Nonprofit Marketing Tips to Reach Donors

Ilia Jones | September 2021

nonprofit-marketing-donors

As a nonprofit organization, donor outreach is an essential part of your business model. And this effort depends entirely on your marketing efforts. Your marketing team works tirelessly to ensure that your organization presents itself to potential donors in an appealing and compelling way. Here are a few tips to help.

Be Clear and Transparent

As a nonprofit organization, it’s vital that you stay away from smarmy sales tactics and blatant marketing or “sales-y” language. After all, you’re not selling a used car. You’re working for a cause that is near and dear to your heart.

Instead, use messaging that puts your mission first. Clearly explain your goals and what you hope to achieve. Spell out for the potential donor how you plan to use their donation and the impact it will make. Celebrate your wins and achievements in a way that is motivational, not self-congratulatory.

Today’s market is shifting toward authenticity. So, avoid flowery, indirect language and tell it like it is and you will attract like-minded donors.

Develop a Winning Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing is still a winning strategy for displaying thought leadership and gaining trust. A content marketing strategy is a plan you follow for all of your communications and marketing. It’s essential to make sure that your social media is on the same page as your marketing communications and website.

Creating great content allows you to give something of value back to your donor community. Also, when used in conjunction with your social media platforms, it creates a pathway to your website.

Craft Valuable Content

Take on the role of educator and provide your audience with insightful information on your cause and things they can do in their daily lives to help. By crafting useful, engaging, and shareable content, you’re providing a service to which they will be happy to contribute.

Blogging is a great way to:

Share your knowledge and expertise
Provide your community information they are interested in
Describe innovative ways your nonprofit tackles the issues you face

Premium content, such as ebooks or webinars, are also great ways to share more profound knowledge on a particular subject. These can be put behind a paywall or require site visitors to sign up for your newsletter for access. This helps you collect donations as well as grow your mailing list and community.

As you’re sharing your knowledge in your content in the form of blogs, webinars, or ebooks, use social media to promote the content. After all, how better to share your valuable insight with the world?

Leverage Social Media

Social media use has skyrocketed in the last couple of years. So, if you want to reach your audience, that’s where they are. Having a robust social media marketing strategy is just the first step toward reaching donors. First, you must post regularly on the platforms that your ideal audience is using.

Next, you need to leverage the ads available on those platforms, such as Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, and LinkedIn Ads. The ads available on these platforms allow you to create ads tailored to your audience and you can repurpose highly engaging content as advertising. This means that with every post you make, you have the potential to also create excellent advertising.

Finally, most of these platforms also offer analytics dashboards to track how your ads and content are performing. Take the guesswork out of creating promotional content by seeing what’s working and leaning toward the highest ROI.

And be sure to include a link back to your website or donation page on all your social media posts to drive traffic and contributions.

Create Email Campaigns that Connect

Email marketing has been around for decades, but it is still a great way to reach your community on a regular basis. Regular emails that aren’t explicitly requesting donations are another great way to connect with your donor base in a way that isn’t asking anything of them.

Creating a weekly or monthly newsletter allows you to share news and updates with your donor community. This helps them to feel connected to your cause and shows them the impact that their donations have. Remember to thank them at the end of each email so that they feel appreciated. Be sure to donate button or CTA as well. Just remember that asking for a donation isn’t the main purpose of these emails.

These regular emails will help keep you top of mind, create a sense of community, and can help spur donations because you regularly inspire your donors.

Focus on SEO for Visibility

In order for donors to find you online, you have to be findable. This is where SEO comes in. While SEO should also be factored into your content marketing strategy, it’s an essential component of your website copy and design.

SEO is a crucial consideration for nonprofit organizations. If you are highly ranked and visible in search engines, you can spend less on paid advertising.

Several components go into an effective SEO strategy:

Page Length – Put more content on each web page will rank you higher. Aim for 800-1500 words.
Page Performance – Make sure your website loads quickly, is responsive, and does what it should.
Keyword Selection – Select long- and short-tail keywords that your organization wants to be known for.
Keyword Use – Keywords should be used in headings as well as meta titles and meta descriptions.
Crawling and Indexability – Make sure your site loads quickly so search engines can scan it and make it findable.

All of these components work together to make your website findable and highly ranked on search engines. This means that potential donors can find you quickly and become a part of your community.

If you’re finding all of this SEO talk too techy or overwhelming, check out our on-demand webinar, Website SEO for Nonprofits. It’s filled with easy-to-understand and valuable information to help you get your SEO on track.

Make Your Donation Page Easy to Find

While this tip might seem slightly off-topic, your donation page is ultimately where you want your website visitors and social media followers to end up. So, keeping your goal in mind of increasing donations, make sure that all roads lead to your donation page.

Feature a donation button prominently on all pages of your website.
Place a donation CTA at the bottom of all your blog posts.
Include a donation CTA in every email and social media post.

While it may seem like this is too sales-y, the CTA doesn’t need to be too loud, large, or flashy, but it needs to be there. By making it easy, you will convert more potential donors into donors.