Friday Five 024: How to Connect with Your Audience

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. 

Nonprofit Marketing Challenges

1) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Generating organic shares on social media.” – Sydney, Park Duvalle Community Health

Our Solution: Try not to focus too much solely on the number of likes and shares. Social takes time to grow and what’s important is that you are putting content out there. It’s about volume and consistency more than the performance of a single post. Push to make something REMARKABLE. Reverse engineer your personas’ needs, wants and demands. What resonates with them and what do they find value in? Also, encourage comments and be sure to engage. Engage with other groups and people, and they will engage with you more as well.

2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Time and graphic design ability. ” – Amber,  Writer’s Room Productions

Our Solution: There are two routes you can take here. Either designate someone on your team to become a practitioner or find and utilize a trusted support person on UpWork. Graphic design ability doesn’t just come overnight. It takes time to learn with a lot of trial and error. If Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator intimidate you, try using Canva for simpler projects. It is very user-friendly and you are able to create many assets from flyers to social media posts. If you don’t have that time, there are many experts in the field that you can hire on sites like UpWork, who will do the projects for a fee.  

3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Creating taglines for content that increase clicks.” – Devin, LiveBeyond

Our Solution: This comes down to studying copy best practices and consistent, systematic A/B testing both on the targeting and content. Once you see which taglines are getting results, it will become easier for you to create new ones and you’ll inevitably see results.

4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Recruiting younger audiences and donors to our organization.” – Julia, Boys Town Louisiana

Our Solution: Keep in mind the three Ts that you can engage someone on to give—Time, Talent and Treasure. On the younger side, you can start with volunteering and fundraising on behalf of the organization for those who don’t have as much money to give themselves yet. But millennials, especially as they get older, are starting to give more.  You can’t ignore Facebook fundraising. This really works with this audience, especially as we near Year-End and Giving Tuesday. Be where their attention is at. Make sure you have a presence on Instagram, and you are creating content there and engaging as well.

Cameron Ripley