Friday Five 031: Protect Time for Engagement
3 min to read ✭ Join us in Episode 031 of the Friday Five, as we cover how to engage younger audiences, how to use Google Ads more effectively, and how to create platform-specific content.
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: “My biggest challenge in digital marketing is trying to engage the younger audience with what our organization does.” – Scott, Reach Out Morongo Basin
Our Solution: Market where their attention is at. This is often on platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. Also, micro-influencers can be really helpful for gaining awareness. For example, this might be a younger person in their early 20’s or a millennial who has a solid following on Instagram. If they care about your cause and you’re able to do outreach and enroll them in your mission, they can share your cause and mission with their audience, which can be an amplifier into those types of markets.
2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Understanding how to use Google Ads more effectively and how to get the most out of our online marketing dollars.” – Cheryl, Heart of Missouri Girls on the Run
Our Solution: The Google Ad Grant is a great tool which provides nonprofits with $10,000 per month in free Google search ads. Yet, the program requires becoming a practitioner and building it well. I’m happy to offer free access to our Google Ad Grant Academy. Although it’s currently in Beta, we’ve used our professional video team and it’s been vetted by the Google Ad Grants team. It contains many hours of content with screen shares of how to utilize the Google Ad Grant well, so it can be used as a strong foundation for you to build off of. Go to adgrantacademy.org for free Beta access forever. All we ask for in return is feedback about the program and content.
3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “We’re having a hard time engaging the people through Twitter/Instagram and providing the right content for the right specific medium.” – Rose, NORFIL Foundation Inc
Our Solution: To spark engagement, we have to be engaged. Drop comments, be more responsive, answer reviews into your service even if they’re bad. Be consistent. Twitter and Instagram are very different platforms. Twitter is arguably the only social platform left, whereas others can almost be seen as distribution networks. Therefore, you have to protect time to produce content for each specific platform. Engage more and encourage engagements, whether it’s positive or negative. Just being more involved will go a long way. This takes time and discipline to accomplish.
4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Lower social media engagement than with my previous organization; more social media accounts, spreading out the audience.” – Libby, Civic Works
Our Solution: Engagement is always an uphill battle. It often comes down to content. How good is it? Get feedback from your personas on what they really think about your content. Focus on your content and how to make it more engaging. Put in the work and find your voice. From there, you will be able to identify your top performing types of content. Additionally, and especially for Facebook and Instagram, you need to be testing paid ads. We’ve witnessed great success in acquisition campaigns when we start with running high engagement ads, which builds engaged audiences, that we then retarget for donor acquisitions. Even small budgets can exponentially improve your engagement, especially if you’re putting a lot of time into the content creation itself.
