Inbound marketing for the non-profit sector attracts prospective donors to your organization by showing them how their support helps the cause and by building a clear picture that explains how their efforts, small or large, make a difference.
Audiences learn about non-profits organisations through inbound channels that provide a wealth of resources and information about the charity, rather than traditional outbound marketing channels such as TV commercials and brochures. Before deciding whether they want to donate to a cause, people educate themselves about the charity, learning as much as they wish about your organisation online. By employing an inbound methodology, non-profit organisations can take ownership of their online presence to a certain degree, helping shape the public's opinion about your causes and activity.
The inbound methodology attracts customers by creating valuable content and tailored experiences at every stage of their journey; it achieves this via various pull marketing strategies. Inbound marketing for non-profit organisations focuses on giving current and potential donors a better understanding of how their efforts make a difference and how the organisation uses their donations to help.
Inbound marketing methods help organisations to work with like-minded people with the same interests and goals, making it a much more efficient marketing strategy. Prospective donors are able to view the valuable and relevant content posted on digital channels to help prompt them to start a conversation and move through the buyer's journey stages (attract, engage, delight), designed to help them make an informed and confident decision to build a long-term relationship with your organisation.
Some of the most common and effective content types include:
- Blogging: through blog posts, donors can find answers to their questions and about the cause supported. They help the organisation provide value and build trust with their target audience while generating content reusable in other marketing efforts.
- Website: the website is an organisation's central representation online; thus, it must communicate and reinforce the value and mission of the non-profits to prospective and current donors and supporters, answering any questions about the organisation and providing all of the pages that audiences would expect to find.
- Landing Pages: the pages within your website that are specifically designed to convert visitors into prospects and donors, encouraging them to take action, So they must be designed and optimised to reduce friction, remove distractions and prompt actions.
- Content Offers: represent private content that provides additional value to your prospects, such as monthly reports, progress achieved towards the goal or success stories, and encourage conversion from visitors or prospects into contact or donors.
- Social Media: having a social media presence and posting regularly is imperative to the inbound methodology for non-profit businesses as they represent an effective way to promote your organisation and interact with the audience.
- Validation Points: methods and materials through which the non-profit organisation can prove its value and build trust with visitors and prospects, such as statistics, donation reports, data or testimonials.
The inbound methodology for non-profit organisations is constructed from the same three stages of the inbound process - attract, engage and delight - adapted for the non-profit sector.
1. Attract
The objective here is to capture the attention of your target audience, attracting the target donors and supporters to your organisation through inbound marketing methods such as content tailored to the specific buyer personas created. To reach the audience, a non-profit organisation must start by creating and publishing relevant content – such as blog articles, content offers, and social media posts – to provide value and become relevant and helpful.
Examples of content that the institution could provide:
- A guide or booklet about how to get involved as a volunteer for the charity
- A blog post that highlights medical or social progress for the cause
- Social media posts about upcoming events and how they will help the cause
- Social media posts about success stories of various people supported by the organisation
The content produced should be considered with SEO strategies in mind. This helps the right people find you when searching for topics related to your organisation. Building an SEO strategy requires a non-profit organisation to identify and target keywords and phrases related to your industry or cause, what challenges you solve and how you help them. An effective SEO strategy will allow an organisation's content and information to appear on search engine pages organically so that people who search for that information can easily find you.
2. Engage
The objective of this stage is to engage the audience, communicate with the donors, answer enquiries and show them how their support helps the cause to build long-term relationships with them. The conversations at this point should be tailored and personalised to each of your personas created, reassuring donors on how your organisation supports its cause and instilling confidence in supporters and volunteers. Prospects and donors can engage with various teams during their customer journey; some examples of departments or units include:
- Volunteers
- Branch administrators/managers
- Social media account representatives
- Customer support operators (in-person, phone, live chat, email)
Engagement strategies that help achieve this include how a non-profit organisation interacts with donors, how events such as fundraisers and charity runs are managed or what impact the organisation had on forwarding the cause.
Mapping out and analysing the customer journey and synchronising the conversations' goals across the team allows the non-profit organisation to offer the best possible service and be helpful to prospective donors and supporters throughout their journey with you. The engage stage also captures the prospects and donors' contact details and interests. Thus, the forms existent on the institution's website that capture prospects' data, the database and CRM functionality, the call-to-action buttons and smart content must be optimised to accurately and efficiently capture this data to be personalised for communications.
3. Delight
Here, you want to ensure that customers are content with the provided services long after becoming donors or supporters for your organisation, keeping them happy, satisfied and informed on the causes progress and the charity's development. The non-profit's teams become advisors and experts who can assist donors, supporters and members at any point on their customer journey. A common and effective delight strategy is using thoughtful, well-timed chatbots and surveys to help, support and request feedback from your donors, members and supporters.
Satisfaction surveys can also be employed to delight stakeholders; for example, surveys sent following charity runs or surveys for volunteers aiding your organisation can be used to capture feedback and delight current and future customers.
The organisation's blogs, website and social media content also facilitate in delighting customers. They represent channels through which charity success stories featuring people the organisation helped, videos and exciting charity events, can be viewed. Or they can engage in meaningful conversations.
Feedback may also be provided through your social media platforms. They may ask questions that you can respond to, or even better, share their experience with your organisation, allowing potential future donors to read this. Creating advocacy at this stage can be very powerful for gaining new customers and creating good social awareness.