Secure your website. Obtain SSL certification to secure data exchanged between your website and visitors. Search engines prioritize secure websites, and users are more likely to trust and engage with a secure site.
To find issues on your website, use a website crawler tool like Screaming Frog. Just know that fixing some of these issues can be challenging if you don’t have an in-house web developer. That’s where an SEO agency like Nexus Marketing can step in to locate, prioritize, and fix the most pressing issues that are harming your nonprofit’s website.
Elevate Your Graphic Design
Regardless of whether someone’s scrolling through their social media feed or passing by a bulletin board with your fundraising flyer pinned to it, they’re more likely to notice marketing collateral that features eye-catching graphics and vibrant colors.
Considering that people retain 55% more information when paired with an image, effective visuals make your content more memorable to prospects, too. Here are a few crucial areas where graphic design comes into play:
- Your logo. Your nonprofit’s logo appears on everything from your fundraising letters to your business cards. Prospects immediately associate it with your organization.
- Website design. The graphics you include on your website are just as important as your site’s layout. You’ll want to include everything from images of beneficiaries and volunteers to artistic elements that emphasize the most important aspects of each page.
- Merchandise. If you sell t-shirts, mugs, or any other fundraising products, feature effective designs on them. Visually-appealing graphics will make the buying experience much easier for prospects who come across your ads for them.
- Printed materials. Effective graphic design is just as important for your printed collateral, such as your fundraising letters, flyers, and service brochures.
If you have limited graphic design expertise, reach out to an experienced graphic designer. Those with experience in the mission-driven space, such as Kwala, understand exactly what it takes to make charitable causes stand out. Their team will work with yours to create anything you request, including flyers, logos, stickers, and even fundraising product designs.
Take a look at this postcard that they designed for the Wildlife Rescue Group:
Well-designed materials like this will reel supporters in and drive action, whether you want people to donate, volunteer, or get involved in some other way. Turning to a professional graphic designer allows you to create marketing materials that resonate with supporters.
Use Current Events
Boost your nonprofit’s marketing efforts by leveraging what is currently going on in the world to create urgency. Is there a story related to your cause in the news? For instance, if your organization is contributing to relief efforts in the wake of a natural disaster, connect your mission to this broader issue and boost public awareness around your work.
Highlight all the work your organization aims to achieve so that potential donors feel inspired to contribute toward your impact.
Follow Up With Supporters
Successful marketing requires more than one-way communication. Cultivate relationships with your donors and volunteers by implementing strategies to start ongoing conversations. This doesn’t mean you need to exchange text messages with each supporter to keep them engaged. Rather, your nonprofit just needs to respond to the actions supporters take to show that you see and value their contributions.
Some basic occasions for reaching out to a supporter include:
- After they’ve made a gift
- After they’ve attended an event
- On their birthday
- On their anniversary with your nonprofit
- On a holiday or at year-end
- Asking for their feedback in a survey
Your follow-up process can also benefit from a multi-channel approach. For example, personalized donor thank-you emails make it possible to show your appreciation quickly. Then, you can send a card or give donors a phone call a few days later when your nonprofit has time set aside for donor outreach.
By reaching out often, you’ll be able to retain more donors and convince lapsed donors to get involved again.
Work With Other Groups
Your nonprofit has worked hard to establish its audience, and you can expand your reach by tapping into other organizations’ audiences. Well-known groups and individuals can introduce your nonprofit to new supporters. If they agree to a marketing partnership, they can handle part of the marketing efforts on your behalf.
A few third parties to consider include:
- Influencers. Influencer marketing is on the rise. The majority of these influencers have smaller (between 10,000 and 100,000 followers and some with even less than 10,000) but highly specific audiences with interests relevant to the nonprofits they support. For example, an animal rights group might partner with a beauty influencer to discuss the importance of buying cruelty-free products.
- Businesses. Corporate philanthropy comes in many forms, including marketing support. Ask businesses to sponsor specific events or campaigns by promoting your nonprofit to their audience. In exchange, you’ll promote the businesses’ products and services to your audience. Like with influencers, look for businesses with audiences likely to be interested in your nonprofit’s cause, such as an animal shelter partnering with local dog groomers.
- Other nonprofits. Nonprofits can work together to connect their audiences with one another. Partner with local nonprofits in your area to host joint events and campaigns. In exchange for them promoting your cause, you can raise awareness for theirs in return.
Before partnering with a third party, thoroughly vet them. After all, your partnership will reflect on your nonprofit, so be sure they are reputable, trustworthy, and likely to present your nonprofit in the best light.
Wrapping Up
Marketing your mission is key to your organization’s ongoing success. From choosing the right channels to keeping up with the latest trends, crafting a strong nonprofit marketing strategy takes plenty of forethought.
Whether you choose paid outlets like search ads or organic outlets like email, there’s a lot you can do to stand out. As you craft your strategies, check out these resources to keep learning:
Supercharging Philanthropy With Workplace Giving Software
/in Nonprofit Tools /by Jessica KingIn today’s technology-driven world, organizations (corporate and nonprofit alike) are constantly on the lookout for new and innovative ways to make an impact. One place where companies’ and nonprofits’ efforts overlap is through corporate giving , and dedicated workplace giving software has been developed to meet each group’s primary needs.
Whether you work for a nonprofit looking to raise more through workplace giving or you’re a corporate entity aiming to give back to your community through the programs, the right software can go a long way.
In this post, we’ll explore how workplace giving software can supercharge your philanthropy efforts, making it easier than ever to connect with your audience, track your impact, and amplify your bottom line. Here’s what we’ll cover:
Read on to see how workplace giving technology fits into your organization’s strategy—and how you can make the right choice for your team. Let’s begin!
What is Workplace Giving Software?
Workplace giving software is a type of tool designed to streamline and facilitate workplace giving programs, which describe a partnership between companies and nonprofits. These programs, which most often include matching donations and supplying funding or time off for volunteer hours , incentivize a company’s staff to give back to their communities.
As the platforms that power these programs, workplace giving software makes it easier than ever for employees to get involved.
Types of Workplace Giving Platforms
As a collaborative project, workplace giving programs generally involve a few key players—and there are different types of workplace giving software to reflect the varying needs. Here, we break it down into software built for nonprofits and software built for companies.
Workplace Giving Software For Companies
Companies often use dedicated workplace giving software to manage their employee giving programs, making the process more easily accessible for front- and back-end users alike. This type of solution essentially serves as a centralized hub where employees can participate in or log their charitable activities (such as matching gifts, volunteer grants, or volunteer time off) while corporate leadership can effectively administer these programs to maximize their impact.
Currently, there are a number of workplace giving software providers creating software for these very purposes. Some of the primary names to be aware of include the following:
How nonprofits interact with these tools:
While these workplace giving tools are designed for corporate benefit, nonprofits and schools are encouraged to register for their free nonprofit profiles on each site. Doing so allows their fundraising teams to log in, verify match requests, and streamline the workplace giving revenue disbursement process.
Workplace Giving Software For Nonprofits
Nonprofits use workplace giving software to identify workplace giving eligible supporters, market the opportunity to their audience, and manage the programs for their communities. These tools are designed to make it easier for organizations to connect with corporate partners, engage employees of participating companies, and track the impact of workplace giving initiatives.
And when it comes to selecting a workplace giving platform for your nonprofit, there’s one that really stands out: Double the Donation.
Double the Donation has historically centered its platform on employee matching gifts. However, as workplace giving potential continues to grow, the company is expanding its focus into corporate volunteer solutions, empowering organizations to make the most of these programs as well.
Here’s how it works:
How companies interact with these tools:
While 360MatchPro is primarily designed to benefit nonprofits and schools, companies are encouraged to make their programs accessible by adding relevant information to Double the Donation’s proprietary database. There’s even an easy form employers can use to submit their new programs or update program information!
Plus, when a company works with a CLMA-designated workplace giving provider, its employees can access Double the Donation’s exclusive auto-submission functionality to submit their match in a single click from an organization’s giving page.
Workplace Giving Software Features to Consider
As you begin your search for the right workplace giving software, it’s important you know what to look for—and how to prioritize your needs. Check out the following features and functionality to consider as you compare and select from top providers.
Powerful Matching Gift Facilitation
For both nonprofits and companies, automating the matching gift process is crucial. Look for software that makes it easy to identify eligible gifts, submit match requests, and track the progress, ensuring no opportunities are missed.
Streamlined Auto-Submission Capabilities
Simplify the process of submitting matching gift requests for employees using groundbreaking auto-submission functionality. With this feature, once an employee makes a qualifying donation, the software automatically generates and submits the necessary documentation to relevant parties. This automation reduces the burden on employees, who no longer need to navigate complex submission processes or worry about missing deadlines.
Lucrative Corporate Volunteerism Opportunities
Ensure the platform offers robust volunteer management capabilities, including event registration, hour tracking, and reporting. Companies can boost employee engagement, while nonprofits can better manage and appreciate volunteer contributions and manage incentives such as volunteer grants and paid time off.
Seamless and Extensive Integrations
The software should integrate smoothly with your existing systems—whether it’s HR and payroll or CRM and fundraising platforms . Seamless integration helps streamline operations and maintain data accuracy and security.
Comprehensive Tracking & Reporting
Both nonprofits and companies need detailed insights into their workplace giving efforts. Look for software that offers robust tracking and reporting features to measure impact, optimize strategies, and communicate results to stakeholders.
Choosing the Best Workplace Giving Software
Now, you’re narrowing down your search and looking for the perfect solution for your nonprofit or company. Consider these best practices as you continue down the funnel to make your decision.
1. Look for CLMA-designated providers.
When choosing workplace giving software, it’s a good idea to look for providers that are designated Certified Leaders in Matching Automation (CLMA). The CLMA designation indicates that the software adheres to the highest industry standards and best practices for workplace giving and corporate philanthropy.
Specifically, it means the provider offers the most accessible matching gift submission process—auto-submission—through partnership with Double the Donation. This ensures that the platform is reliable, secure, and effective in managing donations, volunteer hours, matching gifts, and more.
Hint: Keep an eye out for this badge as you conduct your search for the right workplace giving platform. →
2. Consider platform growth and scalability.
When evaluating workplace giving software, it’s essential to consider the platform’s potential for growth and scalability. As your organization grows, your needs will evolve, too—and the software you choose should be able to accommodate that advancement without requiring a complete overhaul.
In other words, don’t just look for a platform that meets your needs now (even if it’s the most affordable option). Look for a solution that will continue to meet your needs a few years down the line!
3. Read peer reviews and testimonials.
Before making a choice on workplace giving software, take the time to read peer reviews and hear testimonials from other users—especially from those that reflect the size, mission, or other characteristics of your own organization.
These reviews provide valuable insights into the real-world performance of the software, highlighting its strengths and potential weaknesses. By hearing directly from other users with experience in the platform, you can get a clearer understanding of how well it functions in practice to make a well-informed buying decision.
4. Get a demo to see the tool in action.
Finally, one of the most critical steps in choosing workplace giving software is to get a demo of the platform. After all, you want to see it in action before making your commitment, and a demo allows you to explore the software’s interface, features, and usability firsthand, giving you a better sense of how it will fit into your organization’s workflow.
During the demo, make sure to ask specific questions about how the software may handle your unique needs, too. Each case is different, and the best workplace software can be reflective of your organization’s specific goals, challenges, and operational processes.
Final Thoughts & Additional Workplace Giving Resources
Workplace giving software is more than just a convenience—it’s a game-changer for both nonprofits and companies looking to elevate their fundraising and engagement strategies accordingly.
As you consider ways to enhance your impact, investing in workplace giving software could be the key to unlocking new levels of support and achieving your mission more effectively. Embrace this powerful tool, and watch your organization’s reach and influence grow like never before.
Interested in learning more about smart workplace giving strategies and beyond? Check out the following recommended resources for nonprofits and companies:
What to Know About Corporate Giving and the Google Ad Grant. One of the best ways to drive awareness about corporate giving programs is with smart advertising efforts. Find out how the Google Grant can help here.
Matching Gift Automation: What 11 Nonprofits Have to Say. Hear how several organizations enlisted matching gift automation through workplace giving software. Be inspired by these testimonials!
Corporate Insights: The Ultimate Guide to Workplace Giving. Here’s what companies should know about workplace giving. Grow your knowledge of the programs and set your workplace up for success.
SEO for Nonprofits: A Complete Playbook for Better Marketing
/in Nonprofit Communications, Nonprofit Marketing /by Jessica KingImagine your nonprofit’s website as a hub of activity, drawing in supporters from all corners of the internet, each visit translating to real-world impact. By understanding SEO for nonprofits, you can make this vision a reality.
SEO not only elevates your website’s visibility on search engines, but it also drives targeted traffic and fuels your nonprofit’s ability to fulfill its mission. That means more donations, additional volunteers, and greater awareness for your cause.
This complete playbook is designed to empower nonprofit marketers with the knowledge needed to create a user-friendly website that’s designed to improve search engine results. We’ll cover these components:
Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or new to the digital landscape, our guide will help you harness the power of SEO, transforming it into a key piece of your marketing strategy.
What Is SEO for Nonprofits?
Search engines constantly crawl the internet to index websites and deliver relevant search results to users based on their queries. Search engine optimization (SEO) for nonprofits is the strategic process of improving your organization’s website and its content to improve its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). When your content is optimized, it will be delivered to users who search for relevant terms, occasionally below paid advertisements.
SEO involves several techniques, such as keyword research, content creation, backlink building, and technical improvements. The goal of SEO is to increase organic traffic, raise awareness of your nonprofit’s mission, drive donations, earn sales leads, and enhance your organization’s overall impact.
Why Does SEO Matter For Charities?
Search engines are one of the main ways supporters find your nonprofit and get involved in your cause. By optimizing your website for search engines, you’ll make it easier for potential supporters to find your organization.
Beyond increased visibility, there are plenty of other benefits to optimizing your website, such as:
44% of nonprofit site visits come from organic traffic, making SEO a valuable marketing strategy for nonprofits. However, only 37% of organizations have dedicated SEO strategies.
Core SEO Elements for Nonprofit Websites
While Google doesn’t outright list its ranking factors, SEO marketers have made inferences as to what Google and other search engines use to deliver results to users.
Based on this research, there are different types of SEO for nonprofits to effectively reach and engage their audiences. Terms like “on-page SEO” and “technical SEO” refer to specific groups of optimization strategies and elements. Let’s explore these groups and their components in detail to help you fully understand how they influence your nonprofit’s search engine rankings.
On-Page Nonprofit SEO Elements
On-page SEO involves improving individual web pages, ensuring your content is both user-friendly and search engine-friendly. Here are some on-page SEO elements you can easily control:
You can check on-page SEO elements for your nonprofit with tools like Moz Pro. This SEO platform and other similar ones provide a helpful On-Page Grader tool to evaluate individual pages on your website, providing detailed analysis of keyword usage, your meta description, and other critical elements.
Off-Page Nonprofit SEO Elements
Off-page SEO involves activities conducted outside of your website to improve its visibility and authority. Common off-page nonprofit SEO activities include:
Essentially, off-page SEO aims to enhance your site’s authority, trustworthiness, and relevance in the eyes of search engines by leveraging external factors. It’s just as important to your nonprofit’s SEO strategy as on-page optimizations.
Technical SEO Elements For Nonprofits
Technical SEO requires making it easy for users and search engines to navigate your website. You’ll want to improve your site’s infrastructure, ensuring that search engines can crawl, index, and render the site efficiently.
Technical SEO lays the foundation for other nonprofit SEO efforts, so enhance these technical aspects of your site:
Tools like Moz Pro can also be used to scan your website for common SEO issues like broken links, robots.txt issues, or duplicate content. However, there are also free tools you can use, such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights to provide insight into a page’s speed and overall user experience.
How To Conduct Keyword Research for Your Nonprofit
Think of keywords as the queries people enter into search engines to find your nonprofit. They’re a major part of your nonprofit’s SEO strategy, forming the foundation for each piece of content. As such, you need to take time finding keywords that your supporters and beneficiaries use to find your cause.
Follow these steps to find the right search terms and deliver your content to relevant, qualified audiences:
As you create your content, incorporate your keyword into your page title, image alt text, meta description, and page copy. However, don’t overuse your keywords, or search engines will view this as keyword stuffing which can actually hurt your nonprofit’s SEO performance. The best approach is to use keywords naturally in your content.
Still confused about keyword research or need help picking a keyword research tool? Our ultimate guide to choosing Google Grants keywords provides a thorough walkthrough of everything you need!
Practical SEO Strategies for Nonprofits
With an understanding of the basics of SEO for nonprofits, you’re ready to create your strategy. A strategy will help you take a targeted, consistent approach to content creation. Let’s explore some more specific techniques that your organization can use.
Produce valuable content.
This is the single most important SEO strategy any nonprofit should follow. You want your content to be informative, engaging, and high-quality.
This type of content attracts more visitors, encourages longer site visits, and increases your chances of conversion, such as donations or volunteer sign-ups. Plus, strong content will earn more backlinks from other reputable sites, further boosting your nonprofit’s SEO efforts.
Here’s how to level up your content creation:
Further, Google uses a framework called E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) to evaluate the quality of content and the credibility of the creators behind it. While it’s not a ranking factor, producing valuable and original content can provide a better user experience and build trust with both users and search engines.
Experiment with guest blogging.
Reach out to reputable blogs and websites that host content similar to your nonprofits to contribute high-quality, valuable content. You might even accept blog contributions in return. Having experts post on your site can grow your site’s authority even further.
Not only will this nonprofit SEO strategy help you build backlinks, but it’ll also help you establish authority in your field and reach new audiences.
Use internal linking to signal important pages.
Strategically link to key content throughout your website, such as in your navigation menus and throughout content. This helps search engines understand your site’s hierarchy and improves your most valuable pages’ discoverability. Plus, internal linking improves the user experience by guiding visitors to related content, keeping them engaged longer.
Use descriptive anchor text (AKA the text that appears in a hyperlink) that accurately reflects the content of the linked page. This helps users and search engines understand what the linked page is about.
Use AI carefully.
We can’t discuss SEO for nonprofits without mentioning one of the latest marketing trends: generative AI. This form of artificial intelligence creates new content by analyzing existing data. While it can be helpful for informing your content strategy, we highly advise against using it to create your content.
AI tools, such as ChatGPT, lack the human element your content needs to stand out. AI is trained to generate content based on pre-existing information, meaning these tools are incapable of producing wholely original content. Google will likely penalize your content if it recognizes that it was written by AI.
However, you can still use AI as an efficiency tool. Here are some easy ways to inform your content strategy with generative AI:
All hope is not lost though! Here are some easy ways to inform your content strategy with generative AI.
Remember, your nonprofit’s team is the authority on its cause. Your content should showcase this level of expertise through your organization’s unique voice and insider perspectives that can’t be imitated.
Turn to SEO experts for help.
Partnering with nonprofit SEO experts can alleviate the learning curve associated with mastering SEO strategies. SEO professionals bring specialized knowledge and experience to the table, ensuring your nonprofit’s online presence consistently grows. When it comes to SEO agencies, we recommend our friends at Nexus Marketing.
Nexus’s skilled content creation team will create SEO content that shows off your organization’s expertise and engages your nonprofit’s target audience. Nexus can also amplify your authority-building strategy with the help of their expansive network of 500+ partners in the mission-driven space. Here’s a rundown of their digital marketing and SEO services for nonprofits:
With these services, Nexus helped the publishers at David C Cook rank on page one of Google for 187 important keywords. What makes that even better is those are just the keywords they’re actively tracking!
David C Cook and its subsidiaries sell faith-based curricula to churches, Sunday schools, and individuals. Thanks to Nexus’s help, David C Cook’s SEO strategy has turned search engine traffic into reliable revenue generation by attracting qualified leads and growing their online presence.
We highly recommend Nexus’s nonprofit SEO services for organizations that generate revenue by selling products, programs, or services. Although the agency excels at boosting online engagement, they are not ideal for local SEO or attracting donors.
How To Integrate Nonprofit SEO With Search Advertisements
Imagine your nonprofit completely dominating SERP with paid ads and organic content. Paid search ads (like Google Ads) are great for launching your site’s content to the top of SERPs for mission-related keywords. Ads provide quick results while improving organic rankings can take time.
Even better, you can alleviate high advertising costs with the Google Ad Grant. This program provides up to $10,000 in monthly ad credits to eligible nonprofits. That’s an additional $120,000 for your annual marketing budget!
To apply your organization must be a registered nonprofit in your country. Additionally, government entities, healthcare organizations, and educational institutions are ineligible. Plus, you need a high-quality, secure website with helpful content related to your mission. If you’re eligible, create a Google for Nonprofits account and then apply for the Ad Grant. Check out this rundown of the program’s requirements:
Paid Search and SEO Strategies To Try
Once your Ad Grant account is up and running, use these tips to align search advertisements with your SEO for nonprofits strategy:
Google owns over 90% of the search engine market. Plus, 98% of searchers click a result on page 1 of Google, so maximize your search visibility by combining search ads and nonprofit SEO strategies.
At any point, our team of Google Ads experts can step in to help. We handle every aspect of Google Grant management, whether you need help confirming your eligibility or crafting compelling ads that drive results. Reach out to our team to discuss your strategy for maximizing your search visibility.
Start Improving Your Nonprofit’s Search Presence
A robust SEO strategy is essential for nonprofits looking to increase online visibility and attract more supporters. Staying informed about SEO best practices and continuously refining your strategy will ensure your nonprofit reaches its target audience.
Remember, you can maximize your search presence by creating content that ranks organically and using paid search ads. Best of all, you don’t have to pay for those ads thanks to the Google Ad Grant.
To learn more about expanding your digital presence, check out these resources:
How To Surpass the Average Email Open Rate for Nonprofits
/in Nonprofit Communications, Nonprofit Marketing /by Jessica KingIs your nonprofit struggling with low email open rates? Email marketing accounts for 15% of all nonprofit revenue, making it an essential part of your digital marketing strategy. But how does your organization’s performance measure up to the average email open rate for nonprofits?
In this article, we’ll explore industry email benchmarks and share key strategies for surpassing the average email open rate and making a lasting impact on your supporters. Whether you’re looking to craft clickable subject lines or improve your email content, there’s something here for every nonprofit marketer.
Here’s what we’ll cover:
Throughout this guide, remember that all of your marketing channels can support each other. While email is great for connecting with supporters, other channels like social media and Google Ads are also essential parts of your digital presence. Let’s dive in so you can start optimizing your email campaigns and drive greater engagement for your cause.
The Average Email Open Rate For Nonprofits
Your email open rate is the percentage of recipients who open your email out of the total number of emails delivered. These are the average nonprofit email open rates for various popular email platforms:
Each source uses different samples to generate its marketing statistics. For instance, GetResponse only focused on its platform’s active senders with at least 500 contacts while Constant Contact examined data from over 200 million emails.
One factor that can impact your open rate is your bounce rate. For emails, “bounce rate” means an email failed to deliver. In other contexts, such as search engine ads, bounce rate measures the number of individuals who click on your website but leave almost immediately. The nonprofit average bounce rate for emails is about 6.7%.
Why This Email Marketing Metric Matters
While an open doesn’t guarantee further action, it’s the first step in engaging your audience via email. Nonprofits tend to enjoy slightly higher email open rates than most industries, which can be attributed to several factors.
Email list subscribers are often deeply invested in the causes whose email lists they subscribe to, regardless of whether they’ve donated or volunteered. Charitable organizations also typically project a more authoritative and trustworthy image when compared to businesses, making recipients more likely to read communications.
Knowing the average email open rates helps you benchmark your performance against similar organizations. If your rates are below average, it signals a need for improvement in your email strategy. In contrast, high open rates indicate strong supporter engagement, which is essential for maintaining and growing your donor base.
How To Improve Your Nonprofit Email Open Rate
If your email open rates are lower than expected, experiment with different strategies, such as:
If your supporters aren’t opening your nonprofit’s emails, try these strategies to make your outreach enticing. Whenever you try a new approach, check your email open rate to see if the change drove more people to click and read your messages.
The Average Frequency of Nonprofit Emails
Curious whether you’re emailing your supporters too often (or not enough)? According to the 2023 Nonprofit Tech For Good Report, around 68% of nonprofits use email marketing to reach their supporters. Here’s how frequently these organizations send emails:
Why This Nonprofit Email Marketing Metric Matters
The frequency of your emails can significantly impact your audience’s engagement levels. Sending messages too frequently can lead to subscriber fatigue, resulting in lower email open rates and higher unsubscribe rates. On the other hand, sending infrequent outreach can cause your audience to forget about your organization, reducing their engagement.
If you’re sending emails less frequently than the industry average, you might be missing opportunities to engage with your supporters. If you decide to send more frequently, it’s important to ensure your content remains valuable, relevant, and varied to avoid overwhelming your audience.
By aligning your email frequency with industry norms, you can better engage your audience, increase donations, and ultimately drive support for your cause.
How To Time Your Emails Effectively
Follow these tips to strategically time your nonprofit’s emails and improve your email open rate:
While you can use industry benchmarks to find the best time to email supporters, it’s more important to pay attention to when your supporters are active online. Use industry research as your starting point and go from there.
The Average Return on Fundraising Emails
Email marketing and promotional campaigns are powerful tools for fundraising, accounting for approximately 28% of all online nonprofit revenue. For every 1,000 fundraising emails sent, nonprofits raise an average of $90. Other marketing research shows that the average nonprofit raises $5,598.51 per email campaign. These statistics highlight the potential financial impact of a well-crafted email campaign.
Another important metric to pay attention to is the nonprofit sector’s email click-through rate (CTR), which indicates the percentage of recipients who click on links within your email out of the total number of emails delivered.
Similar to the average email open rate for nonprofits, the average CTR for nonprofits varies across email platforms. For instance, Constant Contact reports a 2.94% click rate for nonprofit membership organizations and 2.34% for nonprofit service organizations. Meanwhile, for nonprofits in general, Mailerlite reports a 3.78% click rate, and Mailchimp reports a 3.27% click rate.
Why These Email Marketing Metrics Matters
An individual who opens your email but takes no action is not a useful return on your email campaign’s investment. By comparing your performance to the entire industry’s results, you can determine whether your messages inspire people to click through to your nonprofit website and take an action like donating or if you should focus your efforts elsewhere. For instance, maybe your supporters prefer using Facebook or Instagram over email, making those channels more important for your nonprofit.
How To Earn More From Fundraising and Product Sale Emails
To maximize the effectiveness of your emails to boost donations and sell your nonprofit’s products and services, experiment with the following strategies:
Email is one of the best channels for fundraising, so make sure you’re using it to its fullest potential. Show appreciation, try out new strategies, and inspire your supporters with every message to make this channel even more valuable.
The Average Size of Nonprofit Email Subscriber Lists
The average size of nonprofit email subscriber lists varies significantly based on the organization’s size and reach. On average, nonprofit email lists contain around 4,191 contacts. Small nonprofits typically have about 547 subscribers, while large organizations average 6,602, heavily skewing the industry average.
The average unsubscribe rate for nonprofits is also fairly low, coming in at about 0.18%. Keeping your unsubscribe rate low is essential for growing your contacts list. Plus, it indicates that your nonprofit is providing value to its subscribers.
While it might seem that having a larger email list is better, your engagement rate is far more critical. It’s possible to have a large email list of inactive supporters and deactivated email addresses, which provide little value. In contrast, a small but engaged subscriber base is more likely to open emails, click through them, and take action.
Why This Nonprofit Email Marketing Metric Matters
These email marketing benchmarks provide a foundation for measuring your messages’ value. Are you providing engaging content that retains subscribers and drives engagement? Conversely, are you causing people to unsubscribe due to poor content quality or communication frequency? Remember, an engaged audience is much more likely to respond positively to fundraising appeals, leading to higher open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and overall support.
How To Grow Your Email List
Here are several strategies to fill your nonprofit’s email list with engaged supporters:
Above all, spend time choosing the right channels to promote your newsletter. Remember, you’re aiming for quality over quantity! That way, you won’t fill your subscriber list with disengaged people, inadvertently lowering your nonprofit’s email open rate.
How To Fuel Your Email Marketing With Google Ads
You can use other channels to support your email marketing efforts and grow an active subscriber list that opens your emails.
Google Ads is one of the best channels to support your email marketing. In fact, Google owns over 91% of the search engine market. The search engine behemoth processes about 3.5 billion search queries every day, making Google Ads an incredibly impactful way to connect with new supporters and grow your contact list.
Plus, nonprofits can claim free advertising credits via the Google Ad Grants program! This program provides up to $10,000 a month to eligible nonprofits, helping them pursue goals like increasing email registrations. Check out the benefits in our short overview video:
Sounds too good to pass up, right? Here’s how your nonprofit can promote its email subscriber list via Google Ads:
By following these tips, your nonprofit can use Google Ads to enhance its email marketing efforts and grow its subscriber lists with valuable supporters. In no time, you’ll boost your nonprofit email open rates.
If you need help leveraging this channel, reach out to our Google Ad Grants experts. We’ll take the time to understand your mission and marketing goals. Then, we’ll craft compelling ads, monitor your account, and re-apply for the grant if your account is ever deactivated.
Start Improving Your Nonprofit’s Marketing
By focusing on audience engagement and data-driven insights, your nonprofit can build stronger connections with supporters and drive impactful results via email marketing. Remember, the key to success lies in consistent, thoughtful communication and a willingness to adapt and refine your approach based on performance metrics.
Embrace these practices to maximize your email marketing campaigns’ potential and surpass the average nonprofit email open rate.
For other nonprofit marketing advice, check out these educational resources:
From Likes to Donations: How To Use Facebook For Nonprofits
/in Nonprofit Communications, Nonprofit Marketing /by Jessica KingThink Facebook is just about likes and shares? Think again! For nonprofits, Facebook offers a dynamic platform to build communities, mobilize volunteers, and raise crucial funds.
With around 2.9 billion active users, the site provides nonprofits with access to vast amounts of potential donors, volunteers, corporate sponsors, customers, and beneficiaries. This social media giant is an indispensable asset for nonprofits, and we’re here to tell you how you can leverage its full potential.
To help transform online interactions into tangible support, this guide to Facebook for nonprofits will cover:
From leveraging Facebook’s fundraising tools to advertising your mission, you’ll learn how to engage your audience and strengthen your organization’s digital presence. Let’s dive into how Facebook can become a powerful ally in your nonprofit’s mission to create positive change.
The Impact of Facebook for Nonprofits
Facebook offers tools designed specifically for nonprofits, like fundraising pages, donation buttons, and various engagement features. This toolkit is designed to help nonprofit organizations leverage the platform for fundraising, community building, and advocacy.
The benefits of utilizing Facebook for nonprofits range from increased visibility to enhanced community building. Let’s explore how your organization can harness the power of Facebook to achieve its goals and make a lasting difference.
Wide Reach
One of the most significant benefits of Facebook for nonprofits is its reach. With 71.43% of internet users in the U.S. regularly using Facebook, the platform provides an extensive and diverse audience for nonprofits. This large user base means that your organization can connect with individuals and significantly amplify your message.
Facebook’s global accessibility allows your nonprofit to transcend geographical boundaries, enabling you to connect with supporters worldwide. With Facebook’s apps consistently ranked among the top downloads every month, nonprofits can leverage this immense popularity to broaden their impact and engage with a global community of advocates and donors.
Fundraising Capabilities
Facebook’s robust fundraising tools are a game-changer for nonprofits, providing seamless and effective ways to raise funds directly on the platform. Of the donors inspired to give by social media, 56% are most influenced by Facebook posts. Therefore, it’s essential for your nonprofit to utilize the platform’s fundraising features to encourage prospective donors to give.
These built-in tools make it incredibly convenient for supporters to contribute to nonprofits like yours. Key fundraising tools on the platform include:
Note that only nonprofits based in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, or the United States are eligible to fundraise on Facebook. However, supporters from all over the globe can donate to your nonprofit’s campaigns. See the full list of eligible countries in Facebook’s Help Center.
Facebook also partners with PayPal Giving Fund to benefit nonprofits. PayPal Giving Fund receives the donations given through Facebook and distributes the donated funds to benefiting nonprofits.
Community Building
By leveraging Facebook’s community-building capabilities, your nonprofit can cultivate a dedicated network of individuals who are passionate about your cause and eager to contribute. Create a vibrant, engaged community by:
Facebook Groups and Pages are essential tools in this process, allowing organizations to nurture a sense of belonging and shared purpose among followers. Use these tools to interact with supporters to build trust, strengthen relationships, and keep supporters informed and motivated.
Engaging Content Formats
Content marketing is one of the best ways to communicate your message, showcase your work, and inspire donors to support your work financially. Social media channels, particularly Facebook, lend themselves well to a wide array of engaging content that helps capture and retain your audience’s attention.
Experiment with different forms of content, such as:
These capabilities allow you to cater to your audience’s different content preferences and consumption habits Just pay attention to what content drives the most engagement to focus your social media strategy.
Enhanced Credibility
People are often wary of nonprofits they’ve never heard of before, so establish your credibility by getting verified by Facebook. A verified Facebook Page reassures supporters that your organization is legitimate. You’ll receive a blue verification badge that makes people more likely to trust and engage with your content. This mark of authenticity can help differentiate your nonprofit from fake accounts and similar organizations, providing a clear sign of trustworthiness.
Also, link to your official website in your page’s description, regularly share high-quality posts to show you’re active, and use consistent and professional images. You may even share testimonials from supporters, as potential supporters often look to others’ reviews and experiences before getting involved. Positive endorsements can significantly influence new supporters, encouraging them to trust and engage with your cause.
Cost Efficient Marketing
It’s free to post on Facebook! Grow your organic reach and spread awareness by creating engaging posts and interacting with your audience. The platform’s built-in tools, like fundraising campaigns and sharing capabilities, provide powerful, free ways to generate support, connect with your supporters’ networks, and drive donations.
Ways to Make The Most of Facebook for Nonprofits
Facebook is a powerful platform for nonprofits to engage with their communities, raise awareness, earn sales, and drive donations. Here’s how to use Facebook to further your nonprofit’s mission.
Become a nonprofit on Facebook.
Add legitimacy to your organization’s online presence by becoming a recognized nonprofit on Facebook. To create a nonprofit Page on Facebook, follow these steps that are outlined on Meta’s Basics page:
Facebook recommends a few best practices to ensure your page comes across as credible. For instance, use your organization’s official name or how it’s commonly referenced as the Page name. Then, add your organization’s logo as your profile picture and a cover photo that represents your work and community. From there, customize your URL and add people at your organization as admins to manage the page.
Keep your page updated and post regularly, so anyone who comes across your page will know it’s a reliable source of information from your nonprofit. Check out this updated and informative Facebook Page for the nonprofit Erika’s Lighthouse as an example:
Use Facebook’s fundraising tools.
Facebook’s fundraising tools offer a powerful way to raise funds directly on the platform. As of October 2023, Facebook partners exclusively with PayPal Giving Fund for nonprofits in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Nonprofits that apply and are approved can receive donated funds from PayPal Giving Fund. These donations are irrevocable gifts and can only be refunded under specific circumstances outlined by PayPal Giving Fund’s Donation Refund Policy or as required by law.
To apply, ensure you’re a page admin for your nonprofit’s Facebook Page and that your Page meets these requirements:
Note that your nonprofit also must be a registered charity and in good standing in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia. When applying, be prepared to provide detailed information about your organization and its CEO or highest-ranking official, including their name, date of birth, and address.
Experiment with Facebook Ads.
Consider paying to promote your nonprofit on Facebook. Experimenting with Facebook ads can significantly enhance your organization’s reach, engagement, and impact.
Facebook advertisements are composed of four parts: the primary (or body) text, an eye-catching headline, a description that further explains your headline, and a call-to-action (CTA) button.
Here are some best practices to make the most of your Facebook ads:
You can also link your nonprofit’s Facebook and Instagram accounts together to run your ads on both platforms simultaneously. Track your ads’ performance closely, and use the insights gained to optimize your campaigns for better results.
Create a Facebook content strategy.
Creating a content strategy helps ensure you’re regularly posting a diverse range of content. That way, you can maintain a steady flow of communication and keep supporters engaged.
Include the following in your nonprofit’s Facebook content strategy:
By including these elements in your Facebook content strategy, your nonprofit can create a structured approach to engaging your audience, showcasing your impact, and inspiring action.
Balance Facebook with other marketing strategies.
While Facebook offers robust tools for community engagement and targeted ads, relying solely on it can limit your nonprofit’s reach. Instead, achieve a balanced marketing strategy by using Facebook alongside other outreach strategies such as email marketing, Google Ads, and content marketing.
By diversifying your marketing efforts, your nonprofit can ensure it reaches a broad audience. For instance, share links on Facebook to drive traffic to your website, where visitors can learn more about your cause and get involved. Or, you might encourage your email newsletter recipients to follow your Facebook page, add a social media feed to your website, or encourage site visitors to share your events and blog posts with social media share buttons.
However you approach it, integrating these channels will create a cohesive marketing strategy that amplifies your efforts and reaches a wider audience.
Facebook + Google Ads: The Ultimate Combo For Nonprofits
Individually, Facebook and Google Ads are powerful platforms for promoting your cause. Together, they can become an unstoppable force as long as you have a smart strategy.
We’re big proponents of Google Ads, and when used alongside Facebook Ads, the two platforms can complement each other in a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. Here’s how to use both platforms to maximize your reach, engagement, and conversions:
Targeting
Ad Formats
Synergistic Campaigns
Messaging
Optimized Budget Allocation
Start Making the Most of Facebook for Nonprofits
Facebook offers more than just a platform for communication; it provides innovative tools and strategies to amplify your nonprofit’s voice and reach. Revolutionize your outreach by harnessing Facebook’s features for nonprofits to engage supporters, drive donations, and create a vibrant, active community around your cause.
Don’t forget that Facebook is only one part of your nonprofit’s marketing strategy. Use it in conjunction with other platforms, like Google Ads and email, to maximize your reach and inspire your audience across multiple channels.
To learn more about creating a strong marketing strategy, check out these resources:
501(c)(3) Website Requirements: What To Include On Your Site
/in Nonprofit Communications, Nonprofit Marketing /by Jessica KingYou’ve designed an engaging website that features your mission, highlights your programs, and showcases your work’s impact. But does your nonprofit’s website comply with all necessary regulations?
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) doesn’t have specific rules that mandate what a nonprofit’s website must contain. However, there are laws, guidelines, and best practices that nonprofits should follow to ensure compliance and maintain transparency. Understanding the best practices and requirements for 501(c)(3) websites ensures you meet legal obligations and maximize your digital presence.
This guide will explore tips to ensure your website is compliant, transparent about operations, and informative to potential supporters. Here’s what we’ll cover:
Following these rules will also bring you up to par with the Google Ad Grant’s standards. This program provides eligible nonprofits with free credits to spend on Google Ads, so you can skyrocket your optimized site to the top of Google Search results. Let’s get started!
Are 501(c)(3) organizations required to have a website?
No, 501(c)(3) organizations are not legally required to have a website. However, 91% of nonprofits do have websites, because they offer these benefits:
While not mandatory, having a website can significantly benefit your 501(c)(3) organization. Plus, you need a website to receive free funding via the Google Ad Grants program.
Nonprofit Website Requirements You Need To Follow
So, what should a nonprofit website include? If you decide to create a website (and you should), follow all relevant accessibility guidelines, data security standards, and state-specific regulations. Let’s explore several 501(c)(3) website requirements you must follow.
501(c)(3) Website Requirement 1. Privacy Policy
Your website should have a privacy policy if you plan to collect information from visitors. A clear privacy policy details how personal information collected through the website will be used and protected. For example, how will you use and manage donors’ personal information when they donate online?
Many federal and state statutes govern data privacy, such as:
If your nonprofit has donors outside of the U.S., consider global regulations such as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and the Australia Privacy Act of 1988.
If your website contains data collection features like donation forms, event registrations, volunteer sign-ups, or newsletter sign-ups, you need a private policy. Craft a privacy policy that identifies your nonprofit as the website owner, how data is stored, and how users can opt-out of having their data stored. For more information, Blue Hills Digital provides detailed guidance for crafting your privacy policy.
501(c)(3) Website Requirement 2. Disclosure Requirements
The IRS requires nonprofits to make their tax-exempt status application (Form 1023) and recent annual returns (Form 990) available for public inspection. This can be done physically or electronically. Posting these documents on your website is a convenient way to comply with this requirement.
If you do not want to post these documents on your website, publish a notice about how to obtain them. Many nonprofits also publish their annual report on their websites to exercise transparency with donors, grantmakers, and corporate sponsors.
501(c)(3) Website Requirement 3. Charitable Solicitation Registration
After someone browses your programs and is inspired by your work, make sure they can give instantly with a user-friendly, mobile-optimized donation page.
Make sure donors can give instantly with a user-friendly, mobile-optimized donation page.
However, you must be registered to solicit donations before creating a donation page, selling products, or hosting fundraising events. Failure to do so can result in stiff fines and penalties. Foundation Group’s charitable solicitation registration page explains that 40 states require nonprofit registration, so register in every state you solicit donations or sell products in, not just where your nonprofit is located.
501(c)(3) Website Requirement 4. Compliance With Accessibility Standards
Sections 504 and 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 require federal agencies and organizations that receive federal funding to make their programs and activities, including their websites, accessible to people with disabilities.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) is a set of international standards that explain how to make web content accessible. WCAG 2.1 is widely regarded as good standards to follow. Here are some key takeaways:
Morweb’s nonprofit accessibility guide explains that some website builders also offer accessibility widgets that allow users to manually change font size, adjust colors to grayscale, highlight links, and change the font type to non-serif. Here’s what this tool might look like:
501(c)(3) Website Requirement 5. No Commercial Activity
To maintain your 501(c)(3) organization’s tax-exempt status, it must adhere to specific regulations regarding commercial activity. While some commercial activity is permitted, avoid revenue-generating activities that don’t directly further your mission, AKA unrelated business income (UBI).
This applies to web activities like selling advertising space. If your nonprofit has corporate sponsors, have an acknowledgment page that doesn’t overtly endorse that business. A link to their website is usually permitted but avoid linking directly to promoting specific products.
Limited commercial activity is also a key Google Ad Grant eligibility requirement. These regulations allow commercial activities directly related to your nonprofit, such as ads promoting your merchandise, but prohibit third-party ads promoting another business’s products.
Other Nonprofit Website Best Practices
Following these 501(c)(3) website requirements is a solid start, but a strong nonprofit website involves more than meeting legal standards. To reach as many people as possible through your website, focus on creating a positive user experience, sharing compelling content, and promoting your site through search engine optimization (SEO) and paid advertising.
Promote Your Website With Google Ads.
By applying for the Google Ad Grants program, you can skyrocket your nonprofit website to the top of search results pages (SERPs) for keywords related to your mission. The program awards qualified organizations with $10,000 worth of Google Ad credits each month to spend on search ads that drive website traffic.
Here are some of the basic requirements for 501(c)(3) websites:
Before applying, check out this video for a rundown of other eligibility requirements:
Optimize Your Nonprofit Website For Search Engines.
SEO is the process of optimizing website content to improve its ranking on SERPs to attract more organic (non-paid) traffic. This practice typically results in increased traffic and helps you reach qualified audiences who will engage with your mission, donate, or purchase your revenue-generating programs, services, and products.
Here are some key elements of nonprofit SEO:
While our team at Getting Attention can craft your Google Ads strategy, we recommend the experts at Nexus Marketing for your SEO needs. With 10+ years of experience in ROI-driven SEO in the mission-driven sector, Nexus Marketing’s team will create strategic SEO content that captures your brand and connects you with qualified leads. Plus, they have an impressive network of 500+ partners to supercharge your website’s authority and fuel your SEO growth.
Feature A “Get Involved” Page.
On your nonprofit’s website add a “Get Involved” page that features a consolidated list of giving opportunities, such as:
On this page, explain how donations are used and the impact of all contributions. By providing clear information, you’ll increase donor confidence and empower supporters to engage meaningfully with your organization.
Include Relevant Mission Information.
Thoroughly explain your mission on your website, so anyone who comes across it fully understands what your nonprofit is striving to accomplish. Here are a few ways to feature relevant mission information on your 501(c)(3) website:
These elements help visitors understand your organization’s purpose, connect with your team, and trust your legitimacy.
Share News and Updates.
Regularly updating the public on your nonprofit’s activities and achievements is crucial for maintaining donor engagement. Create a strong content marketing strategy by maintaining an updated blog that features your nonprofit’s latest news, success stories, and event recaps. You can also publish educational resources, such as articles and research findings, to position your organization as a thought leader and create an inbound marketing strategy.
Include A Terms of Use Policy.
A Terms of Use policy outlines the rules and guidelines for using your 501(c)(3)’s website, protecting both your organization and site users. It helps mitigate legal risks by setting clear expectations on acceptable behavior, intellectual property rights, and liability limitations.
A Terms of Use policy isn’t required by law, but it’s highly recommended! For example, you’ll want to inform users that while they have a license to view your content, they may not reproduce, distribute, or use the content in any other way without prior written consent.
Including a Terms of Use policy that covers site usage guidelines will demonstrate your organization’s commitment to responsible online practices.
Bring Your 501(c)(3) Website Up To Code
Ensuring your website meets all 501(c)(3) website requirements and follows best practices is essential for building donor trust and strengthening your online presence. Your website acts as a digital information hub for your nonprofit, so make sure it’s aligned with the latest trends and legal requirements. When well-constructed, your website will engage supporters and help you better serve your community.
To continue learning about digital marketing for nonprofits, check out these resources:
Nonprofit Marketing: Proven Tips to Reach Your Supporters
/in Nonprofit Communications, Nonprofit Marketing /by Jessica KingDid you know it takes 18-20 points of contact to reach a new donor for the first time? For nonprofits, developing an effective multichannel marketing plan is key to spreading awareness, engaging new prospects, and deepening donor relationships. However, a lot goes into crafting the perfect strategy for your organization, from setting goals to your marketing data.
In this comprehensive nonprofit marketing guide, we’ll walk through everything you need to know to refine your marketing efforts. Here’s what we’ll cover:
At Getting Attention, we empower nonprofits to expand their nonprofit marketing capabilities with the Google Ad Grant. While we’ll explore that channel a bit more later, know that it’s a powerful addition to any nonprofit’s toolkit.
Regardless of your nonprofit’s size, budget, or staff resources, taking the time to optimize your current marketing strategy can go a long way toward securing more support for your mission.
What is Nonprofit Marketing?
Nonprofit marketing encompasses the diverse strategies and channels that nonprofits use to promote their causes, secure donations, attract new supporters, and retain existing ones. Effective nonprofit marketing amplifies the organization’s mission and fosters meaningful audience engagement.
Organizations often create nonprofit marketing plans to allocate their budgets, time, and efforts efficiently. This plan typically outlines the core mission, tone, target audience, preferred marketing channels, and branding elements, ensuring a cohesive approach to reaching supporters.
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
There are two main approaches to nonprofit marketing:
While inbound marketing attracts potential supporters whose interests align with your mission, outbound marketing can extend your nonprofit’s reach to people who might not otherwise encounter your cause. Finding the perfect balance between inbound and outbound channels enables you to cast a wider net and reach more prospects.
Benefits of Nonprofit Marketing
A thoughtful and comprehensive nonprofit marketing plan allows your nonprofit to:
Overall, marketing impacts every area of your organization, making it essential for achieving your mission and inciting real change in your community.
Nonprofit Marketing Challenges
Effective outreach doesn’t come without its challenges. By understanding common obstacles nonprofits face, you can plan ahead and minimize potential difficulties further down the road:
Fortunately, your organization can overcome all of these challenges by laying a solid foundation with your nonprofit marketing plan and following the best practices we’ll explore later on in this guide.
How Much Do Nonprofits Spend on Marketing?
While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to how much an organization should allocate for marketing, there are several methods you can use to create an effective budget:
Nonprofits may cut marketing when resources are tight, but promoting your mission is essential for staying connected with donors and driving gifts to stay operational. Instead, opt for low-cost communication channels or apply for a grant.
Whether you’re facing budgetary constraints or simply want to reduce costs, explore our guide to applying for Google Ad Grants to tap into free advertising money.
5 Steps to Create a Nonprofit Marketing Strategy
Crafting an organized nonprofit marketing strategy connects you with supporters and beneficiaries. Your strategy should outline all the information you need to meet your audience’s needs and spread awareness.
If you partner with an external agency, they will guide you through these steps. Be sure to choose professionals experienced in your sector who understand your mission. For example, churches should hire agencies that specialize in religious organizations, as they understand the unique challenges and opportunities faith-based groups face. They can tailor messaging, outreach strategies, and campaigns that resonate with the church’s congregation and community, helping to grow the organization’s ministry.
1. Perform a Marketing Audit.
Start by getting a sense of your current marketing capabilities and available resources. That way, you can start thinking about the changes you’ll need to make.
Gather past outreach materials and campaign metrics to conduct an audit on your most recent outreach efforts. A nonprofit marketing audit often consists of conducting a SWOT analysis, which stands for:
Analyze your results and create a plan for playing to your strengths, overcoming any weaknesses, increasing your opportunities, and mitigating any threats.
2. Define Your Marketing Goals.
Your nonprofit marketing strategy should support your overall goals. Are you trying to raise funds? Encourage volunteering? Garner fundraising event registrations? Every marketing campaign needs a concrete goal and target action to be successful.
When outlining your nonprofit marketing strategy goals, use the SMART method:
From here, list your goals by priority. Clear nonprofit marketing goals will power greater outcomes for your cause.
Examples of SMART Goals
The best way to understand the SMART framework is to explore examples:
These goals start with a core objective and build out the details. From promoting events to selling programming, effective nonprofit marketing can help you increase visibility and drive action. You just need SMART goals and technology to track your progress.
3. Understand Your Audiences.
Focus your nonprofit marketing strategy on who you’re trying to reach. Outline your nonprofit’s current and target audience. For example, if your nonprofit sells religious curricula to churches, your target audience would include church leaders, educators, and parents. Or, let’s say your parks and recreation association wants to sell summer camp registrations. Your audience would primarily be parents and guardians looking for engaging educational summer activities for their children.
Segment your audience members according to characteristics such as:
When you understand who your supporters are, you’ll ensure content aligns with their needs, preferences, and interests, making them more likely to engage. In fact, segmenting digital campaigns produces up to 760% more revenue!
Remember, the goal of segmentation is to ensure your communications are targeted, so understand each group’s needs to create content catered to them. This might involve planning new events, writing new blog content, or trying new media formats like video.
4. Create and Share A Compelling Message.
There are hundreds of ads and messages online, all competing for your supporters’ attention. To make your messages stand out from the crowd, use the CRAM rule to bring your powerful marketing ideas to fruition and connect with supporters. Your communications should be:
Plan out the tone of your message, specific calls to action you’ll use, and any visual branding elements. Then, choose your nonprofit marketing channels and start sharing your outreach.
5. Track Results and Make Adjustments.
Every nonprofit marketing strategy needs a way to measure performance, so you’ll be able to identify your areas of strength and areas for improvement. Here are some examples of KPIs for different channels you might track:
Data is the backbone of your nonprofit marketing efforts. It ensures your campaigns perform well, provides insights for future improvements, and serves as a valuable resource for supporters interested in your impact.
Types of Nonprofit Marketing Channels
The specific nonprofit marketing channels you use are critical to reaching your donors and meeting new prospects. While you don’t need to leverage every platform, a multichannel marketing approach allows you to connect with as many supporters as possible.
Let’s walk through some of the most popular channels that can catapult your nonprofit marketing efforts forward.
Search Ads
To enhance marketing results, many nonprofits leverage Google Ads, a platform where organizations display advertisements promoting their services, initiatives, and educational content. Google places these ads at the top of search engine result pages to expand each organization’s online presence.
Many nonprofits apply for the Google Ad Grant, a technology grant that provides nonprofits with $10,000 in monthly ad credits. These credits can be used to bid on valuable keywords their prospects are searching online and promote their website content with Google Ads.
The best part? Any eligible nonprofit that complies with Google guidelines can leverage this grant. For example, if your church is eligible, you can apply for and receive the Google Ad Grant. It automatically reactivates every month, too. As long as you comply with the program’s rules, you’ll add up to $120,000 to your nonprofit marketing budget each year.
However, a lot goes into determining your nonprofit’s eligibility, applying, and making the most of the program. That’s where an expert Google Grants agency can step in.
The specialists at Getting Attention will champion your cause at every turn. We’ll learn about your specific nonprofit marketing goals and manage the entire Google Grant process, allowing you to focus on your mission with confidence that your Google Ads are in expert hands.
Nonprofit Advertising
While people commonly interchange “advertising” and “marketing,” nonprofit advertising is actually a specific subset of nonprofit marketing that refers to using paid channels to promote your mission. Some of the most common nonprofit advertising channels include:
Advertising can amplify your content to a broader audience, even those who aren’t actively researching nonprofits. With a strategic approach, outbound marketing is achievable, even on a limited budget!
Similar to Google, there are many other advertising platforms with free or discounted options for nonprofits. Explore our full list of nonprofit advertising examples to get a sense of how similar nonprofits tap into paid ads without spending too much.
Website
Your website not only hosts valuable information about your organization but also provides engagement opportunities like online giving, event registration, and more. It’s often the first place prospects go to learn about your mission and where long-term supporters go to show support.
To maximize site traffic, implement SEO strategies. Optimizing your website for search engines helps attract attention to initiatives like your revenue-generating programming. When updating your nonprofit website, try these SEO practices:
Sometimes nonprofits create blogs to drive traffic and post meaningful content about their organizations. This is also a great way to cultivate a community and act as a go-to resource for supporters. Consider blogging about nonprofit industry trends, mission updates, and your nonprofit’s recent events or campaigns.
Using A Digital Marketing Agency
To maximize your website’s potential, turn to a dedicated SEO agency that understands organic digital marketing channels. Nexus Marketing, for instance, helps nonprofits and associations increase revenue by selling their programming, products, and services.
Their value-add marketing services include:
With 10+ years of experience in SEO for mission-driven organizations, Nexus Marketing will help attract and convert your target audience into customers. They can help you strengthen your website and reach your target audiences through search engines, high-visibility webinars, and promotion through their trusted partners in the industry.
Nonprofit Email Marketing
Email is a reliable channel for nonprofit marketers, allowing them to connect with all types of supporters, from first-time donors to those who have been giving regularly for years.
Some impactful ways to leverage email marketing for nonprofits include:
On average, email generates $36 for every $1 spent. This high ROI makes it clear that this nonprofit marketing channel is worth investing in.
Word-of-Mouth Nonprofit Marketing
When your volunteers and donors feel strongly about your cause, they’ll want to share your important work with friends and family members who may be interested in supporting your nonprofit, too!
Peer-to-peer outreach can be incredibly powerful. In fact, 88% of consumers trust recommendations from loved ones over any other type of marketing. Encourage your supporters to reach out to their personal networks, post online about your cause, and share your organization’s social media posts to spread the word.
One powerful way to encourage peer-to-peer referrals is nonprofit eCards. They’re an easy and interactive way to broadcast your mission, activities, and successes.
Create designs for every occasion to encourage referrals year-round. Here are just a few ideas to get started:
Once you design your nonprofit eCards, you can offer them for free, sell them for a set price, or give them in exchange for donations. No matter what, people will be excited to browse your collection and share a cause that’s close to their hearts.
Social Media Marketing for Nonprofits
By 2027, the global number of social media users is expected to skyrocket to 6 billion. Social media’s rising prevalence makes it one of the most viable channels for marketing your mission.
Not only is social media affordable, but it’s also a key way to connect with supporters on a deeper level. You can engage with followers, encourage them to comment or repost content, and build a brand personality that they enjoy interacting with.
Here are tips to leverage social media in your nonprofit marketing strategy:
Whether you use TikTok for connecting with younger generations or Facebook for its long-form posts and its fundraising features, social media is a channel worth optimizing for your nonprofit marketing.
Direct Mail Marketing
While email marketing response rates are typically 1%, direct mail response rates hover around 9%, making it a highly valuable and personalized marketing channel.
For nonprofits, direct mail marketing and fundraising involve writing, printing, and sending out hard copy requests for funds, event invitations, or thank-you letters to your passionate supporters. These letters arrive in your supporters’ mailboxes and provide a tangible connection to your organization—especially when compared to opening an email.
Use these tips to inspire action with direct mail:
As long as it aligns with recipients’ communication preferences, direct mail can both benefit your nonprofit and show donors that you care. Consider partnering with a direct mail marketing company to facilitate the process of writing and sending your letters.
Nonprofit Video Marketing
From short videos on TikTok to longer content on YouTube, many nonprofits have found success in using this form of media to promote campaigns, events, and their mission in general.
Here are some reasons why video marketing for nonprofits is so valuable:
You can incorporate video marketing across your nonprofit website, in social media posts, and in email content. For instance, you can send an event invitation with a video teaser or record a video featuring someone your nonprofit has helped to show donors how much their donations make an impact.
Bonus Tip: Because of their file format, videos can potentially slow down a website. When publishing videos to your website, turn off auto-play to minimize any slowdowns!
Content Marketing for Nonprofits
Content marketing is all about creating valuable and promotable nonprofit content to build your nonprofit’s reputation. While this content will likely live on your website, you can also create specific content for emails or host a downloadable gated resource.
Common types of content you might create include:
Plus, your content marketing materials can be used for other nonprofit marketing efforts, whether you promote it via email, Google Ads, or social media. Consider creating a dedicated team focused on content copywriting.
Text Message Marketing
With a 99% open rate and 90% read rate within just three minutes of sending, text message marketing is one of the best ways to promote a campaign and reach your audience where they already are.
To use text marketing, consider investing in a comprehensive text-to-give tool. Tatango’s nonprofit text messaging guide recommends looking for a text messaging provider with the following features:
With a secure and user-friendly text messaging platform, your nonprofit can confidently deliver a high ROI, engage supporters year-round, and leverage contextual giving.
Contextual giving occurs when a donor gives the moment they’re inspired. For example, someone at a fundraising event might see a text-to-give number on signage and decide to give immediately. Without this option, they might delay until home, reducing the likelihood of completing the donation.
Nonprofit Marketing Best Practices to Follow
Your nonprofit marketing strategy encompasses several moving components, from crafting your messaging to picking the channels you use. Let’s explore general best practices that can help you hone your marketing efforts:
Optimize Your Website for Search
Your nonprofit’s website is the hub of its digital marketing efforts. Optimize it for search engines to ensure potential supporters, customers, and beneficiaries can find it.
While your content is incredibly important, technical SEO lays the foundation for how search engines crawl, index, and rank your site. Let’s explore a few technical improvements to ensure your website can be found and indexed:
To find issues on your website, use a website crawler tool like Screaming Frog. Just know that fixing some of these issues can be challenging if you don’t have an in-house web developer. That’s where an SEO agency like Nexus Marketing can step in to locate, prioritize, and fix the most pressing issues that are harming your nonprofit’s website.
Elevate Your Graphic Design
Regardless of whether someone’s scrolling through their social media feed or passing by a bulletin board with your fundraising flyer pinned to it, they’re more likely to notice marketing collateral that features eye-catching graphics and vibrant colors.
Considering that people retain 55% more information when paired with an image, effective visuals make your content more memorable to prospects, too. Here are a few crucial areas where graphic design comes into play:
If you have limited graphic design expertise, reach out to an experienced graphic designer. Those with experience in the mission-driven space, such as Kwala, understand exactly what it takes to make charitable causes stand out. Their team will work with yours to create anything you request, including flyers, logos, stickers, and even fundraising product designs.
Take a look at this postcard that they designed for the Wildlife Rescue Group:
Well-designed materials like this will reel supporters in and drive action, whether you want people to donate, volunteer, or get involved in some other way. Turning to a professional graphic designer allows you to create marketing materials that resonate with supporters.
Use Current Events
Boost your nonprofit’s marketing efforts by leveraging what is currently going on in the world to create urgency. Is there a story related to your cause in the news? For instance, if your organization is contributing to relief efforts in the wake of a natural disaster, connect your mission to this broader issue and boost public awareness around your work.
Highlight all the work your organization aims to achieve so that potential donors feel inspired to contribute toward your impact.
Follow Up With Supporters
Successful marketing requires more than one-way communication. Cultivate relationships with your donors and volunteers by implementing strategies to start ongoing conversations. This doesn’t mean you need to exchange text messages with each supporter to keep them engaged. Rather, your nonprofit just needs to respond to the actions supporters take to show that you see and value their contributions.
Some basic occasions for reaching out to a supporter include:
Your follow-up process can also benefit from a multi-channel approach. For example, personalized donor thank-you emails make it possible to show your appreciation quickly. Then, you can send a card or give donors a phone call a few days later when your nonprofit has time set aside for donor outreach.
By reaching out often, you’ll be able to retain more donors and convince lapsed donors to get involved again.
Work With Other Groups
Your nonprofit has worked hard to establish its audience, and you can expand your reach by tapping into other organizations’ audiences. Well-known groups and individuals can introduce your nonprofit to new supporters. If they agree to a marketing partnership, they can handle part of the marketing efforts on your behalf.
A few third parties to consider include:
Before partnering with a third party, thoroughly vet them. After all, your partnership will reflect on your nonprofit, so be sure they are reputable, trustworthy, and likely to present your nonprofit in the best light.
Wrapping Up
Marketing your mission is key to your organization’s ongoing success. From choosing the right channels to keeping up with the latest trends, crafting a strong nonprofit marketing strategy takes plenty of forethought.
Whether you choose paid outlets like search ads or organic outlets like email, there’s a lot you can do to stand out. As you craft your strategies, check out these resources to keep learning:
45+ Nonprofit Marketing Statistics To Shape Your Outreach
/in Nonprofit Communications, Nonprofit Marketing /by Jessica KingAs digital transformation continues to rewrite the rules of supporter engagement, nonprofits must harness the power of data to stay relevant and impactful. No matter your cause, understanding the latest nonprofit marketing statistics is more than a strategic advantage; it’s a necessity.
To help you stay ahead of the curve, we’ll share key statistics and trends that are shaping nonprofit marketing best practices this year. These insights will help you craft messages that not only reach your audience but inspire them like never before. We’ll separate this research into these key categories:
Let’s jump into the most compelling and informative research your nonprofit needs to know to adapt, innovate, and succeed.
The State of Nonprofit Marketing: Current Challenges
The nonprofit sector continues to evolve rapidly, influenced by technological advancements and changing donor behaviors. Understanding the current state of nonprofit marketing is crucial for organizations striving to make an impact.
Let’s explore some key challenges nonprofits are facing in their marketing efforts and the strategies they’re adopting to overcome them:
By understanding and addressing these challenges, your nonprofit can enhance its outreach, engage a broader audience, and drive greater impact in your community.
General Nonprofit Marketing Statistics
What These Nonprofit Marketing Statistics Mean
No matter your campaign, taking a multichannel approach will ensure you reach the largest audience possible, helping to increase conversions. Just be sure to focus heavily on storytelling and personalization to boost engagement, response rates, and revenue. Since you’ll likely drive traffic to your website across these channels, ensure your website is well designed, mobile optimized, and makes it easy for users to get involved.
Nonprofit Content Marketing Statistics
What These Nonprofit Marketing Statistics Mean
Content marketing is more important for inspiring supporters than ever. From blog posts to case studies, your nonprofit should test different types of content to engage your audience. To catch people’s attention, integrate your written content with diverse visual content, such as infographics and videos, as these formats are ideal for message retention.
Prioritizing SEO strategies is especially crucial, yet many nonprofits overlook this channel. Create a dedicated SEO plan, complete with comprehensive keyword research, regular content updates, and authority-building strategies. You can even use Google Ads to complement your organic efforts, driving targeted traffic to your site while you build up your SEO presence and gain valuable insights into keyword performance.
Nonprofit Advertising Statistics
What These Nonprofit Marketing Statistics Mean
Nonprofit advertising can significantly enhance your nonprofit’s visibility with target audiences, particularly through digital channels like search and social media. Leveraging tools like Google Ads not only helps nonprofits reach prospects effectively but also provides a substantial ROI.
If you haven’t already, apply for the Google Ad Grants program, which offers approved nonprofits up to $120,000 in annual ad credits, by following the steps in the video below. This generous grant can significantly boost your organization’s visibility and outreach efforts. Also, don’t hesitate to reach out if you need help applying or crafting compelling ads for your cause.
Want to learn more about this valuable opportunity to enhance your digital marketing strategy and connect with more potential donors and supporters? Check out our free Google Ad Grant Impact Report!
Social Media Marketing Statistics For Nonprofits
What These Nonprofit Marketing Statistics Mean
Social media provides nonprofits with unparalleled reach and organic engagement opportunities. Platforms like Facebook, with its vast daily user base, significantly impact donor behavior, making it a key channel for driving donations. Additionally, being active on your nonprofit’s Instagram and LinkedIn allows nonprofits to connect with a broader audience, share their mission, and collaborate with influencers. Pay attention to which platforms your supporters prefer and focus your efforts on those for the best results.
Email Marketing Statistics For Nonprofits
What These Nonprofit Marketing Statistics Mean
Email remains one of the best marketing channels for nonprofits. It offers a direct and personal way to keep supporters informed. Effective email campaigns, particularly those that are personalized and sent consistently, can significantly enhance donor relationships and increase fundraising revenue. Consider how your nonprofit can strategically use email marketing to engage supporters at every stage of their journey with your cause, whether they’ve just subscribed or are already loyal donors or volunteers.
Emerging Nonprofit Marketing Trends To Pay Attention To
It’s no secret that the nonprofit sector has been embracing digital technologies to enhance outreach. Organizations are increasingly leveraging social media, email marketing, and other digital strategies to inspire their supporters and beneficiaries. This digital shift has not only expanded the reach of many organizations but also introduced new ways to measure and enhance impact. Currently, nonprofits are focusing heavily on these current best practices:
Optimizing Nonprofit Websites
More than ever, nonprofit websites are going beyond just providing general mission information. Modern sites are focusing on these elements:
Not only does prioritizing accessibility help with meeting nonprofit website requirements, but it also ensures that any potential supporters and beneficiaries can interact with their websites and get involved.
Paying For Ad Space
Today’s nonprofits find it challenging to stand out in the crowded online space, so many organizations are recognizing the power of paid advertising on non-traditional platforms. These organizations have to be thoughtful about their spending habits to avoid wasting donors’ contributions, though.
Maximizing ad ROI involves targeting specific demographics and interests, selecting the right platforms, and continuously monitoring and adjusting campaigns for effectiveness. Utilizing analytics tools can help track performance, understand user behavior, and optimize ad spend, too.
While paying for ads is out of reach for smaller organizations, many nonprofits are leveraging the Google Ad Grant to alleviate expenses and avoid misusing donations. Using this grant, nonprofits can increase their visibility on the world’s most popular search engine without incurring additional costs. That ensures that more donor funds go directly towards their mission-driven activities.
Check out this example nonprofit ad from Claire’s Place that highlights its mission, lists its services, and points Google users to key web pages to get involved:
Leaning Into Visual Storytelling
Storytelling is a key strategy for inspiring support. With advancements in technology, nonprofits can now easily use powerful photography and produce compelling videos that tell those stories, form emotional connections, and resonate with web users. Modern camera technology and editing software have made creating high-quality visual content more affordable for nonprofits.
Plus, platforms like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok prioritize visual content. By sharing engaging visual stories on these platforms, nonprofits are expanding their reach and attracting new supporters who might not be engaged through traditional methods. Follow this nonprofit marketing trend, and you’re much likelier to inspire action, too!
Personalizing Outreach
Generic messages sent to your entire supporter base aren’t enough to inspire support. Today’s consumers feel frustrated by impersonal website experiences, with 72% of people reporting that they’ll only engage with personalized messages. Luckily, technology makes this aspect of nonprofit marketing much simpler!
Nonprofits are relying on their technology to segment their supporters into meaningful groups, such as small donors, recurring donors, corporate partners, volunteers, and event participants. That way, they can send relevant engagement opportunities or updates on programs those individuals care about.
Using Generative AI
The use of generative AI is snowballing throughout digital marketing. Tools like ChatGPT can help streamline content production by producing outlines, content ideas, and even publication schedules. They can significantly reduce the time spent on routine tasks, allowing your team to focus on more strategic activities.
However, you should not rely solely on AI for content creation. Put simply, AI-generated content isn’t as user-friendly or original as human-written content. Your nonprofit marketing team understands your mission and those who will read your content unlike anyone else. Your organization’s unique voice, creativity, and insider perspectives are irreplaceable and vital for authentic engagement.
Start Tapping Into These Nonprofit Marketing Trends
Now, it’s time to put these nonprofit marketing statistics to use! As you reimagine your strategies, be open to experimenting with new marketing techniques while maintaining your core set of data-backed methods. Focus on what yields the highest ROI and remember that this doesn’t just mean immediate ROI. After all, investing in a long-term audience growth strategy is more important than instantaneous, short-term results.
To continue learning about the latest nonprofit marketing best practices, check out these resources:
13 Must-Have Technology Grants for Nonprofits This Year
/in Nonprofit Fundraising, Nonprofit Marketing /by Jessica KingAccording to Nonprofit Tech for Good, many nonprofits are leveraging technology to enhance their processes—79% use automation technology in online fundraising, and 15% even have artificial intelligence software in place to predict donor behavior. Not every organization, however, has the funds to stay at the cutting edge of technology.
That’s where nonprofit technology grants come in. These grants supply the necessary funds for forward-thinking nonprofits to gain access to software solutions and resources that will magnify their impact. In this guide, we’ll cover:
To achieve bigger and better results, nonprofits must continually adopt and adapt to advances in technology that streamline essential processes such as fundraising, marketing, and donor engagement. By doing so, your organization can free up more capacity for what matters most: bettering the lives of those you serve.
What are technology grants for nonprofits?
Nonprofit technology grants provide essential funding for organizations to acquire and implement cutting-edge tools and software, significantly enhancing their impact and efficiency.
These grants can cover a wide range of technological needs, including:
While general grants can sometimes address technological needs, it’s often more effective to apply for grants specifically tailored to technology. Tailored technology grants are designed to address the unique challenges and opportunities associated with implementing and managing technological solutions, providing more targeted support and resources.
Where can nonprofits find technology grants?
Like most grants, technology grants are typically offered by three primary sources:
No matter your organization’s focus—whether you’re an environmental nonprofit or a nonprofit hospital—access to the latest technology enables you to serve your beneficiaries more effectively and achieve better outcomes. Look to these sources to find an opportunity that matches your organization’s needs.
How can technology grants support nonprofits?
Depending on your specific goals, a technology grant can empower your nonprofit to:
Once you’ve pinpointed your organization’s specific needs for technology funding, it’s time to find a funder that best aligns with your mission and values. The more well-matched you are to the grantmaking organization, the more likely you’ll succeed in winning the grant.
13 Top Technology Grants for Nonprofits
Use these nonprofit technology grants as a jumping-off point to your pursuit of technology funding:
1. Google Ad Grants
Since its creation, the Google Ad Grants program has provided over $10 billion in free advertising to nonprofits. All eligible organizations can receive $10,000 monthly to bid on keywords for ads that will appear on Google’s search results pages. With these ads, you can promote key pages on your nonprofit’s website, such as your donation page or event registration page, to generate more support for your cause.
To meet the program’s eligibility criteria, your organization must:
This nonprofit technology grant can equip your organization with a powerful tool for spreading the word about your mission and attracting more supporters to your cause. To ensure that you secure your grant and make the most of it, consider turning to a Google Ad Grants agency like Getting Attention that can take care of the entire process for you.
2. Salesforce’s Power of Us Program
Salesforce is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides a comprehensive suite of cloud-based applications and services. The Power of Us Program has provided discounted CRM technology access to over 56,000 nonprofits and educational institutions. To join these ranks, your organization must:
You can explore the full list of requirements here. When awarding grants, the Salesforce Foundation prioritizes alignment with its grantmaking goals, demonstrated program impact, a commitment to measuring and adapting, and a strong leadership team that reflects the community it’s addressing.
3. Twilio
Twilio is an SMS and messaging platform that empowers social good organizations to extend their reach. In 2023, an incredible 20,000 organizations used the platform to send over 22 billion messages.
Through its Impact Fund, Twilio awarded $7.3 million in grants and investments to expand access to transformative communications technology for social impact causes last year. Organizations that are eligible for this nonprofit technology grant funding must:
Currently, Twilio is funding projects in digital transformation, humanitarian assistance, and climate action. To receive an invitation to apply, sign up for the Impact Access Program, which offers additional benefits such as discounts on Twilio products.
4. Okta for Good
Okta is a comprehensive identity and access management platform that offers organizations secure single sign-on capabilities, authentication and authorization, password management, user provisioning, security and compliance, and mobile device management.
Okta for Good’s Nonprofit Technology Initiative strives to meet nonprofits’ technology needs by supplying $10 million in philanthropic funding. They’re also providing an additional $10 million via in-kind donations of their technology and services. To be selected for these funds and donations, nonprofits must:
Whether your nonprofit is seeking to improve its data security or move to the cloud, Okta’s focus on digital transformation is worth looking into for any organization interested in technology improvements.
5. Box Impact Fund
Box Impact Fund supports nonprofits on their path to adopting technology that will enhance their daily operations and work. To meet Box Impact Fund’s eligibility requirements, organizations must:
Box lists four specific criteria for evaluating grant applications: alignment, impact, inclusion, and scale. Ensure that your organization matches this funder’s priorities to set your application up for success.
6. Cisco Product Grant Program
Cisco is a multinational technology conglomerate that designs, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, telecommunications equipment, and other high-technology products.
The Cisco Product Grant Program supplies networking and communications technology to nonprofits focused on crisis response, education, economic empowerment, and climate change. To be eligible for the program, organizations must:
Cisco accepts grant proposals year-round and reviews them quarterly. To ensure your nonprofit meets all the criteria, take this eligibility quiz that Cisco provides on its website.
7. Microsoft Tech for Social Impact
Microsoft is a leading multinational technology company. The company launched Microsoft Tech for Social Impact to provide discounted and donated Microsoft tools to nonprofits. These tools can empower your nonprofit to securely manage supporters’ data, reduce operating costs, and enable remote opportunities for staff and volunteers.
To be eligible for Microsoft’s nonprofit programs, your organization must:
One of Microsoft’s most popular nonprofit technology grants is the Azure grant, which awards applicants with $2,000 credits per year and access to the complete portfolio of Azure products and cloud services. On its website, Microsoft provides a step-by-step registration process to access available tech.
8. Technology Innovation Awards
Tech Forward is a nonprofit technology conference that unites organizations to explore how technology can enhance their missions. At the conference, the host provides $10,000 through its annual Technology Innovation Awards to support nonprofits seeking funding for technology-related projects. To be eligible for this grant, your organization must:
As part of the nonprofit technology grant application, you’ll need to present information such as your mission, services, and key constituents, along with a full technology project proposal.
9. TechBridge
TechBridge makes enterprise-grade software to empower nonprofits to eliminate generational poverty. TechBridge’s Dream Big Grant provides an opportunity for nonprofits to acquire technology solutions that will enhance their operations and boost their impact. To be eligible for one of these grants, your organization must:
The application process for one of these technology grants for nonprofits includes an eligibility check, an application essay, and a video submission.
10. Verizon Foundation
Verizon offers invitation-only grants to support nonprofits in three main areas: digital inclusion, climate protection, and human prosperity. Nonprofits must contact their local community relations manager about receiving an invitation. If you’re approved to apply, you’ll still have to meet these eligibility requirements:
Furthermore, if you request funds for IT infrastructure improvements that total more than 20% of the grant’s total direct costs, you must provide specific details on how your organization will use those IT assets in your grant application.
11. HP Technology for Community
HP is a multinational information technology company that develops and sells hardware, software, and services. The company supplies grants to nonprofits so that they can purchase technology to better serve their purposes. To be eligible for HP Technology for Community, organizations must:
While qualified nonprofits can apply from across the country, HP will give preference to those operating in or near the site communities listed in its requirements.
12. The Change Happens Foundation
The Change Happens Foundation is a private nonprofit foundation dedicated to supporting nonprofits focused on creating social change around science, the environment, and education. The foundation offers several grants in these areas. To be eligible, organizations must:
Once you’ve determined your nonprofit’s eligibility, you must submit a Letter of Inquiry as a first-time applicant to determine if the foundation’s interests align with your request. Organizations accepted for further consideration can then submit their grant proposals.
13. TechSoup
TechSoup provides nonprofits and libraries with discounted technology products, services, and training to enhance their mission-driven work. While not explicitly a nonprofit technology grant, it provides incredible offers from leading brands like Microsoft, Adobe, and Zoom.
To be validated by TechSoup, your organization must:
TechSoup even provides a convenient eligibility quiz. Before applying, explore TechSoup’s full product catalog to determine how access to different technologies will impact your organization.
How do I find the right technology grant for my nonprofit?
This list is a great starting point, but there are a few easy steps you should take to choose the best grant for your team. With the right approach, you’ll be well on your way to securing funding for transformative technology initiatives that will enhance your nonprofit’s efficiency, effectiveness, and overall impact.
1. Refer to your goals and mission.
Before starting your search for grant opportunities, it’s important to root yourself in your organization’s goals and mission. This ensures that you only identify and apply for technology grants that are well-suited to your nonprofit.
Remember that each grantmaking organization has its own mission and interests. As a result, they’re more prone to fund nonprofits that align with their own priorities and generate the kind of impact that they’re looking to see.
2. Conduct research.
Among possible technology grant sources, there are around 127,595 foundations in the United States alone. Because of this, it’s essential to be strategic in your research to find the best options. Follow these best practices to get started:
Review each nonprofit technology grant’s application criteria to ensure that you’re eligible to apply. For instance, some grantmakers may require your organization to be located in a specific region or area.
3. Prepare your technology grant application.
Once you’ve found a nonprofit technology grant that you’re interested in applying for, personalize your application according to the research you’ve conducted on the funder. An effective grant application clearly defines your nonprofit’s needs, leverages storytelling to convey your impact, and specifies realistic goals for the funding you’re requesting.
4. Consider seeking expert help.
If your nonprofit wants additional guidance to make your technology grant applications stand out, consider partnering with a nonprofit grant consultant or a tailored marketing agency.
Top nonprofit grant consultants will devote themselves to ensuring that your organization’s grant efforts succeed. Plus, those that specialize in your industry understand your unique needs. For instance, a church might hire an agency to find relevant grant opportunities available to religious organizations.
For a specific example, Getting Attention’s experts fully understand the Google Ad Grants program. From confirming your eligibility to complying with the latest regulations, we know the program’s intricacies and can help you acquire and retain the grant. When you partner with us, our team will take the time to fully understand your mission so we can craft compelling ads that accurately represent your work and inspire likely supporters.
Set high expectations for your technology grant consultant and choose one who will do the following:
A nonprofit grant consultant can be instrumental in helping your organization secure nonprofit technology grant funding, especially if you have limited time and resources to carry out the entire process effectively.
Wrapping Up
New technologies are constantly emerging, and along with them come better ways for nonprofits to serve their communities and make a lasting difference. Figuring out how to incorporate these tools into your fundraising, marketing, and communications strategies is essential to setting your organization up for success.
Government agencies, foundations, and corporations recognize this priority as well. Because of this, there are numerous technology grants for nonprofits available to fund your initiatives—you just need to know where to look and how to pinpoint the right opportunities to pursue.
For more information on grants and how to deepen your nonprofit’s impact, explore these resources:
Creating Meaningful Messages: Copywriting For Nonprofits
/in Nonprofit Communications, Nonprofit Marketing /by Jessica KingWhen it comes to marketing your nonprofit, chances are that you’ll be doing a lot of writing. From fundraising appeal emails and thank-you letters to social media announcements and website content, almost all of your nonprofit’s external communications involve text.
As such, this means that every nonprofit, whether they have a dedicated copywriter or not, does copywriting! However, just because every nonprofit is doing it doesn’t necessarily mean every nonprofit has a dedicated strategy.
To improve the quality of your nonprofit’s copywriting, we’ll explore these topics:
The strength of your copywriting impacts nearly every aspect of how donors interact with your nonprofit. It influences everything from whether they see your organization as professional and reliable to whether they understand your donation page or click on your search ads.
To set your text advertising strategy off on the right foot, let’s first explore a brief overview of copywriting for nonprofits.
Why Do Nonprofits Need Copywriting?
Copywriting is the practice of creating written content for the purpose of persuading an audience to take action. For instance, all of the text that makes up a Google Ad—the headline and description—would be considered copy, and the process of creating that copy is copywriting.
However, copywriting includes more than just advertisements. Again, copywriting consists of all written text created to persuade an audience to take a specific action. This means copywriting for nonprofits includes:
Basically, any time you compose a message meant for an external audience, you are engaging in copywriting.
Types of Copywriting for Nonprofits
While copywriting is a broad category that includes an extensive range of materials, we can still divide nonprofit copywriting into three general categories. These categories are based on the specific types of content you would likely hire a copywriter to produce and encompass most types of nonprofit copy.
Advertising
When it comes to advertising, there are generally two kinds to know: outbound and inbound.
Outbound marketing consists of creating content to be pushed out to a wide audience, regardless of their past interactions, or lack thereof, with your nonprofit. Most types of advertising, such as pay-per-click ads on search engines and social media, are considered outbound marketing. In contrast, inbound marketing usually focuses on content marketing, which we’ll discuss in the next section.
Advertising copy primarily consists of the text on ads. For example, you’ll be conducting advertising copywriting if you create fundraising flyers, run an ad in the newspaper, prepare a script to be read in a radio ad, or use the Google Ad Grant to run search engine ads.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating content for the purpose of generating audience interest, which can then lead to conversions.
For example, a nonprofit like the Nonprofit Leadership Alliance (NLA) sells nonprofit professional development courses, like how to improve fundraising, leadership, and organizational skills. To inspire their audience, the NLA produces blog content that provides advice to nonprofit professionals. Individuals impressed by their expertise will then likely continue exploring their website and potentially sign up for a course.
For other nonprofits, written content marketing might consist of:
While videos and research reports may need more than just writing, copywriting is still a core part of producing these materials. After all, someone needs to write your video’s script, and translating complex topics and research into layman’s terms is an essential copywriting skill.
Grant Writing
Grant writing is a highly specialized type of nonprofit copywriting and requires a unique skill set. While some nonprofit professionals may take on grant writing responsibilities, many organizations opt to work with freelance grant writers or take grant writing courses.
Ultimately, most grant writing skills are good for any writer to have, such as the ability to write persuasively, write to a specific audience, and meet tight deadlines. However, because of the pressure to produce successful grant proposals, it’s often worthwhile to work with a professional grant writer rather than attempt to wing it yourself.
Copywriting Strategies for Nonprofits
Whether you plan to write your own copy, provide tips to your marketing team, or hire a third-party copywriting firm, these strategies can help you create and identify strong nonprofit copy.
1. Have a clear goal.
Everything your nonprofit writes should have a purpose. Before writing templates for your fundraising appeals, thank-you messages, or event invitations, consider what your goal is.
For some types of content, your goal will be more obvious than others. For example, it’s common advice not to ask donors to give again in thank you messages. This is because the goal behind thank-you messages is to thank the donor to build the relationship and push them to restart their donor journey. Theoretically, asking for another donation immediately would cut out the middle steps and be more efficient, but doing so would fail to build a relationship, which is what helps you secure their next gift.
As this example illustrates, most pieces of nonprofit copywriting have short-term goals. Think of each message as a stepping stone in your overall nonprofit marketing plan. For instance, let’s say your nonprofit publishes and sells nonfiction books. To secure sales, you might create advertising emails with the following goals:
Ultimately, all of these messages have the same goal of driving sales. However, each has a more specific goal, such as provoking a specific emotion, that cumulates in earning sales.
2. Know your audience.
Your nonprofit now has clear goals for its copywriting, but those aren’t the only goals you need to take into account. You know what your nonprofit wants. However, what does your audience want, and how can you factor that into your copy?
For example, consider Google Ads. Google uses keywords to find content relevant to users’ searches. However, it doesn’t just give out the highest rankings to the content that uses the keyword a certain number of times. Instead, it considers user intent and presents visitors with content that likely aligns with their interests.
Let’s explore this example of a Google Ad for the keyword “youth mentoring services.”
Google and the copywriters for this ad are making a few inferences about their audience. These include that the user:
These assumptions were not made haphazardly. Rather, both Google and Big Brother Big Sister Atlanta conducted audience research to determine what the average person searching this keyword wants to accomplish.
For your own audience research, analyze your supporter base. Explore donor data to identify trends in giving behavior, demographic information, and engagement rates. If you lack the information you feel you need to make inferences about your audience, consider surveying them directly or purchasing a data append to update and correct your donor data.
3. Prioritize clarity.
Audiences need to understand what you’re trying to say in your copy. While you may want to present a certain tone in your writing or create prose that stands out, do not do so if you are sacrificing clarity.
There are many principles for writing clearly and concisely. While we can’t conduct a course in writing right here, a few key style lessons that anyone can quickly pick up and apply to their writing include:
Additionally, there’s no shame in needing a basic grammar refresh. Before writing your next fundraising appeal, ensure you know where to place your commas, how to avoid run-on and incomplete sentences, and exactly what a semi-colon is for.
4. Use storytelling strategies.
People tend to remember stories better than lists of facts. While compelling statistics and research certainly can be persuasive, factual evidence is usually most effective at converting those already interested in your cause.
To generate that interest, your copy needs emotional storytelling. Storytelling doesn’t mean writing a novel but rather sharing brief anecdotes and examples that have a beginning, middle, and end. A few key elements of nonprofit storytelling include:
When it comes to sourcing stories, you can interview beneficiaries, supporters, volunteers, team members, or anyone else related to your cause you think has a strong story to tell. When translating these interviews into prose, you can do some editing, such as summarizing and cutting tangents, but do not make up new details or remove essential ones. Doing so is unethical and can damage your credibility if discovered.
5. Grab readers’ attention.
Everyone hates clickbait, and your nonprofit should not use it in your copywriting. However, you can use a few lessons from clickbait to create compelling subject lines and post titles that grab interest. For example, try:
Additionally, while this guide is here to talk about copywriting, images and videos can be exceptionally useful for capturing attention. Videos, photos, and graphic design elements break up text, making your pages easier to read and more likely to grab the attention of users scrolling past.
6. Create a brand guide.
If you have several copywriters on your team, intend to hire an external copywriting service, or plan to let volunteers represent your nonprofit, you need a brand guide. Brand guides contain information about your nonprofit’s logo, brand colors, audience, marketing goals, and copywriting practices.
For copywriting, your brand guide should cover:
A brand guide helps every aspect of your marketing strategy, from copywriting to graphic design to presentations. Make your guide easily accessible so you can share it with new team members, volunteers, and third-party services.
7. Have a lot of ideas.
Not every idea you have for new content will be a winner. As part of the writing process, be prepared to come up with lots of ideas, draft several messages, and ultimately scrap most of them to find the best version possible.
As part of the brainstorming process, try:
To ensure the ideas you choose are the right ones, have someone edit all of your writing. Along with helping to catch typos, grammar errors, and stylistic issues that might slip past an automatic spellchecker, editors can fact-check, point out areas that are unclear or unpersuasive, and ultimately share whether they think the piece will succeed with your audience.
8. Issue calls to action.
We’ve already touched on calls to action (CTAs) briefly, but given their importance in nonprofit marketing, let’s dive a bit further into what makes a compelling CTA:
Outside of copywriting, for the actual design of your CTAs, use your brand colors strategically to make them stand out. For instance, if your colors are white and red, like the American Heart Association, you might have white text on a red button.
9. Follow SEO best practices.
As part of marketing your content, your copywriters should be aware of SEO best practices. SEO stands for search engine optimization, and as the name implies, it’s the process of optimizing your content to rank highly on search engine results pages. When your website content appears for relevant keywords, your website can attract more supporters, customers, and advocates.
A tricky part of SEO writing is knowing how to use keywords. Optimizing your content for specific keywords increases the chances it will rank for that specific word or phrase. However, overloading your content with these terms can result in keyword stuffing, which creates a negative user experience and can get your website penalized if a search engine picks up on it.
When it comes to keyword optimization, copywriters can generally rely on this advice:
Additionally, consider each page’s meta description. While meta descriptions are not taken into account for search engine rankings, they can determine whether a user decides to click on your content. Think of SEO as getting your content in front of users and the meta description as determining whether they actually click on it.
Additional Nonprofit Marketing Resources
Copywriting is a core part of all nonprofit marketing, and when done well, it’s one of your most reliable tools for connecting with supporters, no matter where they are in their donor journey. To take your copywriting to the next level and secure more high-value leads, follow the tips in this guide or consider working with a third-party copywriting agency.
To improve your nonprofit marketing strategy even further, check out these resources:
What To Know About Google My Business for Nonprofits
/in Nonprofit Marketing, Nonprofit Tools /by Jessica KingWhat if you could provide Google users looking for your nonprofit with all the relevant details they need to get in touch with you right from the search engine results page? With Google My Business, now called Google Business Profiles, this has fortunately been a reality for some time.
Despite the name of this feature saying “business,” your nonprofit can also create a Google Business Profile! To help you get started, this guide will dive into Google Business Profiles, answering the following questions:
Ultimately, Google Business Profiles are incredibly simple and easy to set up. Once complete, your nonprofit can attract new supporters, increase its visibility, and present itself as a trustworthy, reputable organization to Google users.
What is Google My Business?
If you’ve ever Googled a business, you’ve likely noticed something appear above or to the side of search results that provides a lot of information about the organization you just searched for. This is a Google Business Profile.
A Google Business Profile is a summary of your business that Google will show users searching for your organization. These profiles are primarily managed by the organization they’re about, and they can contain as much or as little information as you want about your nonprofit. Although, it’s better to lean on the side of more information.
For example, let’s take a look at all of the elements of nonprofit Erika’s Lighthouse’s Google Business Profile:
Plus, there’s even more you can add to your profile, such as:
Plus, in addition to appearing in Google search results, Google Business Profiles also appear in Google Maps. For instance, here’s Erika’s Lighthouse again, but on Google Maps:
Is Google My Business Free?
Yes! Any organization can create a Google Business Profile for free. Google wants as many organizations as possible to create and maintain Google Business Profiles because of how they improve the user experience.
Can Nonprofits Use Google My Business?
Yes again! While Google Business Profiles were created with businesses in mind, nonprofits can use them as well.
Through this no-cost program, your nonprofit receives the following benefits:
Boosted visibility.
If you’re serious about search engine advertising, creating a Google Business Profile should be one of your first priorities.
When creating your profile, you will need to choose the “Business Category” that best fits your nonprofit. “Non-profit organization” is included as a category, but thanks to the extensive list, you may be able to select a category that aligns more closely with your mission and services, like “Environmental protection organization,” “Mental health service, and “Food bank” to name just a few options relevant to nonprofits.
This categorization is primarily for search engine optimization purposes. Picking the right category improves the chances that your pages and business profile will be shown to individuals searching for organizations like yours.
This means users looking specifically for your nonprofit will receive additional information about your organization immediately after Googling you, and Google will also have additional indicators of what keywords to push your content for, increasing your page rankings.
Plus, if your nonprofit has services, products, or programs for sale, you are at least slightly operating like a business! As such the opportunity to showcase product photos, respond to customer reviews, and get your organization literally on the map is just as important for your nonprofit as it would be for a for-profit organization.
Location-based traffic.
You’ve likely had the experience of searching for a specific service, product, or type of organization without referencing your location. However, Google still pulls up results for local businesses.
Google has extensive location data for both individual searchers and the various organizations using Google Business Profiles. As such, it uses geolocation to connect searchers with businesses and nonprofits near them to improve the user experience.
Additionally, as mentioned earlier, Google Business Profiles also apply to Google Maps. If you’ve ever opened up your map app to see what’s nearby, Google pulls from Google Business Profiles to direct you toward local organizations.
By sharing your address with Google, you can increase your chances of connecting with local volunteers, customers, beneficiaries, and donors.
Plus, your nonprofit doesn’t need a physical storefront to participate either. If you have a physical location you want donors, beneficiaries, volunteers, and anyone else to know about, you can add your address to your account. If not, you choose your city or area code instead. For instance, if you’re a small organization working out of someone’s house, you likely don’t want to share your address.
Improved credibility.
Almost every organization around has a Google Business Profile due to either setting it up themselves or having an unverified listing created (more on that later). As such, organizations that come up blank on Google can seem suspicious. After all, would you buy from a business with hundreds of reviews or one with none? Chances are the former since 75% of consumers “regularly” or “always” read online reviews before doing business with an organization.
Maintaining a Google Business Profile shows supporters that your organization is active, trustworthy, and has real humans behind it. Plus, with the reviews, the Question & Answer, and Highlights sections, you have plenty of opportunities to talk to customers, supporters, and beneficiaries directly, address their questions, and promote your nonprofit.
How Can My Nonprofit Get Started With Google My Business?
Generally, your nonprofit can create a Google Business Profile using one of two methods:
Set up a business profile.
If your nonprofit doesn’t already have a Google Business Profile, you can create one by navigating to Google Maps, opening the menu, and clicking “Add your business.”
From there, either sign into your business account if you already have one. If not, you can create one by following these steps:
During this process, you can also choose whether to opt in to receive updates and recommendations from Google about how to improve your profile. These can be useful if you are new to Google Business Profiles or want to stay in the loop when it comes to Google’s recommended best practices.
Claim an unverified listing.
To be as compressive as possible, Google will auto-generate listings for some organizations that have yet to create Google Business Profiles themselves. If you’ve ever seen the buttons that say “Own this business?” you might be looking at an unverified listing.
To claim an unverified listing, follow these steps:
Google can take up to five business days to confirm your verification, and updates to your profile may start appearing a few weeks after your verification. Fortunately, you can start updating your profile before verification is confirmed. The changes will only go live after Google confirms your ownership.
How Can Nonprofits Make the Most of a Google My Business?
Ultimately, your Google Business Profile is as useful as you choose to make it. To get the most out of this free service, we recommend:
If your nonprofit is ready to expand its presence on Google by creating a Google Business Profile, we recommend taking just one more step and applying for the Google Ad Grant.
The Google Ad Grant provides participating nonprofits with $10,000 in ad credits every month, allowing you to promote your nonprofit on search engine results pages for free. By targeting keywords related to your nonprofit, you can connect with high-value leads who are likely to be interested in your cause, make a donation, or purchase your offerings.
To get started with the Google Ad Grant, partner with a Google-certified Ad Grant agency, like Getting Attention! As an officially recognized Ad Grant agency, we’re in the loop with any changes to Google’s Ad Grant program. This means we bring the latest knowledge on what’s trending on Google to help your nonprofit apply for the ad grant, create ads, and reinstate your account if it ever gets deactivated.
More Google Resources for Nonprofits
A Google Business Profile literally puts your nonprofit on the map. Supporters can learn more about your nonprofit as soon as they search for you, while your local community will start noticing you popping up nearby. In other words, Google Business Profiles lets you expand your audience and source high-quality leads just by filling out basic information about your nonprofit.
To take advantage of even more Google resources for nonprofits, explore these resources: