Everything you need to know about charity marketing

The hallmark of any strategy is a SWOT analysis. It's important to find time away from the day-to-day implementation to review and assess where your organisation is going.  

Aim to review short- and long-term goals at least every 12 months. Refer to your mission, vision and core values and overarching business strategies and reflect on progress and how marketing activity can support.  

By going through the SWOT process, you'll identify your strengths, weaknesses, threats and ensure you don't miss out on any lucrative opportunities.   

As with any other marketing campaign, charity marketing must start with setting clear goals. So whether you’re looking at generating awareness or increasing your fundraising efforts, your goals will give you a clear vision for what you’re setting out to do.

Secondly, it’s important to make sure that your goals are SMART. SMART stands for:

S = Specific

M = Measurable

A = Attainable

R = Relevant

T = Timely

For example, a goal of simply ‘increasing donations’ is too vague and near impossible to measure in any meaningful way. But the goal of ‘raising donation value by 25% by the end of the second quarter to enable us to deliver [SPECIFIC OUTCOMES] for [BENEFICIARIES]’ sets out just how you can analyse and measure your success in achieving that goal.

Defining your audience can be tricky with charity marketing as it’ll likely be made up of multiple groups, including: funders, donors, beneficiaries and volunteers. So it’s important to make sure you fully understand and segment each of these audiences.

But more than this, understanding exactly who you’re speaking to in your chosen campaign is crucial. Marketing the wrong content to the wrong audience is where many charities and not-for-profit organisations fall short and risk wasting budget and resources.

Many charities have started to embrace the traditional CRM system used by corporates to manage their marketing activities to donors and beneficiaries. Consolidating your efforts into one dashboard helps you to manage the customer journey and devise clever new ways to secure future donations by segmenting, personalising and automating marketing.  

Creating personas is also a great exercise for putting yourself in your audience’s shoes and working out how best to communicate with them. To develop good audience personas, you’ll need to combine data from your existing database with desktop research and, where possible, conducting audience workshops with your target demographic. This will be an invaluable exercise for discovering their motivations and needs. We’ve created a helpful guide on putting together audience personas here.

Once you’ve set your goals and defined your audience, you’ll want to identify your strategic approach. Inbound marketing can be a great choice for charities as it creates meaningful experiences for your audience. An inbound strategy is centred around producing engaging content that pre-emptively answers your audience’s questions, and then sharing that content far and wide for them to discover for themselves. 

The inbound process is all about nurturing your audience through three stages: awareness, consideration and action. In ‘awareness’ you’re looking to make your cause matter to your audience by tapping into their emotions. During ‘consideration’, you’ll need to balance the emotion with logic and any necessary factual information to support your cause. And finally, the ‘action’ stage is all about facilitating their decision-making process by making it easy for them. For example, this could be leading them to a point at which they can make a charitable donation.  

When implementing a charity marketing strategy, it can be tempting to jump straight to this step. But marketing is so much more than just writing a blog or placing an advert, so it’s crucial you complete all of the preparatory steps prior to this. You’ve looked at the ‘what and why’ (goals), the ‘who’ (your audience) and the ‘how’ (your strategic approach) so you can now look at the ‘where’ (tactics).  

Marketing tactics are the channels you’ll use to connect with your audience, like email marketing, paid social, advertising and so on. Tactical planning is a key part of managing (and maximising) your available budget, so you’ll want to start off by asking yourself the following questions:

• When will the activity take place?
• What is the budget for each channel?
• What will this tactic achieve/how does it link back to my goals?
• Who will be responsible for implementing, managing and analysing these activities?

Answering each of these questions will help you to select the channels that are most relevant to your charity's campaign, and therefore adopt the most cost-effective approach.

Crafting your key messages for your campaign starts with tapping into your audience’s needs and motivations. At Eleven, we apply the ‘think, feel and do’ methodology:

Think = What do we want our audience to think as a result of our campaign? How will we appeal to the logical side of their brain?

Feel = What do we want them to feel? What do we want their emotional response to be?

Do = Ultimately, what do we want them to do as a result (e.g., become a donor/supporter).

Once you’ve answered these questions, you can combine the answers with your audience research to craft engaging copy for each of your selected marketing channels. A great example of this in action is the Small Talk Saves Lives campaign we created for Network Rail and the Samaritans, which you can read in full here. Your style of copy will likely vary between tactics, but there are some universal rules to follow for writing great copy which you can check out here.

The reporting stage can often be a bit of a patient waiting game, so don’t expect to see finished results from the get-go. You’ll want to make time for regular reviewing sessions. At Eleven, we tend to hold reviewing sessions weekly, fortnightly or monthly – depending on our clients’ campaigns and preferences.

A lot of time is often wasted in the reporting stage by focusing on the wrong metrics. So you should revisit your SMART goals in line with the tactics you’ve chosen to determine which performance indicators you should be looking at. For example, if email marketing is one of your chosen channels and your SMART goal is to do with getting more donors to read your mail, you'll want to focus on email open rate.

By determining exactly what it is you’ll be measuring in your campaign before you begin your marketing activity, you’ll know what to look for. And therefore, have a better idea of how to determine the success and impact you’re having.

Equipped with this guide, your charity can benefit from a marketing approach that will enable you to do more with less. This will free you up with more valuable time to dedicate to doing the day-to-day work your cause needs.

If you’re looking to implement a charity marketing campaign and would like support with planning, launching and managing a cost-effective solution for achieving your goals, we would love to hear from you. Get in touch with a member of our team today and we’ll be happy to help.