Kivi Leroux Miller - The Nonprofit Marketing Guide

In addition to these four most popular marketing strategies, nonprofits also use four additional marketing strategies that empower others to speak on behalf of the nonprofit, but in quite different ways: word-of-mouth marketing, peer-to-peer marketing, influencer or ambassador marketing, and partner or alliance marketing.

Word-of-mouth marketingis encouraging verbal or written recommendations or testimonials to be shared from one person to another. It relies heavily on casual, unplanned social interactions between people. Much of this will happen naturally on its own. But if you actively encouraging people to talk about you with their friends and family by giving them interesting things to share or asking people to post about you on review sites, then you are engaging in a word-of-mouth marketing strategy.

Peer-to-peer marketingis organizing and training volunteers to educate or advocate on your behalf. You work with individuals, but also support the community of peer educators or activists as a whole. Peer-to-peer fundraising gets a lot of coverage in our sector, but fundraising isn't always the goal. Get Out the Vote operations by political campaigns are another good example of peer-to-peer marketing.

Influencer or ambassador marketingis creating relationships with people with special influence or access to a broader group of people you wish to reach. Influencers can include celebrities, bloggers, market leaders, and anyone else who acts as a gatekeeper who decides whether to pass on your information to their communities. This strategy is especially important for nonprofits who are several steps removed from the people they are trying to affect in some way. A good example is an education think tank that wants to change how children learn in the classroom. They need to influence the professionals working in school districts to pass on their ideas to teachers in classrooms.

Partner or alliance marketingis cooperating with other organizations to jointly promote your cause generally or your specific products or services. It can include referral marketing, affiliate marketing, co-branding, and cause marketing. Examples of partner marketing include several nonprofits collaborating on a one-stop-shop service center for clients, private sector businesses referring customers to nonprofits or collecting donations at the cash register, and museums in a geographic area buying advertising together.

While these four strategies are similar, peer-to-peer marketing is much more organized and actively managed than word-of-mouth marketing. Peer-to-peer marketing also involves many more people than ambassador or influencer marketing. Partner or alliance marketing is typically accomplished through organizational relationships rather than through marketing to individuals.

To complete this list of a dozen strategies, you will also find some nonprofits using general advertising, search marketing, unsolicited direct response marketing, and location-based marketing.

General advertisingis the placement of content into online, print, and broadcast channels meant to reach a targeted or general audience, rather than specific individuals. It can include everything from free flyers posted on bulletin boards to paid advertising in print and remarketing ads on social media. Remarketing is a way to connect again on a new site with people who previously viewed your content elsewhere. For example, if you shop online for a new couch on a website that has a Facebook tracking code embedded in it, then you may see ads for that same couch the next time you visit Facebook.

Search marketingis gaining traffic and visibility from search engines through both search engine optimization of content and paid search listings. Rather than just throwing content up on your blog or website, are you paying attention to what topics bring traffic to your site and writing to encourage the right kind of traffic? Are you managing Google advertising? If yes, you are doing search marketing.

Unsolicited direct response marketingis using mail, email, phone calls, and other communications tactics to communicate directly with people who have not previously opted in to communications with you. It is often used in direct mail acquisition fundraising with purchased or rented lists of names.

Location-based marketingis using mobile phone location data to provide messaging to people when they are physically near specific locations or when they use apps to check in at specific locations. It may also be called geomarketing and proximity marketing. We most often see this strategy used by nonprofits that run large public facilities like parks, zoos, and museums, where visitors can find detailed information about what they are seeing in front of them based on where they are standing.

Objectives are actions or steps you take to implement a strategy. These actions or steps are also what you measure to know if you are meeting your goals. Of all the goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics discussed in this chapter, we find the most diversity in the nonprofit sector when discussing marketing objectives.

That's because of the abundant opportunities to customize objectives to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Resourced, and Time-Bound. If you focus on creating objectives that are measurable and time-bound, you are usually also being specific. Ensuring that your objectives are achievable and resourced helps you stay within your capacity to actually accomplish the work.

In many cases, you should also add some reference to the who (your participants, supporters, or influencers) and sometimes to the what you are communicating about (your messaging or call to action) in order to customize the objectives in a meaningful way.

After coaching hundreds of nonprofit communications directors and teams, I've found that discussing, agreeing upon, and prioritizing specific objectives is the missing piece in the nonprofit marketing strategy puzzle. I strongly encourage all nonprofit communicators to spend more time working through the objectives in their plan than on goals, strategies, or tactics.

Our research at Nonprofit Marketing Guide first identified the 12 objectives most often used in the nonprofit sector in the 2020 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report . Let's start by looking at the five most popular ones. Financial gains and participation levels are most common, followed by expressions of loyalty; change in knowledge or understanding; and people joining, subscribing, or following.

Financial gains or savings.To create a specific objective in this category, you might work to increase the percentage of 5K walk or run revenue raised via peer-to-peer fundraising by 20 percent. Or you might work to decrease your cost of acquisition for new donors.

Participation levels.A participation levels objective can be set when you are trying to increase registrations, donations, RSVPs, etc. For example, you might wish to sell out 90 percent of your workshops this year. Or you might wish to decrease the amount of time between when someone gets on your mailing list and when they take a specific participatory action like advocating for a policy change with their elected officials.

Expressions of loyalty.Loyalty is often judged in the nonprofit sector in terms of retention or renewals. Specific objectives could include maintaining a 75 percent donor retention rate this year. Or perhaps you would like to keep 50 percent of your email list highly engaged, according to a lead scoring tool in your constituent relationship management database.

Change in knowledge or understanding.This objective is best customized by being specific about changing knowledge or understanding within a specific group of people. For example, perhaps you desire to move 75 percent of beginners in your program to the intermediate level in six months. Website metrics, such as the amount of time returning visitors are spending on certain pages, could also indicate a change in knowledge or understanding.