and engaging program participantsSupporting event fundraisingSupporting fundraising from individuals making small to medium gifts
THE MOST COMMON NONPROFIT MARKETING STRATEGIES
The nonprofit sector employs a dozen different strategies, which are the marketing approaches used to achieve your goals. However, based on data first presented in the 2019 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, we know the sector relies heavily on four marketing strategies in particular: permission-based marketing, content marketing, event and experience marketing, and relationship marketing.
Permission-based marketing is sharing content with specific people who have signed up, subscribed, or otherwise agreed in advance to join your mailing lists and lists of social followers. Nearly all nonprofits use this strategy in some way by building opt-in mailing lists.
Content marketing is attracting people to your work and retaining their interest in it by creating and distributing content they find especially valuable and relevant. It is also sometimes called inbound marketing.
Just because you are doing permission-based marketing doesn't mean you are doing content marketing! You can send advertising content or appeals to your opt-in email lists. That's permission-based marketing, but not necessarily content they find especially relevant and meaningful themselves. Sending advertising and appeals are more in your self-interest, even though you have permission to do so.
You can also use content marketing independent of your permission-based marketing mailing lists. For example, when you add great content to your website, people can find it with web searches and read it without being opted-in to any mailing list.
Of course, you find the sweet spot when these two strategies work together. You send great content that keeps people on your lists, which allows you to also send them advertising or appeals without them unsubscribing or unfollowing.
For much more detail on content marketing, please read my book, the award-winning Content Marketing for Nonprofits: A Communications Map for Engaging Your Community, Becoming a Favorite Cause, and Raising More Money (Jossey-Bass, 2013).
Event or experience marketing is using frequent events or participatory experiences to promote your programs and services, encouraging in-person interaction between your organization, supporters, or program participants.
Sometimes this strategy is confused with the “supporting event fundraising goal.” They are not the same thing.
If you are delivering programs and services via events and trying to get people to attend those events, then you are likely using permission-based marketing, content marketing, and general advertising strategies to market your events. Those events are programs or services and therefore your goals are more likely to raise awareness of your issues or to recruit and engage program participants.
If you are using events or experiences to market something other than donating, such as tours or happy hours to introduce new people to your organization, that's what I would consider an event and experience marketing strategy. The expectation is that the event or experience is merely the introductory first step in getting the attendees to do something else.
Relationship marketing is the fourth strategy most often employed by nonprofits. Relationship marketing is creating strong, long-term, loyal relationships with specific individuals and focusing on the quality of those relationships, rather than on individual transactions with those individuals. While the individuals will take a variety of actions in support of your nonprofit over the course of the relationship, their overall engagement with your cause is paramount. Major donor fundraising programs are often built on relationship marketing strategies.
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 marketing is 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 marketing is 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 marketing is 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 marketing is 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 advertising is 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 marketing is 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 marketing is 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
