Best Practices You Should Be Including In Your Updated Nonprofit Marketing Strategy

For nonprofits, donations are crucial to the success of your organization and day-to-day operations. In 2021, a total of $484.85 billion was donated in the US alone–this is 4% more than the total donations in 2020. But aside from supporting a cause, the funds from these donations also help sustain an organization with its operating costs and livable wages. In fact, regularly recurring donations help donors stay engaged with the organization. This also avoids operational costs that would be needed for looking for new donors.

A way to boost donation rates is by marketing your nonprofit to existing donors and to a wider audience. Here are the best practices you should be including in your updated nonprofit marketing strategy.

Expand your digital channels

If you want to attract more donors, the best way to go about it is to broaden your communication channels. For instance, Facebook is the most popular social media platform and is appropriate for long-form content or for redirecting to long-form content. This is because it has posting mechanisms that make embedding links easier.

Look into how National Geographic uses their Facebook page to link to their website content which gets a fair amount of engagement with hundreds of likes. They briefly caption embedded article links and use their website article’s cover photo. Similarly, you can use Facebook to draw traffic to your nonprofit’s blog, where they can learn more about your advocacy and how to be a donor.

Of course, feel free to post on other platforms as well (like Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn) or even use two or more social media sites together. When choosing your platforms, factor in the audience that you want to reach and the content you want to put out. Assess how their format can benefit your messaging and if your audiences use them in the first place. Instagram, for example, is good for photo posting, but something like statistics is better off consumed on Twitter.

Build meaningful relationships with your donors

Building meaningful relationships assures donors of their crucial role in the organization. This is important because nonprofit campaigns that prioritize donor relations are likely to achieve their donation goals.

A good example of this is Project EPIC, which reinforced donor relations by keeping them updated on the crowdfunding campaign. Their updates are comprehensive. On Fundly, Project EPIC shared when the project has finally reached its fundraising goal ($25,000) and has even exceeded it by $5,291. They even include in the update how the project will move forward from there by informing donors that they will be legally represented by Weil, Gotshal & Manges pro bono.

Aside from updates, another way to build meaningful relationships is through a sincere thank you that they receive after donating and when the campaign has finished. LHH notes how the power of thank you is not only proper etiquette but an important part of building good relationships. To make the “thank you” feel more sincere, you can use donation plug-ins that create a more personal thank you note. Handwritten, for example, can be set up to automatically send a handwritten note after a donation has been made.

Incorporate more graphics into communications

What makes a more visual storytelling approach crucial to successful nonprofit marketing is that people are more attracted to posts with visual aid than just text alone. BuzzSumo’s study on image content shares that visual content attracts 2.3 times more engagement than text-only Facebook posts and 1.5 times more engagement than Tweets with no graphics. Case in point: National Geographic’s regular content and World Wildlife Fund campaign content incorporate a lot of visuals.

But adding more visual content to marketing your nonprofit doesn’t have to be as intricate as WWF’s endangered species campaign. It can also be as simple as sharing photos and short videos from your events or previous campaigns. On charity: water’s Instagram page, the nonprofit shares photos and videos of the communities that they work with. Their videos, alone, have thousands of plays.



Both simple and highly creative graphics help donors and prospective grantors to have an idea of the people behind the initiative and the community that they are supporting with their donations.

These best practices, of course, take time to learn. It’s a process of finding which platforms suit your organization and your audiences. But with how important strong and meaningful communication is to support your cause, it’s imperative that these marketing practices be adopted.

Article written by Rebecca Jules

Exclusively for LindaHandey.