How does your nonprofit approach marketing? Do you have an overarching marketing strategy that lays out a complete plan for the coming year? Or do you take a more one-off approach and start from scratch with each new fundraising campaign?
Many nonprofits fall into the latter category due to tight budgets and even tighter schedules.
Marketing strategies can easily fall by the wayside, meaning organizations have to reinvent the wheel to promote a new campaign and miss out on tons of donor engagement opportunities along the way.
But by turning a scattershot approach into a coherent nonprofit marketing strategy, you’ll greatly simplify the task of promoting your work to donors and secure more support.
In this crash course, we’ll equip you with everything you need to lay out a winning marketing strategy for your organization. Here’s what we’ll cover:
Already comfortable with the basics and want to jump ahead? Check out our guide to nonprofit marketing plans to see a sample strategy and grab your free template!
Let’s start with some quick frequently asked questions:
Nonprofit marketing consists of all the strategies and channels that nonprofit organizations use to promote their work to audiences of constituents, donors, and other community members. The specific goals of marketing could include:
A nonprofit marketing campaign is built around a specific objective like those listed above, and the channels, messages, and strategies it uses are tailored to a distinct audience.
A marketing campaign’s goal is usually built around securing conversions, achieved when a reader or web visitor takes a specific target action (like clicking through to a web page, making a donation, or sharing a social media post).
An overarching nonprofit marketing strategy consists of multiple campaigns over time, each pursuing separate goals that support an overall priority for the organization.
For example, an organizational priority might be to boost giving from previous donors through improved retention and engagement with new programs. Campaigns could be developed for the different prongs of the overall marketing strategy, with campaigns focused on re-engaging lapsed donors, promoting a new program, and increasing engagement from previous donors.
We’ll take a closer look and visualize this marketing structure in the “example marketing plan” section below.
At a fundamental level, marketing is important for nonprofit organizations because it connects them with the audiences they need to engage in order to pursue their missions.
While word of mouth and on-the-ground awareness can definitely elevate an organization’s profile, it’s difficult to reach many constituents and donors without taking a more strategic approach. Modern marketing strategies amplify a nonprofit’s voice across multiple channels, encouraging the interactions that keep the organization running and driving impact.
On a more tactical level, marketing gets results and supports organizational priorities. Marketing campaigns help to raise donation revenue, awareness of programs, and more, which are quantifiable measures of a nonprofit’s success.
Nonprofits need a few important tools and resources to implement successful marketing strategies. These include:
While these are all essential categories to cover in your marketing strategy and tech stack, don’t worry if you don’t yet have all of these resources available.
Marketing strategies can (and should) evolve organically as you test new tactics and learn about your audience—just be sure to keep track of your performance as best as you’re able and make new marketing investments as needs and opportunities arise.
A marketing campaign’s goals will inform the specific approach and channels that will work best. These approaches can be broadly separated into two categories—inbound and outbound marketing.
Let’s take a closer look at these two approaches and the marketing channels that are often used for them:
Inbound marketing involves inviting new supporters and constituents to join you. With this kind of marketing strategy, you position your organization as an active, reputable part of the community, building its visibility and creating enticing opportunities for engagement.
Nonprofits use inbound marketing to help establish and reinforce their brands and build organic audiences of constituents and donors within their communities, both on- and offline. A nonprofit might use these inbound marketing channels:
Outbound marketing is all about going directly to a target audience to ask for their support or engagement. It’s more akin to what we think of as traditional advertising.
Nonprofit outbound marketing should be focused to ensure effectiveness, honing in on a very specific audience with tailored messages. Common channels for this kind of marketing include:
Note that the distinctions between the categories of inbound and outbound nonprofit marketing can be a little blurry, especially in today’s digital age.
For instance, various types of partnerships and events can serve multiple marketing purposes at once. You might run a broad email campaign to generate general awareness and engagement while also sending more tailored appeals to small segments of your audience.
Understanding the inbound/outbound distinction is helpful because it can give you a rough framework for your marketing campaigns.
If you know your goals and your audience, you can determine whether an organic inbound strategy or a targeted outbound strategy of direct outreach will be most appropriate. From there, you can narrow down your list of potential channels and strategies to those that will best support your goals.
The marketing funnel is an important conceptual framework to keep in mind when planning marketing strategies for your nonprofit. It helps you to better target your tactics and messages to the audiences most likely to take action.
Simply put, the marketing funnel consists of the top-, middle-, and bottom-funnel phases, with each decreasing in size and correlating to a specific audience goal.
This framework helps us to keep an audience’s level of familiarity in mind and decide what kinds of asks will be most appropriate to push them further down the funnel.
Think of the phases this way:
Example: You want to secure more planned gifts. Your broadest, top-funnel audience isn’t familiar with this form of giving. Start by sending them general educational messages about planned giving as a mutually beneficial way to give and ask them to visit your planned giving website to learn more.
Example: Your mid-funnel audience understands what planned giving is and positively interacted with your last broad outreach. Invite them to get more engaged by requesting information or contacting your organization to discuss planned giving with your team.
Example: When mid-funnel supporters visit your planned giving website or reach out with questions, that indicates interest and triggers your team to contact them. Over email or the phone, your development team reaches out directly to provide information, answer questions, and lay out your full case for support to set up a bequest gift, leading to a formal solicitation.
Not all marketing situations will fit into a clear-cut top/middle/bottom-funnel position, but understanding that audiences with different levels of familiarity need to be approached with different kinds of asks is incredibly helpful. You wouldn’t ask a brand new donor to give a major gift—it takes years of research, cultivation, and relationship-building to reach this point with select donors.
Once you understand the marketing funnel and the different types and channels available, you can begin to put together an actionable nonprofit marketing strategy.
We break the process down into 12 key steps, and we’ll use them to create an example nonprofit marketing plan below. Follow along and imagine the specific goals and tactics that you might want to implement for your own organization:
To build a comprehensive marketing strategy, repeat this core process for your organization’s various big-picture priorities. Just be mindful not to take on too much too quickly. Especially if you’re just getting started with intentional marketing strategies, building momentum with a few high-priority wins can be much more valuable in the long run than spreading your resources too thinly right off the bat.
Consider your organization’s other, ongoing priorities and fundraising campaigns, as well. Even if your annual campaign isn’t part of a shiny new organizational priority, it still needs to be promoted to drive impact. Identify these types of ongoing necessities and follow Steps 3-12 to create sturdy marketing plans for them, too.
Want to walk through a sample marketing plan (and check out a free blank template to fill in on your own)? Explore our guide to nonprofit marketing plans for a closer look at how we'd develop a strategy for promoting a planned giving program.
Don’t forget that your thorough marketing strategy needs to be matched by a stellar online experience. Asking donors to visit a defunct or hard-to-use web page isn’t a good look and can seriously hinder your marketing results. And if they can’t take your target action, they can’t convert!
Key takeaway: To maximize marketing conversions, make sure that it’s easy for your audience to take the next step.
Whether you’re promoting planned giving, asking for newsletter sign-ups, recruiting volunteers, or conducting an annual campaign, taking your target action should be quick, easy, and intuitive.
This is where modern fundraising platforms come in—pay close attention to the quality of the experiences offered by the fundraising, registration, and other tools that your supporters will directly interact with on your website.
Want to see modern fundraising tools in action? Our solutions are designed to help you raise more and improve crucial points in the marketing journeys you build for high-impact types of gifts.
FreeWill offers an industry-leading set of planned giving tools for nonprofits, and our Smart Giving Suite takes all the guesswork out of offering a frictionless experience for your non-cash donors. Explore our complete suite of tools to learn more about how we can support your nonprofit’s giving programs.
And be sure to keep learning about nonprofit marketing and fundraising best practices with these recommended resources:
