If you are a fundraiser or work in the marketing section of a charity, you probably know the importance of digital marketing to your organisation. If your organisation can afford a dedicated fundraiser or marketing personnel, this means you work for a fairly large charity. Most of the charities in the UK are quite small, that means they cannot afford the luxury of an online marketing personnel.
Not having a dedicated online marketing team, should however not stop a charity from taking advantage of digital marketing opportunities available to nonprofits. You could even find charitable search engine marketing consultant, who are willing to offer their search engine marketing expertise free of charge.
Though non-profits have limited financial resource when compared with large corporations, however most charities command the respect and dedication of their supporters. The support and goodwill a charity gets from supporters can be harnessed to get an effective online marketing campaign going.
This article introduces a number of digital marketing resources for charities, especially for smaller nonprofit organisation that do not have an in house digital marketing personnel or the resources to hire an agency to do their digital marketing.
Pimp My Cause – Pro bono marketing for charities
As mentioned in the intro to this article, one of the greatest asset charities have is their supporters and volunteers. These days volunteers are not restricted to people who come to your office to work. When it come to digital marketing, you volunteer can even come from the other side of the world.
A website doing a fantastic job introducing causes to volunteers, especially in digital marketing is a website called Pim My Cause.
Pimp My Cause is incredibly easy to use (and its free). If you are looking for a digital marketing consultant to work on your online campaign, simply register at Pim My Cause, post a wanted advert, state the skills you are looking for, sit back and wait for consultants willing to work for your charity pro bono to contact you.
You can also browse profiles of marketing consultants offering their services for free on the site.
Google Grants for Adwords
Google Adwords Grants are not only available to U.S. charities. You can review the full list of countries here.
The following restrictions apply:
- A daily budget set to £210 USD, which is equivalent to about £6,400 per month
- A maximum cost-per-click (CPC) limit of £1.3 USD
- Only run keyword-targeted campaigns
- Only appear on Google search result pages
- Only run text ads
How to apply?
This process may take several weeks until the Google team can verify your charity number and your eligibility. It means that you must have a current and valid charity number as well as acknowledge and agree to the application’s required certifications regarding nondiscrimination and donation receipt and use.
So if you have a valid charity, go to http://www.google.co.uk/grants/apply.html to apply and be verified by Google. Then, if everything is fine, you will be able to use Google Adwords grants.
Why you should use paid advertisement for your nonprofit organization:
- Because Google is the most popular search engine.
- Because your ad will be shown in the top of search results to potential donors and supporters.
- Highly effective keywords and ads will show Google users what your site is about.
- You will not need to pay for your ads as others do.
Video advertising
One of the most popular ways of promoting your videos is to contact people from your field and ask them to publish your video or comment, like, share etc.
YouTube nonprofit program
You are awarded some additional benefits from YouTube if you are a charity. The charity program you may find here: https://www.youtube.com/nonprofits.
Here is what they offer:
- Donate button. Your viewers can use this button to donate to your charity right from the YouTube video without visiting your site. For now, it is available only to US and UK charities. This donate button works only with Google Wallet so you will have to create an account there if you do not have one yet.
- Live streaming. If you have something that may be very useful to your audience: event, conference, etc – then you may use this feature to promote your charity.
- Call-to-action overlays. You may place a call-to-action on your video for free. It could be a donate button, a visit to your site ad or learn more text. Overlays will be shown at the bottom of the video and will encourage people to click on it. It is FREE.
- Video annotations. You may use annotations to encourage people to subscribe to your YouTube channel.
- Production resources. You may get access to shoot or edit your YouTube videos via creator studio in LA.
Facebook Donation
Unfortunately, Facebook does not offer such great grants as Google. But they offer something that you can use, too. For example – there is a donate button that you can add to your Facebook page. Here is a full tutorial on how to add a button to your page.
- At first, you should create a page if you do not have it yet. “Cause or Community” or “Company, Organization or Institution” could be used for a charity.
2. Go to this Facebook App creator page https://apps.facebook.com/donationbutton/
3. Choose “Go to App” on the Facebook Button Creator application page.
4. Find the name of your charity or organisation in a pop up window
5. Click Install on Facebook page. You will get the list of your FB pages so choose a page where you want to install a button.
6. Click “add page tab.”
7. Once the button appears on your FB page, you can click it and choose “Edit Donate Settings” to change the charity or other aspects of the donation.
According to the report:
- In 2012, 45% of nonprofit organizations raised money using Facebook
- Individual donations are the most powerful ways to raise money on Facebook
- More than £128 was the average donation
Advertising on Facebook is also working well for nonprofits but, as I said, they do not have such grants as Google has.
Working with Media Trust
If you have a UK based charity, then you can go to Media Trust – http://www.mediatrust.org/. It is an organization that helps in promoting charities by using different ways of information sharing. One of the most powerful tools they have is Press Release distribution. You can submit well-written press releases and, very often, popular news resources can pick up your story. Many trusted journalists use Media Trust when searching for a good news topic.
Also, do not forget that it is absolutely free. They also help with:
- Training
- Production
- Consultancy
- Expertise
Grow Your Charity Online
A special site http://www.growyourcharityonline.com/ was created a year ago and introduced widely to different charities by Google stuff and Media Trust. They offer some very useful free tools for those who are not high-level professionals in PPC or other marketing features.
If you have a charity, you can ask for a free report to see what this site can offer to you. If you do not know how to work with Google Analytics, then this service was created for you.
It will help you to see:
- How many visitors you received
- What are the most popular pages of your site
- Which visitors made a donation
- Who signed up as a volunteer
If you are from the UK, then you might be interested in their regular events that can help you better understand how the tool is working. You may read our review of GrowYourCharityOnline here.
Send Text “xxx” to Donate
It is one of the most powerful instruments for offline promotion. It could be TV, newspaper or a banner on the street. People see your message and do what you have asked them. For online promotion, it does not work well according to me and some other researchers. People prefer to visit your site and make a donation using a special button or form instead of sending a text message.
However, it does not mean that you cannot at least consider this method. If you are a charity, then you have to be sure that all available donation methods are available for supporters.
Pay with a Tweet for Ebook
There is one highly effective service called Pay with Tweet http://www.paywithatweet.com/. The main idea of the service is to help you grow your social profile. You may create a small eBook about charity or fundraising and make it available in PDF format.
Using Pay with Tweet means that a person who tweets your page will be able to get a free copy of this eBook. This is quite a smart move. You receive a free follower and he will receive your eBook for free.
Just be sure that your eBook has something of value to offerand keep it as professional as possible.
Build Your Email List to Inform People about Your News
It is very important to have a high quality email list today. Why? Let’s imagine that you have a list with few thousands emails showing an interest in your content. In just few minutes, you can inform them all about your offer or idea.
- Good email list is a sustainable way to drive more traffic to your site.
- If people subscribed to your newsletter in the past, it means these people actually want to hear from you.
- The list is yours and you can make all edits you want.
There are many good email marketing tools you can use like Aweber, MailChimp, ContactContact, CampaignMonitor, GetResponse, InfusionSOFT, Mad mimi, MNB etc.
However, with this you will have to track each your email campaign. What does it mean?
- Once a new email campaign was sent, you should review “Opens rate” and “Clicks rate”. on average,you will receive more than 60% opens and more than 20% clicks. Imagine that you have a list with 2,000 emails. It means 400 visitors for you immediately.
- If you see that some subscribers do not open your message more than 5 times – you may remove them from your list or replace with another contact.
- If you see that you have many opens but only few clicks – try to create more attractive call-to-actions in your messages.
- Emails with failed delivery should be immediately removed from your list
With time, you will build more and more contacts for your list and will not lose old. So you can be in touch with all your readers at the same time.