How to Develop a Marketing Plan for Your Nonprofit

As the leader of a nonprofit organization whose success depends on donors and can only thrive with continued generosity, it’s fair to say that a strong marketing plan is mission critical. Without it, not only will your nonprofit fail to raise awareness of its cause, but you’ll also struggle to gain the financial foundation you need to make a real difference in your community.

The most successful nonprofits have a lasting and widespread impact because the administrative staff behind them run them like businesses. In other words, they count every dollar, give every penny a purpose, and invest some of those funds wisely to help earn more. Similarly, all investments (time and otherwise) invested in your nonprofit’s marketing efforts should justify the same business approach.

In this guide, you’ll learn five essential steps to creating a results-driven marketing plan that will help you grow your nonprofit in a sustainable way.

5 Steps to Market Your Nonprofit

If you feel like you’re shooting in the dark with your marketing plan, it’s time to rethink your approach. When you don’t know who you’re trying to reach, where to find those people, or what to say to get their attention, it’s time to go back to the drawing board and focus on what you need to focus on.

Here are the steps you need to take to ensure your marketing efforts pay off.

1. Define a set of marketing objectives

First and foremost, running your nonprofit like a business means striving to achieve a handful of specific, measurable goals before investing more time or money.

There are different ways to define your marketing goals, but most nonprofits have one ultimate conversion event in mind: donations. However, while donations are important, just as sales are to a business, the biggest brands don’t measure everything in terms of revenue generation. Instead, they also turn to metrics that prove awareness, engagement, and loyalty.

As a nonprofit, you should identify several metrics and goals related to the following:

When setting your goals, set yourself short-term (achieved in the next three to six months) and long-term (achieved in a year or more) goals and make sure they are CLEVER: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-bound. Then identify one or more metrics to help you track your progress toward each.

2. Characterize your audience

Many nonprofits make the same mistake that small businesses tend to make, which is that they have broad, mass appeal. While this may be true to some degree, not identifying a very specific target audience will only hold you back.

Just like the biggest brands do, your nonprofit should take some time to introduce different audience personas. A character is the profile of your ideal supporter. You should even go so far as to give it a name.

Creating a character takes a lot of research and it’s essential that you leave as few guesses as possible. Some of the details you need to include in your target persona include:

Most nonprofits will end up creating two or three personas, but you need to identify one as your primary target.

3. Formulate consistent messages

With your target characters in front of you, you’ll be able to craft messages that will make those characters feel like you’re talking directly to them. Assuming you’ve done your research, this will be lead to better results from your campaigns.

Here are some of the ways your target persona will guide your marketing efforts:

Along with crafting your message around who you’re targeting, you also need to keep in mind that your nonprofit’s brand needs to shine. Remember that your brand voice should remain consistent, even if you change the tone of that voice to match a certain character, campaign, or event.

4. Choose the right marketing strategies

With messages that speak to your characters in order, the next step is deciding how you’re going to get that message across to your audience. There are several marketing strategies to choose from and you will likely use a combination of them to achieve your goals.

Generally, by investing in content marketing, you can build an email subscriber list, which in turn leads to email marketing. Meanwhile, the paid advertising methods you select (if any) will depend on your budget and target persona. It’s also important to recognize that while content marketing generates traffic for the long term, the traffic generated by paid campaigns is short-lived.

5. Analyze the results and keep improving

Whichever way you choose to move forward with your marketing strategy, you need to review the metrics you identified in step one and track your progress toward your goals.

Over time, you will become more adept at setting goals and achieving them. What matters is that you always come back to the data to keep your approach results-based.

Boost your association’s marketing plan

One of the challenges of marketing for nonprofits is learning how to resonate with their audience in an authentic and supportive way. While it takes time to cement your brand voice and understand how to use it effectively in the open market, analyzing your results with every post, message, and campaign will help you get there.