Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
With the right set of digital marketing tools, your non-profit can run a top-notch marketing campaign for a relatively low price. It is essential to choose smart marketing tools that will help you promote your cause while using SEO tools to track your visibility and identify any problem areas. For non-profit organization, three of the significant types of tools that should be considered as a part of you promotional campaigns are SEO, marketing, and content.
SEO Tools
As you undoubtedly know, SEO is an essential part of a successful digital marketing campaign. SEO apps assist you in assessing your site’s performance in search engines so that you can adjust appropriate elements in order to improve your rankings.
1. Google Analytics: It’s impossible to discuss SEO tools without it. As the most comprehensive source of detailed information on your traffic, conversions, and rankings, Analytics is an essential tool for any website.
2. iSpionage: As you develop a SEO marketing campaign, one of the first steps is to generate a list of relevant keywords to target. iSpionage has a powerful keyword research tool that will assist you in identifying keywords, competitors, and success rates.
3. SEOMoz: SEOMoz is the leading SEO management platform, analyzing your site, competitors, and keyword data. The tool will find SEO problems and has a variety of tools that will help you improve SEO for your site.
4. Open Site Explorer: A free tool from SEOMoz (and one that has expanded features with an SEOMoz Pro subscription), Open Site Explorer lets you look at link data for any page on any domain. This is invaluable for analyzing your own site – and your competitors.
Marketing Tools
You efforts in SEO prepare you to launch a great marketing campaign. Once SEO practices are in place, your marketing tactics are key in promoting your site. Incorporate marketing tools into your campaign wisely in order to reach your target audience more effectively.
5. Facebook Mobile Ads: There is little chance that your organization has failed to recognize the importance of Facebook Ads at this point. However, with the growth of mobile, your Facebook ads must be adjusted to appeal to mobile clientele, especially since Facebook is the most popular free mobile app.
6. MailChimp: As a non-profit, you are likely to be advancing a well-planned email marketing campaign. Not only is there a free version of MailChimp, but it also integrates with third-party platforms so that you can easily transition email address collected from other platforms. MailChimp makes mobile-friendly practices easy so that you can efficiently send out email updates, newsletters, information about events, and promotional content.
7. AdRoll: AdRoll is a retargeting ad platform that allows you to tag pages on your site and then show those visitor ads across the web – including on Facebook. Remarketing is one of the most cost effective ways to reacquire donors.
Content Tools
Of course, all of your SEO and marketing strategies are reliant on great content. Even the best marketing campaigns will fall flat if you fail to present relevant, useful information that entices the interest of your potential donors.
8. Ubersuggest: This tool cleverly utilizes Google Suggestions to assist you in coming up with inspiration. As you type, Ubersuggest brings to your attention the latest trends and pages related to your topic that are garnering attention. If you are struggling in your search for sources, this tool offers a little extra insight into similar searches that might yield more productive results.
9. Evernote: If you have a mobile device, Evernote can act as your constant companion that tracks and records any in-the-moment thoughts or inspiration that come to you. Jot down notes, snap photos, or record a thought all in the same place so that you never lose a moment of clarity.
What are your top tools for marketing a non-profit organization?
Stories are one of the most powerful ways for you to connect with your potential donors. Who doesn’t have a favorite memory of hearing a well-loved story? Incorporating great storytelling into your fundraising efforts will demonstrate the humanistic, emotional side of your organization.
1. Find the Fun
In a recent video of Peter Sagal, the charming host of NPR’s “Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me,” he suggests that giving can be fun. Getting your potential donors to commit doesn’t have to be painful and unpleasant. Find a way to emphasize the joy that comes from altruistic giving! Telling a story offers a form of entertainment that can encourage people to donate cheerfully and enthusiastically.
Although you may experience a temptation to rattle off depressing facts and statistics, as they often clearly demonstrate the immense need for your organization’s efforts. However, introducing a positive note into your marketing strategy will allow donors to enjoy the process. You can regale them with the shocking statistics once they have made an emotional connection to your story.
2. Present a Character
At the heart of every great story is a compelling, complicated character. Your hero or heroine needs to draw attention to your cause in a way that produces hope. Choosing a character to focus on that has benefited from the services offered by your non-profit is a smart step.
Tell the story of why the individual needed help and how your organization connected with him or her. Focus on the journey of the character and how he or she is working towards a better future, even if there is no clear guarantee of his or her success. Since marketing is really all about relationship building, present content that allows your audience to build an emotional connection with your character.
3. Develop the Story
A great story hooks you in so that you feel like you have to know the ending. Guide your audience through an emotional journey that explains the significance of your organization. Although your story may be about a character that hasn’t reached a definite happy ending yet, leave your audience with a sense of hope and satisfaction.
Emotional involvement is the goal of storytelling in marketing. Pack your story with every emotion you can manage, from love and joy to sadness and anger. Everyone in your audience has felt all of these emotions, so they will be able to relate and sympathize with your character.
4. Drive It Home
As you wrap up your story, allow your audience’s emotional involvement to discover an outlet for action in your organization. The whole point of your story is to promote the cause of your non-profit, so make it clear that the involvement of the listeners is a possibility. You want the conclusion of the story to motivate them to action, either in the form of joining your organization or donating funds.
Storytelling is a reliable way of creating content that will encourage link building and social sharing, which will generate more leads and conversions for your non-profit. Don’t forget to leave people wanting more so that they will keep coming back to find out the rest of the story!
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
In general, non-profits want to utilize fundraising strategies that are tested and proven. With limited budgets and altruistic goals, deviating from standard procedures often seems like too much of a risk. However, smart non-profits must examine their fundraising practices regularly to ensure that they aren’t using a tactic that simply drains money. One conventional practice to consider is the tradition of offering premiums in exchange for donations.
The promotional products industry generates over $20 billion dollars each year, and their primary consumer base is non-profit organizations. Non-profits realized long ago that the people love to get gifts, so they developed the practice of offering premiums in order to take advantage of this desire. Scientists have even determined that extrinsic rewards (premiums) trigger the same portion of brain as crack cocaine. With such a strong method of eliciting that sense of pleasure, non-profits naturally became dependent on the attraction of premiums!
How Premiums Succeed
Currently, premiums are incorporated into fundraising campaigns in order to drive response and increase gifts. Non-profits generally offer a front-end gift, a back-end reward, or some combination of the two. The most common front-end gift is address labels, while back-end premiums often involve a member magazine.
My wife recently relaunched her blog, Eucharisteo.com, with a new logo and design. She blogs about motherhood, Christian growth, and life.
For non-profits, marketing campaigns have to be direct and focused in order to target the appropriate audience. The shift from generic marketing to specific marketing lets organizations effectively reach the individuals who will be most swayed by your cause. Niche marketing is a creative way of analyzing marketing data so that your campaign captures the attention of the relevant audience.
Developing a niche allows people to gain an insightful understanding of who you are as an organization. Once you figure out a specific niche, it will determine who will be reached by your marketing efforts. Niche marketing allows non-profits to focus on doing what they do best because it lets the product speak for itself. When presented to the right audience, a thoughtful non-profit should sell itself.
Refine Your Target
In order to create a niche, you have to understand what your organization brings to the table for your target audience. Your products or services need to mean something unique and significant to your niche market. A good way to begin defining your niche is to determine exactly what your ideal audience is like. Many non-profits and businesses have successfully initiated niche marketing on a low budget based on their thorough insight into their audience’s lifestyle and interests.
One impressive example of effective niche marketing comes from Lenswork magazine. With a tightly defined niche audience of fine art experts with a penchant for black and white photographs inspired by masters of the genre, Lenswork clearly recognizes its appeal. Using primarily word-of-mouth marketing, the magazine has successfully built a thriving business over the last 20 years.
More people die each year from hunger than HIV, tuberculosis and malaria combined. That’s a sobering statistic that brings into sharp relief the drastic inequalities in our world. It’s sad to think about the big statistics – but what about when we think about the situation from the perspective of one family? I can’t imagine the pain losing a child – but a parent will lose her child in the time it takes for you to finish this sentence.
Fortunately, there is help at hand. Over the past several decades, philanthropists and generous volunteers have devoted both time and money to weeding out hunger from the world. From primarily local efforts in the 1950s and 60s, they branched out to the less privileged areas of the developing world in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Some hunger care groups were organized by priests and churches; others were entirely secular. What they all share in common is a vision to end world hunger. Over this time, we’ve found better ways to address hunger.
Sobering Statistics: World Hunger Today
For the purpose of statistics, hunger is usually conflated with undernourishment. Undernourishment describes the availability of adequate calories and disregards macro-nutrient content of the diet. Eradicating nourishment was one of the chief aims of UN’s Millennium Development Goals resolution, adopted in 2000. The percentage of undernourished people in the world has fallen constantly in the last two decades, going from 19% to just 12% of the world’s population since 1990. At present, there are roughly 870 million undernourished people in the world. While this is far cry from the Millennium Development Goals, the downward trend is nevertheless a cause of much hope.
Poverty, Growth and Hunger
In the last two decades, Asia has emerged as a global growth center. For instance, roughly 9 percent of India’s population emerged out of poverty in the ten years between 1994-2004. Similarly, the high growth rate in China in the last 30 years has managed to pull hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Statistics from Malaysia, Indonesia and Pakistan tell a similar tale.
Unsurprisingly, there is a direct relation between poverty and hunger. Simply put, removing poverty results in higher calorie intake. Ending poverty, thus, can have a dramatic impact on world hunger.
The Effectiveness of Care Groups
The complete eradication of world hunger requires more than merely distributing food packets to the hungry, especially in non-growth areas of the world. The approach must be holistic, involving the community as a whole, and cover not just hunger but also health and disease.
The Care Group model has been widely successful in this regard. The model was originally developed by Dr. Pieter Ernst with World Relief in Mozambique. Delegating authority to 10-15 community-based volunteer educators breeds self-sufficiency and exponential results that reverberate throughout the community. FH Care Groups in Sofala Province, Mozambique, for instance, reported a drastic reduction in infant mortality rate. In areas where the Care Group approach was implemented, infant mortality rate reduced from 68 in 1999 to 38 in 2003. This was made possible by educating the community about health risks in children and providing nutrition to battle fatal vitamin deficiencies. At the same time, cost per beneficiary remained as low as $3.21 per year.
Some other things to note about Care Groups:
- Food for the Hungry Care Groups have reduced malnutrition by up to 38 percent.
- Improved health: In Mozambique, FH Care Groups helped reduce under-5 mortality rate by 62% and child mortality rate by 94% within a four year period.
- Rapid success: in Sofala, Mozambique, undernutrition among children 0-23 months old dropped by 8.1% within 2 weeks of the program implementation.
- High participation: 94% of Care Group Volunteers (CGVs) reported attended a Care Group meeting in the last two weeks.
- Beyond hunger: USAID’s Healthcare Improvement Project has used the Care Group approach to fight hunger as well as diseases like HIV, malaria, etc. In fact, it estimates that it will cost just $2.72 per inhabitant to train Community Health Workers (CHWs) to cover the entire sub-Saharan Africa rural region.
Care Groups have been extremely successful all across the world. The approach has been adopted by organizations as diverse as USAID HCI, International Medical Corps and World Relief. By leveraging the community, it is possible to see drastic reductions in world hunger and push towards a more equal, happier world.
You can support community development and provide training, support, and more with a donation to Food for the Hungry. What’s awesome about this fund is every $1 you give is matched 22 times by USAID and other funding partners. In other words, if you give $50, the donation will effectively be $1,100! What an awesome impact you can have in the lives of children.
Give a gift today and have it matched >>
I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.
