5 Crucial Components of Marketing Nonprofits Often Miss

Here at 27th Letter Media we love to work with nonprofits and added several new nonprofit clients in 2016. As we’ve added more nonprofits to our mix, we’ve noticed there are a handful of marketing basics they often miss.

Here are the 5 things we’ve learned are crucial to nonprofit marketing:

Keep Your Brand Up to Date
With a smaller marketing budget than many for profit business, nonprofits often fail to keep their brand updated, resulting in them look outdated and cheap. A brand refresh may be less expensive than you think and is a great investment for your nonprofit. Beautiful and consistent visuals are incredibly important to capture your audience. Ask your designer to provide you with brand guidelines to help you and your team stay consistent throughout all of your materials, both online and off.

Make Sure Your Mission is Clear and Consistent
Word of mouth marketing still reigns supreme and your best marketers should be your employees and donors. Give all of your employees an elevator pitch to memorize. Consider providing your donors with talking points to help ensure your organization is reflected the way you need it to be. If those who care about your work can’t communicate the mission clearly, it reflects poorly on the organization. When you, your team and donors can clearly communicate your mission the message spreads more effectively.

Maintain a Social Media Presence
Assign a member of your team to manage social media accounts and make sure they post regularly. We suggest picking one or two platforms to focus on as opposed to creating 4 or 5 profiles and not being able to to keep up with them. Find out where your key audience is and use those platforms first. Don’t ask for donations in every post. Instead use most of your posts to provide relevant, shareable content to engage your audience.

Provide a Good User Experience on Your Website
Both businesses and nonprofits fall into the habit of not keeping their website up to date. When a potential donor visits your website they need to have a good experience and find the information they are looking for or they are likely to leave without making a donation. With so much competition on the internet, good enough just isn’t good enough. Allocate appropriate resources to build a high quality website and keep it updated.

Publish Fresh Content
Publishing content regularly is one of the best things a business can do for search engine optimization (SEO). Google and other search engines favor websites with fresh content. You need to be posting at least once a month to compete. We understand there’s never enough time and resources are tight, but assign blog writing and posting to one staff member and make sure they keep up with it. You could also divide the responsibilities among the team so each person is only writing once every few months. If you are unsure of where to start, take a look at our tips for writing simple content.

Get out there and make it happen! If you need help with any brand updates, social media management or content creation, reach out today! We would love to help. ​