Friday Five 013: How to Brand Your Nonprofit & Keep Up with the Trends
3 min to read ✭ Join us in Episode 013 of the Friday Five, as we cover how to keep your company’s brand consistent and keep up with the ever-changing marketing trends.
What is the Friday Five?
Each Friday, we will be answering your most pressing questions from our Digital Marketing for Nonprofits Facebook group. If we don’t cover a challenge that you or your nonprofit colleagues are facing, drop us a comment below or tweet us @CommunityBoost and we’ll add it to the queue.
Let’s dive in!
Nonprofit Marketing Challenges
1) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “I find it most difficult to prove the lift and value of digital marketing in a direct mail focused group.” – Rachel, Summit Marketing
Our Solution: Create a specific landing page for your direct mail outreach. This would not be part of your main website navigation, but a unique link that goes only to direct mail recipients. This helps to quantify how this direct mail resulted in online giving. You could also give the mailers a coupon code or another type of value perk to be able to track the success of that campaign.
2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Tracking, strategy” – Marie, Science Museum of Minnesota
Our Solution: Working with a few other science museums, we understand that ticketing and events can prove to be difficult. This is hard to answer in the short time of the Friday Five, but reach out to us at Community Boost and we would be happy to do an Analytics and Google Tag Manager audit for you. We can dive in deeper to provide tips and a more detailed roadmap.
3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Consistency” – Laura, Arlington Academy of Hope
Our Solution: This comes down to clear accountability and ownership. Give a team member the reigns for the social media and ensure they are not micromanaged. It is more important to document the journey of what you are doing than to spend all of your time creating the perfect post. Content creation is an ongoing task, but know that you can repurpose your content by cutting it up and putting it on your various social channels to extend the life of the piece. This also allows you to ultimately be more consistent.
4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Keeping up with digital marketing trends.” – David, Eastern Shore Land Conservancy
Our Solution: Find the type of study that works for you. For some people, this could be audio learning. Seek out podcasts and audiobooks that dive deeper into your interests. Reading blogs and finding marketing influencers that resonate with you is another method. Be sure to follow them on social media and engage with their content, so that you can train the algorithm to show you things that you want to learn. Hopefully our content can be that for you too.
5) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Generating donations from email campaigns and paid advertising.” – Erica, Great Plains SPCA
Our Solution: It comes down to your targeting, your list quality, and your creative and appeal. Keep trying new things and testing to see what works and what doesn’t. When in doubt, get donor feedback. Do a study group with five of your donors.
There is a book called Sprint by the Google Ventures team, and in it they say that five customer interviews can solve upwards of 80% of your future messaging problems. So if you are about to run a new campaign, run it by five of your donors first. Get their feedback to find out what they liked, what they didn’t, and what resonated with them. This will help you discover how to make your organization stand out from all of the other emails people are getting and generate those donations.
