With all the different tasks (serving those in need, working on grants, and more) to take care of inside your nonprofit’s organization, sometimes marketing can feel like an added stress rather than an important tool. By actively marketing your organization, you are benefiting your cause in several ways… including, spreading the word of your mission and giving people a way to invest in your work.  

Without online marketing (website, social media posts, online advertising), people searching online are less likely to find your organization. If your organization is small, then adding marketing responsibilities onto a staff member’s already busy schedule can also be tough. So, what can be done to reduce some the stress of the additional work? 

Create an Ideal Customer Avatar 

One of the most stressful things about creating any messaging is not knowing what to say. You might know that your typical donor is younger and prefers making donations online… but what if knowing more about your donors meant you have an easier with what to say and where to say it. 

By creating an ideal customer avatar (your donors are buying into your mission when they donate) you can get a clearer understanding of the type of people your organization is talking to. Instead of guessing what your audience is interested in, you know more about ways to engage and motivate them into action. 

Imagine that instead of talking to younger people that prefer making donations online, you know that you’re talking to women in their 30s and she has… a stable career, young children, prefers Instagram and donates to organization’s that ask on social media.  

With a more in-depth understanding of your donors it becomes a lot easier to talk to them in a way that is engaging. Whether you are talking to them on your website, in an email, or over social media, having an ideal customer avatar will make connecting with them a less stressful experience for you and more enjoyable experience for them. 

Automate Where It’s Possible 

Social media is always buzzing with people posting several things a day, seemingly every day. As a small nonprofit that either has a single person working on marketing, and that might not even be their main role, posting on social media can seem overwhelming to keep up with. 

One way to reduce the stress of posting so frequent is by automating when some of the posts go out. Although it’s not possible to automate all your organization’s post, it is likely possibly to do a large portion of them. Any time you want to post about holidays, upcoming events, and educational information are great opportunities to schedule your posts.  

Some of the social media platforms have a built-in way to schedule posts to be published at a future date. If your preferred platform does not have the option to schedule posts then there are free services, like Buffer, that can help.  

There will still be some social media posts that have to be addressed manually (responding to comments, answering other people’s posts that are about your organization, etc). By scheduling some of your posts, you can reduce the stress of trying to remember when to put things up and spend more time engaging your online audience. 

Track and Measure Marketing Effectiveness 

Not knowing how well your different marketing work is doing can be very stressful. Instead of guessing how well each of your marketing campaigns is doing and what might need changing, it’s best to track what is happening. So, what are some of the best ways to track? 

One way to track your marketing is by using Google Analytics to show the activity on your website, as well as the places people are coming from to get to your website. With organization goals setup in the Google Analytics system, you can easily see when people are doing them and how often it is happening. 

Another option is to use tracking built into the different social media platforms and post scheduling websites that you use. They all have their own specific analytics that can help you understand the different things going on with the content your organization creates. 

With so much access to the different tracking it becomes easier to understand what is working and what needs some changes to make it more effective. Using the different tracking tools in conjunction with each other also helps compare the data get a clearer understanding what to do better the next time. 

Conclusion 

Making time to work on marketing, especially if your organization is small, can be stressful. There are a few different ways that you can help to reduce the stress of marketing your nonprofit to the online world. By creating an ideal customer avatar of your donors, you will have a clearer understanding of the who you are talking to and where is the best place to talk with them. With the help of your ideal customer avatar, you can then automate a large portion of your social media posts on the best platform for them, so you have more time to focus on things. All this work needs to be tracked so you can make sure it is working the way you intended. With the help of different analytics, you can get a clearer picture of what’s happening and what needs adjustments.