Nonprofits are challenged to do more with less. For marketers in particular, you’re tasked with finding the proper channels and developing powerful messages to amplify your organization’s work — all while battling limited resources. A formal nonprofit marketing plan gives you clear guidance on achieving that.

We’ll look at the components of a nonprofit marketing plan, giving you exact steps for outlining your own. You’ll have everything you need to develop a holistic marketing strategy. That way, you can form and cultivate meaningful supporter relationships through efficient communication.

What Is A Nonprofit Marketing Plan?

A nonprofit marketing plan is a document that outlines the promotional channels, strategies, and metrics your team will use to spread your mission. This document acts as a roadmap for promoting your initiatives. It provides specific branding guidelines to ensure every piece of marketing collateral is consistent and accurately reflects your organization.

Everyone working at the organization should have access to your nonprofit marketing plan. This allows them to refer to your objectives and align their activities accordingly.

How to Create a Nonprofit Marketing Plan

Especially if you’re a smaller organization, you’re up against established organizations. In other words, you have to go above and beyond to stand out and strengthen brand awareness. So let’s look at five key steps you should take when crafting your nonprofit marketing plan.

1. Conduct a marketing audit.

Unless you’re just now launching your nonprofit, you likely already have marketing experience. That means you have a foundation to build off. Start crafting your nonprofit marketing plan by assessing your past campaigns. Getting Attention’s nonprofit marketing plan guide suggests that you answer questions such as:

• Did you achieve the goals you set? If not, how far short did you fall?
• What platforms did you use?
• What key performance metrics (KPIs) did you track? Did they accurately gauge success?
• What strategies should you use again, and what should you do differently next time?
• Can you reuse any of the marketing materials for future campaigns?

These questions will help you understand where you’re currently excelling and falling short with your marketing efforts.

2. Define your brand.

You’ll want to create a brand style guide as part of your nonprofit marketing plan. This will keep your marketing assets consistent, helping to establish your brand identity. Define elements such as your:

• Narrative and voice: Ask yourself what you want your nonprofit to be known for. Do you want to come across as a warm and compassionate nonprofit that provides families with a haven in their time of need? Or maybe you want to come across as a headstrong, no-nonsense team that will fight for families when they need it most. Choose your narrative and a voice that communicates that.
• Colors: Kwala’s nonprofit branding guide explains that most organizations use 2-3 colors, including one primary color and one or two neutral accent colors. Think carefully about what colors are associated with your cause and will elicit the appropriate emotions. For instance, red can symbolize urgency and is commonly used with health and humanitarian relief organizations.
• Typography: You’ll want to select specific fonts to use in your marketing materials and define in which contexts to use each one. Similar to colors, different fonts elicit different emotions depending on whether they look more playful or sophisticated.

Staying consistent will help supporters remember your brand, making it easier for them to recognize your marketing materials.

3. Define your audience.

Knowing who you’re trying to reach with your promotional materials will help you choose the right channels and messages for them. Based on your current audience, create personas that explain your typical supporters’:

• Age range
• Traits and motivations
• Preferred communication methods
• Giving preferences

Ideally, you’ll want to create a persona for your average donor, volunteer, advocate, and other supporters. Doing so will empower you to craft messages that resonate with different groups of people more meaningfully.

4. Choose your marketing channels.

Once you know who you’re trying to reach, figure out how you’ll reach them. Your nonprofit marketing plan should define the channels you’ll use to spread your message. While there are plenty out there to choose from, here are a few common ones you might employ:

• Social media. A share button is a powerful tool. Determine which platforms your audience actively uses. Within your nonprofit marketing plan, lay out which platforms your marketing team should use and the types of messages that should be shared on each one. You’ll also want to set ground rules for interacting with followers. If you’re crafting a plan for a specific campaign, you can even include a posting schedule.
• Google Ad Grants and Microsoft Grants. Paid search engine marketing is a powerful tool. Programs like Microsoft Ad Grants and Google Grants provide these typically-expensive resources to nonprofits free of charge. Through these programs, you’ll receive free funding to spend on paid search ads and amplify content from your website.
• Direct mail. An awful lot of people still prefer handwritten postcards and letters. It provides a personal touch that can’t be replicated in the digital space. Include guidelines for what types of outreach you’ll send via direct mail, such as thank-you letters, campaign flyers, and project brochures.
• Email. This is a go-to platform for nonprofit marketers because it lets you simultaneously connect with all types of supporters. Plus, most email marketing platforms allow you to segment your email lists, so you can craft more personalized outreach for each type of supporter. Define guidelines for your newsletter and any other outreach you’ll send via email.

With the expanding digital marketing space, the list of marketing platforms never stops growing! And while you’ll certainly want to use multiple channels, be selective in the ones you choose. Otherwise, you risk spreading yourself too thin. Instead of posting the same generic appeal across all platforms, you’ll need to adjust your messages based on each platform.

5. Select key performance indicators.

Your nonprofit marketing plan isn’t quite complete yet! You should include which KPIs you’ll use to measure your success. Note that you’ll want to break down your nonprofit’s metrics for each platform. Here are some common ones you might include:

• Conversions. This is the number of desired actions someone takes to support your work. Great for any platform, this metric might include donations, volunteer registrations, or email newsletter sign-ups.
• Click-through rate (CTR). Specific to search engine ads and email marketing, your CTR measures the ratio of users who click a specific link to the total number of users who viewed it.
• Social media engagement. Get specific with these metrics by monitoring your likes, shares, and comments. Some social media platforms will even provide you with additional metrics like impressions to gauge your digital reach.

Tracking the right analytics will take the guesswork out of your performance. In your nonprofit marketing plan, list out the exact metrics you want to monitor, so you’re not scrambling to correct your strategies if your outreach underperforms.

Additional Resources

Nonprofit Catalog – Read up on more nonprofit essentials by exploring our Nonprofit Catalog.

Nonprofit Marketing Ideas: Promote Your Cause Effectively – Dive into the basics of nonprofit marketing and learn unique strategies for promoting your mission with this guide.

40+ Marketing Ideas for Nonprofits to Spread Your Mission – Fold these ideas into your strategies and create a more robust nonprofit marketing plan.

When asking potential donors to support your cause, you need to present them with compelling reasons why — What challenge are you working to overcome? What are your nonprofit’s plans to tackle it? How will donations drive impact towards that goal?

These questions and more should be answered in your case for support.

What is a case for support?

A case for support is your core message and set of reasons why potential supporters should donate to your current fundraising campaign. An effective case for support lays out exactly what donations to your campaign will accomplish so that donors will feel motivated to give.

A case for support is typically distilled into a central document and adapted into a variety of printed and digital supporting documents, mailers, slide decks, and more. It provides your fundraising team with the central narrative and key details they need, ensuring that all messaging (whether in conversations with donors or in broad marketing materials) is fully aligned with the campaign’s purpose and goals.

Essential Elements of a Case for Support

To create a compelling argument for your campaign and inspire donations, clearly communicate these essential elements in your case for support:

• The campaign’s purpose. What’s the challenge you’re working to address? Why does it matter?
• Your solution and plan. How will your nonprofit address this challenge? What impact will your campaign have on your community?
• Urgency. Why is now the time for your campaign and proposed solution?
• Your unique position. Why is your organization up to the task? How have you driven impact in the past?
• Costs and goals. How much will your plan cost? How much money do you need to raise to cover those costs? How will you raise that money from various sources?
• How donors can help. What are the ways that donors can help drive impact via your campaign?

Underpinning these different elements, your case for support needs to clearly reflect your nonprofit’s unique voice, vision for the future of your community, and your priorities as an organization. The exact format and sections you use might vary based on the fundraising context, but if you can clearly show donors everything they need to know about your plan and why your nonprofit is worthy of support, you can drive amazing results.

When to Develop a Nonprofit Case for Support

Nonprofits most commonly create cases for support for large-scale campaigns (like capital campaigns) to help clarify their messaging while discussing the project with high-impact prospects. But cases for support can be extremely helpful in all kinds of situations Here are a few examples:

• Campaign-specific case for support. This sets out the campaign’s purpose, goals, impact, and how donations will drive that impact.
• Prospect-specific case for support. This document is highly tailored to a single prospect to reinforce their connection to your mission.
• Event-specific case for support. This resource can be created to establish standard messaging to be used for an event, like a large annual gala.
• General case for support. An all-purpose case for support more broadly explains your mission and how donations drive it forward. It can be used for general fundraising campaigns and adapted for more specific contexts.

How to Develop a Nonprofit Case for Support: 5 Steps

According to the fundraising experts at Graham-Pelton, these are the 5 key steps for developing a compelling case for support:

1. Define the purpose and audience.

Determine the specific context for this case for support—for instance, a specific campaign, individual prospect, event, or general use case—and its intended audience.

It’s important to understand who you’re hoping to motivate with your case for support so you can tailor the story it tells and the details it emphasizes to best appeal to them. Even for a general use case for support, it can be helpful to define a donor persona and write with their demographics, average gift amount, motivations, and interests in mind.

2. Gather a writing team.

You’ll need a team to write an effective case for support, ideally with a range of perspectives from across your organization. Leaders and board members, on-the-ground staff, fundraisers, and volunteers or advocates for your nonprofit can all bring helpful insights to create a well-rounded case for support that will serve its purpose.

If you’re developing a capital campaign case for support, you’ll seek input from external stakeholders like constituents and donors in a planning or feasibility study after you have an initial draft that you want to test out.

3. Tell your story.

Outline the core story that you want to tell based on the case’s purpose and audience. Try to create a narrative throughline in your story that encourages emotional connection and will show donors the role they’ll play in driving it forward.

Work with your team to create a first draft of your core narrative, gather feedback, make revisions, and repeat. You should end up with a story that clearly communicates why your campaign is important, what it will accomplish, and how donors will be a part of the solution.

4. Expand your story with supporting details.

Fill in your emotionally compelling story with additional details and numbers to create a complete, watertight case for support. Details can come from:

• Statistics about the challenge your campaign (or overall mission) is addressing
• Your overall strategic plan and specific program plans
• Relevant budgets and financial projections
• Actual stories, testimonials, and statistics about your programs and impact

Remember to tailor your details to best appeal to your specific audience. For instance, grateful patients might be most interested in a healthcare institution’s new research initiatives. Alumni might be most interested in the positive impacts of their alma mater’s athletic department on other aspects of the school’s operations.

5. Put it all together with visuals.

Once you have a finished draft that’s been through multiple rounds of revisions and input from a variety of different perspectives, you’re ready to put it all together. Compile the case for support into a finished document, and gather visual elements like photos, brand collateral, and infographics that can be used in different versions that you create. Brochures, one-pagers, digital versions, and more can all be developed out of the central case for support.

Additional Resources

Nonprofit Catalog – Read up on more nonprofit essentials by exploring our Nonprofit Catalog.

The Top 4 Governance Mistakes that Nonprofit Boards Make – Do you serve on a nonprofit’s board of directors? Learn the most common governance pitfalls to avoid.

Why Donor Qualification Is Key to Fundraising Success – Understanding which donors to reach out to and when will help you fundraise more efficiently.

Today’s marketers work with data every day and understand its vital role in maximizing return on investment for outreach. However, inaccurate contact information—among other crucial supporter data—can ultimately waste your team’s time, lead to a decline in supporter engagement, and hold back your team from achieving its mission. That’s where data appends come into play!

In a data-driven world, there’s no excuse for inaccurate data! Modern technology allows any organization to unlock the power of data appending for a relatively low cost. We’ll take a closer look at the basics, so you can start updating your constituents’ profiles and elevate your relationships with those who make your work possible.

What Is a Data Append?

Data appending is the process of adding new data elements to an existing database. Most often used by marketers, data appending allows you to use identifying information to fill in missing constituent data, such as phone numbers, email addresses, and postal addresses.

To append data, you’ll take the information your nonprofit’s collected on individual supporters and match it against a more extensive third-party database. To reduce the manual labor needed, many nonprofits turn to a trustworthy service provider to conduct the data append for them.

How Can Data Appends Help Your Organization?

There are plenty of reasons why you might append data for your nonprofit. For instance, you won’t have to reach out to supporters to update their information continually. Contacting them is time-consuming on both ends and likely won’t yield results.

In addition to streamlining information updates, data appending allows you to:

• Clean up your nonprofit’s data and make sure your CRM isn’t cluttered with outdated or otherwise inaccurate data (such as those caused by typos during manual data entry).
• Fill in gaps for missing information to ensure you have a complete record for each supporter.
• Increase open rates by sending outreach to the correct email addresses, mailing addresses, and phone numbers.
• Identify new segments within your audience so you can tailor your outreach and services to specific groups who share similar demographics.

Ultimately, you just need to decide what types of information you want to append and how doing so will fit into your larger strategies.

What Are the Different Types of Data Appends?

As a nonprofit marketer, you already know there’s an endless list of data you collect for supporters. Knowing this, you’re probably wondering what types of data you can append for individual supporters. What’s more, which types of data are actually worth appending?

Knowing which information will actually propel your marketing efforts forward will help you spend your budget responsibly. While you’ll primarily want to append contact information, there are some other valuable data points you can append, resulting in richer profiles. Let’s explore some of the most common types!

Contact Information Appends

Verify existing contact information and find missing details to make sure you’re reaching out to the right people. Here are some of the most common types of contact information you can append:

• Email addresses. Email marketing is one of the most lucrative digital marketing avenues. Marketing research indicates that for every dollar spent, you can expect an average return of $36. That’s a higher return than any other form of marketing. But to experience those benefits, you’ll want to have the right email addresses for supporters!
• Postal addresses. Even with the rise of digital marketing, direct mail isn’t dead. In fact, it’s a more personal form of communication that can help you steward deeper relationships when compared to mass emails and generic social media posts. People’s mailing addresses change all the time, so continually append postal addresses to keep them up-to-date.
• Phone numbers. Reaching out via text or phone call can be a great way to connect with supporters. Plus, it opens your team up to more fundraising opportunities, like phone banking and text fundraising. Just like mailing addresses, people’s phone numbers change from time to time, too. Use data appending to make sure you have the most recent numbers for supporters.
• Social profiles. With more than 4.2 billion active users, social media is a fantastic way to tap into a global network of supporters. Connect with your current supporters and encourage them to spread the word about your cause by interacting with your team online. Just make sure you have the right social media profiles for them!

If your email bounce rates are high or your call answer rates are low, it might be time to conduct a data append and make sure the information you have on file is accurate!

Employer Appends

An employer append allows you to add employment information for each of your contacts. This is a fantastic way to identify corporate giving opportunities. Double the Donation’s guide to employer appending breaks down a few ways this process can impact your fundraising, such as:

• Uncover corporate giving opportunities. Research each company’s corporate giving guidelines to determine whether you have any available matching gift or volunteer grant opportunities.
• Identify potential corporate partnerships. If several supporters work for the same company, use that information to kickstart a conversation with company leadership. You can even have supporters facilitate introductions with company leadership if they have direct connections.
• Estimate wealth data. Knowing information like where your donors work and what their roles are can help you estimate their incomes and, by extension, their giving abilities.

With the right strategies, appending employer data can help create more robust supporter profiles and can impact your ability to reach your fundraising goals.

Demographic Appends

With this type of data appending, you can pull essential background information about your supporters, which will allow you to segment them into meaningful groups and send highly-tailored outreach.

NPOInfo’s guide to demographic appends lists the following standard demographic information that nonprofits append:

• Net worth
• Age
• Gender
• Ethnicity and race
• Income
• Marital status
• Presence of children
• Religion
• Political affiliation
• Lifestyle attributes such as hobbies, interests, and occupations
• Buying behaviors such as online product purchases and online gift registries

How you leverage this information will depend on your unique organization. For instance, advocacy organizations may want to verify contacts are of voting age or have a certain political affiliation before reaching out.

Birthdate Appends

Dates of birth help you to better understand how to connect with your supporters. When you get creative, you can leverage birthdays to improve supporters’ experiences with your organization. For example, you might use this information to:

• Send birthday newsletters and gifts to donors.
• Encourage supporters to launch a birthday fundraiser on social media where they ask followers to donate to your cause.
• Verify people are of voting age before contacting them about an upcoming election.
• Segment your donors into similar age groups to send targeted communications.

From simply wishing people a happy birthday to encouraging birthday fundraisers, there’s a lot you can do when you know supporters’ birthdays. Pair all the data you append to transform the supporter experience and cultivate stronger, more meaningful relationships.

Additional Resources

Nonprofit Catalog – Read up on more nonprofit essentials by exploring our Nonprofit Catalog.

The Nonprofit’s Ultimate Guide to Data Append Services – Learn the value of data append services and how the process can transform your marketing strategies.

The Data Append Guide for Nonprofits Working on Data Hygiene – Dive further into the data append process and gain plenty of data enrichment tips with this guide.