What Makes Up Great Nonprofit Marketing
2 min to read ✭ In this post, you'll learn about the three S's that make up the mindset of the best nonprofit marketers.
How can we as nonprofit marketers, that are often under-resourced and overstretched, excel at our jobs? Today, we’re going to talk about the three S’s that make up the mindset of the best nonprofit marketers—Self-awareness, Storytelling, and Speed.
Self-Awareness
The greatest teams and leaders have to be able to see and analyze themselves clearly and objectively through reflection and introspection. It’s more important than ever to be really candid and real with ourselves about what your strengths and weaknesses are as an organization. What are you great at? And what do you suck at, especially when it comes to your digital marketing efforts?
Storytelling
The greatest marketing teams, and really nonprofits, excel at storytelling. And they excel at storytelling in the digital age with written words, pictures, and videos that they deliver at scale for mobile devices.
Speed
But honestly, the hardest, yet most important trait of winning nonprofit marketing teams is speed. Speed is infinitely more important than perfection when it comes to nonprofit marketing in the digital age. The risk versus reward ratio for nonprofits and moving faster, to try new tactics, is not close. Yet, so many organizations take way too long to try new things. There are a lot of reasons why this happens but often when we analyze the leadership and people behind the fastest, highest performing nonprofit teams, it all comes down to culture. Stop waiting while everyone else innovates and taps your donor base. Let urgency conquer fear. Allow the need to act to outweigh your doubts. We have to be on the marketing offense, not on the defense. In today’s world, great marketers need to fail often and fail faster. Celebrate testing at your organization. Even when things don’t work out, the wins will more than makeup for the losses.
Over the past eight years, we’ve been told repeatedly that our donor base isn’t on Facebook or it’s not on Instagram. What about now? Over $3 billion has been donated on the Facebook platform, and that’s not even talking about using Facebook to get people to your website and donation pages. It’s like that now very overused Wayne Gretzky quote, but it holds so true for so many development teams, “skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been”. Every once in a while, a revolutionary innovation transforms how marketing works. If your organization is not self-aware or poor storytellers or really slow, you will miss this opportunity. The reward goes to the early adopters. It’s not a blind leap of faith. It’s a process of trial and error because a fast-moving adaptable marketing team is what you need to be.
