One of the assumptions that I actively try to challenge among many of the Chief Engagement Officers and Executive Directors I speak to at nonprofits is the notion that “Marketing efforts come across as pushy or salesy”. What’s not accounted for here is how ongoing outreach that lacks substance or a clear goal can be perceived as unwanted spam, but when your goal is present in your outreach, marketing automation becomes a necessary tool for driving the organization forward.
Drive Awareness
The competitor to any nonprofit is apathy. This is why it’s so important to make a concerted and relentless effort to educate the public about what your organization has set out to achieve, and what causes you seek to benefit. As an employee of a nonprofit, it’s sometimes difficult to disassociate yourself from the organization and take an outsider’s point of view on the issues that your organization seeks to address, but if you do this, you’ll begin to see the importance of driving consistent messaging to educate humanity why your organization exists.
Drive Donations
If you deploy an educational and consistent approach to messaging the public about your mission, you will undoubtedly strike a nerve with many individuals who want to get involved. Every message, social post, and advertisement to the public about your organization should have a call to action and simple steps to get involved.
Drive Memberships and Renewals
For membership organizations, one of your calls to action referenced above can be initiating a new membership. Once members are already registered, it’s equally as important to keep them up to speed with the developments with your organization as well as the impact that you’re making. You’ll want to cater your outreach to members differently (and more carefully) than your outreach to the general public, so you’ll need to make sure that you deploy technology that enables your organization to segment contacts automatically by membership status and history.
Drive Volunteers
For volunteer organizations, it’s common to include the first step to the volunteer application process as a call to action within your outreach. This can include why it’s important to solicit the help of individuals as well as how their help makes a tangible impact on the cause.
Not marketing today? Here’s how to get started.
If you’re not currently deploying any automated marketing efforts, our team has experience helping you map out your key audiences and matching them with the most impactful messaging for each one. From there, we begin mapping your contacts to each of these audience buckets through a process called segmentation before automating segmentation through the use of a marketing automation tool.
Marketing already? Put your outreach on autopilot
Once we map out your target audiences and create a messaging strategy for each, we help your team map out a marketing calendar along with guided journeys for each audience. A journey may begin by a simple ‘get in touch’ form that lives on your website or interacting with your organization on Google, Facebook/Instagram, or another digital platform. Once that person receives their ‘welcome’ email, we can define the next emails based on their profile to either educate them on our cause, solicit donations, explain our volunteer process or all of the above! This all depends on your goals.
At Plative, we work with organizations at every stage of their marketing/outreach journey and we’re capable of bolstering your existing efforts or show you the ropes from the beginning. To find out what we can do for your organization with marketing automation, please get in touch!
