Excerpt

The marketing landscape has changed, and too many nonprofits are relying on old marketing strategies to reach new donors and volunteers. If you want to know what nonprofit marketing-communications tactics are working right now in 2022, watch this episode. You’ll learn the three most-effective strategies and tips for getting started with them right away so you can rest easy knowing your outreach is attracting new supporters.

Summary

“Although it's not as sexy or fun as social media, it's really powerful because when you post a blog or a video or a podcast on your website with an SEO keyword, it will continue attracting search engine traffic to you long after you post it.”

If you want to spend your marketing budget wisely and use the strategies that are getting results in 2022, you need to understand what’s working (and what’s not working!).

Before you double down on what you’re already doing, take time to learn the three most effective nonprofit marketing strategies for today.

“Find ways of telling the real human stories in the work you do, not only the folks you serve, but a little behind the scenes. How do you plan out a program or service? How do you run your staff meetings? Is there a fun way that you kick off your board meetings that you could share a little bit on video?”

In this episode, learn the number one marketing strategy you must use (hint: it’s video!) and three big ideas on how to make it easy to create videos that excite and inspire. Plus, you’ll discover the tactic that will bring more visitors to your website than social media.

Watch the video to get the full training.

If you’ve learned something from this episode, take a screenshot or post and use the hashtag #marketyourmission so I can celebrate you on social media!

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Transcript

I've got good news and I've got bad news. The bad news is that if you're not using video as part of your marketing mix, you're not marketing in the modern age. The good news is, it's easier than ever to use video to reach more donors, inspire your volunteers, and tell your client stories in such a way that it attracts people to your mission. Hey everyone, I'm Ricardo Ibarra with Market Your Mission and with my 17 years in the design and marketing space, my goal is to help you tell your story, grow your donor base, and ignite a movement around your mission. Today, I'm sharing with you the three most effective nonprofit marketing strategies in 2022. So let's get right into it.

#1 Nonprofit Video Production

Number one of course, is video. You know, I started by saying, if you're not using video, you're not marketing in the modern age.

And that is so true. Why is video everywhere? Well, I think it's because we're all hungry for connection. We're all storytelling machines. And I really think that the reason why all the major social media channels, all the major websites are capitalizing on video is because it is the medium that most closely mimics real life. Right now I'm looking into the camera lens, it's almost as if I'm talking directly to you. I hope that you're hearing me and enjoying this, but we've tried so hard for so many years. Heck hundreds of years, thousands of years, to find a way of communicating with humans who were not right in our shared physical space. It all started of course, with print and then telephone and then television. And now thanks to modern technology, video is everywhere. And I'm gonna share with you some ideas on how you can use video in your modern marketing without pulling your hair out.

First big idea is, think about what activities you already do as part of your regular programming and services. Those are ripe for using video, capture those on video! Maybe it's short form video, like for an Instagram Story or a Reel or a TikTok, or just a quick little clip of a client testimonial. But if you do bigger, larger events, maybe you present workshops either online because you've been forced to go virtual, thanks to the pandemic, or in person in a classroom or in a live setting. Those are great opportunities for you to capture and record with video and then take that video and chop it up and put it all over your social media. Or you could even use those video recordings of workshops and events as a lead capture tool. You could offer those recordings in exchange for someone if they provide you with their email address, couple other big ideas for you.

Testimonials of course, are incredibly important. Now, remember, we always want to get permission before we get someone's likeness on video. And we also want to be very sensitive to the potential implications for telling their story. Of course, if you're working in a sensitive industry, say folks who are experiencing homelessness or domestic violence, you might not want to reveal the identities of your clients. And so maybe instead of capturing client stories, you capture stories from your board members, from your sponsors or your grantors, talking about the importance of your mission and how it's helping make a positive change in the world around you. So you don't have to do just testimonials of your clients and perhaps you're in industry, maybe you're working on clean water and there aren't as many folks that you can go out and, and interview about the effect that your mission has on them.

So turn inwards, look at your staff, your board, your other folks in the circle of support and see if they could give you a testimonial about the value of your work or tell their story of how they came to become involved with you and why they believe your mission is so important. Now on the flip side, I wanna talk about fun video. You know, I, I know that so many of my nonprofit clients are very serious and they are tackling some really important issues. And I really love that. And I also wanna encourage you to lighten up just a little bit. Now you don't have to be a goofball and like point to things on TikTok and like dance awkwardly, but think about using video as a way of peeling back, kind of the professional image we present to the world, and share a little bit more about the amazing humans that you're working with.

Share a little bit about your personality, the personality of the people you serve, or the folks you work with, or maybe even just the folks you interact with on a day to day basis. I'd like to encourage you to find ways of telling the real human stories in the work you do, not only the folks you serve, but a little behind the scenes. How do you plan out a, a program or service? How do you run your staff meetings? Is there a fun way that you kick off your board meetings that you could share a little bit on video? Of course, video is also hands down the best storytelling medium. It is so easy to tell a really compelling story because now there's tons of free video editing tools, everywhere that you can shoot a few short clips on your smartphone, no matter where you are, string them together and voila! In the course of maybe 15 to 20 minutes, you can put together a quick little, three minute video to tell a story to share on your socials.

My final thought for you around video is accessibility. It's really, really important to ensure that any video that you produce has captions for those folks who are hard of hearing. One of my favorite tools to use for captioning is called Temi T-E-M-I.com. And it's the service that I use to create the captions that are right here below me on the video. And they are AI powered. And so you might have to do a little bit of editing to make sure that the words that they captured were correct, but it's a great tool for transcribing your videos. All of the major social media platforms now have a place for you to upload captions with your videos. So I wanna encourage you to include that in your workflow so that you can make sure that your video is as accessible as possible for everyone who may wanna watch it.

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#2 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Nonprofits

Number two of the three most effective nonprofit marketing strategies for 2022, search engine optimization or SEO for nonprofits. Now, if you remember back when the internet started to really gain a lot of traction, oh, I'm thinking back to the beginning of my career in the early aughts, SEO was the end all be-all. There were the black hats who were doing it the bad way. And then there were the white hats who were doing it the good way. Of course, I'm only going to encourage you to wear a white hat and follow the good best practices set forth by all the search engines. But a lot of folks kind of got dissuaded with SEO. It seemed like some tech, mumbo jumbo, and the, the sexiness and fun of social media kind of took a lot of marketers away from SEO. Well, I'm here to bring you back.

And the reason why that is, is because I guarantee, if you look at your website analytics, there are more website visitors coming to your website from organic search than there are from social media. You know, I pulled the analytics data for six of my clients, two of which have really engaged social followings. I'm talking thousands of followers, comments, shares, all that good stuff. And the percentage of traffic that came from social media was under 20% across the board. And most of them had less than 10% of their website visitors came from social media. Contrast that [with] those same six nonprofits, their organic traffic, that means the, the number of people who came to their website from organic search, like Google, Bing, Yahoo, you name it, ranged from 35% to almost 70%. So a huge chunk of your website visitors are coming to you from search engines.

People searching for "clean water stream nonprofit "homelessness shelter," "after school tutoring for kids with ADHD," they're searching for things that are eventually going to point them to your website. So how do you get started with SEO? Well, I want to tell you, I recently gave an awesome presentation to the Nonprofits Association of Washington state, and I included a whole step by step guide on how to use search engine optimization. So I'd love for you to click the link below, get that presentation, you can follow along. I gave you some great examples in it on how to use SEO for your nonprofit by evaluating your current pages and also your future pages. I'll give you the brief version here right now. I use a tool called Uber suggest that's U-B-E-R-S-U-G-G-E-S-T.com. Ubersuggest.com. You can use it for free, or you can use a paid version like I do, and it will give you keyword ideas.

It's kind of like using a search engine itself. You can search in a keyword that's related to your nonprofit's mission. Say international student education, you can search in that. And Ubersuggest will give you related keywords that you can use when you're creating your content. The, the title of this video, "Three most effective nonprofit marketing strategies 2022" was a keyword I got from Ubersuggest. It tells me folks want to know about this. So I'm gonna create a video around this that's gonna go on my blog, which hopefully is where you're looking. And it's going to attract search traffic to my website. You can do the exact same thing. One of my clients offers language exchange groups via Zoom, where an English, a native English speaker can practice. Another language say Japanese and a Japanese student can practice their English. They've got a page for this on their website and I discovered that there's a lot of opportunity for them to create blogs around different types of language exchange that could draw more eyes to their website and ultimately increase demand and excitement for their free language exchange programs. But also it'll attract folks who are most likely interested in their mission of providing cross-cultural experiences and leadership for international students here in the U.S. So check out my lead magnet down below, that Nonprofits of Washington presentation will walk you through step by step on how to use Ubersuggest to find new keywords and attract more folks to your website so that you can leverage this incredible marketing channel or marketing strategy in 2022.

Search engine optimization is going to be here for the long haul. And although it's not as sexy or fun as social media, it's really powerful because when you post a blog or a video or a podcast on your website with an SEO keyword, it will continue attracting search engine traffic to you long after you post it.

Now, if you were to post something similar on a social media site, it'll stop driving traffic to your site after a day or two, because the feed is constantly getting refreshed on those social media sites. And of course, remember the social media sites want to keep users on their site. Facebook wants folks on Facebook, so Facebook can show them ads! Google, Bing, the other search engines, they actually make money by showing people relevant search engine results and sending them to other people's websites. So inherently search engines are invested in your mission because they want to send people to your website.

#3 Email Marketing

Number three of the most effective nonprofit marketing strategies in 2022 is an oldie, but goodie, it's email. Yep. Good old fashioned email. I love email marketing because it is permission based. In order for someone to be on your email list, they have to say "Yes, little nonprofit. Here's my email. I want to be on your list and hear about you," which means that the folks on your email list are going to be far more likely to respond to your questions, your calls to action, your beautiful storytelling, even the fun videos that you create. Number two, I love email because there's nothing standing in the way of your message getting delivered to the recipient. As long as you stay out of their spam filter, if they open your email message, just once, congrats, you're going to be delivered to their inbox over and over and over again, contrast that with social media and the algorithms change.

How many of you been burned by the algorithm? I certainly have. And a lot of my clients are kind of disillusioned with social media. So I recommend sticking with email. I've got videos coming up all about email marketing strategy, but in the meantime, I want you to commit or recommit to growing your email list. Commit to sending them an email with something interesting or valuable every single week and watch those open rates and those click throughs grow. Watch your email list grow and your inspired donors and volunteers grow as you continue to nurture your relationship with them through email, after you've attracted them to your website through SEO and with your amazing video. I hope you've enjoyed these three most effective nonprofit marketing strategies for 2022. Number one is video because it's everywhere. And it's the closest thing that we have to being in person face to face with one another. And it's a great storytelling venue. Number two, search engine optimization because the search engines want to send people to your website. And number three, email marketing, stay tuned for more on email marketing strategy a little bit later. As always, today's a great day to SHINE. So go out and serve with heart integrity, nerve, and excellence. I'll see you in the next video.