This presentation deck is created for the 2014 ESCHouston seminars and workshop series. Learn 5 important trends in digital marketing and fundraising for 2014 (hint - content marketing isn't on this list) and get a template plus resources to create your strategic plan and set-up your Google analytics to measure your success this year.
Presented by Sarah M Worthy, Technology Market Analyst, and Web Experience Designer.
Your 2014 NonProfit Trends and a Strategic Planning Template - Workshop for ESCHouston
1. Your 2014 NPO Digital Strategy Guide of
Online Trends, Resources, Studies,
Influencers, and Tools!
Presented by
Sarah M. Worthy
sarah@worthytech.com
2. Your Strategy Keeps You on the
Road to Achieving Your Goals!
Step #1
Start
Here
Step #2
Step #3
GOAL
3. Does Brand Awareness Increase
Donations? By How Much $$?
http://bit.ly/2014-NPO-content-benchmarks
4. What are Other NPOs Measuring?
http://bit.ly/2014-NPO-content-benchmarks
5. Your 6-Point Strategic Checklist:
Marketing Goal(s)
Target Donor
Target Channels
Influencers
Experience to Deliver
ROI Comparison
Taken from Rand Fishkin, CEO MOZ.com bit.ly/mozcontentstrategy
8. What We’ll Cover Today:
5 Key Trends for NPO Digital Strategies in 2014
The Nuts and Bolts of a Strategic Marketing Plan
4
Bonus: New Tools and Free Resources You’ll Love
Q&A and Wrap-Up
@sarahmworthy | sarah@worthytech.com
9. 5 Trends in 2014:
Analytics
and Roi
Mobile
Giving
Gen Y /
Millenials
Content
Storytelling
Strategic
Investment
s
10. Trend #1 = Analytics and ROI
~80% of all
searches go
through Google
Where do your
donors go to search
before giving?
11. 5 Metrics NPOs Need to Measure
Visitor to Donor Ratio
Cost to Acquire Donor (DAC)
Donor Retention Cost
Lifetime Donor Value (LDV)
LDV to DAC Ratio
12. Analyzing Data - Watch Out for
“Subjective Data” and Ask Questions
Analysis Scenario: here are two reports presented to you by your marketing coordinator. Your
job is to analyze the data and determine if the recommendations for time committed to
activities makes sense.
Your coordinator ranked these marketing
campaigns as most to least effective last year,
(in 2013)
Your coordinator’s recommendation to budget
resources for marketing campaigns in 2014:
13. ROI Comparison: New versus
Repeat
source: http://www.slideshare.net/ChrisLeBrunCFRE
14. Trend #2 = Gen Y / Millennials
83% of Millennial
respondents said
they gave a gift to
a nonprofit
organization last
year!
15. How to Engage Millennial Donors
source: http://www.themillennialimpact.com/research
22. Trend #4 - Strategic Investments
S
W
O
T
What are Your Team’s Strengths?
What are Your Team’s Weaknesses?
Opportunities?
Threats?
http://nonprofits.linkedin.com/
25. Tip: Think About Your .Org’s
Journey When Writing Your Story
Start
Here
Where are you
now? WHY are
you Starting this
Journey?
Who and What do You need
in order to Achieve your
goals?
GOAL
Where Are You
Going and WHY?
26. 2+ Social Channels Increases
Engagement
www.wirthconsulting.com.au/research
27. Share the live action
from your events on
social and encourage
others to share!
iFest.org
31. Focus on Where You Both Win
Your community’s
Goals and Interests
Your .Org’s Goals
and Interests
Where do their goals and interests match
32. Up Next:
The Nuts and Bolts of a Strategic Marketing Plan
Questions? Email & Tweet Me:
www.worthytech.com
sarah@worthytech.com
@sarahmworthy
33. Elements of a Strategic Marketing Plan
GOALS ALIGNED WITH YOUR ORGANIZATION
RESOURCES AND BUDGET REQUIREMENTS
DEFINED METRICS AND EVALUATION MILESTONES
EDITORIAL CALENDAR AND TASKS
35. Visualize Your Plan in One Page
Content Marketing
Strategy
Top 1 or 2
Goals for
your .Org’s
website.
Event Marketing
Strategy
Member Retention
Marketing Strategy
Tactic
what tactics will you use ?
Tactic
what tactics will you use ?
Tactic
what tactics will you use ?
36. 2014 .Org Goal: Learn to Measure, Test,
and Refine Your Marketing Successfully!
1) Increase
donations by
10% over last
year.
2) Grow our
membership by
10% and
increase
retention by 25%
Content Marketing
Strategy
Event Marketing
Strategy
Member Retention
Marketing Strategy
Peer Donor Pages
add peer donor pages and use donors’
stories to boost e-fundraising.
VIP Members-Only
create monthly members only events
to add value to member program.
Loyalty Reward System
track and reward member
participation online and at events.
37. SMART Goals Have the Metrics Inside
Them!
How you’ll reach your goal:
ROI-Connection
1) Increase
donations by
10% over last
year.
2) Grow our
membership by
10% and
increase
retention by
25% over last
year.
Short Version
Content Marketing
Strategy
Event Marketing
Strategy
Member Retention
Marketing Strategy
Long Version
Peer Donor Pages
add peer donor pages and use donors’
stories to boost e-fundraising.
VIP Members-Only
create monthly members only events
to add value to member program.
Loyalty Reward System
track and reward member
participation online and at events.
38. RESOURCES AND BUDGET REQUIREMENTS
Example NonProfit Annual
Budget
70% - Programs
20% - Admins/Operations Expenses
10% - Marketing
39. How Do Your Priorities Fit within Your .Org?
source: NTEN.org
41. DEFINED METRICS AND EVALUATION MILESTONES
1Q
Data Capture
3Q
Experiment with Curation
GOAL
2Q
Targeted Engagement
4Q
Move the Needle on Purpose
2014 Quarterly Milestones
42. Q1 - Capture the Data
https://www.quantcast.com/
http://www.google.com/nonprofits/
Lots of Ways to Capture
Data -> Newsletter Software,
CRMs, Website Plugins...
43. Q2 - Target Your Core Audience and Engage
<- Goal =
Increase New
Memberships
Goal ->
Increase membership
renewals
ThinkLA.org
44. Goal ->
Create and Measure Social
Content Distribution Processes.
cmhouston.org
45. Q3 - A/B Testing and Experiments
<- Goal =
increase email
sign-ups
Goal ->
Decrease the number of
phone calls about our
museum hours
CMHouston.or
46. Q4 - Move the Needle
Goal ->
Increase Lead Generation during
December from our blog post series.
http://blog.tendenci.com/
49. Q1
Objectives
Begin to Capture
Your Data,
Research Your
Audience.
Month 1
Q2
Q3
Q4
Pinpoint Where
your Audience is
Most Engaged, and
on What Topics
Experiment with
Curation and
Growing
Community
Engagement
Use What You’ve
Learned to
Measure and
Improve ROI on 1
(or more)
Channels
Set-Up 3 GA Goals
Halloween Party
Blog Post
Theme
New Year!
April Showers
Member Event
4th of July
Thanksgiving Drive
Daily Social
Month 2
100 tickets to Gala
Blog Post
Theme
Valentine’s Day
Month 3
Staff CRM Class
Email Newsletter
Theme
Spring Break
Q1 ’14
Summer Break
Back to School
Give Thanks
Holiday Gala
Send Direct Mailing
Christmas in June
Promote Gala
Q2 ’14
Q3 ‘14
Increase Dec Gifts by 10%
Q4 ‘14
54. Social E-Fundraising Tools
Education Crowd-Fundraising
http://www.pledgecents.com/
Mobile Payments Forms
https://www.dwolla.com/nonprofits
Local Peer Fundraising
http://groupraise.com
Peer to Peer Fundraising
www.stayclassy.org
Components of a Strategic Plan | Roadmap Template:
* setup goals and objectives,
* research and develop a plan,
* get your website mobile ready and learn to use it,
* focus your message on your target audience, and
* prioritize and measure your ROI from the different channels available to you.
later on, we’ll tie this into writing your NPOs story arch.
this is just to give you a good idea of how not to set goals that won’t get you to the end of the road.
what are you measuring?
when thinking about metrics - focus on how to connect the measurement to your ROI.
This checklist was completely taken from Rand Fishkin, founder of MOZ.com (formerly SEO Moz, a great web analytics tool I love using)
http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/rand-mozconcontentstrategy2
Rand also says there are 5 questions to answer to get to the core of your strategy:
what are your ultimate goals?
who do you need to reach to achieve that goal?
where is this target group on the web today?
who/what influences your target group?
what experiences will earn the impact you need?
This content was completely taken from Rand Fishkin, founder of MOZ.com (formerly SEO Moz, a great web analytics tool I love using)
http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/rand-mozconcontentstrategy2
This content was completely taken from Rand Fishkin, founder of MOZ.com (formerly SEO Moz, a great web analytics tool I love using)
http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/rand-mozconcontentstrategy2
What We'll Cover today:
--> 5 key trends, including real information about search marketing and Google’s “nerfs” to search in 2013.
* Google Analytics updates and how you can use them to track your donors and online influencers across the social web, email, and your website.
--> Hear successful nonprofit case studies and how you can apply their tactics to your own online fundraising programs.
* * Plenty of time for Q&A to get your nonprofit's top digital marketing and website questions answered
What’s included here for us to cover and you can take home, there’s links and I’ll have this up on my slideshare account to download and share:
--> A Quick Start Plan for your 2014 Content Marketing so you have content ideas that will engage your donors and add long term value to your online fundraising efforts.
--> Free and Inexpensive tools for nonprofits to help you manage your online marketing with limited resources, time and staff.
here are the 5 trends I see as being key to success for NPOs this year.
each of these elements should be considered:
1) Millenials are now in their 30s, they have jobs and kids in many cases. Millenials also are the most giving - both in time and money. Now is a great time to start focusing on getting this demographic involved in your cause.
How to get Millenials involved tips: they tend to give smaller amounts to more organizations rather than large donations to one or two orgs. Be ready to ask for less more often, give them easy ways both online and offline to participate - millenials like to get involved with the org’s they support and expect to see results from their donation. They also want to be more hands-on in deciding how you spend their money.
2) Video is now virtually free and it’s a great way to get face time with your community at a scale-able/global level. Use Google for NonProfits, YouTube, and Google+ to get both SEO and social boosts in traffic and engagement.
Here’s resources for NPO online video tactics
3) Mobile: more people have access to the Internet via a mobile device than a “land line” PC. Get a responsive design for your website and focus on a mobile-first content strategy.
4) Analytics and ROI: now is the time to focus on learning how to at least communicate with your paid and organic search marketers. There’s lots of scam artists out there, and even worse - uninformed but well meaning consultants who will steer you wrong without knowing it.
This arena of the web tech industry has changed rapidly and very few people are really up to speed both on the changes as well as how to apply them to your organization’s goals this year.
5) Strategic Investments - this encompasses analytics in a way, because analytics are the way you measure your tactics alongside your strategic plan and refine to improve your results over time.
This year there’s a huge trend in for and nonprofit corporations to buckle down and educate your staff, focus on customer and member/donor retention loyalty,
6) In 2013, about 40% of the world’s population was able to access the Internet with regularity. More than 60% of the World doesn’t have access to the Internet, and there’s still a long way to go with adoption of web technology, social media platforms etc. Twitter doesn’t have enough users to rank highly enough for most large advertising companies to see viable for investing in yet...
The real value you have from investing in social media as a nonprofit is going to come from integration with your offline programs and activities. Event marketing with a well thought out online promotional/content strategy can boost attendance at future events as well as boost your online Brand awareness and community engagement.
Key tips for not going crazy with search engine optimization:
* people/users before robots: prioritize your content to encourage users to become donors, donors to become volunteers and members, and members to become long time donors,
* don’t worry about enticing robots to your website because robots don’t have any money to give you.
* get Google analytics installed, it’s free and it measures/tracks everything. Google Analytics = a different tool/product than Google Search.
1) Should I be on other search engines besides/in addition to Google?
2) What does Panda, Hummingbird, and/or Penguin mean and why do I, as an NPO executive care?
3) what is search engine marketing, what does PPC mean? what’s a cookie? do cookies come in other flavors or just Google/chocolate chip/sugar? ;)
Analytics and ROI: now is the time to focus on learning how to at least communicate with your paid and organic search marketers. There’s lots of scam artists out there, and even worse - uninformed but well meaning consultants who will steer you wrong without knowing it.
This arena of the web tech industry has changed rapidly and very few people are really up to speed both on the changes as well as how to apply them to your organization’s goals this year.
Marketing analytics, which also is called data analytics, is the broad term for the tools you use to prepare, track and view campaigns at all stages to determine what methods and messages are working, what isn’t working and to fine tune strategies and tactics.
Google Analytics changes: in theory, nothing’s changed since I first started using Google and figuring out search engine marketing about 15 years ago. the real reason you hear all these “SEOs” up in arms about Panda, Penguin and so forth is because Google updated their algorithms (fancy word for a math equation) and now they’re better at automatically weeding out the useless, irrelevant and spammy content from our search results.
So all those old seo “pick your color hat” tricks don’t work. They were always just hat tricks.
The real problem is that most people who learned search marketing learned it inside a corporate environment and the entire industry is still barely more than 10 years old. If you don’t understand Google’s business model and core values, then you’ll miss how these changes just re-aligned the product with Google’s over-arching and clearly stated goals.
That’s a long story - we can always meet and chat about it if you’re interested another day. Today, what NPOs need to understand is that you have to ask questions before you hire anyone to do your online search engine marketing, organic or paid (PPC/pay per click)
Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Resources:
what Hummingbird means for your NPO: http://www.nten.org/articles/2014/how-google%E2%80%99s-hummingbird-update-affects-nonprofits
beginner’s guide to search engines: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/how-people-interact-with-search-engines
Here are 5 metrics that your nonprofit should measure, courtesy: http://info.firstgiving.com/blog/bid/94762/5-metrics-your-nonprofit-needs-to-measure.
1. Visitor to donor ratio - more than just knowing how many total visitors show up at your website (that’s pretty useless actually), measure the ratio of total visitors as compared to donors who visit your site. both new and repeat donors can be measured, compare visitor vs donor flow through your site’s pages and content to gain insights on how to improve.2. Cost to acquire donor - understanding how much a new donor costs, on average and individually when possible, is crucial to setting your marketing budget as well as guiding your other Programs and Membership prices and budgets. You need to make sure your organization is bringing in more dollars than it’s spending.
3. Donor Retention Cost - it costs less to persuade your current donors and volunteers to give again than to find new prospective donors. Track your recurring donors costs and think about how to build donor loyalty and retention programs to optimize your donor retention rates.
4. Lifetime donor value (LDV) - how much does each donor give to your organization over time? are you seeing trends in repeat donors? statistics show that typically, donors will give larger gifts and give more frequently the longer they’re part of your organization. advanced: track donors who are also actively participating in other programs at your organization. many NPOs report noticing trends between increased volunteerism and donations/giving showing a correlation between the two behaviors.
5. Lifetime donor value (LDV) to donor acquisition cost (DAC) ratio - Once you have the statistics on lifetime donor values, compare this figure to the acquisition cost (as well as retention costs). Provide a lifetime donor value to donor acquisition ratio for each of your donors. This will help you focus your efforts on the most productive sources to truly maximize your nonprofit’s fundraising efforts.
this is from a survey of nonprofit communications professionals for 2014. The report is linked in the resources list and there’s tons of great information in the report.
For this slide though, I want to focus on how I would look at this information, and let’s say I’m the ED or Director of Marketing and this is a report from my team’s results last year. Because this is a crucial part of getting your marketing strategy right this next year... you’ve got to look at your data from last year and make a plan that aligns with what your previous results and your experience tells you is going to work and what won’t.
there’s several ways we could interpret this, and I don’t have time to really go in-depth on how to analyze and test for every possible marketing hypothesis. but 3 big things stand out in this data that I want to highlight and tell you how I’d approach this for developing the next year’s strategy and tactical plan:
1) Rule of Thumb is to do more of what works, and less of what doesn’t: why are we spending a small percent of our time on what appears to be the most effective type of content (presentations delivered in person)? Is it a cost factor? what is the cost per presentation versus the return to our organization from increased donations and grants? ($$$)?
I think some people get caught up in data analysis and over complicate it. I like to start by just looking for the one thing that’s wildly out of place and ask why is that there? why doesn’t it match the rest of the story this data set is telling me?
2) Email Newsletter articles are #2 for most effective and #1 on time spent. This looks pretty good and I wouldn’t nit-pick on the time spent. What I would nitpick on, and all of you should, is what is the ROI for our email newsletter articles? how does the ROI compare to other campaign ROI? If email newsletter is “the most effective” what does that mean for driving conversions of new and recurring donations?
3) Again, this is a place where the subjective nature of “effective types of content” for rating this survey causes issues/creates hurdles for developing a hypothesis about this but I’d definitely dig deeper to find out what kind of ROI (long and short term) we’re getting from website articles, and why are we spending so much time on website articles for such a low return?
perhaps the website articles aren’t that effective on their own, but they are an important “assist” in converting through other channels, like presentations and email newsletters by providing a base and credibility to prospects who visit our website after hearing a presentation or reading an email. Perhaps the website article is providing content for the newsletters, thus driving those conversions...?
Data Analysis involves lots of “guessing” aka hypothesizing, and asking lots of questions around “why is that what I’m seeing?” with an open mind and focus on your donors.
http://www.slideshare.net/ChrisLeBrunCFRE/annual-giving-campaign-acquiring-renewing-and-upgrading-donors
I just wanted to drive this point home with an example of how important it is to measure and understand the ROI from your different activities. Using these numbers - if this was your organization’s ROI for repeat versus new donors and your donor attrition/churn/loss rate was relatively low... keeping that rate as low as possible at 20 cents per $1 makes more sense to me than to put the majority of my time into acquiring new donors.
I’d want to invest more into keeping existing donors and persuading them to give larger and/or more frequent gifts. I’d look at what my donor attrition rate was - how many donors do I lose each month, quarter, year that has gone to another organization? In a for-profit situation, these would be your customers leaving to purchase from your competition.
Invest enough money into acquiring new donors at a rate that matches or exceeds
enough about metrics. let’s go onto trend #2 ...
http://blog.tendenci.com/is-your-fundraising-platform-ready-for-my-generation/
Millenials are entering their 30s, they have jobs and kids in many cases. Millenials also are the most giving - both in time and money. Now is a great time to start focusing on getting this demographic involved in your cause.
How to get Millenials involved tips: they tend to give smaller amounts to more organizations rather than large donations to one or two orgs. Be ready to ask for less more often, give them easy ways both online and offline to participate - millenials like to get involved with the org’s they support and expect to see results from their donation. They also want to be more hands-on in deciding how you spend their money.
millennials:
* prefer to connect via technology
* share in micro ways
* more likely to volunteer for hands-on causes
* tend to give larger gifts over time and they tend to bring more word of mouth / friends & family donors to an organization than other generations
* give to feel they made an impact
** more interested in monthly giving, prefer to get their updates from your organization via social media.
according to Facebook - there are 98 million people in the United States on Facebook under the age of 35. There’s 78 million people under the age of 30. 30% of the US population today is under the age of 35.
Resources on Millennials who Donate:
http://www.themillennialimpact.com/research
http://blog.tendenci.com/is-your-fundraising-platform-ready-for-my-generation/
Millenials are entering their 30s, they have jobs and kids in many cases. Millenials also are the most giving - both in time and money. Now is a great time to start focusing on getting this demographic involved in your cause.
How to get Millenials involved tips: they tend to give smaller amounts to more organizations rather than large donations to one or two orgs. Be ready to ask for less more often, give them easy ways both online and offline to participate - millenials like to get involved with the org’s they support and expect to see results from their donation. They also want to be more hands-on in deciding how you spend their money.
millennials:
* prefer to connect via technology
* share in micro ways
* more likely to volunteer for hands-on causes
* tend to give larger gifts over time and they tend to bring more word of mouth / friends & family donors to an organization than other generations
* give to feel they made an impact
according to Facebook - there are 98 million people in the United States on Facebook under the age of 35. There’s 78 million people under the age of 30. 30% of the US population today is under the age of 35.
Resources on Millennials who Donate:
http://www.themillennialimpact.com/research
according to Facebook - there are 98 million people in the United States on Facebook under the age of 35. There’s 78 million people under the age of 30.
30% of the US population is under 35.
source for writing great NPO annual reports: http://blog.marketingv2.com/bid/259881/12-Themes-of-Stellar-Nonprofit-Annual-Reports
Chart Sources: http://www.nten.org/articles/2013/mobile-matters-the-impact-of-mobile-technology-on-peer-to-peer-fundraising-0
Mobile: more people have access to the Internet via a mobile device than a “land line” PC. Get a responsive design for your website and focus on a mobile-first content strategy.
* responsive versus mobile optimized versus desktop/laptop version
tip: if you can use a CMS like WordPress or Tendenci then you can get pre-built responsive themes for free or low-cost. then, the price to change colors and add your content varies depending on if you outsource or do it yourself. I recommend you go with a professional and outsource this type of project if you’re not tech-savvy.
* expectations: take the time to really figure out on paper sketches and in a powerpoint what you want. link to the powerpoint/keynote free wireframes here
http://www.techsoup.org/mobile-technology mobilepayment info
http://blog.tendenci.com/the-three-tech-trends-your-association-cares-about-in-2013/
Karen McGrane has amazing research about how consumers access and use the Internet on mobile devices.
Here’s a few of my favorite quotes and what I want to really highlight here is that NO ONE is really caught up and online, mobile-optimized, and ready.
However, it’s crucial for nonprofits in particular, and this is why you should go check out the Mobile Content Mandate post and slideshare deck Karen wrote, it’s crucial for nonprofits to focus on a being mobile first and mobile forward thinking because more of the poor and minorities are only accessing the web from a mobile device.
Karen talks in length about the best way to create a mobile first content strategy, and I won’t go through everything. I just want to show you a couple of web page examples contrasting mobile versus a desktop so you can see how good content translates well to a mobile screen.
Strategic Investments - this encompasses analytics in a way, because analytics are the way you measure your tactics alongside your strategic plan and refine to improve your results over time.
SWOT Analysis for NPOs: http://nonprofitchas.com/blog/2008/12/strategic-planning-swot-analysis-toolkit/index.html
This year there’s a huge trend in for and nonprofit corporations to buckle down and educate your staff, focus on customer and member/donor retention loyalty,
Technology has advanced to a point where our older economic and business models aren’t effective anymore. New models have emerged and paid off that incorporate... that have become reliant/dependent upon technology. This means you and your staff need to upgrade your skills, and your organization needs to spend time figuring out what skills and human resources you’ll need in the next few years to keep growth at a solid pace.
Resource Ideas:
LinkedIn is a great resource for nonprofits to find volunteers, post job listings for Board members, and find ways to promote and market to business professionals on the social media platform.
ESCHouston is also a great place for getting updated education.
Consider investing in something like Team Treehouse or Lynda.com for technology and digital marketing educational training.
NTEN.org
Don’t underestimate the importance of this trend in 2014 and I would recommend setting aside 10-20% of your overall budget (if possible) to provide training for your team. By investing in your organization’s core knowledge/skill capabilities today, you’ll be raring to go in 2015 - which is going to be darn exciting if my predictions/forecast is right.
pg27 2014 Nonprofit Communications trends report.pdf
this is an arena where I thought I’d point out what research is showing about age as it relates to strengths and weaknesses within your organization
The Hero’s Journey is from - http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2013/03/brand-storytelling-content-marketing-heros-journey/
storytelling distribution management is becoming a very complex art of incorporating your different programs and events, online and offline, into an engaging story arch
Video is now virtually free and it’s a great way to get face time with your community at a scale-able/global level. Use Google for NonProfits, YouTube, and Google+ to get both SEO and social boosts in traffic and engagement.
Here’s resources for NPO online video tactics
In 2013, about 40% of the world’s population was able to access the Internet with regularity. More than 60% of the World doesn’t have access to the Internet, and there’s still a long way to go with adoption of web technology, social media platforms etc. Twitter doesn’t have enough users to rank highly enough for most large advertising companies to see viable for investing in yet...
The real value you have from investing in social media as a nonprofit is going to come from integration with your offline programs and activities. Event marketing with a well thought out online promotional/content strategy can boost attendance at future events as well as boost your online Brand awareness and community engagement.
this is an attempt at really simplifying a very customized process
here’s a way to approach your story telling: write your beginning and ending first.
what needs to be in the middle (#2 underpants gnome) in order to figure out the details of the journey.
bonus tip: watch the Wizard of Oz and think about you as Dorothy, your nonprofit is poor little Totot (and possibly Kansas) and your audience is living in the bright and vivid and magical land of Oz.
study worth noting when planning for your channel distribution
here’s a visual example to demonstrate how to create online content during your live events and programs to share via mobile and with visual website content like photos and videos.
Here’s just an idea of where other nonprofits are expecting to devote time experimenting on social media in 2014.
I think this is from a report by http://www.nonprofitmarketingguide.com
this is just a little gratuitous data now. To share a quick comparison of how NPOs are changing over gradually, still, from print to digital.
I apologize - I forget what report this is from. I think it was from http://www.nonprofitmarketingguide.com but I’m happy to update this slide with proper credit to the report if I’m wrong.
Keep in mind this report was solely talking to millennials but it’s a good list to look at for understanding all the different reasons people state for why they donate.
this sounds really simple and obvious - but this is where you really need to devote most of your time early on during strategic development.
write down the goals and objectives for your organization, then write down some of the personal interests and hobbies of your staff and Board, write down the stories of each person who is already part of your organization as a supporter or staff. find out why they joined, what got them involved, what results do they want to see from their donations?
whew! we’re going to race through this next part!
Here’s a template of how to start with developing your own nonprofit’s marketing strategy and plan this year.
I’m going to go through this quickly, and at a semi-high level so we have time for questions at the end.
there’s tons of links and information for you in your presentation deck that you can take home and review, and use later.
setup goals and objectives,
research and develop a plan,
get your website mobile ready and learn to use it,
focus your message on your target audience, and
prioritize and measure your ROI from the different channels available to you.
Elements that Make up the strategic plan:
always set clear goals up front. write them down - keep them to less than 3. this helps you stay focused (especially when you’re doing researching because it’s a giant world wide web...)
Goals and metrics to measure them
Tasks and an editorial calendar/way to assign them and ensure they’re done on time, inside a story framework
A list of your resources: budget, people and time available, what else do you have available and what do you need in order to reach your goals?
Include what you’ll measure and milestones along the path to take time, reflect on your data/results, and make sure you’re still aligned with your objectives. If you’re doing something that’s taking you off course from your initial goals then this is a chance to either re-focus your goals and priorities (IN WRITING ALWAYS) or stop doing what’s not working, and do more of what is working to move you forward towards your goals.
What are your goals, what are your resources (people and money and materials), and how can you use your resources to accomplish your goals, sustainably?
we don’t have that much time today, and this is a massive topic all on it’s own (marketing strategies across various channel mixes)
I talk a lot about how to set goals and so for today, we’re going to just pretend we went through these exercises already to set SMART Goals.
Content Initiative Planning Questions:
1. What are your goals for your online fundraising this year?2. What are your biggest challenges or fears?3. What is/are your core source(s) of revenue/funding? How long is your donor conversion cycle?4) Who competes for your donors’ attention and what are your differentiators?5) Define your target audience. 6) What is your current process in place for accepting online donations? Offline donations? Are they well integrated? (yes, no, unsure) 7) What methods are in place, currently, to inform your organization about your audience personas?
this is a great chart I found and adapted for using with my clients’ marketing strategies.
Often people get confused about strategy versus tactics and they’ll say they have a “social media strategy” but when I ask them what the strategy is, they’re response is really vague.
Ask the audience if they have a social media strategy?
This helps me to start figuring out the tactics I’ll use, and gives me a way to share this with the Board or CEO, and list out my marketing channels to start experimenting and finding the right marketing mix.
this is a really quick demonstration and what I want to highlight is how from here - you can start to develop a metrics/measurement-focused plan.
I want to go through the next few slides quickly, then we can go back again – but right now, just look through all of this and don’t try so hard to apply it to your organization until you’ve seen it a few times.
I’ve set a goal that’s not actually SMART here - and this is one example * so let’s define “successfully” as a SMART goal together:
hint: move the needle on your marketing campaign with intent. by the end of the year, you’ll know how to do this yourself in 2015 and get better results than in 2014.
this is a really quick demonstration and what I want to highlight is how from here - you can start to develop a metrics/measurement-focused plan.
now we’re going to tie it all together into a one year plan with quarterly evaluation milestones, and break down our tasks into monthly “bite-sized” chunks.
again - I’m taking you through some templates that you’ll be able to print out and use.
slidehunter.com and marketo.com have great resources for powerpoint and presentation slide templates. fyi
this is just one average. and it’s to help give you a baseline to start with, a template so to speak, if you’re new to creating a strategic plan using a budget.
What are your goals, what are your resources (people and money and materials), and how can you use your resources to accomplish your goals, sustainably?
marketing ~ 10% (or less)
programs ~ 70%
admin/operations expenses ~ 20%
NTEN.org nonprofit Data-Decision Making workbook
In the mock organization chart below, do two things:• In the small box in the upper left, define how important the information would be to each type of role inyour organization (High, Medium, or Low).• In the larger space in each box, list some of the key pieces of information that a person in that role inparticular might be interested in seeing. Don’t worry about what’s possible or practical just yet, simplybrainstorm what they’d ideally like to see.
I want to give you all some resources and a space to think. This isn’t a topic I’m able to cover today, and it’s not really my expertise.
I’m better at recommending what to focus on technology-investment wise, and I want to make sure to include the budget, as it’s an important part of the equation.
so - now you’ve figured out where you are, where you want to go this year, what resources you need - now it’s time to make a PLAN!
Here’s how we’d lay out your plan in quarterly milestones.
This is just an example - and I’m not expecting you to just use this exactly. Every organization is unique and has a unique story and journey.
there are lots of tools and products for capturing your analytics data.
think about how to reach your audience and what you want them to do, then create content and engage, be sure to measure results
you’re well on the path to becoming a thought leader, and your Brand is now being referred to by others as a “trusted source” inside your theme/topics selected in the first half of the year.
use automation tools - what you’ve learned can be scaled and curation is a time-saver compared to content creation, yet
I want to demonstrate the importance of testing and measuring your content all the time.
CMHouston changed some things:
little girl on the left vs right, email sign-up, buy tickets
they test these frequently and change things up based on what their analytics and website reports tell them.
email newsletter sign-ups were part of a goal for one marketing campaign and they featured it prominently in the upper right on their homepage. As they changed their goals, they changed the homepage to put those goal-focused calls to action front and center of visitors.
the real point here is that the Museum set-up their A/B tests with intent to test their hypothesis and reach their goals faster:
* increase email sign-ups was the goal in the top left image,
* another goal later was to increase ticket sales
you want to make sure you’re evaluating how you spent your time and money, and other resources
a strategy is not meant to be written in stone
your editorial calendar is where you start writing down your plan, and keep track of content that you’ll create along with deadlines, content ownership (who’s making each item?), and metrics as you collect them on content marketing campaign results.
-> help you see the content you need to create over the next several days, weeks, and months,
-> helps you list out content themes and distribute them by channel (e.g., a calendar for your newsletter and another for Facebook), by audience (e.g., how you'll communicate with parents this month, versus communicating with teachers), or by program (e.g., so you see how different programs are included throughout your communications channels).
-> help you prioritize. You probably can‘t do everything that‘s being asked of you. You can‘t even do everything that you want to do. By mapping out in a grid or on a calendar your opportunities to communicate, you start to see the limitations that are really on you.
help you see what’s working and what’s not over time
the simple solution is a shared Google Docs spreadsheet. Ours uses a new tab for each month primary type, a list of channels, and
I also use a tool called Asana
here’s one way to put it together visually. Start connecting metrics with tasks and goals month by month and quarterly.
Q1 (jan-mar)
fundraising goal
an idea about marketing tactics used to give you more ideas as you make your plan.
obviously, we can’t cover all the different tools out there.
http://www.curata.com/blog/content-marketing-tools-ultimate-list/
I have two PDFs related to this NTEN report on how to become a data-driven nonprofit, and what metrics to measure and why.
Here’s some more social fundraising platforms: http://mashable.com/2011/03/14/social-good-fundraising-tools/
resources for more http://www.slideshare.net/kanterBeth Kanter is awesomeNeil Patel - he’s the “king” of online conversion optimization atm: http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/01/20/7-smart-ways-to-combine-content-marketing-with-seo-for-more-qualified-search-traffic/
Here’s some more social fundraising platforms: http://mashable.com/2011/03/14/social-good-fundraising-tools/
resources for more http://www.slideshare.net/kanterBeth Kanter is awesomeNeil Patel - he’s the “king” of online conversion optimization atm: http://www.quicksprout.com/2014/01/20/7-smart-ways-to-combine-content-marketing-with-seo-for-more-qualified-search-traffic/
http://www.stayclassy.org/blog/the-essential-2014-checklist-make-this-year-a-success/
http://www.fundraisingip.com/fundraising/new-year-planning-checklist-non-profits/
FAB Digital Marketing designed my logo, and the owner and founder, Felicia Ann Bates, is absolutely brilliant at web and print design plus. She’s also able to bring people together on a project with no drama, tons of creativity and results!
Here’s a list of additional places to go for nonprofit digital marketing and analytics support. The above 4 are my top recommendations, and below are links to other sources that I’ve used to make this presentation for you.
It takes a lot of research and effort from a diversity of organizations studying nonprofit business best practices. Here’s a list of other online sources that I use to find NPO research studies and trend reports:
http://www.nonprofitmarketingguide.com
http://www.google.com/trends/
http://www.pragmaticmarketing.com/
http://iveybusinessjournal.com/topics/marketing/a-marketing-plan-for-turbulent-times
http://techsoup.org
Graphics and Marketing Plan Templates were heavily influenced/taken from:
* http://marketo.com/resources
* http://slidehunter.com
* http://fabdigitalmarketing.com