Your Nonprofit Marketing Plan: How to Raise Mission Awareness and Compel Action

Nonprofits of all sizes increasingly turn to digital marketing channels to build awareness and attract sustaining gifts. Fundraising data show net gains from meeting donors online, asking for support, and highlighting your social impact. 

The organizations driving the digital growth – seen in nearly every mission sector – are harnessing creativity and technology to engage supporters.  

From fundraising to cause marketing, nonprofits are finding wider audiences and remaining top-of-mind for donors with a multiplatform marketing strategy. In fact, a Blackbaud benchmark report reveals a nearly 11% rise year-over-year sector-wide — specific to donors who made repeat donations online.

So how do you position your organization to benefit? Put simply: Accelerate full integration of social media, creative content, and email into your nonprofit marketing plan. In this guide, we’ll show you how! 

First, let’s refresh on a few basics.

What is Nonprofit Marketing? 

Every step you take to create mission awareness, communicate with donors, educate the public, and show your nonprofit’s impact can be a form of marketing. Nonprofit marketing touches nearly every aspect of the organization but is especially critical for community engagement, fundraising, promotion, and advertising.   

For donors, volunteers, and community members, nonprofit marketing underpins:

• Mission engagement
• Donor giving 
• Matching gifts
• Supporter retention
• Effective advocacy 

How Do You Write a Marketing Plan for a Nonprofit? 

If you’re just getting started, prioritize substance over form. Every marketing plan relies on a deep understanding of your goals and audience. Feel free to let your plan be a living document so that you can adjust your nonprofit marketing strategy as resources change.  

A basic framework for your nonprofit marketing plan should include actionable strategies (such as sending a monthly donor email newsletter) aligned with strategic organization goals (such as increasing the average revenue from sustained giving by 10% over 12 months).   

Your nonprofit marketing plan is your organization’s roadmap to reach its goals. Combine this document with a content plan, consistent branding, and analytics to measure results and you’re standing on solid ground.  

How do you Promote a Nonprofit?

We like this simplified donor-centered approach offered by Philanthropy Daily, which defines three “pillars” essential to sustainable fundraising. Marketing is key for each pillar, beginning with brand awareness, building toward donor retention, and prioritizing donor engagement.   

Of course, with your marketing plan, you’ll need to drill into far more details to answer questions like: 

• Is there untapped potential in your email list? 
• Is cause marketing worth the ad expense?
• Is social media conducive to activating donors?
• Is content marketing feasible for my staff? 

To help you answer these questions and more, our nonprofit marketing guide presents four main building blocks – steps if you will. 

1. Social Media 
2. Tools 
3. Email 
4. Philanthropic Storytelling 

See what we did there?

It really is a lot of ground to cover so we hope the mnemonic device comes in handy as you deploy these strategies with your organization. Let’s dive into the first step!

How to Market a Nonprofit on Social Media 

Social media (closely followed by email marketing) drives the most giving activity, with Facebook and Instagram leading the way for social networks. 

Generally, you’ll want to be on any platform where your prospective donors spend time and any space where your mission naturally fits. Let’s look at three ways social media marketing for nonprofits can drive results. 

Video Content

Show-and-tell with personality-filled videos that showcase your operations, community or volunteers. Promoting an annual gala or ticketed event? Compile photos and videos of last year’s event, coupled with a sneak peek of this year’s theme or venue, for a short teaser video on social media. Introduce new staff members or volunteers with one- to two-minute videos alongside a link for new volunteers to sign up. Midway through your end-of-year campaign? Film a short update with your executive making a direct appeal for support. 

Video content works for nearly every platform and many shots or b-roll can be repurposed for another campaign or event.    

Giving Tuesday 

Less than half of U.S. nonprofits ran a full social campaign for Giving Tuesday in 2022, according to research from the Nonprofit Marketing Guide, a training and coaching company.

You’re not alone in feeling skeptical that your message could rise above the social noise on a day when every nonprofit and foundation is campaigning. And even if it does: Will the effort draw one-off giving and not the deep engagement your budget relies on?

For many nonprofits, there’s hesitation on Giving Tuesday but your marketing plan could use the season in a new way. For instance, why not experiment with the Tuesday after Thanksgiving as the official social media launch of your end-of-year campaign? Or ask your followers to share, repost, and broadcast their own message about supporting your organization? 

As you build a calendar of social media content from your marketing plan, consider whether your best approach on Giving Tuesday might be simply replaying top-performing posts that show your organization’s social impact. Video, blog links, updates, and more can all be repurposed from prior campaigns to maximize your resources and potentially reach more people. 

Facebook Groups 

Are there sub-groups within your Facebook followers? Do certain posts tend to have narrow but deep engagement in the comments? Do you see supporters organically forming text chains and group messages to privately discuss their connection to your organization? It might be time to create an offshoot online community under the banner of your nonprofit.

Most nonprofits – any organization, actually – typically should resist the urge to create more than one main page or group based on niche or temporary issues. These tend to splinter your audience and often aren’t successful because the secondary pages have too small of a following. However, private Facebook community-based groups can work for a mission-centric organization if there’s demand for online support. 

Consider whether you have the staff to help moderate the group or if there’s an ace supporter with interest in doing so. Make the group private to reduce trolls and encourage authentic discussion. 

A Facebook group full of the people you are primarily serving can become an important feedback channel for programs and new initiatives. There may be people here also with powerful impact stories who would be willing to be featured on your main page, email newsletter, or blog. (Keep reading for how to supercharge these elements of philanthropic storytelling!)   

Email Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations

Email marketing serves as a powerful tool for nurturing relationships, sharing impactful stories, and driving donations. Yet there are significant hurdles. 

For starters, the average organization reports that less than 15% of their contacts and email list donated in the last year. Add to that the difficulty of tracking email open and conversion rates and you may be wondering how much time to invest in this channel.

But here’s the rub: Nonprofit marketing data show a clear correlation between a robust email channel and more fundraising revenue. 

Email is effective for many of the same reasons marketing works on other channels:

• Keeps an online audience plugged into your work year-round
• Automation tools save time and scale your messages
• Segmentation targets the right supporter at an optimal time 
• Analytics empower strategy to let you know what’s working

We’ve produced a deep dive into nonprofit email marketing to help you make the most of your supporter list. There we unpack examples such as these ideas for a monthly newsletter:

1. Features: Spotlight the work of a superstar volunteer or share a testimonial with background showing the impact of your work. 
2. Promotion: Build anticipation of an upcoming event or fundraiser with sneak peek details exclusively shared with your email list. 
3. News: Highlight a Q&A with a member of your staff when a part of your mission makes big news outside your organization. 

When executed effectively, email marketing can significantly contribute to achieving your organization’s mission and fundraising goals. This is also the place to make sure your organization fully utilizes automation tools. Marketing tools (which we’re tackling next!) let you send personalized messages based on donor interactions and ensure you welcome new members with all the information they need to fully engage. 

Let’s look at three types of tools that will make your marketing more effective. 

Nonprofit Marketing Tools

Nonprofits need a variety of free and paid tools at every step of marketing. Some of these tools are channel-specific but most are flexible enough to use across platforms and mediums. Integrating these three tool types improves efficiency and expands your reach.

Automation Marketing Tools

If you’re growing your email list and managing more than one social media account, you’ll benefit from automating at least part of your process. 

Take advantage of audience segmentation features if provided by your donor relationship management software. For large lists, dividing users by giving history or program interests can lead to more effective email marketing. Automation features offered by email marketing tools such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact, for example, can save time by sending sign-up welcome messages and thank you notes. Nonprofits have many great options for email marketing and we’ve built an in-depth guide to help you get started or level-up your efforts.  

For social media, tools like SocialPilot and HootSuite integrate all your accounts into a single dashboard. This can save time on cross-posts, tracking engagement, and implementing content calendars. For less time-sensitive posts, automation features can optimize the day and time and automatically schedule your prepared posts or recycle evergreen content. Some social media tools offer AI-generated content suggestions but be sure a human reviews the post to ensure the tone and subject are in sync with your mission.    

Visual Marketing Tools 

There’s no substitute for original photography to showcase your programs, community engagement, and hard-working staff or volunteers. But some content will need a different touch. 

Highlighting attendance and donations from a recent fundraiser? A fully customizable graph on Canva (which has tons of free templates and visual elements) may be a quicker and more direct way to tell a story of impact. 

Sharing a testimonial or program participant story where confidentiality is required? Check sources like Unsplash or Creative Commons for royalty-free professional photos that are more appealing than stock images but still generic enough to avoid compromising your subject. 

Need to send a promotional video or a collection of videos from a recent project? Platforms like Vimeo can help beginner-level video editors create engaging clips and full-fledged marketing video content. There are many options (including free ones) for nonprofit organizations to add video content to social media posts, websites, and more. 

Nonprofit Advertising Tools 

If you’re enrolled in the Google Ad Grants program, you’re likely familiar with the power of search engine-based advertising. For eligible nonprofits, Google will contribute up to $10,000 per month in ad credits. 

Placing your message and organization website at the top of a relevant search engine results page (SERP) can build mission awareness, connect community members to your program or services, and attract like-minded donors. Google ads deliver based on search engine optimization (SEO) keywords, search location, and user history to populate the most relevant results for someone using the search engine. 

An added benefit of using search advertising is having detailed analytics at your fingertips. Google ads can be a great way to test new marketing strategies by studying how different program descriptions perform or which ad prompts win the most email sign-ups. Search ads and SEO are also instrumental in forming your strategy for content marketing – which is our fourth and final step in this nonprofit marketing guide. 

Content Marketing for Nonprofits: Philanthropic Storytelling 

Think of your signature program or your most important service area. If it’s a long-standing part of your organization, think of the last few years – who runs it, what’s the appeal of it, and what’s your biggest challenge related to it? If it’s a new program, think of the early days of planning for it – what problem would it solve, who would it help, what questions kept you up at night? 

How many of those questions had technical or statistical answers? Did the questions bring to mind specific people and the way your organization helps them?

Did you think of spreadsheets or did you think of spreading impact? 

There’s no wrong answer here. This exercise hopefully, though, helps you identify the communication differences between providing information vs. storytelling. 

Neuroscience research has slowly confirmed what professional marketers, journalists, artists, and therapists have known all along: “Just the facts”-style content won’t have the effect that narrative storytelling can. This is great news for nonprofits! 

The heart and soul of the average nonprofit includes programs to help people in remarkable circumstances and collaborative work to solve real-world challenges. The material could practically write itself (we wish!) as content marketing helps nonprofits inspire, engage, and educate. 

Content marketing can encapsulate any form of written or visual work you share with followers online, in ads, or in print. Often, content marketing centers on your website blog – the landing spot for someone who finds you via Google or clicks a link shared by email or on social media.

Philanthropic storytelling takes supporters and community members behind the scenes to show both the challenges and impact involved in nonprofit endeavors. Content marketing works to highlight the lives of those you serve and the dedication of your staff and volunteers while making an important connection for donors to see the fruits of their gifts.  

A nonprofit blog is a great place to share fundraising updates, program launches, staff changes, and more. Just keep in mind the exercise from before: Tell these stories by showing people in action and unveil emotion with rich descriptive language.

Of course, every poet needs a sharp pencil – so don’t forget the essential technical parts of the story and the content distribution. We recommend creating or updating a uniform style guide or brand book and linking to this from your marketing plan. This can be a living document and may be quite simple unless you work with outside content creators or have a large in-house team. 

At Beyond Marketing, we’re experts at making sure our assets follow your brand rules and if you’re just getting started with content marketing, we’ll work with you to produce engaging communications in a consistent voice. 

We know how important and sometimes daunting nonprofit marketing is. We’re standing by ready to help with all forms of digital marketing! We’d love to hear about your work and goals – call Beyond Marketing today!