Marketing best practices for nonprofits

Mark Schaefer

1 year ago

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

My 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