Why a Marketing Campaign is important for Nonprofits

Marketing plays a vital role in generating awareness for your nonprofit’s mission, generating donations, and engaging ongoing donors. Without it, you might really struggle to fundraise or help those your organization intends to help.

Even if you have marketing campaigns in place, they can still fail. For nonprofits, it’s all too easy to fail if you’re not sure what marketing tactics to use, you don’t clearly tell people what to do on your website, you don’t track your campaigns, or you aren’t able to leverage tactics fully.

Below we highlight the top reasons nonprofit marketing campaigns fail and how you can avoid making the same mistakes:

Reasons Most Nonprofit Marketing Campaigns Fail

1. Your Calls-to-Action Aren’t Clear

For most marketing campaigns, you’re going to have a single call-to-action (CTA), the action you want website visitors to take. It can be to donate, to read more, to sign up for a newsletter, or anything where you want an action to take place. However, if you aren’t clear about what you want people to do, how are people going to know to do it.

This is a very common marketing fail.

To ensure your calls-to-action are clear, you should:

  • Use strong verbs – Action words help propel users to, well, take action. Examples are Donate, Subscribe, Join Now, Give, or Support.
  • Be consistent – No matter how many tactics you’re using within a marketing campaign, you should use the same call-to-action to ensure everyone who reads or sees gets the same message.

This article shares good examples of calls-to-action and is worth the read.

2. You Don’t Track, Analyze, or Report on Your Campaigns

The only way to tell if your nonprofit marketing campaign is working is to track and report on your progress and success. In order to do this, you’ll need to set it up the right way from the very beginning – which for most is part of the problem.

Before you begin any marketing campaign you should set SMART goals. This gives you an objective and a way to benchmark future campaigns. Once you do that, you’ll need to decide how you’re going to measure the goal. If your goal is a specific amount of donations from Twitter, you’ll need to figure out how you can track those specific donations and where you’ll gather the data.

Not setting up the proper tracking before you launch the campaign, will prevent you from getting true data on your goal.

Once you’re set up and you launch the campaign, it’s best to review every few days to make sure tracking is working. However, you shouldn’t begin analyzing the data because there might be that much to really analyze and any reviews you do at this point won’t be truly accurate.

Your nonprofit fund accounting software can also probably help track and report on your various marketing campaigns. Tying together your software systems and tools will give you a more holistic view of how the campaign is performing and what you do can differently in the future.

If you are trying to figure out what the best nonprofit accounting software solution is for your organization, give us a call today at  (843) 971-9061.

3. You Don’t Leverage Social Media Correctly

Social media is a huge opportunity to engage with your prospective and current donors. However most nonprofits, don’t fully leverage the various platforms to their advantage. Or they don’t follow best practices and end up talking only about themselves.

Top social media fails:

  • Not using images
  • Only talking about themselves or their mission
  • Not sharing enough on their chosen channels
  • Not responding to messages, DMs, comments, or mentions from followers/fans
  • Being on every channel when it only makes sense to be on a select few

Check out the video below to see how you can amplify your nonprofit’s social media efforts:

Need help leveraging your nonprofit fund accounting software in your marketing campaigns? We offer various training programs to help you learn how to maximize your nonprofit software while maximizing the effects of your marketing campaigns.