Marketers are used to fitting their skills to the needs of different types of businesses, and to the needs of different kinds of customers. However, when you take the profit motive out of the business and get away from the notion of selling a product to the customer, how do you adapt?

While some businesses use cause marketing to wear the flag of a cause (often with real support alongside it), nonprofits are entirely focused on it. As such, marketing with them comes with a few differences that you need to get used to.

Adjusting Your Marketing Skills To The Nonprofit Space

Your audience still matters greatly.

Know your audience. It’s always been one of the keys of marketing, and this doesn’t change for nonprofits. However, in this case, it’s not customers you want to learn about, but your donors and people like them.

Use the donor sign-up as an opportunity to collect data, such as age, employment status, lifestyle, and more. This data will give you a better idea of what demographics are more likely to be sympathetic to the cause.

This can help you develop an audience profile that can help you focus your messaging. As a result, you can better allocate your marketing budget to reach those exact audiences.

Don’t be afraid to reach out.

Direct mail, and other forms of direct communication, tend to have some of the greatest returns on investments for brands. However, these brands also tend to be careful with how much they are willing to impose on people. Customers can have a negative reaction to being ‘bothered’ by someone trying to sell them something.

With nonprofits, you don’t have that issue as much. Although a deft approach, like using Rally Corp text messaging for nonprofits, is required, your potential donors are a lot more willing to have their day interrupted by a good cause. Many of them just don’t want to be rude and close the lines of communication without showing some concern.

Make use of that urge and get your foot in the door, whether by text or quite literally.

Every brand needs a story.

Just as you can make use of the same key lesson of “know your audience,” you can also still use the power of brand storytelling to help create an emotional connection with that audience. In the case of nonprofits, however, content marketing tends to have a different angle.

It’s often not as much about the needs of the audience, but rather, the needs of those who are impacted by your mission. Focus on the challenges faced by those the nonprofit is trying to help, as well as how your efforts can directly make an impact in their lives.

Showing the process and results of the nonprofit’s mission is greatly important to show donors the difference they can make.

#nonprofitmarketing Showing the process and results of the nonprofit’s mission is greatly important to show donors the difference they can make. Click To Tweet

Nonprofit marketing relies on many of the same techniques and tools as commercial marketing but with adaptations. Hopefully, this article has helped you get an idea of some of the changes you can make to be more effective in this field.

Ciao,
Miss Kemya