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.
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