Friday Five 028: Testing New Strategies
3 min to read ✭ Join us in Episode 028 of the Friday Five, as we cover new strategies to test out in your organization's digital marketing.
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: “Engagement! Getting more comments in order to expand the reach of our posts. Also, I would like to use the Facebook Ad features better.” – Kelli, Big Brothers Big Sisters of Tampa Bay
Our Solution:
We often hear general things like dropping comments, engaging, and adding your 2 cents to the conversation. Those are all really important, but we want to share a special tactic that we would recommend in this instance and we call it the Post Ad Method. This is where you take an existing post from your Facebook feed that already has some engagement on it – comments and likes, and you turn that post into an ad by using the post ID that’s dedicated to that post. This can be really powerful because all of a sudden it’s a sponsored ad in people’s feeds but it’s your actual organic posts, and we can drive thousands of likes, shares, comments which can be really powerful. Facebook gives it more visibility because it already has that social engagement and if budget is an issue you can get a lot for your money here and you can just generate a ton of engagement.
2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Being a one-person shop managing web, social, email and any other digital campaigning/marketing tools.” – Jeff, Peace Action
Our Solution: Marketing teams can be quite small at a lot of organizations, so our biggest advice is you have to prioritize and be as effective as possible. You can only do so much, so you have to think about the channels that are going to make the biggest impact. There’s the 80/20 rule where 20% of your work and efforts typically make up 80% of your actual results in these channels. So really identify which marketing channels work best for your organization. We would also recommend trying to inspire some volunteers that you think can help. Not just any volunteer, any intern, but find somebody you think can make a difference. Inspire them into the mission and if they are passionate about marketing and your cause, they can become a real asset to your organization.
3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Staying on top of trends.” – Buddy, Animal Medical Center
Our Solution: We really recommend that organizations follow their competitors, whether that’s other nonprofits or for-profits in your area. See what they’re doing and get inspiration from that. Everyone has different learning styles, but we find a lot of value in podcasts. The audio format can be a big time saver as you can listen to them while you’re on the road or traveling. From there, subscribe to blogs and follow different marketing influencers that resonate with you. Hopefully that’s Community Boost and hopefully we’re creating content that you find valuable as we’re focusing on the nonprofit niche. Let us know what you want to see and hear and how you want to see it, how you want to hear it and we’ll put resources into creating that. You also have to enjoy learning and enjoy the process of it because that’s half the battle.
4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Creating strong messages that inspire giving or action.” – Megan, Children’s Health Foundation
Our Solution: This is something a lot of causes deal with. At the end of the day it comes down to storytelling. We encourage you to stay very hope-focused. In 2019 a hope approach works and works effectively. There’s a framework you can utilize called the three T’s where we want to make our creative Tangible, the actual impact that takes place; it’s Transparent, the donor knows exactly where those funds are going; and that last T is Take action, so making sure you have a strong call to action. The last thing when it comes to messages and inspiring people to give that we often sleep on is stewardship. When you frame the question, you initially think about acquisition, but often some of the lowest hanging fruit is on the stewardship side and how we say thank you, how we express our gratitude. That can often really increase lifetime value.
