Friday Five 029: Content. Content. Content.
3 min to read ✭ Join us in Episode 029 of the Friday Five, as we cover creating meaningful content for all platforms and generations.
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: “As a small nonprofit with limited staff it is difficult to find the time to create meaningful content for our social platforms.” – Haley, Junior Achievement New Brunswick
Our Solution: We have to find a way, and often that’s more in how the organization is led. We need champions for social media whether that’s you or you and your boss. We have to enroll people in the why. Creating content and having the resources to do so is so crucial. This often comes down to a conversation of the differences between marketing and development and why they’re so important. Your organization needs to build its brand and quality content is a big piece of that. Content creation needs to be about documenting your organization’s journey. Not some perfect, polished piece of content. It’s not about the perfect flyer or the perfect commercial video that’s like a TV ad. It’s just about what’s going on. Instagram stories, written, audio, video, images, whatever works for you. Find your voice and get that content out. It takes your organizational buy-in that we want to document the journey. We want it on social platforms and we want everyone to contribute to that.
2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Creating fresh content that is cross-generational.” – Ben, Mobile Meals of Toledo
Our Solution: We want to start by saying that not all content has to be fresh. Most organizations aren’t repurposing content. When we do a new video here at Community Boost, we plan for that to be published on social upwards of 10-30 times depending on how engaging it is and we try new creative, but repurposing helps you post more because not everyone sees everything the first time. As for cross-generational content, think about the personas specific to your organization, and create content for them. Put it all out, anyone can consume it, but they’ll self select what they like most. Think about why you’re creating content for them and what will resonate most.
3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Knowing the correct platform for our large demographic between the ages of 18 – 49.” – Nicole, Stage 773
Our Solution:
The ages of 18 to 49 is a pretty big demographic so there’s probably some sub-segments we need to think about. We checked out your site and your shows look super fin. It’s not platform-specific really, instead focus on the content that your team is best at. Is that videos that then somebody turns into a blog post? Is it audio? Is it written? You’ve got a great photographer you can take advantage of. Focus on where you can succeed. That’s what you’re producing and then you’re putting it out on all platforms that can potentially make a difference. Based on what you do, Facebook and Instagram make a ton of sense for you. We would definitely focus there, create content for those sub-segments on those platforms and explore Facebook and Instagram ads to make sure that great content gets in front of those sub-segments at a high frequency.
4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Because of our project budgets, we look for larger donors.”– Sheila, River Alliance
Our Solution: Most organizations do have some sort of major donor approach. The challenge can often be bridging marketing and development, making sure they are supporting each other. We need major donors, but marketing can support that journey to share the impact your organization is having. That also needs to get shared out on social. You can also enroll your major donors to care more where you can help them. Try asking for a big gift, but run a matching campaign and use that money to get even more money. That can help them care about it, and an online presence can really accelerate this. Many major donors at one point were smaller donors, so it’s important to cultivate and foster that. Don’t sleep on days like Giving Tuesday where the average donor is 25 years old. It’s a great way for new donor acquisition, but also see if you can leverage your large donors care to spark new, smaller gifts.
