Friday Five 019: How to Extend Your Nonprofit’s Reach
3 min to read ✭ Join us in Episode 019 of the Friday Five, as we cover how you can increase your nonprofit’s reach using social media, Facebook ads, and your own current donors.
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: “Our website SEO, which leads to low engagement.” – Prama, Minds Matter NYC
Our Solution: First, execute an SEO audit analyzing both on-site and off-site, which includes what is linking to your site. From there create an SEO strategy that includes which keywords you would like to rank for and how you intend to do that. Be sure to set up proper measurements to ensure you are monitoring those keywords and how they are doing. Continue to execute on the plan because SEO is a long-term game and you might not see results right away. In the short-term, supplement with Google Ad Grants. As a nonprofit, you can get $10,000 per month in free Google Ads. The Ad Grant is a great accelerator to go after non-branded search terms.
2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “We have a lot of social media engagement but are not transitioning those followers into leads/prospective donors. ” – Faith, Latin American Coalition
Our Solution: Focus on your appeal and your ask when you post. Think about the three Ts. Is it Tangible? Humanize the story and the impact. Is it Transparent? Let your followers know what their donations are going towards. Are you Taking control? Be very clear in what you are asking of them, so that they are more likely to convert into donors.
3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Our organization has fundraising events across the globe and we want to learn the best way to deliver content and market these events to our supporters/donors.” – Lauren, EOD Warrior Foundation
Our Solution: Focus your efforts on Facebook and Instagram ads. Whether it’s a Facebook event page, an Eventbrite or on your site, Facebook and Instagram ads can be very successful for you because you can hyper-target not only based on zip code and the local area of your fundraiser, but also filters on things like if they support veteran organizations to ensure that the people your ad is in front of are aligned with your mission and more likely to help.
4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Engaging a younger audience.” – Dharmachari, Aryaloka Buddhist Center
Our Solution: Meet them where they are at. You need to be on Instagram posting, following, and most importantly engaging. Comment on other’s posts and use a variety of relevant hashtags on your own posts to increase your reach. You can even direct message people if you think they would be a good fit. It’s not difficult, it just takes time and commitment.
5) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “We want to reach the best audience for our mission: Helping Haitians change Haiti through education. We have a national base of supporters but would like to expand it for awareness and fundraising purposes.” – Suzi, Haiti Partners Inc.
Our Solution: Continue to humanize the need. We encourage you to tell stories of hope with a connection to how much more work still needs to be done. Study organizations that are a bit bigger in size from a marketing perspective and learn from their practices. And always ask your current supporters why they care and support your organization, and then think about how you can illustrate that to new audiences.
