Digital Marketing for the Mission Driven

Most leaders of organizations—especially small ones, startups, not-for-profits— know that digital marketing is critical to an organization’s success. Still, its complexity and perceived expense hold leaders back from taking advantage of the channel. This episode of Messaging on a Mission dives into how and why digital marketing is a must-have for any organization with a message on a mission.

Key Takeaways

Digital marketing is certainly more important than it has ever been given that so much of our relationship building right now is online and remote and between people who are not physically in the same room together.

Digital marketing tools—your website, your social media, your advertising—can help you reach your strategic objectives, to reach your annual goals, to reach your fundraising targets.

Advertising is a huge area of opportunity for nonprofits. Advertising as a channel can build awareness, tell a story, bring people to an event, seek registrations, or build an audience or an email list. It can build relationships with an audience of people that have been at a particular event.

Know your audience: who they are, where they are, what’s important to them, and how they want to communicate.

When we talk about marketing and what’s the biggest gap and how can organizations be moving forward in this space, if you’re unsure who your audience is and how to communicate with them, that is potentially the biggest problem your organization is going to face.

Think about what the donor or follower wants to accomplish by following or giving to the organization.

What works for any one organization is different than the next. If you are trying to reach a young audience and you are not on social media, you are going to fail to reach that audience. You don’t need to be on every platform. If your audience is not on Twitter, don’t spend any time on Twitter.

Email is ending its usefulness as a communication tool. It’s never going to go away, but it’s not near as effective as it used to be.

Be consistent with how frequently you post content to the platforms your audience is active on.

There is a lot of benefit from posting on consistent days of the week, consistent types of messages, and content consistency.

Episode Guest

Jeff Kelly is the Strategy Director at Butterflyly, a fundraising and digital marketing agency for nonprofits. We are a small passionate team on a mission to help nonprofits grow in the face of unique fundraising challenges and rapidly changing marketing strategies. Jeff graduated from a corporate technology career to start Butterflyly and away from work he is a husband, father, big picture systems thinker, beekeeper, blueberry farmer, and shipping-container homeowner.