How effective is your nonprofit’s marketing strategy? Are you getting the results you want? What if you had a way to assess where you should focus your efforts that could have the biggest impact?
A strong marketing strategy is built on the ability to develop and execute 8 key areas within your organization. Assessing your ability to execute each of these areas is critical to maximizing your marketing resources. A simple yet innovative Marketing Score Card has been developed to help you assess your organization’s marketing effectiveness and provides a visual representation that highlights areas of strength and also areas that need improvement.
The eight areas reviewed must build upon one another in order for your marketing to work effectively. The first step is to build a strong strategic plan which includes a clear problem statement of what your nonprofit does, a clear mission statement, and an inspiring vision. Next, you must have a clear picture of who your nonprofit is targeting both from an impact perspective and a support perspective. Without clearly defined buyer personas you cannot effectively create a unique selling proposition and promotional strategy that resonates with your clients, supporters, and volunteers.
After you have defined your strategic plan, ideal targeted personas, and unique selling propositions you can now begin to focus on your strategic branding and messaging. This becomes important in creating the brand identifiers such as your logo, copy tonality, and other visual representations that are critical to building awareness, trust, and action. Only then can you begin telling your nonprofit’s impact stories and other important stories that are consistent with your brand and begin building trust and inspiration within your supporters.
To get the message out effectively you then need to have a well-defined web optimization strategy and inbound marketing strategy that drives interested parties to your website and content. And, finally, you can now begin to execute paid advertising strategies including the $10,000 per month Google Ad Grant to effectively reach more of you constituents.
The Marketing Score Card helps your rate each of these 8 areas to identify the specific items within your overall marketing plan that need improvement and the order in which they need to be completed. For example, without a clear picture of who your targeted personas represent it is difficult to create the best messages and promotional strategies. The key is how well your strategy maps to your branding and then your branding to your digital marketing strategies. Everything must work together.
It is worth the time to go through the Marketing Score Card and assess where your nonprofit stands within each of the 8 categories. It is also helpful to reassess your marketing using the Score Card on a quarterly basis to identify new areas of focus. The Nonprofit Marketing Score Card is free and can be downloaded from my website www.movementum.com.
Start building momentum in your marketing using this simple but effective tool. You will be surprised at how this tool will help you focus your efforts and assist with the building of a more dynamic and robust marketing strategy. If you are thinking about using the $10,000 per month Google Ad Grant I strongly recommend you do a marketing assessment to determine if your organization is ready to successfully manage the grant. If your marketing plan is not well developed, you will quickly loose your grant eligibility due to not being able to meet the criteria.
Download the Nonprofit Marketing Score card today and begin taking control of your organization’s marketing and begin building the momentum it needs to make an impact.
Are you spending too much time and energy on creating and updating reports?
Do you wish there was an easier way to create the reports and keep your board updated almost automatically?
In this episode of Movementum Moment I will review a way you can create your marketing reports automatically and have them sent to your board on a monthly basis without having to do anything. Just think of how much time you could free up allowing you to focus on managing your marketing instead of spending a large amount of time in just building and sending reports.
There is an easy way. Just start using Googles Data Studio. This free tool from Google allows you to create dynamic dashboards which automatically update as the data changes. The source of the data can be a google sheets document or over 300 other common google applications, CRM programs or web and social media analytics tools. You can even automate your Quickbooks data.
The first task is to determine what you want to measure and report to your board. Do you currently have key performance indicators or what are referred to as KPI’s that allow you to measure the success of your marketing efforts? If you do, then you are ahead of over half of all other nonprofits. Define what are the objectives of your marketing and how can you best measure success? Obvious ones are number of new donors and number of website visits. Other areas that are important to measure included your donor acquisition costs or reconversion of donors and volunteers. Make sure you look at your website analytics, social media analytics and Youtube data to determine the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts. If you are using Google ads you can measure your ads Click Through Rate, Conversion Rate and Cost per Click to determine which ads are the most effective.
Once you have your KPI’s defined you can create easy to read dashboards using Google Data Studio and have the dashboard emailed to your board members monthly or other defined intervals. The dashboards are dynamic, interactive and a great way to communicate real-time data.
If you have never used Google Data Studios there are a number of easy tutorials that walk you through how to apply your data sources and build great looking dashboards using your brand colors and logo. You can apply templates that have already been designed with Google analytics data, Social media analytics or YouTube data and just replace the data with yours. In no time you will have professional looking reports that a generated automatically. Next just set up an ongoing email list and send interval and magically your reporting is automatically completed for you every month.
Just think of the time you will save and how professional your nonprofit’s marketing reporting will now look to your board.
I hope this weekly tip was useful. Good luck as you continue to build your marketing momentum and if need help in creating your data studio dashboards or any digital marketing assistance please go to my website www.movementum.com and take a look at the available easy to follow how to guides or contact me for further assistance.
Does your nonprofit have a clear and consistent digital marketing strategy? Are you getting the result you hoped for?
One of the most important aspects of running a nonprofit organization is having a solid digital marketing strategy. If you are not generating new leads or current donors through your website, social media and email, then you’re missing out on people who could help advance your cause.
Marketing your organization online with a shoestring budget may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right digital marketing strategy, you can start engaging people through your various marketing channels. Today I’m going to give you 4 digital marketing steps that will attract, connect, engage and inspire your audience of donors and supporters.
The first step is to start with your nonprofits website. Your website is the curator for all of the information that goes out about your organization. Your website does not have to be that large but tit does need to be designed so that it is easy to understand, has good SEO to bring people who have an interest to your site and very visual in telling your story.
Second, you can then begin to drive traffic to your website through inbound marketing. Since almost half of all people that go to your website come from organic searched. Paid advertising including the Google Ad Grant can be leveraged to reinforce your message and gain a broader reach. Step 1 is getting them to your website and step 2 is getting them engaged once the arrive. Quality content about your cause is important.
Third make sure you have strong landing pages with a clear call to action. What do you want your new visitor to go away with concerning your nonprofit? You need to provide something of value that your audience is looking for that relates to your cause. Also provide them some incentives or reason to return to your website.
Finally, make sure to drive your messages through multiple channels. Smart phones are the number one way people will look for information on social media, emails and your website. Notifications built into an app or social media page are good at keeping your information fresh and in the eyes of your followers.
When it comes to engaging people to act and keeping them engaged over time most nonprofits usually fall short. Studies have shown that only 4% of the followers of a nonprofit’s Facebook page will actually see the post unless paid advertising is involved. For every 10,000 facebook fans only 31 of them will actually engage per post on average.
So how do you get your audience to become motivated?
Behavior = Motivation + Ability + Prompt
So make sure your messages are clear and resonate with your audience and offer easy call to actions to get them engaged. And if you really want build your marketing momentum you must learn to let go of control and give your supporters the tools to connect with each other. There is a great digital web community called Mighty Network that provides you with the ability to host a community that can build upon itself and lets you engage with all of your followers as you provide the content and direction to flame the fire.
To learn more about how to begin building your digital marketing momentum go to my website movementum.com and download the how-to-guide on “Building Your Digital Marketing.” If you missed any of the previous videos on the 8 steps to building your nonprofits marketing plan go to the movementum youtube channel. Good luck as you continue to build your movement and give it the marketing momentum it needs to make an impact.
If you’re not engaging in social listening, you are missing a lot of opportunities to grow your nonprofit, community and find new donors. Social Listening can be your new secret weapon
Hi, my name is Bruce Stapleton and welcome to this weeks Movementum Moment. Over the last 6 weeks I have reviewed the steps in the Nonprofit Marketing Roadmap that will lead you down a path of to building the momentum you need in your marketing. You can review these past videos by going to the Movementum Youtube channel. This week I want to highlight how social listening is a powerful way to elevate your engagement with supporters.
You want to know who supports what you do. Don’t you? Social listening is a way to tap into all the online conversations and find ones that resonate with your cause. This allows you to connect to the right people, build influencer relationships, monitor the effectiveness of your campaigns, and manage your nonprofits reputation.
You can’t just jump on social media and start looking at your feeds. It’s much bigger than this. You want to identify the people that resonate with your cause that are not currently on your social media pages but are active and talking about topics that your supporters and donors are interested in. To find these potential influencers you must have a clear strategy on what topics and keywords you want to focus on. This is why it is critical to have a clear mission statement and supporting messages so you can identify the key phrases and common questions that someone would ask to learn more about your nonprofits focus. The problem statement you defined when creating your brand positioning is a great way to find actionable key words. Also use the target market personas as defined in your brand strategy to further clarify your ideal supporter and what social media platforms they typically use.
Many non-profits are growing more reliant on social media to identify and engage with new supporters. Social-listening software analyzes massive amounts of public data, non-public social media, open source intelligence, and various other sources to surface relevant conversations – happening right now – that matter to your organization. The software then lets you harness these conversations to support initiatives, build relationships with influencers and supporters (online and off), manage reputational risk, and help you make smarter decisions. Social media listening tool like Awario, Hootsuite or Mention are three that seem to be good and economical choices for a nonprofit on a tight budget.
Social listening is about taking the time to understand what people are saying about your cause, building relationships with influencers, authentically engaging your supporters, and strategically monitoring what goes on in the social space.
For more information and templates you can use to get started go to my website at www.movementum.com and download the how-to-guide on “Building Your Cause Through Social Listening”. Next week I will review the last step in the roadmap and provide 10 ways to grow followers using digital marketing. So until next week, have a great week.
What’s the quickest way to engage your audience, generate support, and ignite a movement? Tell them your story. The strongest nonprofit brands are the ones that are seen as a cause. The ones that people move for, strive for and even care for. A good brand story creates a movement that can build marketing momentum.
In this video I want to address how you take your brand and begin telling stories that bring it to life. A strong brand story creates the emotion and connection with others that brings life to your organization. Your brand story builds loyalty and trust by making your brand more tangible.
People not only need to understand what you do but they must feel what you do so it creates an emotional bond. You have to take those intangible things you do on a daily basis and turn them into impact stories that get people engaged and passionate about your cause.
The first step is to lay the foundation of your story through an inspiring and consistent elevator pitch. If you had 60 seconds in the elevator with someone and you wanted them to become a supporter what would you say? What will get them excited about your cause? Create an elevator pitch that can be used consistently by all of your staff and board members.
Now find stories about your organization that support or enhance your elevator pitch. Maybe it’s a story about how your organization impacted someone’s life. Or an inside look at what it’s like to work with your organization as a volunteer or staff members. There are other types of stories you can highlight such as your founders story on how why your nonprofit was created or how your nonprofit has reacted to the pandemic and continued serving the needs of those in that need it most. As you create your stories make sure you have a clear main character that has been improved by your organization and position your nonprofit as the guide or mentor that helped them overcome their challenge or conquer their villain. Make sure you have clear connection from the problem to the solution and highlight the conquest and outcome to your main character. It’s the same formula used in movies to get and keep the audience engaged.
One of the most inspiring aspects of working with nonprofits is the opportunity to hear powerful stories from so many different types of causes – stories of transformed lives, revitalized neighborhoods and game-changing partnerships with businesses and government. You can hear it in the voices of the Executive Directors and volunteers. You now just need to drive these messages through your marketing.
Storytelling drives passion and passion drives action.
If you would like more information on how to begin telling your nonprofit’s stories with passion and energy go to my website: www.movementum.com and download the how-to -guide on “Telling Your Brand Story”. This will give you the steps, templates and everything you need to get started.
When you tell someone your nonprofit’s name do they know who you are? Even more important can they state in one sentence what you do?
From my experience, many nonprofits take a narrow approach to brand management by seeing it primarily as a tool for fundraising. However, a growing number are moving beyond that approach to explore the wider, strategic role that a brand can play.
The four primary reasons your brand strategy is critical to your long-term success are first, a strong brand helps you stand out from the crowd and makes your organization memorable. Second, your brand is critical to building trust within your target market. Third, it will help increase engagement and build stronger demand for supporters and donors. And finally, a strong brand brings together all of the pieces of the organization aligning the internal identity and external images providing consistency, increased awareness, and common support from all constituents.
Creating a strong brand builds on your nonprofit’s vision and creates a clear path you intend to take now and in the future that clearly conveys who you are. It must be simple and clear in effectively telling your message about what makes you unique. The perception someone has about your nonprofit is based on all of the touchpoints they experience when learning about or dealing with your organization. It’s based on the equity your brand creates through messages, outreach, participation, and all forms of marketing.
The three main components of creating a strong and consistent brand include your brand positioning, personality, and identity. All of these must be in synch. Your brand positioning must answer the questions of who, how, and why. It must clearly state who you serve, how you solve their problem and why you can do it better than anyone else. Your brand personality must build on the character traits that are consistent with your organization’s value and primary traits such as sincerity or excitement. And finally, your brand identifiers such as your logo, color choices, and other forms of visual representations must resonate with your audience.
You must make your nonprofits brand tangible in the eyes of your supporters. And no matter where they see your nonprofit’s message; whether it’s on a sign, social media, or by meeting one of your board members, it must remain consistent. Remember, it’s about building trust to drive increased awareness, engagement, and yes, donations.
How prepared was your nonprofit for the changes in 2020?
As Philip Crosby, an expert on total quality management once said, “Good things only happen when planned; bad things happen on their own.”
Nonprofit’s experience ongoing change due to numerous and often simultaneous external factors that are beyond their control. Many of these factors can be uncovered and managed through conducting a SWOT analysis discussed last week. But, in the end, it is your people that have to accept, adapt and act on the change. Your nonprofit’s success culminates in your constituent’s desire, knowledge, and ability to make it happen successfully. So to build and implement an effective change management strategy you need to address both the process and the people. To be successful you must take an assessment of your change management process and ensure you answer the important questions concerning how you assess, prepare, manage and reinforce the necessary change.
To assess your organization’s ability to change you need to identify any roadblocks that may be in the way. As you prepare for the change can you need to assign a lead who can establish a sense of urgency and ensure the knowledge is acquired and as many of the roadblocks identifies are removed? When you begin to manage through the change you need to identify the short-term wins and celebrate them to build momentum. And finally, once implemented how do you ensure the change will be sustained? What are the plans to reinforce and anchor the change into the culture of the organization?
As you work through the process you also have to simultaneously address the change down to the individual level. The ADKAR model is a great coaching tool to support individuals through the process.
Each individual in the organization needs to have a clear understanding and awareness of the need to change.
They need the desire to support and participate in the change.
They need the knowledge of how to change through education and training. 4. They need to have the acquired skills and resources giving them the ability to implement the change.
They need continual reinforcement to sustain the required change.
Understanding each of these steps and providing an assessment of your organization’s ability to implement them is critical to your success.
For a copy of the How-to-Guide, “Creating A Strategy Playbook Through Change Management”, click on the link. For a copy of the Roadmap that takes you through each step of the process to build a strong strategy marketing brand and digital marketing strategy, click here.
After last year’s unprecedented events it may be time to do a SWOT analysis for your organization. The SWOT analysis should be used to identify internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats that influence and affect your performance. Your organization’s strengths can be your staff’s motivation and the major building blocks of your key marketing messages.
Understanding your weaknesses helps you improve and adapt practices to help mitigate any negative impact. By taking the time to identify opportunities you can spot new areas of growth and capitalize on those that could be the difference to your organization’s ability to get new donors and supporters.
The four things that will make your SWOT analysis meaningful and successful are to:
Be honest with your assessment and have others review it providing honest feedback.
Start with what you know. Your strengths and weaknesses are usually easier to identify than external factors so get information from as many sources as you can including external partners, suppliers and major donors.
Look at different scenarios based on how external factors are changing. Identify how you can capitalize on these opportunities and minimize the impact of potential threats.
Finally, the best strategy is the one you use. So make sure you use this new knowledge to adapt and change your marketing. Keep the SWOT analysis as a fluid document and a major input to your marketing plans. What do you need to adapt to communicate your message that shows the world how you make an impact.
If you would like more information on how to conduct a SWOT analysis for your organization or to learn more about the roadmap to successfully implement and manage the 10000 per month google ad grant, please go to my website at www.movementum.com. Next week I will address how to adapt and manage through changes while remaining true to your mission. But, until then, have a great week.
Do you wish there was a way you could find more donors and supporters for your nonprofit? This week’s Movementum Moment identifies one way you can find more donors and engage with influencers that are interested in your nonprofit. Using a social media listening tool provides you with the ability to connect to the right people and discover strategic insights supported by data. It provides you with the data you need to successfully implement your digital marketing strategy for a reasonable cost.
The social listening tool identified in this episode is Awario. This is a relatively new tool that provides a vast amount of social media data for a very reasonable cost. They provide a 50% discount to nonprofits. For more information on social media listening and how you can improve your digital marketing go to the website https://www.movementum.com and review one of the “How-to-guides,” entitled “Discovering and Connecting Through Social Listening.”
What would you give to have more personal time while also growing your nonprofit at the same time? If you use automated tools to connect with the people that are important to your nonprofit you can communicate more effectively while taking away many administrative tasks. In this week’s Movementum Moment Bruce Stapleton reviews 3 tools that you can use to help reach more people and engage with messages that are meaningful and impactful. The tools also provide you the ability to continually create the important content you need for your website and social media posts. The three tools reviewed in this video are: Airtable, Google Data Studio, and ConvertKit.
Video Transcript
Hi welcome to this week’s Movementum Moment. This week I want to help you build your marketing momentum by giving you three online tools that will improve your nonprofit’s performance and more importantly, make your life easier through automating the many tasks that you’re probably now doing manually. Hi, my name is Bruce Stapleton the founder of the Movementum Group. So what are your toughest challenges for 2021? If you’re similar to the nonprofits that I work with then some of your challenges that you’re facing include finding more donors, getting people to volunteer, and consistently creating content for your website and social media. The trick is to automate many of these processes that you now do manually. Like sending out bulk emails or downloading data for reports. Now I haven’t found a perfect tool yet that does everything but I do have ones that work together seamlessly so you can get back to what’s important in making an impact with your non-profit.
One of the tools is AirTable. This free content management tool provides you with the ability to easily collaborate with your staff, board members, and anyone else that may need access to this important information. This tool has many easy to follow templates that meet your needs for content creation and event tracking. It also provides automated notifications or alerts when something is completed or needs attention. It’s as easy to use as a spreadsheet but has many of the functions of a database that helps you organize your business.
The second tool that links with AirTable and allows you to build a dashboard to easily track and monitor many aspects of your business is Google Data Studio. This automatically updates the data as it’s created in AirTable or whatever source you’re using. It’s visually pleasing with charts and graphs and links with Google Sheets and Google Analytics. It can connect with over 300 data sources incorporating ones you probably are currently using right now. You can create easy to understand dashboards to monitor your nonprofit’s performance and show management or your donors how you’re doing. This tool is also free.
The final tool for this week is an email system that allows you to automatically send out emails based on specific criteria thereby eliminating the administrative tasks of bulk emails and remembering to send them out on a regular basis. Sure there are many email systems out there that allow you to send and collect emails and manually send them out in bulk. But, are you using the automation tools that allow you to send emails automatically as people engage with your non-profit? Are you tailoring your emails to fit the needs of specific groups? One way to improve your content creations is to send an automatic email weekly to your staff and volunteers asking them to write a few bullet points on what good things have happened that week. This will help you build your content for inspiring stories and social media posts. One tool that’s easy to use and builds great landing pages you know is ConvertKit. You can build automated sequences based on subscriber behaviors and continually reach out to them with meaningful content. You can also automatically send email reminders to your staff and volunteers. The great thing about ConvertKit is that’s easy to use and it will also link with Google Data Studio to give you easy reporting and real-time monitoring. ConvertKit has a free option for capturing emails and building your lead pages. But, if you want to use the automated features, which is really the key reason to use it, the cost is around twenty-nine dollars a month. A small fee to pay for the extra time and return you’re going to get from these automated tools.
So if you’re not currently using digital tools to collaborate, automate, and report the great things your non-profit’s doing then you need to stop take a look at what these three tools can do for your organization. Take away those many administrative tasks from your staff so they can spend the time on the important things to build your nonprofit. So good luck and see you next week.
Note: ConvertKit Link is an affiliate link. However, I fully support and use this product.
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