Every nonprofit organization is unique: The mission steers the organization, and that purpose drives everyone who works there and all the work they do. So it follows that nonprofit marketing is also unique. And while there are pros and cons, one of the most common issues faced by nonprofit marketers is how to maximize nonprofit marketing when resources are limited.
Working in nonprofit marketing can be rewarding …
Particularly when you can enjoy:
A passionate team, always ready to lend a hand to further marketing efforts.
Powerful storytelling opportunities from clients, donors, and community supporters.
A strong sense of purpose behind every project.
But it can also be challenging.
Many of us can relate to frustrations like:
Incredibly small teams.
Impossibly tight budgets.
More priorities than you can count.
So how do small nonprofit teams find marketing success (ideally, without careening into clinical burnout)? It’s not easy, but it is possible — with smart strategy, prioritization, and clever implementation.
Here are some of the most workable tips for how to maximize your nonprofit marketing through strategy (and stretching limited resources).
With insights from real, experienced nonprofit pros who have been there:
Erin Cooper
Director of Development at House of Ruth
Heather Gotlib, MPA
Communications and Content Manager at Belle of Louisville Riverboats
April Sage
Director of Communications at Ronald McDonald House Charities of Kentuckiana
Always prioritize your projects (i.e., don’t sacrifice the important stuff for the urgent stuff)
In my opinion, one of the best things about building a marketing strategy is also one of the hardest things about life: You can’t do everything.
If you’re anything like me, this is a bitter pill to swallow when it comes to life. But when it comes to marketing, this limitation is a powerful starting point: Accepting that you’ll need to be selective forces you to think strategically right away — and creativity thrives under constraint.
So when it comes to creating a marketing strategy, the first step for low-bandwidth marketers is determining what absolutely needs to happen, i.e., your highest priorities.
There are going to be many competing priorities: Ongoing awareness-building, community engagement, storytelling, website management, and so on — not to mention the small day-to-day projects or “surprise” priorities that tend to appear (especially if you’re also the organization’s media contact).
On top of all that, there’s always potential for large-scale one-off projects, like rebrands or website overhauls, that could ultimately do more for the organization than some smaller time-sensitive priorities. Your task is to look at all of the potential priorities, and decide which are most worth your focus. That’s how you end up with a plan that works for you.
This process doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking, and you can do it at any time. Here are some of the key steps to get you where you want to be:Maximizing your marketing efforts and minimizing your stress levels.
Not sure where to begin?
1. Map out time-sensitive initiatives
As you begin considering your priorities, a good place to start is by roughly mapping out any timely initiatives within your organization.
For example, you likely have regular programming and events that will need marketing support. Depending on your organization, you might need to make time for promoting summer programs, a yearly gala, annual days of giving, educational programming, or the annual report. You might be an attraction with a busy season for ticket sales. These should all be taken into account.
2. Align with organizational fundraising and revenue goals
Getting clear on organizational goals is key for ensuring that your marketing efforts pay off — literally.
For-profit marketers are highly focused on driving revenue, and this is true for some nonprofit marketers as well. For example, attractions-based nonprofit organizations like the Monterey Bay Aquarium rely on revenue streams like admissions, memberships, retail, and food services to make up their 9-figure operating budget.
However, for many nonprofits, especially charitable organizations, the majority of their revenue will come from contributions like donations, endowments, and fundraising.
So while in for-profit settings, marketing and sales teams are responsible for bringing in most of the dough with contracts, customers, subscribers, etc., in nonprofit settings, the development teams usually set financial goals and secure funds through writing grants and direct appeals, peer-to-peer fundraising, and planning events.
Erin
My experience is mostly in fundraising, so I’ll always think first about what our donors need to see, hear, and learn.
Our marketing and communications efforts mostly drive our fundraising needs. That means our Annual Fund campaign, donor communication pieces, and materials for our annual fundraising breakfast.
My second priority is building awareness — reaching and educating a new audience that doesn’t already know about us and what we do.
Even if your marketing is focused on raising funds, you’ll be working on more than just direct appeals. A holistic marketing and communications strategy will always involve reaching new audiences through indirect marketing and brand building.
Boosting awareness, trust, and community support are invaluable for your long-term organizational success (and for growing your pool of donors).
April
When marketers have the room to develop longer-term and more holistic communications plans (without always thinking about direct attributions), outcomes improve for the whole organization.
Building awareness, talking about volunteers, brand storytelling — these are really important, sometimes get lost when the focus is solely on fundraising.
3. Collaborate to get ahead of last-minute asks
One of the biggest challenges for all marketers is the prevalence of last-minute high-priority asks. Regularly “putting out fires” will derail and delay your other projects (and stress you out).
In nonprofits, this can be even trickier if you’re working with internal clients who aren’t used to collaborating with marketing teams. That means it’s on you to get on the same page with your stakeholders so you can get ahead of projects.
April
I work best when I cut down on last-minute tasks and back-and-forth with other teams. I like to get ahead of things.
This year, I scheduled a marketing campaign and tactics meeting with every team lead in the organization. I wanted to make sure I understood where other teams’ priorities were for the year ahead, and talk through how we could work together to be successful. This also gave me the chance to put together a calendar, so it’s easier for me to manage everyone’s workload.
This also gives you the opportunity to communicate your own goals for marketing efforts, get buy-in, and help your colleagues start thinking like marketers.
This fosters collaboration and consideration between teams, plus it can often have the long-term benefit of helping you get more organic content and content ideas.
4. Think through the important-but-not-urgent projects
Think through the non-urgent projects that have the potential to make a big difference to your overall organization.
For many marketers, these are projects that sit on your “wish list” for ages, but you never seem to have time to do. They can include small projects (like redesigning email signatures) or really big projects (like completely overhauling your website).
And while projects like these can divert efforts from other initiatives, sometimes they can seriously save you time in the long-run. For example, you might decide to carve out some time to create Canva templates or automate processes — so considering these projects at this stage is well worth the effort.
5. Get your priorities in order
This is the really tricky part, because, if you recall, you can’t do everything.
You’re going to have to cut some initiatives altogether and scale back on others. But at this point, you should feel empowered to talk through your reasoning and move forward with the projects with the biggest potential payoff.
This is also the time to start thinking about securing (and justifying) outside help if needed, especially for one-time “set it and forget it” projects like brand guidelines, template creation, and optimization. Many marketing agencies offer pro-bono services for nonprofits, so you can do more with less.
Most importantly at this stage, remember to be realistic about bandwidth (and nice to yourself and your team). Burnout is just not worth it.
Turn your priorities into marketing goals
Goals give projects purpose, focus, and built-in measures of success.
But when you’re working as fast as humanly possible, pausing long enough to formalize goals for your projects can feel impossible — even wasteful. I promise it isn’t! Thinking about projects in terms of concrete goals forces you to pause and think strategically (which can be especially helpful if you’re prone to getting swept up by the sheer volume of tasks on your plate). So as often as you can, transform your priorities into clear marketing goals.
Think about what you’re really trying to accomplish with each project. Then, set SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound — for as many of your projects as possible.
For example, if one of your initiatives is related to volunteers, your SMART goal might be something like “Increase new volunteer applications by 10% over the next six months through monthly volunteer newsletters and bi-weekly volunteer highlights on our social media platforms.” This goal is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Bound, so you can start working from these goals right away.
Focus on your most effective marketing channels
These days, there are simply too many marketing channels for any marketing team to utilize all of them, so small nonprofit teams need to be extra selective. The platforms that work best for you will depend on your mission, your content, and your goals.
You’ll want to have a basic understanding of digital marketing metrics in order to see which platforms are worth the effort, but most nonprofits see success with email and social media.
April
Email is definitely our most successful channel — we get a lot of engagement on emails from people who want to learn more about the families we serve and volunteer opportunities. We also do well on Instagram.
Erin
Our most successful marketing channels are Facebook and our monthly e-newsletter.
Heather
Instagram is our most successful marketing channel for sure, followed by email.
Email
Email has been the reigning champ of direct marketing channels for years, boasting low barriers to entry, high returns on investment (ROI), and great engagement.
This is perfect for nonprofit organizations because it offers regular touch-points with your database, distributes timely info around events, and delivers emotive storytelling content, like client testimonials.
Plus, email marketing has some distinct advantages over the direct physical mailers that have often been a cornerstone of nonprofit marketing:
It’s much less expensive
It’s much easier for your audience to act quickly on any calls-to-action you include
You can measure engagement and assign direct attribution
These are huge pros, whether you’re trying to drive donations, boost attendance, or foster engagement.
Social media
“Social media” has become almost synonymous with “marketing” in recent years. And it’s true that social media is one of the most powerful marketing channels you can utilize to share information, tell stories, and grow your audience.
But not all social media platforms will be equal when it comes to your marketing efforts. Your most successful platforms will depend on your organization, target audience, and the content you’re creating.
For example, if your target audience is older, you might see better results from Facebook than TikTok. If your content is highly visual, you might get more traction on Instagram Reels. Check out this great example from Heather, who tells the story of the Belle of Louisville through short videos featuring popular songs played on the boat’s calliope:
Creative content like this helps reach new audiences, and foster engagement and dialogue. But it can take a lot of trial and error to land on content that really takes off. Trying new things, experimenting with social media tools, and regularly analyzing your content performance can help you achieve steady growth on social.
Creating reels and curating newsletters is all well and good, but don’t neglect your website.
In most cases, your marketing and communications will direct your audience to your website — to learn more information, complete a transaction, or make a donation. It’s also (hopefully) the first result to show up in search engines when your audience searches for your organization name.
The size and complexity of your website will depend on your organization, but it’s not a channel to ignore. At the very least, make sure your site is user-friendly, updated, mobile-responsive, and optimized.
If you’re not sure where to start, we offer free website audits with no strings attached!
Build a marketing calendar
Once your projects are prioritized and your goals are in place, it’s smart to create a working marketing calendar. A marketing calendar will help you manage bandwidth, stay on top of initiatives, and get the most out of every project.
Don’t get overwhelmed: You don’t have to map out every moment of every day a year in advance (in fact, that would be a colossal waste of time, which we’ve already established, you’re short on). You can work in whatever time increments work best for you — and you can have multiple working calendars with varying levels of detail.
Erin
I’m a visual person, so I keep a big dry-erase calendar. I can see my deadlines and break down big projects into digestible tasks — that way I don’t get too bogged down at any particular time.
Having a daily to-do list, and being able to cross things off that list each day, is important to me. It helps me feel accomplished, and it also helps me focus on today and not look too far ahead at how much isn’t done yet. That can get overwhelming pretty quickly.
Don’t get bogged down by details
The purpose of this exercise is to give you a roadmap to make your life easier — not to give you more work. As you move forward with content initiatives, you can fill in the nitty-gritty details of your strategies.
Build in time to review content performance
You put in all the work to prioritize your projects and set those SMART goals — so make sure you build in enough time to regularly review those campaigns. Keeping track of what works (and what doesn’t) will pay off in multiple ways.
Prepare for change
Planning, organizing, strategizing — these are all great uses of time and will help you maximize your marketing efforts. But as Heraclitus said, everything is constantly changing. And while he wasn’t specifically talking about nonprofit marketing, he totally could have been.
Stretch your resources
After doing all of the planning and preparation, you’ll probably still have more on your plate than you can reasonably accomplish. With small budgets and small teams, “work smarter” really just means “be scrappy” and “stretch resources.”
Tap your people resources
Your network is one of your most powerful resources.
Your board, junior board, and volunteers can help fill the gaps and keep things moving. Organizations like Catchafire connect nonprofits with skilled volunteers. Many marketing agencies offer pro-bono services to nonprofit organizations. And it’s always worthwhile to reach out to the pros you know:
Erin
Knowing people outside the organization who are experts (writers, content creators, graphic designers, PR experts, and so on) has saved me so many times. When I’m stuck, need advice, or just need help finding the right resources, having people to ask is really powerful.
Use the right tools for the job
Make your life easier by using the right tools for the job. There are so many tools and platforms that offer nonprofit discounts, from graphic design to social listening, and so much more. Tools can help you automate processes and streamline your work can save time, while platforms that simplify research and testing can help make your marketing campaigns more successful.
April
I use a lot of discounted (and free) tools to make my job easier and to make things work better. Canva is huge and always growing their toolset. Having brand controls, being able to create templates, and being able to submit designs for approval has helped to offload some of the work from my team. Adobe Express is also free for nonprofits! Asana has a nonprofit discount, and really helps with project management. We can manage our inbox for creative requests, keep the right stakeholders involved, and make sure we’re not overloaded. And of course, Google Ad Grants.
Think experimentally
When you’re doing more with less, you have to think creatively to get the most out of your efforts. Get used to thinking experimentally, from partnership and earned media opportunities to new approaches and platforms.
Heather
Instagram trial reels has helped us share our video content more widely and grow our audience on that platform. And, since we’re an attraction, posting on free community calendars and getting earned media — especially from local publications — helps us get the word out about events and opportunities.
I use the PERMA Model to approach my customer funnel. Every interaction, or piece of content, is a different level of Positive, Engaging, Relationship crafting, Meaningful, or intended to create a sense of Accomplishment.
Be aware of burnout and work to avoid it
You’re excited about your work, you’re passionate about your mission, and you want to do a great job. You’re even looking for ways to maximize your marketing efforts!
You’re on the edge of disaster.
Just kidding.
But not really, because burnout is a serious risk. And when you’re a small team trying to do a lot of things, it can be easy to push yourself a little too far.
Burnout is serious, recovery doesn’t happen overnight, and unfortunately for you high-performers, few things will have a more negative impact on your work.
Set boundaries
It’s almost become a cliché, but that’s because it’s really good advice. Unfortunately, setting work boundaries can be hard, especially if you care a lot about your work. Communicate with leadership, be consistent with your capacity, and remember that the reason you set boundaries is so that you can keep performing at a high level.
Erin
Boundaries are so important. I learned the hard way what my job is and what it isn’t; what I can do and what I can’t. My boss reminds me that I have to use my time efficiently and be realistic about things that are outside of scope.
Stay flexible and balanced
Setting boundaries is vital, but there will always be busy times and chaotic periods. Expect the unexpected, but remember to stay balanced: Within yourself, and with dedicated rest time.
Heather
Sometimes, if a social media post gets really popular over the weekend, I’ll have to spend that time responding. When that happens, I’ll take a Monday rest day and black out my work channels. It really helps because that’s a day when there’s naturally less engagement.
April
I work to keep perspective and manage my own energy reserves. I have to remind myself that I don’t need to meet anyone else’s energy level, and that helps keeps me grounded.
When things pop up that demand my energy, especially urgent things, I pause and ask myself, “How much energy does this require?” I know that if I go all out on everything, I’m ultimately not doing any favors for myself or my other projects.
Do your best, forget the rest
You are a nonprofit marketer. You are scrappy, smart, and crafty. You find clever ways to get things done. You always do more with less.
No doubt maximizing your marketing output is basically second nature — but hopefully you found a tip or two in this article to help you stretch your resources (and minimize your stress levels). And if you did, consider signing up for our newsletter to get notified when more articles drop.
I’m so grateful to my friends and colleagues for collaborating on the first Oh Hi Marketing article. I really enjoyed getting to hear their perspectives and insights, and couldn’t imagine a more meaningful end to this piece than these words from my friend, Erin:
Erin
I think most people who work in nonprofit marketing are here because they believe in the work being done by the organization and care about the people they serve. That’s certainly the case for me.
I don’t really think of myself as working in “marketing” — I think of myself as working in a nonprofit. While I know some of my skills would translate to a marketing role outside of the nonprofit world, I think my greatest strength is in working with limited resources.
I’m proud to admit that I know a little about a lot. I have to get creative sometimes and figure out how to get things done without a lot of time or extra hands. That means, I often know when to stop spinning my wheels and reach out to others (the experts) for what I need to complete a project. I think that’s what it takes to be successful in a nonprofit.
Did I get something wrong or miss a life-changing nonprofit marketing hack? Are you interested in working with Oh Hi Marketing? Please contact us!
