The Nonprofit Marketing Ideas Blog

Are you creating a digital marketing strategy for your nonprofit? Are you looking to revamp your organization's digital marketing strategy? In either case, this post contains some easy things any development or communications specialist can do to make a Web site or a Facebook page work harder.   Define Goals and Objectives If fundraising, do you want individual donors or subscribers, or are you going for major donors and legacy gifts. All four require different tactics and different marketing copy.  Are you motivating people to take a certain action or change behavior? If yes, you need to figure out how to appeal using something like AIDA or a sales funnel. Know Where You Are Take stock of your recent success in social media and on your site. Answer these questions, at a minimum: 1. How many visitors come to your site from each social media account? 2. How many visitors come to your site and immediately leave? 3. What percentage of visitors hit that Donate money and give?...

This is a post about selling social change. This is also a post about selling innovations. Veganism, policing by consent, solar power co-ops are, what? Innovations. People adopt new behaviors and use new products or services.  Innovation is not a technology thing - "We've just launched the most fun and useful personal fitness app on the planet! Download it today!"  Innovation is not a financial thing - "We offer the most innovative products in personal investing! Click here to learn more!" If you want to advocate for something or get people to adopt a new behavior, you are promoting innovation. To do this successfully, you need to understand some things that fall outside the usual realm of marketing and fundraising communication. You need to understand what makes innovations take hold or fade away. Let's take a closer look at the characteristics of successful innovations.  Characteristics of Successful Innovations:  Many nonprofits have selling social or tec...

This article dives into behavioral science and social marketing. You might want to review Part 1 before continuing. Last time I focused on fundraising and behavioral science. I'll assume you are somewhat familiar with things like framing and hypothesis testing.  To review something else, social marketing is about using advertising and persuasive writing tactics to convince people to change their behavior for their own benefit versus to benefit a company. You get people to do things for themselves rather than buy this product or select that service.  How you do this is a subject of several books. I can introduce some of the scientific concepts you need right here.  Literature Review: Don't make things up. Figure out what's work on similar campaigns in the past. And find out what academic literature has to teach you about "selling" your ideas. Scholars have published research on public health initiatives like vaccination. If you are trying to promote vegetarian eati...

This post marks the beginning of a series on insights from sociology and psychology to raise more money, gain more supporters, and change behaviors. If you have a cause to promote this series will be helpful. If you are just starting a nonprofit and want to get decent fundraising or marketing results faster, this series will be helpful too.  First, let's look at some basic scientific concepts that might be valuable in your digital marketing efforts. Then we'll dive into some psychological insights you can use to raise more money or keep your supporters loyal to the organization.  Social Marketing Science 101 If you've never taken a course on psychology, sociology, or behavioral economics...well, you've been missing out on some valuable insights. We'll return to the point in future posts. For now,, I want to focus on some basic scientific terms that can and should, come up often in nonprofit marketing efforts.  Theory - In science, a theory is the best available exp...

If you want to start a social change effort, launch a nonprofit, or plan for your organization's future direction, you are doing some strategic planning. Whether you call it that or have formal planning sessions is beside the point. You can use an informal process or a formal one. The more important the plan, the important it is to follow a system and take your time. With those thoughts in mind, this post is an introduction to SWOT analysis for nonprofits. I also want to introduce a new tool that can make SWOT analysis more helpful to a nonprofit team or a group of activists. SWOT for Nonprofits: Strategic planning should be standard for all nonprofit organizations. SWOT analysis is a method of looking at an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Many business students, and some managers and executives, undoubtedly know how to do a SWOT analysis for their business. In case that lesson came a long time ago, here is a summary of SWOT. Strengths ...

This short article outlines a technique you can use to focus your efforts to solve social problems through advocacy, public education, program design, or social marketing. What follows is a framework for thinking about how best to attack a given social problem This process should be helpful whether you know what your options are or not. You'll answer a series of questions about the issue starting with the most obvious question of all.  What is the problem? What is the challenge or problem you want to tackle? This is the broad social problem, like domestic violence or climate change, or something a bit narrower. Avoid stating that the lack of a specific thing is a problem - no playground in the neighborhood, no soup kitchen in the neighborhood, and so on.  There are a few reasons for not including a solution in your problem statement. First, you were probably assuming too much about the social problem in question. You will never look at other, better ways to address...