5 Reasons why your nonprofit marketing plan isn’t working (and how to fix it)
Are you struggling to get more people engaged with your nonprofit, and things seem to be stuck? In this episode, learn what might be wrong with your nonprofit marketing plan and how to get your marketing-communications back on track so that you can focus on your mission.
Summary
“A campaign is a very tactical string of content and offers or calls to action that help guide the folks that you're interacting with in person or online, your ideal donors or volunteers. It helps guide them from one point to another so that they know what you're going to ask them for.”
Are you trying to inspire more donors or reach new volunteers, only to be met with crickets? Or worse yet, apathy? In this episode, learn how to evaluate whether your marketing-communications plan is working so that you know your nonprofit’s impact is growing while you serve the people or cause that matters most to you.
“You are conditioning your circle of support to look forward to what you have to say by being consistent.”
In this episode, discover the five biggest areas where your nonprofit communications strategy may be failing you and how to get it quickly back on track so you can get back to work.
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Quotes & Notables
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Transcript
Every nonprofit needs a marketing plan. And that marketing plan should be bringing you new donors and new volunteers every single quarter. If that's not happening for you, stay tuned because I'm sharing with you five reasons why your nonprofit marketing plan isn't working as well as you want it to.
1. Don’t try to appeal to everyone
Now, the big question at the top of this list is are you trying to get everyone to care about your mission? Now I know a lot of you may be struggling with getting folks to pay attention. It's a really busy world out there, especially on the interwebs. Everyone is trying to get your attention. Advertisers, big brands, your friends, your aunt's cat, your social media feeds, your email inboxes are full of things. And that's why the number one reason why your marketing plan may not be bringing you the new donors and volunteers every quarter or that you so desperately want is because you're trying to appeal to everyone.
It's a common, common practice that when we start marketing, we think, oh, I'm really passionate about this. So of course, everybody else is gonna be really passionate about this, but it's a pitfall, because most of us don't have the bandwidth to really think and dive deep into every single thing that comes across our plate each day. Think about yourself, right? You probably just have a few passions, a few hobbies, a few, you know, a handful of really good friends, a handful things that you really, really care deeply about that you're passionate about. And the folks that you're trying to reach your ideal donors, your ideal volunteers, the folks who are most likely to engage with your mission are the exact same way. One of my clients serves high school students in a career and technical education field. And one thing that's really great about them is because they're only serving middle and high school students in a certain group who are all studying this one career tech prep subject.
They are inherently limited in the folks that they can reach, who will really care about their mission. And it works to their advantage. They have excited students. They have the parents of those students. They have folks who work in that very same industry that the students are studying in. And then of course, they have stakeholders across the state of Washington who are all invested in that same industry, in those same skills, in those same career paths. Now I know that a lot of folks may not have that kind of specificity. Maybe your nonprofit is working to end homelessness, or maybe you are working on ocean cleanup, or you're advocating for a particular animal or a type of person who's experiencing some hardships in their lives. Maybe you just want to increase access to music in the schools. The, the best thing that you can do, regardless of what industry you're in regard of what your mission vision is, is to really drill down, to think about who is most likely to care about your mission.
And here's an exercise that I often recommend for folks doing that is thinking about the folks who are adjacent to your industry or your big topic area for your mission. So for example, if you're working on ocean cleanup, maybe the folks who are interested in hiking or kayaking or sailing or fishing, or any sort of like water-based outdoors activity, might be the types of folks that you want to try and reach with your marketing plan. That's because someone who loves sailing whether on lakes or in the Puget Sound like here in Seattle, like some of my friends do, that person is more likely to care about your mission of ocean cleanup, because they're already appreciating the natural water around them, and they're already spending time on that. And it'll be easier for them to connect your mission of cleaning up the oceans from plastic to their personal desires and the things that motivate them every day.
You know, have you ever met a sailor? I have I've, I've got a couple of friends with sailboats and it's so funny because their sailboat is like an extra partner. <Laugh> I have some friends who talk about their boat like that, like they're dating. And I love that. And I also know that they do really deeply care about the natural environment. So finding folks who have those similar adjacent shared interests with your mission is a fantastic way of really connecting and finding new groups of people to connect with online or in person over your mission. If you're working on getting more music in the schools. Well, obviously folks who love live music, maybe jazz or classical listeners of your local classical station could be interested in that. Or just folks who like patronizing the arts, right? Maybe there's a local, a local theater goers association, or groups of folks who love to go out to a live jazz or a blues place, or go to a little rock concert.
Those are the types of folks that it wouldn't be too big of a step for them to go, oh yeah. Well, you know, I love live music and I love the performers and I love the artistry. And yeah, I, I, I could care about your mission of getting more music in schools, because I see what that leads to. I see that helping kids explore their creativity and their joy and creative expression through music. It's an easy step for me to see that and go, oh, that leads to something that I love over here that leads to something that's that I'm passionate about, that I really enjoy. So that's tip number one is if you're trying to get everyone to care about your mission, that could be the foundational piece of why your marketing plan isn't bringing in new donors and volunteers, every single quarter.
My name's Ricardo Ibarra with Market Your Mission. Thanks for tuning. After 15 years in the marketing and design industry, I wanna leverage all that I know to help nonprofits like yours, share their story, grow your donor base, and ignite a movement around what you're doing.
2. Be consistent in your marketing
My next big idea is, are you being as consistent with your marketing, and outreach as you could be? Now, I know the last couple of years have been crazy for everyone, including myself. I know so many of my clients have really struggled with budget cuts or setbacks, you know, reduced elements of individual contributors. You know, folks aren't donating as much because they're struggling and that takes its toll, right? That really impacts our ability to do the things that we know are gonna help us. But I also see this kind of issue with consistency in the, the, the fat times.
You know, the times when our budgets are full, we're fully staffed, we've got a lot of folks on the team. And that's because of course, as nonprofits, we're really trying to be good stewards of our donors' and our grantors' money and time. So we try and put as much money towards our programming as possible, but sometimes we can shoot ourselves in the foot because we're not being as consistent with our marketing and outreach as we could be. Why is this so important? Well, what I was sharing with you earlier about the incredible amount of information that everyone takes in every single day, it's just incredible. All it takes is one scroll or one flick of the scroll wheel on your mouse, on your Facebook feed or your Twitter feed, or your email inbox to see how much information we're getting. The key here is to adjust your mindset.
A lot of my clients will say, yeah, I want to reach more folks. I want to get our message out there. I want to share our mission and the good work we're doing in the world, but I'm worried I'm gonna email them too much. I'm worried. I'm, I'm posting too much. I'm worried that I'm gonna oversaturate and I'm gonna tire them out. The great thing about that is it's not true. Let me give you permission right now to post as often on social media, as you want to, because most estimates say that if you have a business page or a business account, at most 20% of your followers will see one post (https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-algorithm/). So if you post something on Monday morning, you can change up the graphics, change up the text a little bit and repost it again on Thursday. And even then maybe only 20, 30, 40% of your followers will see that. And also remind yourself that the folks who are connected to your organization, the folks who are in your circle of support, they're invested in your mission, just like you are. And they will love hearing more from you. The other great thing is by being consistent, you condition the folks who are paying attention to your message, to look forward to what you have to say.
You are conditioning your circle of support to look forward to what you have to say by being consistent. One of my clients sends out a newsletter every Thursday, like clockwork long before I even started working with them. So I can't even take any credit for this. They have been sending out a weekly newsletter to their, the students that they serve and also to their, their community list, anyone else in the community. And they have been doing this for years. And you know, how many folks are on their email list? I think the last check, it was like approaching 25,000 people, which is insane. I know, but that's the kind of results that consistency gets for you. The folks on their email list, myself included, look forward to that well-written newsletter. It has a profile of a remarkable student. It has upcoming events for the community. It has little pieces and updates on programming and things that they, they are doing on the campus where they're at, they're at a university campus.
And what I love so much about it is it's a long form piece of content. You know, it takes three to five minutes, sometimes even more to read and it links back to their blog. It links back to their websites to event signup pages. And I know every Thursday I am gonna get that newsletter. I look forward to it and I also look forward to the stories that they share. So if your marketing plan, isn't giving you the juice, isn't drawing in the new donors, isn't energizing the folks who are already on your list, be more consistent.
3. Select your platform to “own”
Are you trying to post everywhere? Now I know, I just told you it's okay. You can post as many times as you want on the social media platform forms. As long as you're posting interesting content, go ahead. You're not gonna make your audience tired because only a tiny fraction of them are actually going to see each post, but there's a caveat to that. Don't burn yourself out. And it's a common thing that even I did when I started my career and I really wanted to get into social media marketing, and I wanted to get into digital marketing.
I thought, well, there's Facebook and there's Instagram and there's LinkedIn and there's YouTube and there's and there's, and there's, and of course now there's TikTok and Snapchat and all the cool platforms. But if you spend all your time frantically trying to post all over these different places, you lose some of the power and the intention that comes from building a platform. So instead of trying to post everywhere, focus on one social media platform that you are going to own and make your home.
How do you, how do you choose which one of those you should use? Well, wherever you see the most activity of the people, you are trying to reach. Some of my clients work with students. So they are on Instagram, hard. They're on Instagram, every single day posting every single day, because they know that their demographic of that college age student, you know, 17 to 24 ish, they're spending a lot of time on Instagram.
Some of my other clients are on Facebook because they know they have a slightly older audience who are on Facebook every day. They were earlier adopters with Facebook. And so they feel comfortable with that platform. And so they own Facebook. Another client of mine is pretty much exclusively on LinkedIn and they post once every day or so, what they're doing is, again, they're, they're conditioning and they're sharing in such a way that their circle of support knows, Hey, this is our home on the web, aside from our website and our email list and our blog. This is where you can find all of our most recent news and updates. So pick one place, one social media channel and make that your platform. Of course, I'll talk in a later video about funnels and how to get people off of your socials and onto your website and into your emails.
So stay tuned for that. But the important thing here is if your marketing plan isn't working, how you want it, if you're not getting those, those new donors or the volunteers, if your email list isn't growing every single week, maybe you're a little too scattered. Maybe you're trying to do too many things and you just need to dial in and, and really figure out, okay, where are the folks I'm trying to reach, spending their time online? Where, where can I reach them? Where can I engage with them? Where can I share the good work that we're doing? Share a little humor, share some insights, share some news, make that your platform and save yourself from that feeling of burnout that comes so quickly in the nonprofit space. So just real quick, I wanna honor you for even working in the nonprofit world. I know that it's a really tough industry to work in, and it requires a lot of heart.
And so I honor you for that. That's why I'm here is I love the impact that folks like you are making in the world. And so I just wanna applaud you and let you know that I see you. And I'm so grateful for you. And I hope you'll take this to heart that you don't have to post everywhere. You can focus on just one social media platform, make that your jam, make whatever the content you're sharing on there as great as you possibly can and save yourself from the burnout and the expectation of having to juggle all these different networks. Now, of course, if you're in a larger nonprofit and you, you have a dedicated communications person and they have the bandwidth and the capacity for it, awesome. Pick a complimentary network, pick a tertiary network. I can't even say that! Pick a third network that you want to own, but always remember that your number one platform network, that place, that you are gonna be posting consistently and getting your message out besides your website and your blog and your email list. Let that be your home. Let that be the source of all the information that you share out onto the internet.
Join Market Your Mission Monthly
I'd also like to invite you to my monthly training program. If you are enjoying this video head over to marketyourmission.co/monthly, where you can learn about my monthly training program. I go live every single month for at least 90 minutes. And I teach and I train on a topic in nonprofit marketing and communications, just like this, except it's a two way street. You get to ask questions. It's a mini seminar, it's a mini training seminar, and it's all about helping you grow your donor base, share your story and ignite a movement around your mission. So I hope to see you there at marketyourmission.co/monthly.
4. Align your marketing/outreach into campaigns
Next up are you aligning your efforts to campaigns? That's another reason why your nonprofit marketing plan might not be working as well as you want is you might not be aligning your efforts to campaigns. What do I mean by that?
A campaign is a very tactical string of content and offers or calls to action that help guide the folks that you're interacting with in person online, your ideal donors or volunteers. It helps guide them from one point to another so that they know what you're going to ask them for. A campaign is just a simple, structured piece of content or a structured plan that takes your ideal circle of support, your donors and volunteers, from point A to point B around a current topic, or a big ask that you have. I'll give you an example of this. One of my clients produces an incredible performance showcase of high school students, excuse me, college students from all around the world who share their cultural music and dance from their home countries. We have seen Japanese Taiko drumming, Chinese classical music, beautiful Bollywood dance formations, African drumming. It is absolutely incredible. And they were really kinda struggling to sell seats, be because their marketing and outreach efforts for this event were kind of sporadic and haphazard. They'd send an email one week and maybe do a little blog post, and then they'd post about it a couple of times on social media. And then a couple weeks later there'd be another email. And it, it all felt disjointed. One of the things that I did when I started helping them was to align all their efforts around a campaign.
We stepped up our branding and design game. We developed consistent messaging and themes. We planned out when each blog post was gonna go out and what the content of that blog post was. Their staff and student volunteers got together with all of the performers and started collecting stories and pictures and samples of what those performers were gonna share. So for example, one of the one of the groups was a Hungarian dance group. And so they had a few of the student performers come in in the full, the, the, the full costumes or the dress that they were gonna wear during their performance. Took some photos, wrote, typed out some notes of like what the audience was looking at. And they posted that on Facebook. So we built this campaign and for effectively six weeks before the event, that was the bulk of their social, their email, their blog content. Anytime anybody looked for this organization, the first thing they would see was this event on their homepage.
They would see their social media posts talking about the event, talking about the planning of the event, talking about the student involvement of the event, because it's all run by college students, talking about the student performers, all these things helped align everyone's expectations of what they were seeing from this organization, creating a campaign. We created a special webpage just for the event, not just a signup page, but a page talking about what the event was, what their vision for it was, who was going to perform, what folks could expect. And of course, all the fun details of like a little reception and the cultural exploration activities that they had in the lobby for kids. We aligned all of their marketing outreach communications into this campaign in the first quarter of the year. And I'm happy to say that after a year or two, they've been selling out to a packed house, it, this campaign took all these kind of sporadic pieces and this kind of haphazard thinking around marketing communications and really cleaned it up and made it streamlined.
So that regardless of where someone was on the internet, whether they were on Facebook or nonprofit their Instagram or their Twitter account, or on their email list, they would see the same messaging. They would see the same event. They would know, oh, FIUTS is promoting CulturalFest. It's time for CulturalFest. So the folks who've already attended the event because it's been going on since the late sixties, early seventies, folks who knew about the event were like, oh yeah, it's CulturalFest time. And folks, who'd never heard about it, folks who were new to the organization or just joined the email list, or just found a social media post were like, oh, that's really cool. And they saw the consistent messaging over and over and over. And it all led to the landing page. It all led to this one big action that the organization wanted them to take.
They knew, okay, they're selling tickets to this event. This event is about these student performers. Do I want to go? Yes or no? I've gotten all this great information. I've been really entertained. I've been inspired by these students' stories. So the big ask was: buy your tickets for CulturalFest. That's one way that you can really take your marketing plan up a notch is, think about your campaigns. You should have a campaign in your marketing plan for every quarter of the year. Now don't worry. It's fairly easy. If you have major keystone events, if you have a big fundraiser, if you do an annual campaign, guess what? Those are all marketing campaigns that you can just build on the front end. So if you know, your big fundraising dinner is the end of June. Great. The three months leading up to that, that's your fundraising dinner campaign.
Tell the stories of the volunteers who are gonna be there. Tell the stories of your organization. Talk about the speakers. Talk about the venue. Talk about the difference this event is going to make talk about the silent auction or the live auction, or how much fun it's going to be, or the location. Talk about all the folks that are involved. Talk about the story of why you're holding this event and then lead them to that landing page. Make sure that everything you're doing is aligned around this campaign. And if you don't have major events, if your activities are just kind of ongoing throughout the year, that's okay. You can make campaigns just to support your organization. You can choose. Okay. You know what? Quarter three is always kind of slow for us for individual contributions or new volunteers. Let's do a campaign. Let's do a volunteer drive campaign.
Tell a friend that could be your theme. Tell a friend about us. And all of your communications out to your audience are all centered around that campaign. I hope that serves you well, because I think that can be the one of the great ways of really ramping up your marketing communication strategy this year, and really increasing the speed at which you're getting new donors and volunteers.
5. Write (and share) a clear value proposition
Finally, the last reason why your nonprofit marketing plan isn't working or might not be bringing in those donors and volunteers that you want every month is you might not have a clear value proposition. Now, what I mean by that is to the rest of the world who doesn't know anything about your organization or very little, what do they think when they look at your website or your social media profiles? What is that captivating reason for existing? One of my clients also works in the education space and creates a scholarship for high performing underserved transfer students.
So these are students from a wide range and diversity of backgrounds. They serve immigrant students, students of color, LGBTQ+ students, it is fantastic. And definitely one of my favorite organizations to work with and their value proposition is simple. Their scholarship is for students who want to be change makers in the world. And so they've built a whole curriculum with their partner university to help these remarkable students who are from historically disadvantaged populations to really understand that they do have the capabilities and the skills to be change makers, to really make an incredible positive impact on the world. And they do that by teaching them writing skills and presentation skills and research skills and developing a cohort model. Everything that this nonprofit does is squarely built around their value proposition of creating change makers, who, who have it in their hearts to really rise above whatever life circumstance they're in now, and really envision an incredible credible future for them.
So I want that for you. What does your nonprofit do and believe the world should be like in such a simple and, and concise way. What is the difference you're making in the world? Try and say this in as few sentences as possible and make sure that you're really clear about what that means for the folks you're trying to attract. You know, I think the, the value proposition kind of builds on what we've been talking about in this video: it needs to identify who you're serving and also who you want to get interested in your mission, who are you inviting into that story? It needs to be consistent, of course, and it needs to really align to the core offering that you do. Your value proposition says, this is why we're here and this is why you should care. Those are two great questions to answer. Your value proposition answers, "Why are you here? Why are we here? And why should someone care about your organization?” All right. Thank you so much for staying tuned to the end of the video. I hope you learned a lot!
Reminder, if you would like some one-on-one training with me or some group training with me, check out my monthly training program at marketyourmission.co/monthly. I go live every month in our members area and I teach and I train on the latest marketing tactics for nonprofits. We have website site design, we have content creation. We have email marketing, we have video marketing, all of these topics and more, every month I go live for at least 90 minutes, usually about two hours. And then at the end I do a Q&A session. So you can ask me all your burning questions and it's all for a really great price because I wanna serve folks like you in the nonprofit sector. So learn more about that at marketyourmission.co/monthly. And remember every day is a great day to shine.