SMBRD #54: Social Media for Non-Profits

Becky Murray writes for the Social Media Breakfast Red Deer blog and recaps the monthly speakers. We invited Becky to share the points taken from our presentation to our blog as well. We hope you enjoy the post! Original blog post found here 

October’s SMBRD was focused on marketing for non-profit organizations. Kerstin Heuer from HeuerDesign is a marketing specialist and certified digital marketer that has been working with non-profit organizations for the past ten years. She offered her insight on how to emotionally connect with your audience, get better results, and attract more funding.

 

There are four steps to creating a strategic marketing plan

 

Clarify your message
Know your audience
Be relevant
Connect, engage, and measure

 

Clarify Your Message

• Keep your message simple and easy to understand
• Be specific. Provide social proof.
• Show impact.

Know Your Audience

• Remember, everyone is not your audience.

• Create a specific persona for the people you want to reach. Determine sociodemographic data, values & goals, frustrations & challenges, objections, and sources of information.
• Once you know who you are marketing to, you can create content based on what topics these people are interested in, what brands they like that you can connect with, what people they connect with, and what influencers are doing similar things.
• You also need to know what stage of the relationship you are in with your audience.

Be Relevant

• You need to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right message, the right mindset and the right offer.
• It’s not that your prospective donors don’t want to support you, they just want to date first. This is where we learned that the theme of the talk was, “Don’t be creepy”. Like dating, your donors need to meet you and get to know you first.

• Like all marketing campaigns, your goal is to create awareness where your audience gets to know you, then engagement where your audience knows and likes you but is not yet engaged with you, and finally, completion where your audience now knows, likes and trusts you and therefore, supports, volunteers, donates and advocates for you.

Connect, Engage and Measure

• Create a hub by connecting everything you post on social media back to your website and whatever you update on your website, post on social media.
• Get your audience to know you by introducing your organization, share stories of impact, show behind the scenes. You can do this through blog posts, social media updates, videos, and photos.
• Share something useful, such as postcards, and include a call to action or opt-in option.
• Inspire your audience to sign up for your newsletter
• Get them to like and trust you by providing more resources. Reports, podcasts, quizzes, surveys and email marketing.
• Email marketing is a great way to grow your donor list. Let your subscribers know what they can expect from you and create an email series to connect to all your new subscribers in the same way.
• Make it easy to support your cause. Communicate what you want your supporters to do and make it easy.
• Make your donation page easy. Don’t have a navigation bar that can distract people away from their donations. Remind people what they are donating to and what their money will help do. Use great images.

• Have a specific landing page for your fundraising campaign that all traffic from social media will go to.
• Using cookies, you can follow the people who navigated away from your donation page and then target messages to these people. Again, don’t be creepy.
• Say thank you. Create a specific thank you page with a message from the executive director.
  If you’re looking for more from Kerstin’s presentation, head over to our Facebook page and watch the live feed.