5 things you must do before writing your nonprofit marketing plan
If you’re operating your nonprofit without a marketing plan, you’re leaving money on the table. In this episode, learn the five things you need to measure and evaluate before writing your nonprofit marketing plan. This will help you be more effective with the time and resources you have and ultimately reach more people.
Summary
“The best way to identify your audience and connect with them is through their aspirations and their values.”
If you want to reach more people and grow your movement, you need a marketing plan. Before you dive into the marketing tactics and strategies that will help you do that, take time to understand five important concepts that will help you be more effective (and save some time and money!).
“The next level of your nonprofit’s growth and service depends on reaching the next level of consistency and commitment in your marketing.”
In this episode, discover how to target your ideal donors beyond demographics, learn the three marketing channels every nonprofit must use today, and how to set realistic marketing goals.
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Quotes & Notables
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Transcript
Too many nonprofits are operating without a marketing plan at all. And you know what that means. They're leaving money on the table.
Hey everyone, I'm Ricardo with Market Your Mission. If that sounds like you that's okay, we are gonna help you out today because I am sharing five things must do before writing your nonprofit marketing plan. If you are, gung-ho about growing your donor base, getting new volunteers, rallying folks around your cause, you probably realize that you need a plan. You need a marketing communications plan and before you get to that, here are five things that you absolutely must do so that exercise of defining your marketing plan is a success.
Define Your Audience
Number one, define your audience. One of the biggest pitfalls I see in so many nonprofits, especially the, a little teeny ones, the small ones, the ones that are really boots on the ground is they equate their personal passion with their mission, with a belief that everyone will share that same passion.
And sadly, that's just not true. We are all so different and so varied that the chances of everyone being interested in what you're interested in are slim. And that's okay because digital marketing, the modern age of the internet has made it much, much easier to connect with and find folks who are interested and are passionate about the same things as you. One of the pitfalls that I see folks wander into when they're defining their audience is basing that audience description solely on demographic data. That's things like age, gender, income, location, that sort of thing, but that doesn't tell the whole story of the human being. Let me give you an example, say you are trying to increase adoption and use of electric vehicles. So you think, okay, well, you know, electric vehicles are kind of expensive. And so, you know, maybe my ideal audience is a Latinx woman who makes over $75,000 a year and only has one kid and lives in a big city.
Okay. The challenge with that is: that person may be interested in driving an electric vehicle, like you're trying to promote, they may also look at a car as just a tool. And so they don't really care too much about what they drive. And they're more likely to just drive you know, a, a used car or a hand me down, or maybe they're someone that is more interested in how they're perceived and what their things and their car says about them and, and their status. And so they may want to drive a luxury vehicle that may or may not be electric-based or hybrid-based. So the challenge is when we get too stuck on the simple demographics, we kind of paint ourselves into a corner. Instead, what I want to encourage you to do when you're thinking about your audience, it's okay to think loosely about demographics, but don't get too hung up on them because they don't paint the full picture.
That same person is better described by their aspirations and their values. The best way to identify your audience and describe who they are and connect with them is through their aspirations and their values. Aspirations is what they're trying to do in life. What they're trying to accomplish, who they're trying to be, what vision they have for themselves in the future. I kind of already touched on this in my example. Remember, this hypothetical $75,000 a year, female earner may very well have a desire of getting rid of her car, or may be really environmentally conscious and may be really thinking about, you know, how can I lessen my carbon footprint, or she may be trying to get her kids off to school and not worry about that too much at all. She may be trying to invest more in her kids' education. So the aspirations of this individual, what they want in life, what they're trying to accomplish in life, should be fairly closely aligned with your mission.
Now they don't have to be exactly your mission, right? If your nonprofit is working to provide access, to clean drinking water all over the United States, especially in communities that are, you know, affected by lead pipes, let's say. The aspirations of your ideal audience doesn't have to be someone who believes that you know every community needs to have clean, fresh drinking water, but their aspirations do, do need to be related to your mission. And that could be a desire to live a healthy lifestyle, trying to raise their kids healthily, or maybe they have elderly parents that they want the best for. And so health and the aspiration of creating a life where they're healthy and they feel good, and they have access to things like clean drinking, water, clean air, healthy foods, that sort of thing. That's a way of connect on similar aspirations with your target audience, with your, the folks you're trying to reach in a way that doesn't feel quite so on the nose and it also doesn't limit you. Notice if you start talking with someone and you say, "Hey, you know, I'm, I'm working with a nonprofit and we're working on improving drinking water across, across the country." That they might say, "Okay, that's great. That's, that's fantastic." But then you can lead in with a question of, you know, we're we think that drinking water is really critical for personal health or for our kids safety. Do you like to exercise? Do you have any kids, these aspirations that I'm talking about, it may seem like this kind of a more amorphous abstract concept, but really it's just a fancy way of saying, what are people trying to do? What do they want out of their lives? Do they want to be able to take their kids to a beautiful lake? Maybe they have a little cabin by the lake, or maybe they just have a favorite RV campground where grandparents like to take their kids like mine did.
Maybe there's a stream running through there. Those aspirations, if you can find them out and understand what, what motivates them, you can tie those into your mission of providing clean drinking water. "Oh, It's so great. I love, I love hearing about how your grandkids, you like to take them to the RV park and it has that beautiful stream. And you like to go fresh water fishing. Well, you know, you, you seem to care about clear water, clean water. Maybe, maybe you might be interested in, in helping us out. Maybe you'd like to volunteer." The second aspect of defining your audience that's really powerful beyond aspirations are their values. These are the things that underpin their actions. These, this is the bedrock of their or aspirations, that same person who loves taking their grandkids to that fishing hole or to the RV campground, with the beautiful stream.
They may value family time. They may value the outdoors. They may value spending quality time. They may value being a role model. If you can identify what they value, then you can connect the shared values that your organization has with their personal intrinsic values. Let me give you another example. You know, there's a lot of nonprofits working on promoting literacy in our schools. I have a, a big soft spot in my heart for nonprofits in the education space. And so if your nonprofit is working on literacy or access to books or libraries or reading or language, some of your values might be helping students or young folks or, or people be more informed and engaged citizens. Your values might be that books really had a great part of your life and your upbringing and reading stories and sharing those and connecting with a other cultures and ideas and dreams through the written word.
That could be a value for you. And so if you can connect your organization's values of increasing literacy with your ideal audience's values of maybe library access, or sharing stories, or preparing students or young folks to be great citizens, that's a more effective way, a more whole-person way of connecting with your ideal audience, because it transcends income. It transcends gender or gender expression. It transcends race and ethnicity. It transcends orientation. It transcends location. Somebody who lives in New York and really values, literacy, and thinks every child should, should have easy access to books and learning and reading, and be able to communicate in the best way that they can is also going to be likely to support your nonprofit located in Sacramento, California, that is getting library books or library time, or building a library for the kids there because you've connected on your values.
But if you're stuck on, oh, that person's in New York City, they don't care about local kids here. You might be surprised. The internet is a pretty wide-open place, and it's connected us so much more these days. So, focus on defining your audience by their aspirations and their values. If you want to go deeper on this idea, click the link below. I want to give you the worksheet that I use with all of my clients to help them define their audience. It not only includes the, the important demographic data, the details like income and age range and ethnicity, you know, wherever they're at, but it also takes you the step further to help you identify their aspirations, their motivations, their values, their beliefs, and some of their media habits too. So you can really have a deeper understanding of the whole, whole person behind the folks you're trying to reach.
Identify Your Goals
Number two, before you start writing your nonprofit marketing plan, you need to identify your goals.
You can't go anywhere without picking a destination, right? And you don't even need to start writing your marketing plan to start thinking about where you want to end up. I like to think of marketing goals in three categories, reach, engagement, and conversions. I'm gonna talk about all three of those. And of course, you also need to identify the goals that are important to your organization. If it's serving a thousand lunches every week or every month to the folks that you're serving. Fantastic. If it's pounds of plastic up out of a local river, fantastic. If it's the number of children who are getting a book bag full of books and supplies to help them succeed in school, fantastic. For your programmatic goals, I'm not gonna give you any advice in this video, because I know that you and your team are the best folks to identify those goals, but you also need to consider your marketing goals. And the first category is reach. This is, simply put, the number of folks that your message reaches or will reach. Remember we're setting goals here. So the first category I want you to think about for your marketing goals before you start creating your nonprofit marketing plan is your reach. How many folks do you want to reach?
Think about all your different marketing channels. You've got your website. You've got an email list. You've got an email list, right? I'll be doing a video on that very soon. You've got your social media channels. You have in-person events. You have signups, you may have a physical location. Maybe you're a pet adoption shelter, and you actually have folks walking through your door. Fantastic. What are your goals for that reach? How many folks do you want to know and be aware of your existence? How many folks do you want to reach with your marketing messages? How many folks do you want to be enthralled with your communications? The second type of goal I want you to think about are your engagement goals. So now we've got them aware of us. We've reached them with our marketing message, but how are they engaging with that message? Are they clicking a link? Are they pressing the like button? Are they writing a comment? Are they responding to an email? What are they doing? How are they engaging with your marketing? Are they taking a flyer? That's engagement.
How can you find ways of quantifying each of your major marketing channels and even your programmatic activities for engagement. Now, if you're thinking about your nonprofit programming, you might also think of not only engagement in terms of the folks that you serve, but also your entire circle of support. Remember your circle of support are your donors, your volunteers, your stakeholders, the clients, and people you serve anybody who's connected to your mission. How are they engaged in your activities? If you're serving a thousand lunches a week? Well, maybe the principal at that school, how do you evaluate that person's engagement? They're not eating the lunch, but how do you evaluate their engagement? Or if you're fishing up, you know, you're measuring how many pounds of plastic you're pulling out of a local river or, or a lake. What's the engagement. How do you set a goal for the engagement with maybe the local fish and wildlife folks or engagement with other groups, maybe there's a local Rotary or Kiwanis or other civic group that you want to engage.
Engagement is important because it shows that the awareness of your organization is moving into action. Speaking of action, the next type of goal I want you to think about are your conversion goals. Now that's just fancy marketing speak for taking action, really doing the thing, signing up your email list is a great conversion goal. Donations, great conversion goal. How many new volunteers do you want every month? That's a fantastic conversion goal. If you're evaluating your social media, how many folks are you getting to your website? And how many of those are either signing up for your email list or downloading a, a freebie or a white paper or a report or an activity book. Conversions could also be actions taken by others in your circle of support. Maybe you have a favorite policymaker who's advocating for your organization's mission. And one of their convertion, one of your conversion goals is for them to put their name on a piece of city legislation that will have a positive impact on your mission.
So the three types of marketing goals, I want you to think about are reach, engagement, and conversion. And then of course, before you start writing your nonprofit marketing plan, you've also got to think about your programmatic goals. How many folks do you want to serve? What are the measurable outcomes that you are going to realize this year?
Hey, everyone. My name is Ricardo Ibarra with Market Your Mission. And after 15 years in the design and marketing industry, I wanted to create something just for folks like you, just for nonprofit leaders who want to share their story, build their donor base, and ignite a movement around your mission. Some of my favorite clients have been nonprofits. And so that's why I started Market Your Mission. I want to be the amplifier for your impact in the world. And today I'm talking about five things you must do before you start writing your nonprofit marketing plan.
Evaluate Your Current State
Number three, evaluate your current state. Now, before we, or after we pick our destination and we decide what our goals are gonna be. We also need to understand at the same time where we're starting from, right? Google maps, Apple maps, whatever maps you use, <laugh> remember Map Quest? Whatever map you use always has to know where you are before it can give you directions to wherever you want to go. The same thing is true in your marketing, you've got to evaluate exactly where you're at and remember, be kind to yourself. You know, a lot of nonprofits spend the bulk of their money on programs and activities and marketing, sadly time and time again, ends up being an afterthought. So that's okay. If you're just getting into this, or you've been doing this for years and years and years, and you realize, okay, Ricardo, I, I get it.
I need to start a marketing plan and I need to get on track. That's fantastic. And be kind to yourself as you're evaluating your current state. There's a couple of different marketing channels I want you to take a look at when evaluating your current state. Of course, you need to evaluate what your programs and activities are doing. How many folks are you serving? How many backpacks are you delivering? How many pounds of trash are you fishing out of the river? That's fantastic. The three channels that I want you to think about when evaluating your current state, are email, your website, and your social media. Those are kind of the trifecta in digital marketing. Those are the bare minimum you've gotta have in order to be really effective in today's digital landscape. For your email list, you want to evaluate how many folks are on our list.
That's simple enough, right? You also wanna evaluate what percentage or how many folks open our emails. If you're using a modern email marketing provider, like MailChimp or Constant Contact or any of them, they will give you these statistics. Now, if you've been paying attention to the digital marketing game, you might remember that Apple just released a feature that prevents some email marketing providers from knowing when a user opened their email. And that's okay. Don't worry about that because the next metric that I want you to evaluate for your email will help make up for that fact. And that's your clickthroughs. So not every email provider can determine how many folks clicked through your link from an Apple device, but your website analytics will tell you how many folks came from email. So even with Apple's privacy restrictions, if you manage to get someone to click your website from an email, you send them, you will see that in your website analytics, and that's okay.
You can attribute where that link comes from in your analytics. I'll share more on that later, but just to recap, when you're evaluating your current state, I want you to look at how big is your list. How many folks open your list and how many folks click through to go to your website from your emails. Up next in evaluating your current state is looking at your website. Now, if you don't have Google Analytics installed on your site, get on it. It's super easy, super fast. Google has tons of step by step guides on how to install Google Analytics on your website, regardless of where you've built or host your website. Of course, my favorite website builder and host is Squarespace, but you can also use WordPress. You can use Wix, you can use Weebly, you can use all sorts of things. Wherever you've built your website, make sure that you have Google Analytics installed because that will help you evaluate your current state.
Here are a few of the things that I want you to look at. Number one, website visitors, duh, no brainer, right? That's a great metric. Look at them on a month to month basis. If you have a full year of analytics, use that because there will often be seasonal variances in the number of folks who are coming to your website, and you can use that to your advantage. After website visitors I want you to look at where they are coming from. Where are your visitors coming from? Are they coming to you from social media, from search engines? Are they clicking links from your email? Are they typing in the URL for your website? Those are called referrals because it identifies where they came from, who referred them to your website. That's really important because it allows you to see how well your marketing and outreach is working.
If you notice that, oh, wow. You know, we, we posted that video on Facebook last week and then the next couple of days, we got tons, more website visitors, boom, that's really helpful insights. You know that maybe you want to try doing something similar to that video. Maybe you need to post at that same time of day. So when you're evaluating your current state, look at your website referrals. Couple of other things I want you to look at when you're looking at your website and evaluating your current state, look at your most popular pieces of content. That can tell you what programs and activities are most interesting to the folks who are visiting your website. If you're producing a weekly blog or some sort of long form content, telling stories, sharing insights, getting behind the scenes, that can also be a really great indicator of what your audience wants to see more of.
And then finally, the other piece to look at is time on page. Now, if you see a really tiny number, like 90 seconds, don't worry about that. That's because most folks who visit our website sites and come through social media or search engines might not find what they were looking for. They might just be browsing. And so they'll pop off your site. But take a look a little deeper and see if you can find the most popular content and, and which pages folks are spending the most amount of time on. That's a great way for you to introduce the folks who visit those pages to other activities you're doing. Maybe if one event page is really popular and folks spend a lot of time on there, you might put a little box on that page, reminding them about a similar event that's coming up.
Okay. The next area where I want you to evaluate your current state is with social media. And there's two big types of metrics I like to pay attention with social media: engagement and amplification. Notice I didn't say likes, who cares about likes? And I'm also not super interested in the number of followers you have, as long as that's slowly growing, okay? Those are what a lot of folks call vanity metrics. And it's because they're not really actionable. They're not telling you anything about how much how many volunteers you're able to cultivate or inspire. And they, they don't really tell you anything about like how much money you're bringing in from individual contributions. So leave the vanity metrics aside, don't pay too much mind to them. Look at your engagement metrics. What are folks commenting on the most? Are they engaging with your social media? Are they like really having a conversation with you? If no, that's okay. I'll share with you some tips on how to do that at a later date. The other thing to look at on your social media is the amplification rate. That's the shares. That is what pieces of content are folks sharing. Are they amplifying? What's getting picked up by maybe the Instagram Explore page. How, how are your hashtags performing on a post that's all in your amplification rate? So as a quick recap, social media evaluating your current state, look at engagement and amplification.
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.
Determine Who Will Be Responsible
Onto the next big idea, the next reason or the next thing that you need to do before writing your nonprofit marketing plan is to determine who will be responsible for it and what numbers they will be responsible for. So you've identified your goals. You've looked at reach, you've looked at engagement. You've looked at conversions, you've looked at your programs, okay? We know what our goals are. You've evaluated your current state. You've looked at your email. You've looked at your website. You've looked at your social.
You've looked at your programs where you're currently at. Now it's time to make someone on your team responsible for this plan. I'm not saying you can't spread that around your team and, and maybe have the person doing development in charge of a few things and your communications person doing another things, or heck even someone working in finance can even be in charge of some things. But at the end of the day, there needs to be one person in charge of running your marketing. One person needs to be responsible for making sure that at the end of the day, what you've planned for gets done no matter what. And this is so critical because we're all so busy. And I wanna honor you for doing all the things and wearing all the hats. Maybe you're in a teeny, tiny nonprofit. Maybe you're the only person. And you're thinking, Ricardo, how in the heck am I gonna do this? It's okay. You can get, you can get through this. And if that person is you fantastic, it's a level of commitment that is required and consistency to make marketing worthwhile.
There is a level of consistency and commitment absolutely required in order to make your marketing effective, to ignite that movement that you want to create, to inspire new folks to donate to your cause, to energize the folks that could potentially be volunteers. And of course, to share your story. So my challenge to you is: who is that one person going to be, who is in charge of your marketing? They don't even have to be a marketing expert. Stay tuned to my channel, I'm gonna be posting so much gold for you to help you learn all about marketing and communications. And of course you can join my monthly program at marketyourmission.co/monthly. The next part of this is not only determining who is responsible for your marketing plan, but what numbers they are responsible for and the numbers that everyone is responsible for. This is a really powerful business tactic.
Give everyone at least one number they're responsible for. Okay, Maria, you are responsible for growing our number of email subscribers. Fantastic. Now Maria knows I've got my goals. I know where I'm at. We're at a hundred of 'em and our goal is to get to 200 of 'em by the end of this quarter. Fantastic. Now Maria knows exactly what she's got to do, Derek. Okay? You are in charge of making sure that our blogs get a 20% increase in traffic over the next year. Great, now Derek knows exactly what you expect of him and whoever is in charging of the marketing plan. They can go to Derek and say, Hey, Derek, how are our numbers looking? What's our increase. It's been three months. How's it going? Derek says, oh, you know, it's increased 5%. Okay, well, Hmm. 20% divided by four. We've got four quarters in this year.
Okay. We're fairly on track. Let's see what else we can do. You see how much clarity this brings? This really makes your entire team a well oiled marketing machine because they have clear instructions and they know who is responsible for that plan at the end of the day.
Set a Realistic Timeline
The final thing, number five that you must do before writing your nonprofit marketing plan, set a realistic timeline for your marketing. I know if you, if you've never done this before, or maybe things have changed in your organization, you might not know truly how long good marketing can take. And that's okay. You can make incremental progress every week, every month. And certainly every, every quarter.
But what's really important is to also evaluate all the other things that your organization is doing. If you have a busy schedule of programs and activities, if you have some big grants that you're writing for, if you are just totally swamped and you're one person wearing all the hats I applaud you. And I'll also encourage you set a realistic timeline, give yourself a little bit more time than you think you need. You know, we're really good at being very idealistic when setting our time. And there's nothing wrong with giving yourself a little bit of grace and a little bit of extra, a room to accomplish these big goals. Because if you're like me, I, I think I know you that you're the type of person who's got the big dreams and the big heart and wants to make a big impact and you've gotta protect yourself.
So before you start writing your nonprofit marketing plan, take a look at what's coming down the pipe, what's on the calendar and set realistic timelines for when you're actually gonna get the work done. If it takes you an hour to write a blog post. Great, is that gonna be every Monday morning? Awesome. What's gonna stand in the way now, if it takes you half an hour to schedule social media posts for the week or for the next day or, or whatever it is, make sure you put that in your calendar and make sure that you're giving yourself a little bit of buffer time too.
I hope this has been helpful for you. Thank you so much for tuning in. Remember every day is a great day to shine. So go out and serve with heart integrity, nerve and excellence. I'll see you in the next video.