How to Develop a Nonprofit Marketing Strategy
Being a nonprofit marketer usually means small budgets and even smaller teams, with tight turn arounds and a strict set of brand guidelines to follow.
Often nonprofit marketing campaigns will be lumped in with comms, or passed off to an intern as there aren’t enough resources to have a full time marketer.
But a successful nonprofit marketing campaign can be the difference between hitting your fundraising target and not. Between growing your audience and stagnating. And for that reason, it’s important to give your nonprofit marketing strategy enough time and energy to thrive.
A solid marketing strategy is an essential no matter what size your nonprofit is. Having your goals defined and knowing what path to follow can help in times of a crisis as well as be a guiding light when you’re in the weeds. A marketing strategy sounds like a complicated to produce, official document, but really it’s just an outline of what you would like to achieve and how. But before you start building your marketing plan, you need to do some background research.
As with developing your nonprofit tone of voice, you should always start by conducting a competitor report. What are other nonprofits in your sector doing? What are nonprofits in different sectors but with a similar audience doing?
Understanding what your audience is expecting to see if the first stage of developing your marketing strategy.
You should also have a strong understanding of your larger organizational goals. Your marketing strategy should be tailored to achieving those goals, and should not be a stand alone activity.
If your organization wants to be the most well known nonprofit in your niche, you should focus your marketing activities on brand awareness. If your organization wants to build a bigger audience, you should gear your efforts towards lead generation.
Once you understand your market and your company goals it’s time to build your marketing strategy. Conduct a SWOT analysis on your current marketing outputs to understand what you are currently doing well and what can be improved. Try to get feedback on your SWOT from organization members across the pay grades and from different departments. Everybody will have a different understand of the marketing they perceive to be most successful, and it can be helpful to take on board different view points.
After you have conducted your SWOT think about where you want your organization to be in 5 years time. Write that down. This will be the starting point of your strategy. The goal can be big or small, but it shouldn’t be vague
Once you have your five year goal, work out what individual inputs are needed to achieve that goal. If you want to be the number one nonprofit for children with cancer in America, you need to build a large audience and brand recognition. Whereas if you wanted to have a successful volunteering program, you will need to think about how you can advertise yourself to local companies and communities as a good place to volunteer. A mind map can be a helpful way to chart these thoughts.
Once you understand the individual inputs for your large goal, repeat the process with your smaller goals.
If you need to build a large audience and brand recognition (to. be the number one nonprofit for children with cancer in America) you will need to build a recognizable brand. You might want to hold some high profile events, or you might want to form a partnership with celebrities.
The inputs you are mapping don’t need to be things you can do today, but they should be important milestones that you can work towards. Repeat the process until you have an action that you can start working on today. This could be as simple as setting up a new email campaign, or commissioning new stock photography.
This mind map of inputs forms the basis of your nonprofit marketing strategy. You can track your marketing strategy however you like; in a report, in a gantt chart, in a spreadsheet.
You can of course revisit your marketing strategy whenever needed. Perhaps things are moving faster than expected? Perhaps one of the threats you identified on your SWOT has changed. Your nonprofit marketing strategy should be a living document that grows and changes with your organization.