Non-Profit Marketing: How To Craft A Marketing Plan For A Non-Profit Organisation
Marketing for a non-profit organisation demands a unique approach. Unlike for-profit businesses, non-profit marketing is focused on promoting nonprofits’ missions and values, rather than products or services.
Nonprofit marketing plans help to provide a blueprint of how organisations can engage with their supporters, donors and stakeholders while helping achieve their fundraising goals. Nonprofit marketing also helps nonprofit organisations (NPOs) to communicate their messages, raise awareness about their causes – thereby enhancing support from donors, volunteers, staff and partners.
Below are reasons why nonprofit marketing plans are important and some essential steps to crafting a powerful marketing plan for a non-profit organisation.
Reasons Marketing for Non-Profit Organisations Is So Important
Don’t overlook the importance of marketing in a nonprofit organisation.
Around the world, marketing for nonprofit organisations helps charities achieve their goals, fulfill their missions. Nonprofit marketing plans also enable them to continue to deliver successful and impactful programs.
These are some of the reasons why non-profit marketing is critical:
Nonprofit marketing plans help enhance awareness about charities and their causes by helping nonprofits articulate and communicate their message and achievements.
By communicating transparently and engaging authentically, nonprofits can build trustworthiness amongst their supporters.
Successful marketing also helps garner support for nonprofits, which can take the form of attracting more volunteers, donations, or advocates who help champion their cause.
Nonprofit marketing is intertwined with fundraising, helping to mobilise and accelerate fundraising efforts and build strong networks and partnerships with potential donors and supporters.
Marketing can also help nonprofits communicate their causes in a way that helps people better understand the cause, and what they can do to help support the cause. This can also help establish nonprofits as credible sources of information and allies in championing specific causes.
Key Components of a Non-Profit Marketing Plan
For nonprofits developing a nonprofit marketing plan, the following will help you better understand the key components to include in an effective plan.
While using a nonprofit marketing template to develop your marketing plan may be a good place to start, it’s important to fully understand your organisation’s strengths, weaknesses, budget constraints, and in-house capacity to implement the plan.
It may be worth considering the services of a professional nonprofit marketing agency like Green Socials to assist you in developing a robust marketing strategy and to help you implement parts of the plan where your organisation may lack the capacity or technical skills.
Understand Your Audience
The first step in any marketing plan is to understand your audience. In the case of non-profits, your audience may include donors, volunteers, members, and the communities you serve.
By understanding your audience and who you are trying to reach, your nonprofit can personalise its communications so that messaging is more relevant, impactful and effective.
Understanding your audience’s needs, interests, and motivations can help you tailor your message effectively.
To gain an in-depth understanding of your target audience, consider finding out more about your audience, including the following:
Demographics: What is the average age and gender of your audience? Where do they live (specific towns, cities, regions, or countries), and what is their average income level? Also consider other metrics such as their level of education.
Values and interests: What values, lifestyles, and interests do most of your audience aspire to? Finding out what they value and interests them helps you tailor messaging in a way that they will find most engaging, valuable and relatable.
Behaviour: What do most of your audience do online? Are there specific online communities that they are part of, discussion forums where they are most active, and specific activities that they are most involved in online? Finding this out may help you reach and engage with your audience better.
Supporter personas: nonprofits can develop personas of their supporters to help them understand their motivations, values, behaviour and needs.
Communication preference: consider which forms of communication your audience prefers. This may include email, newsletters, social media updates, and more.
Define Your Goals
Your marketing plan should be guided by the goals of your organisation. Are you trying to raise awareness, attract more volunteers, or increase donations? Defining your goals can help you develop a targeted marketing strategy.
Here are three things that you may want to develop for your nonprofit to boost your marketing efforts:
A bold and succinct mission statement: this should communicate the purpose of your organisation and should inspire your audience to support your organisation.
A vision for your organisation: Having a vision statement helps define your long-term goals and the impact you want to achieve.
SMART goals: develop goals for your organisation that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART), which are also aligned with your mission statement and vision.
An example of SMART goals for nonprofit marketing
As an example, your marketing goals may include boosting your website traffic by 30% over the next year or forming 20 new corporate partnerships. You may also want to increase social media engagement by 15% or increase your social media followers on a specific channel by 10% over the next 6 months.
Develop Your Message
Once you understand your audience and goals, it's time to develop your message as part of your overall marketing strategy. Remember, your message should be more than just what you do; it should convey why what you do matters.
Nonprofit messaging should also be designed to resonate with your audience, in a way that they can easily relate to and be motivated and inspired by, your message.
Your messaging should embed your nonprofit’s passion and commitment to your cause, helping to foster emotional connections with your audience.
When you develop your messaging, also consider defining:
A consistent brand identity: Developing a brand identity includes defining your brand’s logo, fonts, colours and your tone of voice. Setting guidelines that everyone in your charity can follow, helps ensure consistency. A consistent brand identity helps your supporters to easily identify your organisation and can help foster trust and credibility.
Your key messages and calls to action: Taking time to clearly identify your nonprofit’s key messages helps to make them more impactful and to communicate them in a way that’s tailored to your audience.
Your unique storytelling approach: Many brands use storytelling to create an emotional connection between their causes and brands, to help foster support for their organisations. Developing your unique approach to storytelling can also help show the impact that your organisation has, and can motivate people to support your cause.
Select Your Channels
There are many ways to reach your audience, from traditional media to social media to email marketing.
The channels you choose should depend on where your audience is and what kind of message you want to convey.
Most marketers opt for a mix of channels which includes both traditional and digital ones to reach your audience. This includes social media, email marketing, websites, search engine optimization (SEO), events, PR, content marketing, influencer marketing, and print media.
Next, you will need to outline strategies for each channel that you’ve selected. For example, your content marketing plan will include specifics of how you will leverage your blog posts, infographics and YouTube channel to achieve your goals and engage your audience.
There are many different types of nonprofit marketing. There’s an art to developing content that engages your audience and boosts engagement, while showcasing your impact and inspiring people to take action and support your cause.
✨ Does your nonprofit have a strong digital marketing, content marketing and social media presence? Green Socials can help you develop plans and strategies to elevate your nonprofit and engage your audience using personalised digital marketing, email marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing tactics. Find out more about our services and get in touch to book a free discovery call. ✨
Measure and Adjust
Finally, it's crucial to measure the success of your marketing efforts and adjust as necessary.
Tracking the progress and success of your marketing efforts on a regular basis through analytics and reporting can help you uncover key insights that assist you in optimising your strategy.
Keep track of key metrics, like reach and engagement, and don't be afraid to tweak your plan based on your results.
Here are some ways to measure marketing performance:
Track key performance indicators (KPIs): depending on which channels you are using, you can set KPIs to help measure the progress of your website and content marketing, social media strategy, donations page and other key elements of your marketing plan.
Use dedicated analytics tools: every platform you use has different analytics you can track using dedicated analytics tools. For example, you can track website visitors and sessions using Google Analytics, and can track social media engagement and follower growth through other social media management tools.
Through regular reporting you can test and compare tactics to see which ones are most successful for each channel.
Nurture Relationships and Partnerships
An important aspect of nonprofit marketing involves nurturing and building relationships with supporters and stakeholders. This includes donors, volunteers, supporters, staff and board members.
By focusing on nurturing relationships you can foster a sense of community and loyalty, with your supporters helping to advocate for your cause and organisation.
Here are some ways that you can nurture relationships with supporters:
Build stewardship with donors: Every time someone donates to your charity, send them a personalised thank you to show your appreciation. Continue to foster relationships and engage with your donors by communicating the impact that their donations have made, while also keeping them informed on program updates and ways to get involved in future.
Engage your volunteers and staff: Volunteers and staff can be powerful advocates for your cause, can help amplify your messaging and can help build your network and connect you with potential donors and supporters. It’s important to show your gratitude to staff and supporters for the work that they do, to recognise their efforts and to keep them updated and engaged as valuable members of your community.
Build a thriving community: Nonprofits have the opportunity of building a community of supporters, who can be engaged at in-person and online events, through social media channels, through your website, and through other marketing channels. Some nonprofits actively engage their members through newsletters and events, while others create dedicated community spaces on websites or social media platforms. The possibilities are endless.
In addition to fostering relationships, nonprofits can also focus on nurturing and building partnerships with other organisations. This can be most effective where organisations have shared values and where their missions are aligned.
Nonprofits can build partnerships with other nonprofits, businesses and corporate partners, and influencers.
When identifying and engaging with partners, it can be helpful to outline strategies of how the partnership can be mutually beneficial and to clearly define the partnership and agreement so that expectations can be managed.
Do you need help crafting a nonprofit marketing plan?
Are you looking for experts to assist you with marketing for a non-profit organisation, or more specifically, with crafting a marketing plan for a non profit organisation?
While you can do this in-house, it can help to have professionals with the experience and skills to help you craft and refine your marketing strategy.
Marketing agencies like Green Socials also have the capability to help you execute and implement your nonprofit marketing strategy, assisting you with social media marketing, content marketing, and more.
Here’s what one of our clients, Audrey Barucchi from the nonprofit Conservation Volunteers Australia, had to say about us:
” Green Socials is by far the best choice we've made for both our social media and newsletter! Not only our visibility and engagement metrics have increased significantly in a matter of weeks, but Val and her team have slowly become an extension of ours! They're an absolute pleasure to work with and I would strongly recommend Green Socials to all purpose and values driven organisations.”
In conclusion, crafting a marketing plan for a non-profit involves a unique set of challenges, but with a clear understanding of your audience and goals, a compelling message, and the right channels, your organisation can effectively communicate its mission and make a greater impact.
By investing in a well-crafted marketing strategy, nonprofits can amplify their impact, attract more funding and donations, develop more partnerships, engage more volunteers and garner more support for their organisations and causes.
👉 At Green Socials, we are experts in developing marketing plans and strategies that elevate nonprofits’ communications, marketing, fundraising and partnerships efforts. Take a look at our marketing services and get in touch to book a free discovery call to discuss your marketing goals.
