Friday Five 032: Getting People to Act

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. 

Let’s dive in! 

Nonprofit Marketing Challenges

1) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Resource, budget and capacity!” – Emma, Bath Carers’ Centre

Our Solution: There is an older blog that we did called Nonprofit Marketing and Fundraising Traction Channels. This is a framework that we adopted for nonprofits and it talks about all the key traction channels that you can use to grow your organization and your digital efforts, but also how to prioritize these and that’s a big part. You want to think about all the different channels and which ones have the most potential, the most reach, and will be the most cost-effective for your organization. Then you pick three to test deeply to set some goals around and see if they have the potential to scale because if you are very resource-strapped, you want to limit your growth channels to as few as possible, so you can focus on those. 

2) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Keeping up with all the changes.” – Lisa, Foodshed Alliance

Our Solution: First, determine how you learn best, whether that’s from audio, written or video content. For auditory learners, podcasts and audiobooks can be a great way to keep up. There are also tons of written blogs out there. The Classy blog, for example, has many great resources. You just have to find an influencer that really fires you up and you enjoy learning from. We’ve also found it beneficial to study general digital marketing from the for-profit world and then try to see it through the lens of the social sector. That’s often a way to keep up with really fresh content, especially as there might not be a ton that’s super nonprofit specific when you’re getting into the details of certain digital channels. However, there is great social sector content on fundraising and we encourage you to check that out as well.

3) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Getting people to our events.” – Kim, Michael’s Miracles

Our Solution: There are a few channels that can certainly work here. First, the Google Ad Grant can work well if you think there’s search intent, meaning people might be going to Google to find events that are very similar to yours. This could be things to do in your city and we’ve seen it work well with theaters. We would also recommend running Facebook and Instagram ads which can be great for driving event attendance because we can really push our message to a very hyper-targeted group about the events we’re running. Other than that, having a strong landing page that really connects and converts is important, whether that’s an event page or your own site. You want to make sure you have that and you’re going to have to have the persuasiveness of the creative and copy really dialed in as well. 

4) Your Biggest Marketing Challenge: “Reaching more people and converting them into YFU supporters or ambassadors.” – Rachel, Youth For Understanding USA

Our Solution: It comes down to storytelling and sharing your impact in a tangible and transparent way. Really humanizing the connection, the power and what it means for someone to become a supporter or an ambassador of your cause. With that, Facebook and Instagram ads are great when we’re trying to move somebody from step one of a funnel into step two and really driving that conversion remarketing staying top of mind. This is so imperative for your cause and for your mission and if they resonate with that, to convert. 

Cameron Ripley