Digital Nonprofit Marketing Strategy Guide [Templates and Tools Included]

Content Creation and Content Marketing Strategy for Nonprofits

Before your start Creating Content, you need to set up a strategy for your Nonprofit. You don’t want to be sailing to the left and drift away from your goals if you actually needed to sail to the right.

Taking a bit of time to write a couple of things on the sheet we provide, chatting with colleagues, volunteers and donors can help a lot.

If you can answer the 8 simple questions, you’re already on the right track. Nothing needs to be perfect from the get-go. Start somewhere and get a feeling as you proceed.

The reason you should set up your Content Marketing Strategy is because your Nonprofit unique. Start identifying:

• What makes your nonprofit unique?
• Who would be interested in the content you create?
• Where do potential donors people hang out?

Check out the simple 8-step Content Marketing Strategy Guide.

Your strategy sits at the base of your content creation. The stronger it is, the easier the next steps are going to be.

Start Creating Your Nonprofit Brand Story

As a Nonprofit, NGO, or Social Enterprise, you have a head start over for-profit organizations when it comes to telling a compelling Brand Story. You should definitely use that to your advantage. Later in this Guide, we will go over how to tell a compelling story when creating content. This exercise is about creating your brand story so you can use bits and pieces throughout your communications.

Get your Brand Story Guide and  Template.

Your Nonprofit Brand Story consists of three elements related to your past (I), present (II), and future (III). Completing this exercise should give you valuable insights which you can use for years.

Just like the rest of the resources, it should be evolving as you gather more insights.

Nonprofit Content Marketing Goals and KPIs

Just because you’re not running a for-profit organization, it doesn’t mean that you should not set goals and pay attention to what is working and what is not. You need to keep experimenting to reach your Nonprofit’s goals and be able to have the biggest impact you can.

In the Content Marketing Goals and KPIs Guide, we walk you through how to identify your most important channels, look at data you already have, and work backward to set goals and KPIs for the future.

You don’t need to be accurate. You don’t need to set goals for every single thing that you do. You do need to start somewhere so you can get a feeling of what is working and what is not and to improve along the way.

Set up your Nonprofit Brand Style Guidelines

As a Nonprofit, you need to tell a consistent story and you need to be instantly recognizable. Setting up your Brand Style Guidelines (and sticking to them) will help you to create content that’s recognizable on all channels.

From all the exercises in the Growth Storytelling Framework, setting up your Brand Style Guidelines is one of the easiest. Be sure not to skip it.

You can find out how to set up your Brand Style Guidelines here and if you want to check out this article to get inspired by some cool Nonprofit Brand Style Guidelines examples.

In this article, we’ve used our own guidelines often. For selecting the colors, for our tone of voice, our Owls mascots, and for the visuals we will be using on our Social Media accounts. It’s just great to have consistency in everything we create, have easy-to-use templates, and not needing to think about every new image we create.

Nonprofit Storytelling

As a Nonprofit, storytelling is a must. Luckily you probably actually have a great story to tell and people have been in love with hearing and reading stories since… Since forever!

Before writing and reading became a thing, great stories were the ones that survived the test of time.

To be honest, if you’re not a storyteller by heart, it can be pretty difficult to add storytelling techniques to your writing. But I’m hoping you’re thinking; ‘challenge accepted’!

Because! My goodness, a well-written piece of text with a great story is so great to read and it makes people feel something and it gets them to take action!

As a Nonprofit, that’s what you want. You want people to take action!

Take small steps, do what you need to do, but start writing better stories. The Storytelling Guide takes you to clear steps on how to do so.

Keyword Research for Nonprofits

What we notice by working with Nonprofits for quite a while is that they usually write articles and blog posts about what they think is valuable for their target audience.

This means that you could be totally wrong and that you’ve spent days if not weeks or months writing content and… no one reads them because they don’t rank in search engines.

We see this happen often. But what if I told you that you don’t need to guess anymore?

What if I told you that there are tools that can help you find out what people are searching for, how often, and how easy/difficult it is to rank for those search terms?

You can find the entire process in the Keyword Research Guide and the Growth Storytelling Frameworks has a cool template included so you can get started right away.

Coming up with Effective Content Ideas for your Nonprofit

To help you out, even more, we’ve set up a process of taking the keywords you’ve identified as highly valuable, entering them in a Content Idea Generator, and coming up with effective content ideas your audience will love.

It’s always difficult to come up with new content ideas that are not just fun to execute but actually help you reach your goals. Be sure to check out the guide and template and put them to good use.

The more valuable content you can create, the bigger your impact.

On-Page SEO Optimization Checklist

After you’ve written your articles and blog posts, take a couple of minutes and go through the On-page SEO Optimization Checklist to check if the keyword you targeted is actually in your heading, title tag, and intro. Check if your images are compressed and have SEO-optimized alt tags. Check a couple of small things that can help a ton with your on-page optimization.

The better you’re able to rank in search engines, the more people you can reach, the bigger the impact 😉

Not sure how often I’m going to repeat that in this article.

My point is. You can go through the steps and be done with it. Or take a bit of extra time for each step of your content creation and distribution and be a lot more effective.

The more you do it, the easier it gets!

Nonprofit Hashtag Research

Just like doing your keyword research to find out which keywords people actually search for, hashtag research helps you to understand which hashtags people actually follow.

We often see people adding random hashtags to their posts. #OurNonProfitRocks.

Ok cool. How will that help to make sure you reach your target audience on Social Media?

Check out how you can find the best hashtags per social channel and how to create a mix of hashtags to target low competitive and popular hashtags with every post.

The guide walks you through the process, tools, and ideas behind a good hashtag mix. Be sure to check it out.

Nonprofit Content Distribution Strategy

After you’ve created all the great pieces of content, it’s time to share it with the world. That doesn’t mean post it on your Facebook page once and be done with it.

No!

Content distribution is an art in and of itself. Just like content creation.

We’ve been experimenting with our Content Distribution Framework for years and we want to share how to get the most out of your promotion efforts.

Check out the Content Distribution Strategy Guide and start setting up a simple structure at first.

The framework can hold thousands of articles and dozens of distribution channels, but don’t overwhelm yourself. Start slowly and build up.