Friday Five 006: Becoming a Practitioner in Digital Marketing & Reaching Donors!
3 min to read ✭ Join us in Episode 006 of the Friday Five, as we cover how to grow conversions with Facebook ads, utilize resources to better understand analytics, strategic planning, and 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: “Growing interactions and conversions with Facebook ads, promoting giving opportunities and getting high conversions on Facebook ad campaigns.” – Jeff/Mike, CREW
Our Solution:
The most important thing to remember with Facebook ads is that your ad creative and audience targeting play a huge role in seeing conversions. Many nonprofits don’t take advantage of the hyper-targeting Facebook’s platform offers, such as creating lookalikes and custom audiences. You can create a target custom audience by uploading donor or customer lists. From there, you can create lookalike audiences based on the information provided from your past donors.
Another tactic you can utilize is building up the credibility of a social post and then running it as an ad with the engagements you received from the post. This will show your audience that people are engaging with your organization and will make them more likely to click on the ad.
Learn more about how you can utilize custom and lookalike audiences in our latest post: 10 Digital Tactics Guaranteed To Drive Ticket Sales
2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Reporting in a meaningful, timely and actionable way.” – Erin, Mercy Home for Boys And Girls
Our Solution: You can’t improve what you are not measuring. The best way to go about this is to utilize free tools that are available to you. A resource that would help with actionable reporting is Google’s Data Studio.. It is really great for setting KPI’s, or key performance indicators, and reporting on key analytics metrics. Additionally, there are other systems that can help with reporting such as Report Garden or Raven Tools. However, these options will vary by price and are not free like Data Studio.
3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Still learning to use digital marketing for donors.” – Aaron, Rhode Island Zoological Society
Our Solution:
Digital marketing is still landscape that is always changing, so take advantage of its malleability. It’s important to really take the time to become an ongoing student of the space and become a practitioner within digital marketing.Tap into available resources like podcasts, audiobooks, e-trainings, etc.
The key to digital marketing is understanding where your audience’s attention is at. What platforms are your donors using? What is grabbing the majority of their attention? Since digital marketing is a continuously changing platform, you have to be okay with trial and error. It takes time to become a practitioner of this space, but getting there requires taking risks and learning from high impact failures.
4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Having a coherent longview strategy instead of putting out fires all the time.” – Katie, California League of Schools
Our Solution: The best approach to this is setting a strategic plan. A really good book for this is Measure What Matters. This book talks a lot about setting OKRs, or objectives and key results. Setting OKRs for your organization gets down to figuring out what your objectives are and also, what key results need to be accomplished to create that overall goal. This allows you to both qualitatively and quantitatively measure your progress. When you have a goal and a strategic action plan set in place, your team will work more efficiently on the forefront instead of retroactively putting out fires all the time.
5) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Reaching younger donors through online giving.” – Claire, Our Hope Association
Our Solution: Younger donors often don’t have the means or financial stability to donate. However, that’s not to say they don’t want to be involved. Young donors do want to be involved and want to give in some aspect.
Three ways a younger demographic can give to an organization is through time, talent or treasure. With younger donors you have to create some sort of ladder for them to go up.This could be starting them off as volunteers and then having them do peer-to-peer fundraising. Once they have had a role in your organization, they will feel more invested in your mission. This way, they are more likely to become recurring donors.
Also, take advantage of the power and visibility of social media. With younger audiences, their attention is always online, on mobile and on social media. So, social media is a great way to engage with the younger demographic in order to get them invested in your story.
