Marketing best practices for nonprofits

Marketing best practices for nonprofits

Remarkably, over 10 years of The Marketing Companion podcast and hundreds of episodes, I have never covered marketing best practices for nonprofits!

100% human contentMy friend Keith Jennings is the perfect person to break this cycle and bring us up to date on the nonprofit world. As vice president of community impact for Jackson Healthcare, Keith develops programs to help nonprofits adjust and thrive in a fast-changing world.

He describes his job as “losing sleep” over ideas of how to use marketing to activate people in the nonprofit world. A few stats from the current state of nonprofits:

  • In 2021, giving grew by 4%, even with challenging economic conditions.
  • Memberships still matter. Cultural nonprofits generated 53% of their online revenue from memberships, while Public Media generated 100% from memberships.
  • 45% of donors are donating to crowdfunding campaigns that benefit nonprofits.
  • 56% also donate through online stores that benefit NPOs. Consider creating an online store for your nonprofit if you don’t already have one.
  • NFTs are taking off as a way to raise money for your nonprofit. Unsilenced Voices sets up NFT art competitions for the girls in their program to draw/paint pictures. The nonprofit mints and sells them to fund school tuition, supplies, and lunch for the girls.

With his background in marketing, Keith is the perfect person to help us assess practical and actionable marketing best practices for nonprofits.

Keith and I dig deep into:

  • Psychology of motivation
  • Role of community to help donors become part of the change narrative
  • The importance of “calls to public,” “calls to donor,” and “calls to government”
  • Impact of the size of the nonprofit
  • Creating an ongoing dialogue instead of annual campaign
  • The advantage of embedded emotion
  • Prioritizing marketing tactics with changing demographics
  • Importance of word of mouth marketing
  • Moving from promotion to product-centered nonprofit businesses
  • The enlightened aid-to-trade pathway
  • Sustaining momentum through PR and advertising
  • Applying “jobs to be done” theory to nonprofits
  • Assessing the ideal nonprofit marketing budget

Click on this link to listen to hear Episode 266

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Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

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