SECOND EDITION

KIVI LEROUX MILLER

I opened the first edition of this book with a chapter called “10 New Realities for Nonprofits” with an emphasis on “New.” Back in 2010, I was still urging nonprofits to be OK with calling this work “marketing” rather than euphemisms like “outreach,” to take social media seriously, and to convince them that people over 50 really were using the Internet. Thankfully, we've moved well beyond those sticking points.

All of the other elements in that original list proved foundational to the work of nonprofit communications. While I have updated this list, what you'll find here are the assumptions on which all of the other chapters in the book are built. Understanding this list will help you get the most out of this book and to understand the choices I suggest you make.

Many forces beyond your control will affect how you market your nonprofit organization. The economy will go up and down. Friendly elected officials will be in charge, and then they will lose an election. Talented volunteers, staff, and board members will come and go. What people can do from their phones no matter where they are in the world will continue to grow.

But I don't expect the following 10 realities to change much.

At Nonprofit Marketing Guide, we've been researching communication effectiveness at nonprofits for more than a decade. I can tell you with absolute confidence that nonprofits that treat marketing and communications like the specialty profession that it is get better results.

Each of us communicates every day, and as a result, many of us think we are good writers, have good taste and a sense of style, and assume that others like the same things we do. Unfortunately, it's just not true! Successfully marketing a nonprofit organization requires an overly broad set of skills to be applied to a relatively narrow set of priorities. As the work becomes more and more dependent on sophisticated technology, it's even more important to employ staff who understand what they are doing and are committed to their own ongoing professional development.

For maximum effectiveness, your confident and skilled marketing staff need to work within an organizational culture that values marketing and communications.

Too often nonprofits just want communications staff to make all the stuff – the social media and website updates, the newsletters, flyers, and event invitations, etc. The least effective organizations treat their communications staff like fast-food drive-through windows, taking orders and churning out content.

In contrast, supportive organizations understand that you need more than just communications tactics for success. You need real strategy. You need planning. You need adequate resources, including time, talent, and treasure. You need to view marketing and communications as an essential, valued function.

Nonprofit marketing work comes with an overabundance of options and decisions to make. You simply cannot do it all. You have to make choices, and that can be incredibly challenging to do.

Communications staff who don't understand this and don't learn to manage expectations for both themselves and their organizations will find themselves burned out within a few years. I never expected to incorporate the concept of setting personal boundaries into my communications coaching practice, but it's become an essential skill.

When I teach nonprofit marketing workshops, I often make participants chant this with me in unison, so they remember it: “There is no such thing as the general public! There is no such thing as the general public!”

The general public includes everyone, from newborns to elders, from rich to poor, from incarcerated to the jet set. No matter how much you try, you will not reach everyone. In fact, if that's what you try to do, odds are good that you will reach no one. Instead, you need to focus on specific groups of people and work toward communicating with them in ways that connect with their particular needs and values.

When nonprofit marketing programs fail, organizations too frequently blame the tactics. “We tried an email newsletter, but no one read it.” “We sent out a direct mail fundraising letter, but it didn't raise much money.” Closer examination of those tactics often reveals that the message was too generic and therefore spoke to no one in particular.

All communications should be created with particular groups of people in mind. That's the only way to create content that people will find relevant.

The multitude of ways to communicate directly with the world has never been more accessible, largely built on the evolution of both social media and mobile technology.

I encourage all nonprofits to think of themselves as media moguls. At a minimum, you are likely managing a website, email, and a couple of social media channels. Most nonprofits go far beyond this list to include print mailing, media relations, in-person and online events, and more.

Do not think of all of these different ways to communicate (we call them “channels”) as separate and independent from each other. At a minimum, use a multichannel approach where you think through how to share your content across several different channels. Your community can interact with you in each channel.

Even better, take an omnichannel approach where you deliver your content across many channels in a way that creates a more consistent, seamless experience for your community. Where a multichannel approach centers on how your messaging appears in different places, an omnichannel approach centers on how your community members experience your messaging, regardless of channel.

Although you'll be encouraged in this book to remember that your supporters are real, individual people and to speak to them personally, it's also important to remember the power of your network as a whole and the connections that your supporters have with each other.

Think about when you host events. Isn't it wonderful to see all of those people who care about your work in one place, talking to each other about the good work you are doing, and feeling good about their contributions to something much bigger than themselves?

Smart nonprofit marketers find those people who are enthusiastic about the cause and who also have large networks of their own. You then feed those big fans and help them spread the message to others. They may fundraise for you, but just as important, they also “friendraise” for you.

Consider integrating fundraising, marketing, communications, and information technology into community building or community engagement teams. Incorporate all that is learned through your community of supporters into program design and implementation. Using marketing to facilitate community building is likely the best way to achieve your nonprofit's ultimate mission.

What emotions does your nonprofit evoke in people? What is your group known for? This is your organization's brand, image, or personality – and many nonprofits are finding that their organizational brand is closely related to the personalities of their most public staff members. This has always been true for smaller organizations, groups led by a founding or longtime executive director, and nonprofits created in someone else's memory or honor.

But now larger nonprofits must contend with this reality too. Good online marketing, especially in social media, is personal, which means that your staff should present themselves as real human beings in your communications. This mixing of personal and professional can be quite uncomfortable for people who highly value their privacy or who hold on to more traditional or dated definitions of what is professional and what is not.

The personality of the messenger – you – can affect the message. Think about your own personality and voice – your personal brand – and how it impacts the organization's brand.

Because the Internet has revolutionized communications between organizations and individuals, effective nonprofit marketing programs can be implemented for online pennies on the print dollar. Although you still need a budget to pay for good web hosting; email service providers; some upgraded, professional-level services; and, of course, staff, lack of money is no longer the biggest stumbling block to good nonprofit marketing. Now the sticking point is lack of time.

Engaging supporters in conversations is more time-consuming than blasting messages out to them. Managing profiles on multiple social media sites is more time-consuming than updating your website once a month. Writing a blog with several posts per week is more time-consuming than sending out a print newsletter twice a year. Although all of these tasks do take more time, they are also more effective at building a community of supporters and encouraging them to act on your behalf.

One of the most frequent concerns we used to hear from nonprofits about using social media and participating in conversations with people online was that they would lose control of their messages. They feared people would say bad things or manipulate their image in some way.

It's questionable whether that kind of control really ever existed, but the reality is that it is long gone. If someone wants to bad-mouth you online, they can do it right now whether you are there to see it and respond or not. Shutting down your computer or phone won't prevent those conversations from happening. They'll just happen without you there to correct any misconceptions.

Rather than trying to avoid awkward, negative, or challenging conversations online, your better approach is to learn ways to effectively engage in and, where possible, manage the way those conversations play out over time. Try to bring consistency to your messaging. It's much easier to steer a conversation and to suggest topics for additional discussion than it is to control what people say.

Good nonprofit marketing has many possible outcomes, and raising dollars is one of them. But nonprofits also use marketing to find and galvanize volunteers; to persuade decision makers; to change public policy; to raise awareness; to encourage behavior changes; to converse with clients, supporters, and partners; to foment social change – and more.

Although you can have successful long-term marketing campaigns that don't involve fundraising, you cannot have successful long-term fundraising campaigns without marketing. Marketing and communications are how you talk to your donors in between those times when you ask for money. They're what pull new people into your pool of potential new donors and what keep current donors happy with your organization so they will give again.

This is not a fundraising guide, but you'll find fundraising-related tips and examples throughout the book, because that is one result of successful nonprofit marketing.

There is no one best way to market your nonprofit or your good cause, although some approaches have better odds of working than others, especially given these ten realities. I've tried to include in this book both the strategies and tactics that I believe will have the greatest likelihood of success, especially for smaller organizations, but you won't know what works best for your group and your supporters until you try, gauge the results, and try again.

Don't fear failure in your nonprofit marketing. Fear will make your approaches too conservative, and you'll become just another one of the thousands of really good causes out there that struggle day to day because they don't get the support they deserve.

Instead, be bold. Author and pastor Basil King said, “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid.” You won't get it right the first time, and maybe not the second either. What's important is that you try new ways to reach out and grab hold of your supporters’ hearts and minds. When you do, they will come to your aid.

When Jane Austin, the marketing director for AchieveMpls, which runs career and college readiness initiatives for high school students in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, started her job several years ago, the communications work was scattered across the organization. “Things were … a mess,” said Jane. “The website was broken. Our mission statement didn't match our actual work. No one could describe what we did. New program videos, social media accounts, and taglines popped up without notice. Our red logo appeared in a wide range of shades from pink to orange. Our designers and web consultants were far too expensive.”

Jane knew she had her work cut out for her. Getting communications on track and into the care of a professional team felt overwhelming. The other staff were long accustomed to managing their own communications projects and were suspicious of Jane's questions and offers of help.

She started with some baby steps. “Most importantly, I started by learning about my new colleagues and building their trust. I took the view that my colleagues were my clients, and I met with them to find out about their needs. I worked hard to be an attentive and responsive listener, sharing my vision that we were partners in our marketing work,” said Jane.

Over time, communications projects and decision making began to shift to Jane as she demonstrated that she knew what she was doing and could produce good work on schedule and below cost. Jane began creating new office systems, assembling a team to help build a new website, reaching out to media, and securing new vendors. As trust in Jane grew, she was able to create new communications guidelines and protocols to guide AchieveMpls's communications work and create more consistency across the organization.

“Now several years later, our little marketing team is seen as an integral partner in our programmatic and community outreach work,” said Jane. “We work hard to keep innovating our marketing work and also pay close attention to the importance of internal communications in building staff engagement.” As a result, Jane has seen AchieveMpls's visibility and reputation in the community grow, while finding her team playing an increasingly important leadership role in the health and vitality of her organization.

At Nonprofit Marketing Guide, we meet many communications staff who are at the beginning of Jane's journey: in the middle of a hot mess. Much of the work we do is centered on helping people like her do exactly what she did: professionalize the marketing and communications functions within her organization.

It's rarely an easy journey, and it often takes several years, as is it did for Jane.

Many nonprofit leaders, especially those who come to their organizations because of a passionate commitment to a specific cause, mistakenly believe that nonprofit marketing is about nothing more than creating newsletters and social media updates about the good work the nonprofit is doing. Those with corporate experience sometimes narrowly define nonprofit marketing as brand management, public relations, and advertising. Still others, especially those responsible for fundraising, believe that all nonprofit marketing should direct people to donate money. While their numbers have certainly dwindled since the first edition of this book, some people still believe that marketing is nothing more than self-interested selling that has no place in the nonprofit sector. (Those people are, of course, wrong.)

In fact, marketing in the nonprofit sector is much, much more than any of these incomplete assumptions. To manage it effectively, it's vital to understand the depth and breadth of the work.

In this chapter, we'll review a more complete definition of marketing and how it applies to the nonprofit world. We'll also look at the difference between marketing and communications. Then we'll get even more specific by reviewing and defining the most common nonprofit marketing goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics.

Consider this official definition of marketing from the American Marketing Association: “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

As you can see, it's much more than just communicating about the programs or services that your nonprofit provides. Marketing is also about creating those programs or services, from the outset, and delivering them to your participants and supporters. Thus, marketing is not just something you do when you have the time or money; it's an essential component of a well-run organization, right alongside strategic planning, financial management, and evaluation of your effectiveness in implementing your mission.

Also included in the formal definition of marketing is exchanging offerings that have value – in simpler terms, you give a valuable to someone and you get one from them in return. In the business world, a person gives money to a business and the business gives them a service or product, like a box of cereal. But long before you walk out of the grocery store with a box of Crunchy Cocoa Flakes, the business's marketing department has helped determine how that cereal tastes and what it looks like in the bowl, because they have learned all about the cereal preferences of people that make up families like yours. They've figured out how much to charge you for it, based not on production costs alone but also on what they think you'd be willing to pay. They've also decided which stores will carry the cereal on their shelves. They've figured out what the box should look like and what they need to put in the TV commercials, so your kids won't stop bugging you until you add Crunchy Cocoa Flakes to the shopping list.

Of course, it's not quite that simple in the nonprofit world.

Instead of boxes of cereal, nonprofits are often “selling” products and services that are much more abstract, such as education, advocacy, facilitation, technical assistance, and networking. Many times, the characteristics and descriptions of those products and services are not solely for the nonprofit to decide; they are defined instead by government agencies, foundations, and other institutions that fund or regulate the nonprofit's programs.

The exchange is also not as simple as swiping a debit card and walking out of a store with a bag full of groceries. In the nonprofit world, programs are often offered to individuals for free, because their creation is paid for by contracts, grants, or charitable donations. The individual participants pay for what's offered with something other than money, such as their time, by performing a desired action, or simply by demonstrating a willingness to consider a different point of view.

In addition to these costs to both the nonprofit and the participants, we must also consider what's called the “benefit exchange.” What does the nonprofit get out of it, and what does the participant get out of it? Where is the real value to both parties? Nonprofits often get one step closer to achieving their mission, whether it's reducing domestic violence or beautifying a neighborhood. Participants, on the other hand, often get some kind of emotional payback, such as feeling physically safer or knowing they've made their community a better place for their children.

The same is true for people who support nonprofits with donations of time, talent, and money. Nonprofits receive these benefits and in exchange, supporters get something too. Sometimes it's concrete, like tickets to an event or a fancy meal. Other times, it's an emotional benefit, such as feeling proud or inspired. Supporting a nonprofit can also affirm one's identity as a good person or as someone who makes a difference in the lives of others.

I participate in numerous social media groups for nonprofit communicators, and several times a year, someone wants to debate the difference between marketing and communications. Sometimes words like public relations or outreach are also thrown in the mix. Many of these debates center on which words should be included in someone's job title or team name. As organizations grow, we also sometimes see battles about which executives or staff teams will control the various aspects of marketing and communications work, which also leads to parsing the definitions as the work is divided.

The practical reality is that both words, marketing and communications, are used interchangeably in the nonprofit sector. Communications director, manager, or coordinator is a much more common job title than marketing director, manager, or coordinator. However, those communications directors are almost always doing what I consider both marketing and communications work.

When asked to define the differences between marketing and communications, I tend to simplify the conversation by saying that marketing is the more strategic form of this work, and communications is the more tactical form.

Marketing is about the value exchange. You have to know who you are talking to, what messages will resonate with them, and the best ways to deliver those messages. Those are strategic choices. Communications, on the other hand, is all of the content you create and your plan to distribute that content so that you can maintain relationships with the people consuming that content. Every nonprofit needs both.

Again, in practice, both words are used interchangeably in the nonprofit sector. If you are speaking with someone who insists the terms are different, I encourage you to explore their definitions in the context of your conversation, so you fully understand the implications of those word choices.

After coaching hundreds of nonprofit communications directors, I've found that rather than debating whether they are doing marketing or communications, it's more meaningful to discuss whether they are marketing for the primary purpose of fundraising or marketing for the much broader purpose of community engagement.

Through the many years of research for Nonprofit Marketing Guide's annual Nonprofit Communications Trends Reports, we found a pattern: communications directors answered our survey questions quite differently depending on the “why” behind their work. We found a nearly equal split: about half of nonprofit communicators work directly in support of fundraising goals and the other half work more broadly for community engagement, which may or may not include some fundraising.

Communications staff who work primarily in service of fundraising goals have a more well-defined target audience: donors. Much of the communications they produce fit within the “Ask, Thank, Report” donor communications cycle. They ask for donations, then thank donors for their support – both individually and collectively – and then report back on the good works that those donors have made possible, often using a supporter-centered style of writing. (We'll explore ways to express gratitude in particular in Chapter 9 and various nonprofit writing styles in Chapter 10.) These communicators often focus more on direct mail and events as communications channels, as compared with staff who are not personally responsible for fundraising goals.

The other half of nonprofit communicators focus more broadly on community engagement, with fundraising as a secondary or tertiary goal, if at all. Their primary goals, target audiences, messages, and communications channels are usually much more varied than those of communicators focused more narrowly on fundraising.

But what does community engagement mean? Just as with the conversation about the difference between marketing and communications, it's essential that you define what community engagement means in the specific context of your work, because it can mean many different things.

At Nonprofit Marketing Guide, we define community engagement simply as keeping people inspired by and active in the work. To elaborate, community engagement includes awareness, interaction, and participation. Let's look at these elements a bit closer.

Awareness is about introducing your organization and/or your issues to people for the first time. Communications activities like search engine optimization, media relations, and list building are common awareness activities.

Interaction is about getting people to demonstrate that they are willing to move beyond just being aware of you and your cause. Activities such as liking, commenting, and sharing on social media are forms of interaction. Opening emails and clicking on links, downloading documents, and other simple form completions on your website would also fall under interaction.

Participation is a form of engagement that requires following through on a call to action of some sort. It could result in learning more, advocating for your cause, attending an event, donating, or volunteering.

As you think about what community engagement really means for your organization, give these three categories some thought. What is the right mix of awareness, interaction, and participation-building communications in your plan?

Now let's take a closer look at the specific goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics most commonly adopted by nonprofit communicators. Because the definitions of the various marketing strategies and objectives are new to many nonprofits, we'll spend the most time on those. We'll quickly summarize the goals and tactics, which are more widely understood.

If you get overwhelmed by all of the new vocabulary and definitions, don't worry. We'll go over a simplified plan next, in Chapter 3.

Marketing goals are the broad outcomes you seek via communications that help you achieve your larger organizational mission goals. In the nonprofit sector, a dozen goals represent the vast majority of the communications work. These 12 goals fall into four categories.

Community Engagement and Education Goals

Brand and Leadership Goals

Program Recruitment Goals

Fundraising Goals

It's common for communications staff to say they are expected to work on six or more of these goals simultaneously. Based on research from the 2019 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report, the most popular nonprofit communications goals are:

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 fundraising with purchased or rented lists of names.

Location-based marketing is using mobile phone location data to provide messaging to people when they are physically near specific locations or when they use apps to check in at specific locations. It may also be called geomarketing and proximity marketing. We most often see this strategy used by nonprofits that run large public facilities like parks, zoos, and museums, where visitors can find detailed information about what they are seeing in front of them based on where they are standing.

Objectives are actions or steps you take to implement a strategy. These actions or steps are also what you measure to know if you are meeting your goals. Of all the goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics discussed in this chapter, we find the most diversity in the nonprofit sector when discussing marketing objectives.

That's because of the abundant opportunities to customize objectives to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Resourced, and Time-Bound. If you focus on creating objectives that are measurable and time-bound, you are usually also being specific. Ensuring that your objectives are achievable and resourced helps you stay within your capacity to actually accomplish the work.

In many cases, you should also add some reference to the who (your participants, supporters, or influencers) and sometimes to the what you are communicating about (your messaging or call to action) in order to customize the objectives in a meaningful way.

After coaching hundreds of nonprofit communications directors and teams, I've found that discussing, agreeing upon, and prioritizing specific objectives is the missing piece in the nonprofit marketing strategy puzzle. I strongly encourage all nonprofit communicators to spend more time working through the objectives in their plan than on goals, strategies, or tactics.

Our research at Nonprofit Marketing Guide first identified the 12 objectives most often used in the nonprofit sector in the 2020 Nonprofit Communications Trends Report. Let's start by looking at the five most popular ones. Financial gains and participation levels are most common, followed by expressions of loyalty; change in knowledge or understanding; and people joining, subscribing, or following.

Financial gains or savings. To create a specific objective in this category, you might work to increase the percentage of 5K walk or run revenue raised via peer-to-peer fundraising by 20 percent. Or you might work to decrease your cost of acquisition for new donors.

Participation levels. A participation levels objective can be set when you are trying to increase registrations, donations, RSVPs, etc. For example, you might wish to sell out 90 percent of your workshops this year. Or you might wish to decrease the amount of time between when someone gets on your mailing list and when they take a specific participatory action like advocating for a policy change with their elected officials.

Expressions of loyalty. Loyalty is often judged in the nonprofit sector in terms of retention or renewals. Specific objectives could include maintaining a 75 percent donor retention rate this year. Or perhaps you would like to keep 50 percent of your email list highly engaged, according to a lead scoring tool in your constituent relationship management database.

Change in knowledge or understanding. This objective is best customized by being specific about changing knowledge or understanding within a specific group of people. For example, perhaps you desire to move 75 percent of beginners in your program to the intermediate level in six months. Website metrics, such as the amount of time returning visitors are spending on certain pages, could also indicate a change in knowledge or understanding.

Joining, subscribing, or following. This objective helps you measure list growth. It can be customized in many ways, such as increasing newsletter subscriptions by 20 percent this year, or optimizing email sign-up forms on your website to convert more visitors to subscribers, for example.

Nonprofit communicators may also consider additional objectives that attempt to measure the impact of their communications on how people think and feel.

Increased levels of influence. This objective would assess the extent to which your communications are increasing your influence with specific groups of people or increasing your share on the public conversation. For example, you might seek to get invited to speak at five industry events. Or you might try to improve your search engine rankings on 10 keywords. Or you may try to get your policy positions covered in five prominent media outlets.

Increased satisfaction. Perhaps you want your program participants, supporters, or influencers to feel more satisfied about their work with or relationship with your nonprofit. In this case, you might customize your objective to raise the Net Promoter Score for a specific program to +60. Or, if you use a lead scoring system to measure engagement of your email list, you might want to keep at least 35 percent of your list at a five-star engagement level.

Expressions of trust. You might wish to track whether your communications are leading certain groups of people to say or do things that demonstrate their trust in your organization. For example, you might want three new organizations to agree to partner with you on a new project. Or you may want 100 new participants to trust your nonprofit to help them address an especially difficult challenge.

Change in tone or attitude. You may be interested in tracking the extent to which communications help change the tone, sentiment, attitude, or preferences expressed by a group of people. In this case, you could work to move the majority of social media comments you receive from negative to positive. Or you could use feedback surveys or polls to gauge changes in attitudes or preferences over time.

Finally, nonprofits may also choose objectives that help measure the impact on how people behave.

Increased demand or desire. Are communications increasing requests, demands, or desire for something the nonprofit offers? For example, a health clinic may create a marketing plan to increase appointment requests by 30 percent next quarter.

Increased readiness or empowerment. This objective would help measure whether communications were helping certain groups of people be more ready or empowered to take a specific action. For example, you might develop a plan so that 70 percent of petition signers continue to open educational emails six months later. Or you might track the percentage of people who move from being aware of an issue to acting on it.

Change in behavior. If you want your communications to lead to measurable changes in how people behave, you might set an objective such as 50 percent fewer students engaging in behavior resulting in suspensions next semester.

It's worth noting that attributing some results, including behavior change and change in tone, specifically to a nonprofit's communications plan can be extremely challenging or expensive. It's unlikely that you'll be able to connect your communications directly and exclusively to those results.

Instead of drawing a direct link between your communications work and achieving an objective, we often speak instead in the language of Key Progress Indicators or Key Performance Indicator (KPIs). These are indicators of progress toward your goals and mission.

The tactics you use – the channels or type of content – can also influence how you phrase your objectives. I do caution you against only using objectives that are directly tied to a specific tool or communications channel. Ideally, you are using multiple tools or channels to achieve an objective.

Tactics are easier to understand: it's all about the content you make and the channels in which you distribute that content.

Content includes all forms of writing and visual content, such as photography, graphics, and video.

Nonprofits especially interested in content marketing will likely create content in the form of downloads, problem-solving tools, and quizzes. Some nonprofits rely on content created by others through content curation or synthesizing data and information from others.

The most popular communications channels for nonprofits are:

Nonprofits also use:

To make working with the goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics described in this chapter easier, Nonprofit Marketing Guide created the Nonprofit Communications Strategic Planning Card Deck. The double deck of playing cards, which includes definitions and examples, allows nonprofit communicators to visually lay out their communications plans. The card deck can also be used for a variety of planning and training exercises.

“When I begin to feel overwhelmed,” says executive director Jeanette Stokes of the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South, “I can see all those cards spread out and realize that we can't do it all. I say to myself, ‘Pick a goal and strategy and a few tactics.’”

Communications strategist Tara Collins feels the same way. “When planning a campaign, I restrict myself to just the three best cards for goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics so I don't get overwhelmed or sidetracked. The card decks allow me to lay it all out, shuffle, discard, reshuffle, focus and then get it all down on paper quickly.”

The card deck is available at both Amazon.com and NonprofitMarketingGuide.com.

I use this quote from Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author Thomas L. Friedman in many of my trainings:

“In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue.”¹

Ineffective communications teams struggle with conflicting opinions and ambiguous interpretations of basic terminology. Effective teams, on the other hand, have a shared vocabulary that is clear and meaningful.

In nonprofit organizations where marketing is a fairly new or poorly understood concept, it's vital for communications staff to name and therefore own many important facets of the work. That includes naming the goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics described in this chapter. Doing so will help you build your team, be more strategic, and increase your effectiveness.

“We used to use what I call the ‘Oh My God’ method of planning our communications,” said Jeanette Stokes, executive director of the Resource Center for Women and Ministry in the South. “We'd look at one another and say, “Oh my God, if we don't tell people about this right now, it will be too late!” The chaotic creation of communications would ensure.

However, after Jeanette and her team began following the planning advice in this chapter, they felt much more organized and in control of their communications work. Even after their communications director left for another job, remaining staff were able to manage the communications work together. “We would have been completely disorganized in our communications to the public except for the editorial calendar. We make it, follow it, and know what each of us is supposed to be doing,” said Jeanette. “We've been doing well enough in the absence of a staff person focused on communications only because of the editorial calendar!”

At Nonprofit Marketing Guide, we get asked all the time how to create a marketing or communications plan or strategy. But there isn't a simple answer, because it all depends on what you mean by those words: marketing, communications, plan, and strategy.

Several different documents, including an editorial calendar like Jeanette's, make up what we collectively call a marketing strategy and communications plan. Here's how we approach it.

I think of the marketing strategy as the document that answers the fundamental marketing questions that won't change much at all for the next one to three years. What are the marketing goals and objectives? Who do you need to communicate with most and what are the core messages to share with these people? What resources will be allocated to implement the strategy? A marketing strategy includes the following sections:

These sections are further defined in Table 3.1 and we will now look at each section more closely.

If you aren't sure where to begin, we suggest that you start with the most popular marketing goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics we reviewed in the previous chapter and build from there.

Table 3.1. Elements of a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy

In this section, you define what you need to do or to accomplish.

What are your short-term and long-term goals? What do you want to achieve through marketing?

I suggest you begin with the twelve most common goals described in the previous chapter and winnow those down to what's most appropriate for your nonprofit.

The four most common marketing goals are engaging our community, brand building and reputation management, raising awareness of our issues, and supporting event fundraising.

Here you describe the conditions under which you must operate. This is also called an environmental scan. You'll also sometimes see a SWOT analysis – a review of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Some strategies also include a marketing audit of existing communications work.

You may want to answer some of the following questions. What are the internal conditions under which your marketing program must operate? What are the external conditions under which you must operate? What partnerships can you rely on? What skills do you need, and which do you have on staff now? What systems need to be in place in order for your plan to succeed? What barriers must be overcome for your plan to be successful?

Who is the competition – who else is providing similar resources and information? Who is providing information or urging actions that are in conflict with your approach? Are there any myths that must be overcome? Are there any policies that will positively affect the outcome of your marketing plan? Are there any policies that could negatively affect the success of the marketing strategy?

In this section, you describe in detail who you are communicating with and what their interests and needs are.

What groups of people are you trying to reach? Within those groups, what are the specific subgroups of people who are most important to you? Who are some personas within the groups? What do these people care about? What's important to them? What's not important to them? What is their current level of interest in you and your issues? How much knowledge do they already have? What else do you believe they need to know?

Your organizational brand or personality is your identity and how others see you and feel about you. Brands are communicated through everything from word choices and visuals to the timing and location of your communications. Speaking in a unified organizational voice across all of your communications channels is an important part of your brand.

You'll want to create a brand and style guide that articulates all of the specific details (we'll discuss brand and style guides more in Chapter 15); however, your strategy should answer some basic brand questions. What is your organization really all about? What's your story? What makes you special? What will others associate you with? What tone, voice, and style best represent your nonprofit?

In this section you lay out the specific messages that are most likely to work with your target audiences. You'll answer questions like these.

What are you trying to get people to do? What kind of installment plan or baby steps can people take along the way? What's in it for them? Why should they care, and why now?

Given your target audiences’ interests, needs, and values, what specific messages about you and your work are most likely to resonate with them? What messages or approaches would they be most likely to ignore? What kind of information do the specific groups want to receive from you?

In the previous chapter, we reviewed the twelve most common nonprofit marketing strategies. These are the marketing approaches you will take to achieve your goals.

The four most common marketing strategies are permission-based marketing, content marketing, event or experience marketing, and relationship marketing.

You can customize these strategies by being specific about which targeted communities each strategy will be used to reach and which programs or services you will market with each strategy.

In this section, you define your marketing objectives, which are the measurable steps you take to implement a strategy. We encourage you to make your objectives SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Resourced, and Time-Bound. As you add the details to make your objectives SMART, you will be referencing the earlier sections of your strategy on your targeted communities and your messaging and primary calls to action.

What specific measures are available to track the effectiveness of the marketing campaign? Which measures are of primary importance and which are secondary? How often will you review and report on the metrics? How will the metrics influence adjustments to the plan? What's impossible to measure, but still important to consider, perhaps through anecdotal information? Are there any unstated or hidden expectations that need to be addressed?

The most popular objectives for nonprofits fall into these four categories: joining, subscribing, or following; participation levels; change in knowledge or understanding; and financial gains or savings.

Here you describe the tactics you will use to deliver your messages to your audiences. Think about questions like these.

What communications tools should you use to deliver messages to the target audiences? How specific and personalized should communications be? Who should deliver the message? Will you use offline tactics, online tactics, or a combination? How often should your audiences receive the messages via any given communications channel? Where should these messages appear?

The most common communications tactics are websites and/or blogs, email marketing, social media, storytelling, earned media or public relations, events, and direct mail.

In this section, you outline the financial and staffing resources required to implement the plan. You may wish to answer the following questions.

What financial resources are required? Where will these resources come from? Do they exist today, or do they need to be developed? What staffing resources are required? Do you have the skills and time needed on staff? Or do you need to hire new staff and consultants/freelancers? Do you need to recruit volunteers to perform certain tasks? Do you need to enlist the support of various partners to implement parts of the action plan?

What elements of the plan will be scaled back first if adequate resources are not available? What elements of the plan should be expanded or accelerated first should additional resources become available?

While your marketing strategy focuses on big strategic questions and answers that will not change frequently, your communications plan is a much more dynamic and living set of documents that are constantly adjusted and updated.

When we talk about communications plans, we are most often referring to some combination of three different documents: The Big Picture Communications Timeline, an editorial calendar, and creative briefs.

A Big Picture Communications Timeline maps out all of the events and milestones (both within and beyond your control) that will drive your communications in the coming year, along with your primary calls to action and the major storylines you want to share. It's completed with all parts of the organization in mind: programs, fundraising, and marketing/communications. My second book, Content Marketing for Nonprofits, contains a full chapter on Big Picture Communications Timelines and you can also find additional information at NonprofitMarketingGuide.com.

An editorial calendar is your day-to-day working plan and what I consider to be the most important of all of the documents discussed in this chapter. At a minimum, an editorial calendar outlines what you are sharing, in what communications channels, and when. You can add much more detail, including who is responsible for what, internal deadlines and workflows, and more.

Editorial calendars can take the form of spreadsheets or calendars. Whether you have “spreadsheet brain” or “calendar brain” – which format allows you to work more productively – is up to you.

An editorial calendar, along with your Big Picture Communications Timeline, will help you keep track of what's called the story arc. Although each communications piece should be able to stand on its own, it's also helpful if you view each article or video as part of a larger story that you are trying to tell. Using an editorial calendar can help you map out that story arc, or how the story will progress or evolve over time.

Ultimately, you'll work toward creating a master editorial calendar that includes everything that's being created and published in a given time period. However, in practice, many nonprofits find it easier to begin editorial planning with just a subset of their communications.

You can ease into editorial planning by setting up your editorial calendar in several different ways.

By channel. Create a separate editorial calendar for each major communications channel that requires a significant amount of content, such as your newsletter or blog. You can also create an editorial calendar for your social networking presence as a whole.

An editorial calendar for a quarterly print newsletter could have the standing heads or placeholders for the different types of articles you typically include in your newsletter (for example, success story, donor profile), as column heads. The publication date of each issue would run as row heads in the left-hand column (see Table 3.2 for an example). You would then fill in the grid with the specific article details for each edition, such as the name of the program that the success story would come from and the name of the donor who would be profiled.

Or let's say you want to create a weekly social media calendar to ensure that you are updating your status and contributing to the conversations on a handful of sites throughout the week. You would put each of the sites (Facebook page, Twitter profile, and so on) across the top row and the days of the week down the left-hand column. Now you can fill in as many boxes as you like with the topic you want to talk about or the kind of update you want to share (say, retweet three times, post a discussion question on the Facebook page).

By audience. You can also organize editorial calendars by audience. If you have multiple, distinct audiences (such as teachers, parents, and students) and you want to ensure that you communicate with them regularly, you might create a calendar for each audience with your channels down the side and your time frames across the top. If you have several groups of people who you're trying to reach out to and you're concerned that your communications may unconsciously favor one group or other, this method will help you find the right balance.

Table 3.2. Sample Editorial Calendar for a Print Newsletter for a Local Humane Society

By program. You can also organize editorial calendars by program if you have several different programs and you want to make sure that you are spending an appropriate amount of time communicating about each one. Just as with the audience-oriented calendar, you can list your program across the top and dates down the side, then fill in the boxes with channels and specifics about the content you'll deliver there.

The third type of document that could be considered a communication plan is a creative brief. A creative brief is a quick worksheet that you fill out before you get started on any significant piece of communications work. It's like a mini strategy for a particular campaign or project.

Using a creative brief forces you to consider important questions before you get started. It's also a wonderful collaboration tool that helps your team work out potential conflicts before you spend a lot of time on the project. It's also a nice touchstone that you can return to if you feel like a project is going astray at any point.

Here are common questions in a creative brief worksheet:

You can find much more detail and examples of Big Picture Communications Timelines, editorial calendars, and creative briefs in my book, Content Marketing for Nonprofits: A Communications Map for Engaging Your Community, Becoming a Favorite Cause, and Raising More Money, as well as at NonprofitMarketingGuide.com

By using these three planning documents together, Melissa Cipollone, the communications strategist for Pasa Sustainable Agriculture, has greatly improved the efficiency of the organization's publication production process.

“I start the planning at the beginning of each year, where I work with all of our staff to create a Big Picture Communications Timeline for the year,” said Melissa. “Then I schedule creative briefings with staff as needed, where we work together to fill out a creative brief.” This guides their brainstorming process and focuses the conversation on important decisions such as the purpose of each publication, its intended audience, its backward production timeline, etc. “We also clearly define roles, such as who are reviewers, who are approvers, who will design the layout, etc.,” said Melissa.

Next, she adds the production timelines to a shared Google editorial calendar, so everyone involved in a production can see the agreed-upon deadlines. “Having a shared editorial calendar also lets me easily show others where we might encounter bottlenecks or conflicts with other planned projects,” said Melissa.

Finally, she initiates a production and editing process that includes clear steps. These are: (1) creating an outline; (2) reconciling a “global” draft, where they only focus on the content and structure of a piece; (3) reconciling a “local” draft, where they hone in on sentence-level edits; and (4) copyediting and proofreading to polish everything up.

“Creating a streamlined planning and production process has helped me work more collaboratively with our staff, and reduce conflicts,” said Melissa. Before, staff would realize that their visions were misaligned after a lot of time was already spent on a draft, or they wouldn't account for the time needed to allow peer reviewers to participate in the production process. “It's certainly not a fool-proof process, but it's helped us tremendously,” said Melissa.

Although drafting a comprehensive marketing strategy and communications plan that answers the scores of questions posed here is ideal, the reality is that this kind of thoughtful, well-researched, and well-considered plan is out of the reach of many organizations, perhaps including yours. You may not have the time or staff cooperation to pull it off. If so, you'll turn instead to the quick-and-dirty approach that focuses on the three most important questions in nonprofit marketing:

Nonprofits without communications staff always have the answer to the third question. We need a flyer! We need a billboard! We need to be on Snapchat! Your challenge is to always introduce the first two questions into the conversation: Who is this for and what do we want to say to them or ask them to do?

Once you get those basics into the conversation on a regular basis, you can add two other questions:

The American Red Cross wants every household to do three things: to get an emergency kit, to make a communication and evacuation plan, and to be informed about the disasters that are common in their communities. That's their product. Fair enough, but how are they going to make it happen?

Although the American Red Cross has the resources to develop comprehensive marketing strategies complete with healthy amounts of audience research and environmental analyses, I asked Mark Ferguson, who managed the “Do More Than Cross Your Fingers” campaign several years ago for the American Red Cross, to share the marketing strategy for the campaign in the quick-and-dirty format.¹

The Red Cross's historical research and experience shows that moms with kids under 18 living at home are especially receptive to messages about disaster preparedness. No surprise there – if anyone is going to care about the nest and the babies in it, it's Mom. But some research also showed that 82 percent of moms say they drive household purchases. So, if you are trying to get a family to organize a disaster preparedness kit that will most likely require some purchases, reaching out to the people who decide what to buy makes sense.

But what do you say to a busy mom to get her to make this a priority? It was important for the Red Cross to come up with a message that spoke to moms but that also had broader appeal to the American public at large. Even if moms were the target, the message needed to be appropriate for a much wider audience as well. It was also important, said Mark, for the message to start from where people were and to help them move forward with their family disaster planning, regardless of how much they may have already done. Through their research, they knew that about 80 percent of families had taken one of the three key steps (getting a kit, making a plan, or staying informed), and this campaign was about moving them to take another.

To come up with the right message, the Red Cross hired the firm Catchword Branding, which specialized in naming. They provided a thousand possible slogans to the Red Cross, many of which were simple variations on one idea. Using a cross-functional team (marketing, development, disaster preparedness, field staff, and so on), the Red Cross whittled the list down to the best five. Those five were then tested through an online survey with Harris Interactive to find which one resonated best both with moms and with the public at large.

Of the five options, said Mark, one was in the form of a question and one played on the “heroes” theme that the Red Cross has used successfully before. Another one was deemed too snarky or too clever (survey respondents said it just didn't sound like the Red Cross). The chosen theme, Do More Than Cross Your Fingers, stood out among the five with both moms and the public at large. “It was fresh,” said Mark, “but not in any way offensive.”

With a message in hand, the next decision was how to get it out to moms. “We knew that moms are really active online,” said Mark. Thus, the campaign centered on www.redcross.org/domore, and all of the other online and offline tactics pointed back to that page.

The Red Cross also wanted to emphasize that each family is different, so what's in their emergency kits should be different too. Thus, one of the key components of the website was a game called Prepare 4 that helped you build your own personalized kit.

“One of the goals was to make disaster preparedness simple and interesting,” said Mark, “not just a brochure or a ho-hum shopping list. We wanted something interactive and friendly.” During the game, you'd answer questions that helped you build a kit that was customized for your family, right down to including something fun for the kids to do while the power is out. At the end of the game, your list of items was emailed to you so that you could go gather up the items from around your house and go shopping for what was missing.

You could also share what you included in your personal kit with others in a My Kit section, as spokesperson Jamie Lee Curtis did on the site via video. The selection of Curtis as the spokesperson was another move that connected well with moms.

The Red Cross also reached out to “mommy bloggers” who had blogged about disaster preparedness before. They pursued coverage in traditional print magazines focused on women and parenting. Marketing partnerships with Clorox and FedEx (brands many moms use regularly) rounded out the campaign channels.

No matter how big or how small your nonprofit may be, asking yourself the three basic questions behind a Quick-and-Dirty Marketing Plan will help ensure that you are headed in the right direction:

Creating a marketing plan before launching into tactics, however simple the plan (even if it's nothing more than answers to these questions on the back of a napkin), is always a smart approach. It's as true for nonprofit marketing as it is for disaster preparedness – you have to do more than cross your fingers!