I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on inbound marketing for non-profits and charities. There are several charities out there that are doing great things with their online fund raising efforts using inbound marketing, marketing automation, and donor relationship building (Charty:Water is a great example). I set out to see what these successful charities are doing and more importantly, how they are doing it. After about a month of on-and-off research, here is what I’ve come up with.
Inbound Marketing for Non-Profits and Charities: What do the best do?
Annual Campaign
Have an annual campaign: each year, successful charities have a “project” that they focus their efforts on. They focus on accomplishing a goal and make sure that they are public about it. Email newsletters, prominent internet content, and informed donors are all very important. A way to show progress on a project is also very motivating. Larger Charities take up to two weeks to go to the location their project will take place and collect videos, pictures, stories, and anything else that would be helpful for them to launch their campaign afterward.
Donor Information
Collect as much info about each donor or potential donor as possible. This can be an organizational problem when trying to keep track of each person who donates, what they donate towards, and what projects they are interested in. Keeping them informed about how their donations are affecting others is also hard to keep track of on a donor-by-donor basis. There are many donor tracking applications out there that can do this and help make the tracking of that information easier.
Shareable Content is Key
The stuff we produce for web and for in-person interactions needs to be awesome. It needs to be remarkable. It needs to be something that is easily shareable and something that is memorable. In order to do this, we need continual on-the-ground content that has stories and information attached to it. For example, take a picture of a family near a well and get their story about how the clean water has helped them specifically. Someone local could be hired to do this on a piecework basis.
Happy Donors are Promoters
When past donors are informed of the projects they help fund and are kept up to date with how their donation has changed the lives of specific people, they are MUCH more likely to promote your charity and become advocates for change. They also tend to be repeat donors.
Want to learn more? From the research I’ve done, I have a lot to share and I plan on sharing more about it here on my blog. Subscribe via the signup box on this page to keep in touch!