Friday Five 034: Connecting with Your Audience
2.5 min to read ✭ In this post, we’ll learn about verbiage, building a local audience, how to shift from corporate to individual donors, and why keeping up with changes in tech is so important.
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: “We are a National Site but cater to local markets so finding the right verbiage that fits all of Year Up.” – Melanie, Year Up
Our Solution: Make use of geo-targeting throughout all ad platforms and create landing pages as needed especially if you’re investing both time and money into digital ads for a specific event. Take your audience to a landing page that really speaks to that event and demographic. For verbiage, craft different messages to see what resonates and consider the user journey as you create user experiences.
2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Our online audience is relatively small in Hawai’i. We have somewhat of an online presence, but engagement is pretty low. We need to build our audience of young, energetic people who are willing to engage online.” – Eileen, Hawaii Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice
Our Solution: As described above, utilize geo-targeting within Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and Google Ad Grants. Micro-influencers can also have a huge impact. Find people with a solid social media (Instagram) following that care about your cause. Reach out to them on Instagram and see if they’ll promote your campaign or event. The relatively small audience in Hawai’i can be used to your advantage by tapping into the locally-focused community.
3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “We have historically relied mostly on corporate donors and govt funding, so we are trying to build a base of individual donors. Changing our strategy has been a challenge we’re trying to learn more about.” – Michelle, National Domestic Violence Hotline
Our Solution: Individual giving, when done well, can be significantly predictable so evolution of your funding model makes sense, but building that individual donor base can take work. Inquire as to whether you can leverage your corporate donors and create a match system with new individual donors. When you’ve seen an increase in the number of first-time givers, work with those leads and drive referrals or have people be advocates and use social credibility to share why they support your cause. Many times, when it comes to individual giving, people give because they care about a cause that also has social credibility; people they admire who are advocating for the cause. So, leverage corporate donors and think about the marketing funnel when it comes to individual donors. Drive engagement, drive support, provide value, share the mission and go for that initial donation ask. When you get that first donation, it’s all stewardship and relationship nurturing from there.
4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Keeping up with rapid changes in tech.” – Felicia, Salem Academy and College
Our Solution: This is a topic that many organizations around the world are working their best to navigate. Keeping up with tech can be thought of as the price it takes to be great. Organizations that develop the muscle to keep up and develop the skills for new tech advances are successful and outperform. For example, brands like Charity: Water really invested in the power of content, quality of content and storytelling early on. This brand-building didn’t necessarily have a return on investment (ROI) straight out of the gate but proved incredibly successful in fundraising efforts. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Think about where your audience is and where their attention is at and market there. At first, organizations that invested time and effort into learning new apps like Snapchat were scrutinized, but the skill sets they acquired while learning that platform placed them miles ahead in know-how when Instagram Stories was released. Protect time to develop tech skills, which will internally build a culture of trying new things, of failing and subsequently learning. Develop teams that are passionate about digital technology because it will scale your impact.
