How are your 2018 nonprofit marketing plans shaping up so far? If you’re anything like me, you probably view each New Year as an opportunity to learn and improve from the prior year in ALL areas – including your marketing strategy. Last year I implemented a couple of new ideas into my own marketing mix. Some things worked well, and I plan to continue using them in 2018. However others didn’t quite pan out the way I’d hoped, so I left those behind. My motto: Fail fast and learn from it.

As a nonprofit marketer, by now you’re fully aware that a blog can be a valuable tool to support your nonprofit’s growth in a variety of ways. But just in case you need a reminder: A nonprofit blog has the capacity to create value for your current audiences while supporting a strategy that can improve cause awareness, cultivate supporter generation, and increase fundraising. 

Thanks to the Internet, donors are more empowered than ever to make informed giving decisions. With the growing number of digital channels available to them, today’s savvy donors are becoming less influenced by traditional marketing methods and are instead opting to use search engines and social media platforms to gain knowledge about charities and causes before committing their support. As a result, ROI has declined for many traditional outbound lead generation tactics commonly used by nonprofits including print ads, direct mail, cold calls, and email newsletter campaigns.

Although most U.S. nonprofits and charitable organizations are actively using Twitter (86 percent according to a study by the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research), CEOs remain slow in their Twitter adoption.

Powerful storytelling is the lifeblood of a nonprofit’s fundraising campaign success. Without a great story to share, it is virtually impossible to effectively draw an emotional connection between prospective donors and your cause.

What are audience personas?

Audience personas are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal target audience. They help you understand your donors, members, sponsors, volunteers, and prospects better. And they make it easier for you to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of these different groups. 

At its core, an effective content strategy allows you to tell your brand story, educate your audience, and offer solutions to their pain points. That strategy is then executed by creating content, selecting keywords, optimizing web pages, and building links around the terms your audience is searching for online.