3 For-Profit Marketing Strategies Your Nonprofit Should Be Testing

1. Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is a valuable piece of content that you share in exchange for a user’s contact information. To give a real-life example, here at Community Boost last year before year end, we created a Facebook blueprint. We had everyone on our team who was strong in Facebook advertising contribute to it and it became a guide. And all we asked for in exchange for this piece of content was the nonprofit’s point of contact information, a little bit about the nonprofit and their email address. Then on our end, those that we felt might be good partners we followed up with to see if they’d be interested in working with us.

As a nonprofit, you’ve learned really incredible things about your programming, your mission, and the people that you help impact. What if you compiled all of those things into a fact sheet, a report or some kind of guide? We’re not talking about a report like your financial statements, but a format that would be really interesting for people who are visiting your site for the first time to learn about. Take information that your nonprofit is a thought leader on, compile it into a pdf or a guide, and then offer it on your site through a scroll box or a smart bar. If you want to learn more about these conversion design elements, read the recent post on our blog.  

2. Remarketing

Of the three, this is the one that you need to implement the fastest because it captures such low hanging fruit. Think of the last time that you were on Amazon and you went to put something in your cart and then for whatever reason you didn’t end up purchasing it. Maybe you got distracted or you realized you didn’t have your wallet on you, whatever the reason you didn’t end up purchasing that thing that was in your cart. What if every single time that somebody went to complete a donation with you, but then for whatever reason they didn’t, you were able to follow up with them in various methods around the Internet to make sure that they had the best possible chance to actually do so?

There a few different channels that you want to keep in mind. Truthfully, we’d recommend you do all of these. Number one is display advertising on Google. These are the banner ads that show up on the side of sites that you visit. You’re going to absolutely want to test some display advertising if somebody makes it to your donation page but then doesn’t complete that gift. It’s really easy to build an audience of those people.

Number two is abandoned cart emails. It’s the same exact thing as you would get on Amazon or on good eCommerce sites. If you have the ability to do this with your email marketing platform, you want to be reaching out to people with an email saying hey, it looks like you were starting your donation but ended up not finishing it. And then asking them if there’s any way that you can support them to actually do so. 

Then number three, and potentially our favorite and one of the ones that we’ve found to have such high impact, is remarketing through Facebook and Instagram. We often talk about marketing where people’s attention is actually at. A lot of people still definitely check their emails and they will see those display ads like we talked about earlier, but it’s hard to beat the power of social media and having a reminder to come back and complete somebody’s donation right there in their social media feed. If you guys have any questions about how to set up remarketing, please feel free to ask a question in the comments or reach out to us at communityboost.org and we’re happy to have that conversation.

3. Brand Building Advertising

Create a video or an ad that doesn’t have any kind of an ask. We bring this up because there have been several ad campaigns in the last few years from for-profit companies that really caught our eye. One of them was from this male shorts brand called Chubbies. And the very first ad from them was of people partying and having fun at a lake, riding around hydro jet packs, doing dock flips off of boats and you didn’t really know what was going on except for at the very end they flashed their logo across the screen. What was really cool about that is it sort of leaves the narrative up to the user. 

We want to challenge you to think, and this is more of a budget specific thing. If you don’t have the budget to create something like this, that’s okay. But if you do have some extra marketing dollars and you’re looking to try something new this year, try creating a video that tells a story about your programming without any necessary narrative, and then test not running an appeal at the end of it. You can use Facebook and Instagram advertising to share this video with tens of thousands of new people who do not know about your nonprofit. And it’s really simple to retarget those people. You can do remarketing like we just talked about with people who have watched at least 10 seconds or more of that video. 

Michael Goodrum