Content Marketing for Nonprofits

A Communications Map for Engaging Your Community, Becoming a Favorite Cause, and Raising More Money

Kivi Leroux Miller

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781118722374
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro y benéficas

Nonprofits are communicating more often and in more ways than ever before...but is anyone paying attention?

In her follow-up to The Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause, Kivi Leroux Miller shows you how to design and implement a content marketing strategy that will attract people to your cause, rather than begging for their attention or interrupting them with your communications. Youll learn how to plan, create, share, and manage relevant and valuable content that inspires and motivates people to support your nonprofit in many different ways.

Inside:

• Eye-opening look at how nonprofit marketing and fundraising is changing, and the perils of not quickly adapting
• Up-to-date guidance on communicating in a fast-paced, multichannel world
• How to make big-picture strategic decisions about your content, followed by pragmatic and doable tactics on everything from editorial calendars to repurposing content
• Real-world examples from 100+ nonprofits of all sizes and missions

This book is your must-have guide to communicating so that you keep the supporters you already have, attract new ones, and together, change the world for the better.

Part One

Finding a New Path: The Power of Content Marketing

Content marketing is a new kind of journey, a trek into the backcountry. While many others have walked this path before you, it is still largely wild and uncharted territory that will require an adventurous spirit as you make your way. You can and should prepare for the journey, but you also need to be flexible enough to adapt to what and whom you encounter along the way.

The chapters in part 1 lay the groundwork for understanding the significance of this new path for your communications plan, why it matters to your long-term success, and how to embrace it by setting some new communications goals.

Chapter 1 reviews some of the major societal shifts under way that will affect your marketing strategy: namely, the explosion in the number of communications channels, the shifts in the ways different generations relate to charities, and growing out of these first two changes, a shift in who’s in control of the message. You’ll see why communicating in ways that are much more relevant and engaging to your participants and supporters is essential today.

Chapter 2 takes a closer look at the shift from traditional nonprofit communications to nonprofit content marketing and at how you can use this shift to position your nonprofit as a favorite cause. It also reviews the stages nonprofits commonly move through as they evolve their traditional communications plan into a modern content marketing strategy.

Chapter 3 describes setting your content marketing goals and how to measure your progress toward those goals. It looks at understanding the influence of program and fundraising goals on your content marketing strategy, learning what will drive your success, and aligning the kinds of metrics you watch with your goals.

Chapter One

Hearing the Call of the Wild

The Case for Changing Your Communications Approach

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This chapter is about . . .

• Recognizing why the term target audience no longer works
• Understanding the real impact of social media on your communications strategy
• Communicating with adults in four different generations
• Reaching your supporters’ inner angels instead of their inner bookkeepers

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It’s a new, wild world out there, and yet many nonprofits are communicating as if they were still living in the ’80s or ’90s. It’s time to throw out your excess baggage, full of illusions that you are fully in control of your communications and outdated notions that you should do the same things as before just because “we’ve always done it that way.” The journey you’ll take in this book requires you to be lighter on your feet, so while you’ll still carry a big backpack, you need to be smarter about the communications tools you put in it.

Before you start walking down this new path, let me give you a bird’s-eye view of the territory you are venturing into.

The End of the Target Audience

Target audience is a common marketing term for the people you are trying to reach with your communications. I’ve used it regularly since I started working in nonprofit marketing and communications, including in my first book, The Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause. But I’m trying to banish it from my lexicon, and I suggest you do the same. This term embodies the old way of looking at nonprofit marketing and communications, an approach that I hope you’ll transition away from as you progress through this book.

While the concept of focusing on specific groups of people—via list segmenting, for example—is still very valuable, thinking of this focus as targeting is troublesome because it conjures the image of you blasting your content toward the target, rather than an image of you creating content that naturally attracts specific types of people to you. The term audience presents a similar problem because it implies people sitting passively and quietly while you present to them.

Today, your goal is engagement with people who care about the same things your organization does. While some people will still sit and silently consume what you produce, the goal for most nonprofit communicators is to get people to take some sort of action in response to that content, even if it is as simple as raising a hand and clicking “like” on Facebook or sharing a story they read in your newsletter over coffee with a friend.

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Engagement means getting people to interact with your organization in ways that build a relationship between them and your organization, so they are more likely to follow through on actions that help you achieve your mission (from advocating for your cause to donating funds to participating in your programs). Engagement is sometimes measured in one-time actions, like sharing a piece of your content with their friends on Facebook, which over time, you hope, will culminate in your organization becoming one of their favorite causes.

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Segment Your List to Be More Relevant

Segmenting a list means pulling a smaller subset of groups of names from a mailing list, based on specific criteria. You might sort or segment recent donors from those who haven’t given in the last twenty-four months, or you might segment by zip code, by who attended your last event, or by who opened your last e-newsletter. Segmenting allows you to provide customized and relevant content to each segmented group on your mailing list: this means, for example, that you don’t remind people to register for an event when your records tell you they have already registered.

“We found that the single most predictive factor in whether someone will open an email from us is whether they have opened one in the past,” says Brett Meyer, speaking of his experience as communications director at the Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) (personal communication, February 2013). For its various email messages, NTEN will segment based on whether someone

• Has opened two emails in the last 60 days
• Has opened an email in the last 180 days
• Has opened an email in the last year
• Hasn’t opened an email in the last year

“We want to keep the email openers engaged, and we want to reengage the others,” says Meyer. NTEN messages fairly heavily—two to three times a week—to those who are engaged but sends only the best content or notices about free webinars or new downloads on hot topics to those who are less engaged.

If you haven’t opened a message in the first week, NTEN will often send a reminder message. “We have found that people who haven’t been very engaged are much more likely to read the content when they get that second reminder message rather than from the first message,” says Meyer.

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For many nonprofits, engaging their community also means actively embracing members of it as not just consumers of content but coproducers of content as well. Communications do not flow in a single, irreversible, targeted direction any longer, but back and forth between a nonprofit and its community members. Oftentimes the community members themselves become the spokespersons for the cause—an idea that still frightens many nonprofit leaders (maybe you?) but that should ultimately excite you because of the potential to reach and connect with so many more people.

So if you don’t call those people out there on the receiving end of your communications the target audience, then what should you call them?

Participants, Supporters, and Influencers: Your PSIs

I’m not one for making up brand-new words, so I’ve been using a trio of existing terms instead: participants, supporters, and influencers, who are collectively your PSIs. I’ll use this terminology throughout this book. I think the abbreviation is apropos, because it reminds me of how important it is to keep a car’s tires inflated to the right PSI (pressure per square inch in this case). Too much PSI in either case leads to an uncontrolled explosion, and too little leads to terrible performance. There’s a PSI sweet spot for your car’s tires, and there’s a PSI sweet spot for your nonprofit too: the right number of participants, supporters, and influencers to help you accomplish your mission without overtaxing your organization.

When I say participants, I am referring to the people your organization serves, as well as those who have actively embraced your mission and are helping you directly to implement your programming, such as volunteers and advocates. When I use supporters, I am talking about financial donors, individuals and groups who endorse your work, and volunteers and advocates who help to build your community without directly implementing programs and services. When I use influencers, I am talking about people who are typically more disinterested or objective about your particular organization than either supporters or participants, but who can still have a big impact on how others perceive you, such as journalists, elected officials, and some of your professional peers.

There’s often some overlap among these groups, especially between participants and supporters and between supporters and influencers, and that’s fine. It’s less important to categorize someone as a participant, a supporter, or an influencer and more important to view him as part of the community that is making good things happen, rather than as a passive bystander. In addition to referring to these people as your PSIs, I also refer to them collectively as your community. You may call them your network, your family of support, your members, or whatever you like—just try to get away from the term target audience as much as possible.

Seismic Shifts Affecting Your Marketing Strategy

What’s brought about this shift away from target audience thinking and toward more inclusive community engagement? Just as tectonic plates far underground create lots of little tremors and sometimes shocking jolts at the surface, big and small shifts are rumbling under the foundations of nonprofit marketing and fundraising too.

All your communications should be rooted in the answers to three questions:

1. Who are you communicating with?

2. What is your message to them?

3. How will you deliver that message?

The answers to the who and how questions are being affected by two major societal shifts, in media and in demographics, that are raising great debates among and within nonprofits about how they should approach their marketing and fundraising. Your answer to the question of who you are communicating with needs to take into account the changing demographics of the people who support nonprofits. The growth in communications channels, especially social media, is changing the way you will answer the question about how you will deliver your message.

These two shifts are combining to produce a third powerful shift in who is in control of information and who has the power to share it and discuss it. In other words, you alone no longer decide what’s relevant about your work; your participants, supporters, and influencers have a say too. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Title
• Copyright
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Part One: Finding a New Path: The Power of Content Marketing
• Part Two: Who Will Go with You: Redefining Your Marketing Relationships
• Part Three: Envision the Journey: Preparing Your Content Marketing Plan
• Part Four: Set Out on Your Trek: Implementing Your Content Marketing Strategy
• Part Five: The Right Provisions for the Journey: What You Need to Know about the Channels You Choose
• Conclusion: Don’t Go If You Won’t Have Fun
• Nonprofits Included in This Book
• References
• Index