Nonprofit Expert Episode 13 – How To Stay Top of Mind with Donors

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Welcome to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect.

Dana Snyder Host 00:09

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DonorPerfect Ad 00:03

Welcome to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect.

Dana Snyder Host 00:09

Welcome to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect. I am Dana Snyder, speaker, host of the Missions to Movements podcast and creator of the monthly giving Mastermind, and I just happened to be your guest host for this episode today, talking all about how we should be thinking about marketing as a part of our growth strategy. And speaking of growth, I have been collaborating with the Donor Perfect team on something super exciting a personalized growth plan for you. To find new donors, all you have to do is go to donorperfectcom backslash growth, answer five quick questions and receive free resources curated specifically for you, directly to your inbox. I’m talking about from podcast episodes to webinars and eBooks. These tools were selected to guide you specifically into the next phase of growth.

01:05

Now, nonprofit resources sometimes feel like they’re distributed as a one-size-fits-all solution, and that’s not what we did here. So, whether you have zero to 50,000 donors, this quiz will lead you to the right resources based upon where you’re at. So again, head to donorperfect.com/growth to get started. So for today’s conversation, I wanted to take you back in time to when marketing and philanthropy intersected my life at the same moment. Come back with me to 2007. What were you doing in 2007? It feels like a lifetime ago, right, I was starting my journey in philanthropy as a freshman in college. Now I heard about our school’s dance marathon program, and at UCF it was called Nightthon. Shout out to those who also participated in their local school’s dance marathons and we supported our local Children’s Miracle Network hospitals. I signed up for the first year as a dancer and then I loved it so much I joined the executive board for the remainder of my time at UCF, and every step of my journey, from signing up as a dancer all the way through the end, had some element of marketing, and none of it felt like marketing. And that’s good marketing right there. The steps that I had to take from hearing the story of one of the miracle children in a classroom, all the way to going to their website, to signing up, all the way to fundraising, peer-to-peer all of those elements in the emails had marketing throughout, but it never felt that way.

02:46

Marketing in our world can sometimes feel like an icky corporate term and I really want to flip that on our head so that we can embrace marketing. And why should we do that? Because marketing moves people to take action and, in our case, action for good. It’s helping to fulfill the passions and the purpose of the people that we’re calling into our mission. Just recently, on International Women’s Day, I became a new monthly donor to two organizations, one of which I had recently seen their founder posting on LinkedIn a few thought leadership pieces. You might think, okay, is that marketing? Yep, sure is. And because I had recently seen her content when I was thinking about women founded nonprofits that I wanted to support on International Women’s Day, her organization, the Hope Booth, was top of mind, and that’s what I want you to remember is marketing keeps you top of mind. When the right moment sparks a donor to take action, will they think of you.

03:57

So if you’re an organization and you’re thinking we have a tight budget, how can we justify spending money on marketing, which can sometimes feel like this facade, right? Well, here’s the thing we don’t want to be called and kept like the best kept secret. Right, that’s what I hear all the time. It’s our organization, it’s like a best kept secret. Marketing helps blow that away. Now, usually for B2C companies, average marketing spend is five to 10% of your revenue. Newer organizations it’s often closer to that 10% to 20% of revenue mark, and the justification of that spend is in the impact that you’re able to create.

04:41

What’s interesting about marketing is it’s never cut and dry. We always know that this is going to work. When your organization has made the case to spend funds on marketing and you’re trying to think about how can we make sure that it’s just going to work, I have to tell you you have to be okay with testing things and maybe not always hitting home runs, but what marketing does and if you’re tracking it properly, it gives you data and it tells you what is working and what’s not working. What channels do people respond to? What channels did they not respond on? They love this email. They didn’t love this email. This image really got a lot of click-throughs, this one didn’t. And making sure to do an analysis of these things month over month, quarter after quarter, year after year. So I always start with data.

05:30

What I recommend is, if you’re starting to build out a marketing plan, is to look at your Google Analytics reports. Most of the time, the actions that we want people to take are going to be on our website. That’s our home base. Another great tool that you can look at is Microsoft Clarity. Google Analytics and Microsoft Clarity are both completely free, and the cool thing about Microsoft Clarity is it actually gives you the ability to see heat maps of where people are on your website and where people are leaving your site based upon their scrolling habits. And crazy and sadly to say, I think it’s like 85% of when people drop just after your header. So literally that one scroll, people are gone. So you want to make sure that whatever you have that’s important to say is right at the top before people scroll.

06:18

So when you’re looking at your Google Analytics and you’re trying to decide where to invest your marketing dollars, we want to ask where are people visiting your website from? Is it organic, social? If so, what channels? What social channels should you be paying attention to? Are there a ton of people coming from Facebook? Are they coming from Instagram, youtube, pinterest? And not only where are they coming from in droves, but also where’s the quality traffic coming from? What channels are people spending? Are they going to two or more pages? Are they spending a few minutes versus, let’s just say, twitter or X? If people are coming from there, are they coming to your website only spending 10 seconds, even if it was coming in droves, but they’re only for 10 seconds. That’s not a quality visitor. So where are the most quality visitors coming from? Also, are they coming from just Google searches? If so, there’s that amazing $10,000 a month Google grant. Have you activated it? Are you running it? That is something. If you’re given $10,000 to do something with and you can see the results you want, maybe it makes sense to invest in an agency or a consultant to facilitate that Google grant for you.

07:28

Or what about a third party? Is there a third party site that’s drawing a ton of traffic? Is there a blog on a site somewhere that’s driving traffic? If so, can you partner with them? Is there something that you can do? Essentially, you want to meet your audience where they are, invest in the channels where they are Communicate with them, in the channels that they are Social. Did they find you on Facebook? Communicate with that audience on Facebook? Is this audience prone to text messages? Let’s try text messages. Do they love direct mail? Let’s try direct mail, email, et cetera.

08:04

So you kind of have to test everything, and there’s this marketing term that we’ve talked about that’s called omni-channel marketing and that’s having this multi-pronged approach. We’ll see this all the time. For instance, I get targeted by HelloFresh all the time and they will email me. Then they send direct mail, had text messages and what’s interesting is, our lives are so busy. I have an 11 month old at the time of this recording, and sometimes she’s sick, sometimes she’s great, sometimes I’m traveling for work. Life is busy, right, and so is yours. So are your donors, your supporters. So what channels does it make sense to focus on? And sometimes the first time you reach out, they’re just not available or they’re busy, so they need to have that additional encouragement to sign up. Don’t feel bad about sending multiple emails, about testing different pieces.

09:00

So then, when we want to think about paid ads, I get asked all the time when would I use paid ads and what would I promote if I was doing them? And my answer is you can run paid ads all the time. There are a multitude of ideas and goals that you can put together for ads, one of which is visibility. Being top of mind, you can run ads to increase engagement, to grow video views on pieces of content, just to be continuously seen to cold audiences that have never heard about you and to your warm audiences of people that already support you, but maybe just because the algorithm, they’re not seeing your content all the time. Another visibility play is running a re-engagement campaign.

09:47

I want to share an example that happened recently to me with St Jude, and you can do this too. I’m just sharing an example because it happened to me recently. So I was on St Jude’s website and I was looking around their monthly giving experience. I hit X, clicked off the website, opened up Facebook. Sure enough, I scrolled once and there was an ad for me asking me about being a monthly donor for St Jude. What happened there is they have a pixel, a piece of code that Facebook provides to you, that was put on their website. They were able to tell what web page I was visiting and they reengaged me with an ad relevant to the page that I was just on. You can easily also set this up and they’re usually not very expensive because it’s a smaller audience subset that’s visiting that website. So that’s an example of just anytime somebody’s visiting a specific page and they don’t take the action that you want them to.

10:45

You can set up an ad that’s like target everybody, except for people that have made a donation or who are our monthly donors for an ad just to remain top of mind and to re-engage. You can also run lead generation ads. So I have a Grow your List Ads Challenge where I work with 20 organizations in the spring and the fall on growing their email list. Because, let’s be real people coming to your website and let’s just say you have that join our newsletter opt-in how fast is your email list growing with that right? It’s usually like a trickle a trickle of people over time and we want an influx. So lead generation ads help us do that.

11:24

We generate a lead magnet which is a free download or could be a video or webinar, something of value, in exchange for someone’s email. So a couple of examples I was working with Roots Ethiopia. It’s an amazing organization and they created Ethiopian recipes and so we had three different audiences that we targeted. She generated 404 emails in like the two weeks that we ran the challenge. It worked so well. Each new email was 98 cents less than a dollar. Replicated, it grew another 400. She had 800 new emails to her email list with this lead magnet.

12:04

Now you do not have to do a recipe booklet.

12:07

It’s all based upon thinking about what would your ideal audience find valuable to them to learn about you and come on your list.

12:15

So there are ads that you can run specifically just to grow your email list. And then, of course, there’s donation and conversion campaigns. If you want someone to give a gift or to be able to attend an event or take some sort of like conversion action on your website, you can run ads for that as well. Or take some sort of like conversion action on your website, you can run ads for that as well. So, as you can tell, you can run ads literally all the time, dependent upon what you want your budget to be. If you want to learn more about that, I have a lot of resources on my website, positiveequationcom, that you can check out and also see when my next Grow your List Ads Challenge is running. So I hope this was helpful as you start to think about marketing and how you can really integrate some best practices, dependent upon where you are in your organization’s journey. I would love to connect with you, follow me on LinkedIn, Dana Snyder, and check out my podcast, missions to Movements, to go behind the feed of marketing case studies for good.

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Thank you for listening to Nonprofit Expert presented by DonorPerfect. For more information and a special offer, visit DonorPerfect.com/podcast.