As a nonprofit organization (NPO), you cannot realize your vision without the support and participation of donors. This makes your donor engagement strategy just as important as your mission. With the combination of an aging American population, a recovering economy, and the rapid evolution of technology, capturing the attention of would-be donors is a significant challenge.

The obstacles that NPOs have difficulty overcoming include:

  • Increasing budgetary requirements
  • Attracting new donors
  • Retaining existing donors
  • Unsatisfactory return on investment (ROI)

How can we use our limited budgets to be more effective in our efforts to attract, engage, motivate, and retain donors? Inbound marketing is designed to do just that. By focusing our efforts on developing highly engaging messages tailored to specific profiles that represent our donors, we can nurture relationships over time and ensure a better return.  Let’s look at how this works:

Know Your Audience

If you were to give a presentation to a group of college students, your approach would probably be different than if you were speaking to a group of physicians, right? Inbound marketing helps you to evaluate your donors and prospective donors to determine what demographic profiles are most prominent. Once you understand who you are speaking to, you can be more effective in your approach.

Get Personal

By matching your donor file data to your representative donor profiles, you can create highly customized messages that will grab the attention of prospects and donors alike. Think about a commercial that shows young people playing ball in a park. A pleasant experience is used to suggest that the advertised product or service will benefit young people. Tapering your marketing messages to the interests and lifestyles of your donors can form a similar connection.

Get Found

Where do you spend your time? Google reports that more than 3.5 billion searches are conducted each day. That’s more than 1.2 trillion searches each year. The truth is, whenever we have a question or concern, we rely on Google to provide answers. Where will our search take us? YouTube? A blog? A website? There are many possibilities, but each of them are directly tied to words we typed into the search engine. Your NPO will only show up in the results if your content relates to those searches. Inbound marketing uses keyword analysis to ensure that your web pages contain the words that are most likely to be used in a search.

Be Creative

It seems that donors today are choosing to support fewer NPOs than they may have in the past, favoring those that allow them to make the greatest impact. This preference makes it imperative to ensure your messaging is compelling and demonstrates a cause and effect relationship between a donation and the desired outcome. By publishing compelling, highly-creative messages in multiple mediums and channels through inbound marketing, you are better able to attract, engage, and retain the attention of prospective and current donors.

Inbound marketing dramatically increases your ability to cultivate relationships with new and existing donors and demonstrate how their contributions have enabled your NPO to achieve objectives. By tracking data related to user interaction, searches, and responses to your messaging, inbound marketing enables you to continually adjust your strategy to attain optimal ROI.

If you would like to learn how your NPO could benefit from inbound marketing, contact 3D Studios at 914-304-4229 or [email protected]

We Can Help

3D Studios helps businesses grow their influence and their brands. As a boutique brand management agency, we begin with a thorough analysis of your needs and partner with you to develop and execute a marketing plan that will help you take your business to the next level. To learn more about how 3D Studios can help you, visit us at www.3Dstudios.net or call 914-304-4229.