The Best Nonprofit Marketing Strategies for 2024

Nonprofit organizations require as much of a marketing effort as any other type of commercial company or enterprise.

Since the cause behind most nonprofits can be elusive or falls out of an everyday field of view, they must constantly remind volunteers, donors, and clients about their worthy cause. This helps raise enough money and mobilize public interest to further the nonprofit’s cause.

This can only happen with a strong nonprofit marketing plan.

Marketing for nonprofits can go various ways. You can share posts on social media, run paid ads, create content, or send direct mail to your donors’ doorsteps. But with so many approaches, you’ll have a lot on your plate figuring out the best way to raise funds for your cause.

We’re here to help you out and analyze some of the best non-profit marketing strategies for 2024. 

Postalytics have made automated marketing more accessible to nonprofits in the United States and Canada. You can integrate your CRM and run triggered direct mail marketing campaigns. 

If you want to find out more about Postalytics, check out the demo.

Besides choosing automated direct mail for nonprofits, you can also opt for the following marketing strategies to boost your visibility among the right crowd.

Set Goals for Your Nonprofit Organizations

The first and most important part of any marketing strategy is to set viable goals.

Marketing goal setting helps nonprofits define, track, and achieve success with donors and supporters. It can help you understand how long it will be before you start seeing the results of your marketing efforts and who’s the most passionate about supporting the cause. 

Having a goal can also help you streamline your efforts accordingly.

Setting a goal is not only beneficial for the company’s success but also offers a sense of direction to people in the organization. Goal setting can show your employees what they need to focus on during the upcoming months, helping them prioritize their tasks. Here are some steps that will help you define your goal.

Understand Where You are

To set a goal, nonprofit organizations need to understand their current realities. 

Think about where you are, and what you’ve achieved up till now. If you want to boost your yearly income, then think about where the majority of your money comes from at the present time. Take a look at every aspect of your organization, such as services rendered, staff structure, mission, production, etc., before you lock in on your crucial goals.

Think About Where You Want to be

Set specific goals that you want to achieve. This will help you guide where you want your organization to be in the upcoming 12 to 36 months. Make a list of things that you want to change. Knowing your final destination will determine what you’ll need to get there.

Find the Best Way to Execute a Nonprofit Marketing Strategy

Look for tactics and tools that will help you execute your strategy and get your desired outcomes. 

The paradigm of automating, delegating, and eliminating offers great results. 

To start, separate everything into three main buckets. Then, look for every marketing task that you can automate. This will be your first bucket. For example, Postalytics users can integrate their CRMs to automate most marketing efforts and ultimately focus on designing marketing material to boost collected funds. This tool will help customers go through the marketing funnel and take the desired action.

Then, try to delegate the rest of the tasks. Batch them in the second bucket. And finally, eliminate everything that doesn’t produce good results. This will be your third bucket.

The automate-delegate-eliminate execution strategy will help you stay on top of your goals at all times.

Set Milestones for Review

Goals act as guidance for your organization’s activities, but they need some fine-tuning from time to time. 

Set a time to review results, goals, and progress on major quarterly meetings. This helps you improve your goals and make changes based on the current circumstances of your organization. Also, if you make good progress in a few weeks or months, reviewing your goals will help you level them up to boost profits, improve click-through rate, or gain high conversions in a short time as you double down on your best-performing tactics.

Automation Tools for Nonprofit Marketing

Nonprofit organizations often lack time to execute various marketing strategies they need to raise funds, motivate volunteers, and raise awareness. Automation tools like Postalytics make marketing much easier and more approachable for busy nonprofit organizations and their marketing teams.

Postalytics allows you to integrate your CRM like HubSpot to feed data into the automation system. Create a free account and discover everything you need to execute a nonprofit marketing strategy:

• Easy to use letter and postcard editing tools
• A cloud-based system that manages direct mail campaigns
• Personalization tools to effectively engage with your customers
• No minimum and maximum limitations on postcards, letters, and flyers
• Triggered direct mail options that will let you reach your donors at the right time

Choosing an automation tool will boost your chances of achieving the desired result. It helps you connect with clients, volunteers, and other people at the right time. This is either when they visit your site or contact you for inquiries. Postalytics is also ideal for nonprofit retargeting cold leads so that you can motivate clients who already know your company to support the cause. This helps companies to save money and time.

Social Media Marketing for Nonprofits

Digital space has gained immense popularity in recent years. People have been using the medium to advertise their companies and products thanks to the variety of marketing opportunities and methods available. Additionally, you can find a large chunk of your audience on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. This way, you don’t have to use multiple marketing strategies to target a massive audience.

Social media platforms allow you to tell your organization’s story. A well-designed social media marketing campaign can help you engage, capture, and retain your clients’ attention. These platforms build awareness of your nonprofit organization, which can help you for fundraising purposes. It also offers a broad range of marketing methods. You can opt for paid advertisements to raise funds or spread awareness of your services. Many organizations also create engaging content to retain current clients simply.

The demand for influencer marketing has grown with the increased use of social media networks. Companies hire popular celebrities or fundraisers to post about their brands from their profiles. This way, organizations reach out to celebrities’ followers and engage with them to support fundraising efforts or spread awareness.

Since there are several social media platforms, you need to choose one that works best for your operations. Here are some things to consider while picking the ideal platform.

• Does your target audience live on the platform?
• Can the platform help you reach your goals?
• Think about which platform you can manage easily for the best results?
• What type of marketing can help you engage with your audience to achieve your goals?

Automated Direct Mail Postcards and Letters

Direct mail is another ideal option for nonprofit organizations. However, many organizations avoid it because it requires you to:

• Create a large batch of postcards and letters
• Set manual campaign setup
• Establish a campaign without measurement, tracking, and integration with other channels.

To avoid these problems, you can use Postalytics to execute impactful and successful nonprofit direct mail marketing campaigns. This tool allows you to personalize your letters and postcards to efficiently engage with clients. Starting off by addressing your volunteers or clients by name will capture their attention and motivate them to read further.

Postalytics also allows you to create beautifully designed letters and postcards. This tool features templates, editing options, and multiple designs to ensure that your direct mail looks professional and charismatic. Direct mail printing for nonprofits is much easier when you use Postalytics, as the company will print, organize, and post postcards and letters on your behalf of you.

On top of that, you can launch direct mail campaigns at any time. Similarly, you can automate the entire campaign so that mail reaches clients at the right time. Postalytics can also help you motivate clients to visit your website, improving your click-through rate. Each letter and postcard contains a QR code. So, if the recipient understands your message, they can use the QR code to visit your site. Not only does it compel your client to check your website, but it also helps you track your campaign results. 

USPS bulk mail rates for nonprofits are also much more affordable compared to other marketing methods.

How to Create a Direct Mail Campaign?

Here are some steps that you need to follow to launch an impactful direct mail marketing strategy.

Build or Buy a Mailing List

You can do this by integrating a CRM like HubSpot, SalesForce, Active Campaign, InfusionSoft, Act-on, Zoho, GreenRope, and Pipedrive, with Postalytics. This high-tech, state-of-the-art tool will extract all your client’s information such as client name, mailing address, email, etc. Postalytics will use this data to send mail to your clients and volunteers, following the set triggers like dates, events, or actions.

Alternatively, contact our sales team to buy a list with your target demographics.

Create a Mailing Piece

Now, it’s time to craft pleasing and engaging mailing pieces. This means you need to work on the appearance of your postcard and letter as well. Choose the right template, color, font, size, etc. Once you do that, write your message. Some key points to remember while writing your message:

• Make sure to personalize your postcards and letters
• Keep your tone professional and easy to understand
• Write a precise message that will resonate with your audience
• Add your organization details and website in a pURL or QR Code.

Test the Marketing Campaign

You need to test your campaign before launching it. So start by sending direct mail to a couple of your clients and volunteers, and wait for their feedback. Postalytics makes it easy to A/B test your message and measure what gets a better response. Ultimately, you can focus on what really works and avoid wasting marketing dollars on underperforming creatives and messages.

Since Postalytics allows you to incorporate QR codes, contact numbers, and other details, interested people will have a clear way of getting back to you. The growth in response, click-through, and conversion rate will allow you to understand the flaws in your campaign. Then, you can work on these before launching a bigger and more influential campaign.

Run Your Campaign

Now, it’s time to run your campaign. With the help of Postalytics, you can automate the process if you want to send mail after some time or on a specific date. Once you launch the campaign, wait for a response. Postalytics helps you track campaign results so that you can understand the target audience’s behavior in real-time.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is among the most popular ways to market any company and one of the most impactful methods. It is a strategic process to create and share relevant, valuable, and consistent content to attract an audience, retain them, and build their awareness. This ultimately drives your audience to actions that fulfill your organization’s mission.

Content marketing also helps you build trust in your clients. When you share valuable information with your audience, they’ll consider you an authentic source of information. This way, people will follow your organization to learn new and important things about fundraising, how nonprofit organizations work, and the different issues in the world that your organization is trying to solve. Content marketing is also important to improve an organization’s image, define your organization’s mission and personality, and establish brand awareness.

Despite offering you several benefits, content marketing can be challenging. It requires expertise, skill, and knowledge, so you can’t get the desired results at an amateur level. As a beginner or amateur, you will need to learn tricks to create an impactful marketing strategy before beginning content marketing. There are also several things that you need to consider for marketing, such as a niche, tone, platform for content creation, and the elements you want to incorporate in your content.

If you’re successful at creating an effective marketing strategy, you can reap the following benefits.

• Increase organic search traffic
• Expanded brand awareness
• Helps you create authority in a particular field
• Increase accessibility for a broader audience
• Supports social media, PR, and direct mail campaigns

Organize Events

If you have the budget and ability to manage an event, you can organize an event. Strategically designed events help community members and donors engage with the organization actively. An organization can opt for different types of events based on its mission and goal. These include:

• Donor appreciation event
• Gala nights
• Silent auctions
• Online or live auctions
• Hybrid fundraising events
• Virtual fundraising events

If you want to raise funds through marketing, organizing an event is a great way to connect with your donors and explain why you need the funding. The event serves as a way to allow individuals to act on something they truly believe in and network with like-minded people.. By participating in the event, people feel more connected with the cause. Compared to other approaches, an event is more effective at encouraging them to offer their services for a cause. The best part of organizing an event is that it leaves a lasting impression on your volunteers and donors. This results in greater long-term support for your cause, helping you reap the benefit of organizing an event for a longer time.

Here are some tips that you need to consider to organize a valuable event.

• Define your event goals
• Choose date and venue
• Create a team
• Create an online registration link
• Sent Invitations
• Decide event logistics
• Organize an event

Furthermore, you need to choose a method to invite people to attend your event. Note that as more people attend your event, you raise more funds to spread awareness about the cause. You can opt for a direct mail method to engage with your current clients and volunteers. Use Postalytics to send appealing invitation letters and postcards to people who have supported you. If you want to connect with individuals who aren’t on your mailing list, you can market your upcoming event on social media through paid advertising.

Apply for the Google Grant Program

Google Ad Grant program offers qualified nonprofits more than $10,000 per month in ad credit. This means you can run a paid advertisement in Google search results without paying a dime from your pocket. This helps nonprofits attract interested individuals to their websites. Nonprofits that are struggling to succeed in their mission due to not having the resources and funds can benefit from this program.

Whatever your nonprofit’s goals or needs, you’re eligible to apply for this program. But you must be careful to comply with Google’s policies and rules. If not, you can lose the grant and won’t be able to run free ads on Google. Before applying, you also need to ensure that you are eligible for the Google ad grants. For this, nonprofits should have 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt status. Besides that, you must have a website that meets Goggle’s quality standards. Lastly, nonprofit organizations need to agree with Google’s terms and conditions.

Here are the steps to follow to apply for the Google ad grant.

• Access your google for nonprofit organization account
• Register your organization with TechSoup
• Incorporate features and improve the quality of your website to meet Google Grant program requirements
• Set up your Google ad grants program application account
• Start using this program

Bottom Line: Nonprofit Marketing Strategies

When choosing the right marketing strategy, think about your skills, expertise, and abilities. Also, evaluate your budget and goals on a frequent basis. These factors will help you choose a marketing strategy and execution that you can easily design, run, and manage. 

Nonprofit marketing for beginners can be challenging. In that case, it’s good to automate as much of your marketing as possible. Postalytics can give you all the tools needed to automate the entire direct mail process so that you put less effort, energy, and time into fighting for your cause while simultaneously running strong fundraising campaigns.