Marketing automation is especially important for non-profit organisations because it can help them operate more efficiently and effectively with limited resources. By automating repetitive and time-consuming marketing tasks and by using technology to better segment and personalise their outreach, non-profit organisations can save a great deal of time and simultaneously actually improve donation rates. It frees up time to focus on their core mission and goals while still reaching their target audience.
Interestingly, 3 of the first 4 steps actually have nothing to do with marketing automation per se. Instead, they focus on ensuring your investment in automation is aligned with the organisation’s purpose, the people you wish to target and ensuring you have “petrol” to fuel the engine.
Step 1: Define your goals:
Before you start implementing marketing automation tools, it's important to define your goals. Ask yourself what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. Is it increasing donations, engaging with volunteers, or raising awareness about your cause? Different goals will require quite different campaigns. With automation ist a great deal easier to keep different campaigns with different goals in their own "swim lanes." Conflating campaign and content makes it hard to see the wood from the trees.
As with all organisations of every ilk, there are always a long list of challenges. The question is, on which one should you focus? From our recent discussions and experience with non profits, a key challenge often revolves around managing data and especially donor records and keeping one central "source of truth." For without that solid foundation many other problems can grow.
Step 2: Choose the right tools:
Research different marketing automation tools and choose the ones that are best suited to your organisation's goals and budget. Consider factors such as ease of use, scalability, and integration with your existing technology stack.
Our advice is:
- Always to start small and ensure the foundations are solid. But choose a platform that allows you to scale later. Look to the future, plan for one to two years out. Will today's choice scale for what you plan to do in a year's time?
- Think of the whole donor lifecycle, not just the initial awareness and attraction phase, but also how you are going to market to existing donors and convert them into advocates. (Here is an article on donor lifecycle management if you are interested in the topic)
- Invest in one central platform: These days organisations have dozens of applications in use. This is creating unimagined complexity and duplication. We strongly advise our clients to invest in one ecosystem or platform and stick as much as possible to applications that work natively within it. For us, HubSpot's tools provide the best platform for non profits.
Step 3: Create buyer personas:
Identify your ideal supporters, volunteers, and donors, and create buyer personas for each group. This will help you tailor your marketing messages and campaigns to their specific needs and preferences. It's likely most organisations will have multiple audiences to which they wish to appeal. Personas allow you to develop tailored messages. Automation allows you to deliver those messages to segmented lists in a manageable way. This personalisation + automation is a key reason we see donor rates increase after automation is implemented.
Step 4: Develop a content strategy:
Create a content strategy that aligns with your buyer personas. This is likely to mean creating separate streams of content such as blog posts, email campaigns, social media posts, and other types of content, targeted at segmented lists with tailored messages. Often keeping up with the constant demand for new content can be a killer. However, automation can do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to distributing that content.
Step 5: Implement your marketing automation tools:
Once you have chosen your tools, implement them by setting up email campaigns, landing pages, and other marketing automation workflows. Make sure that everything is integrated with your donor management system, CRM, and other tools. Usually non profits set up a series of evergreen, "always on" campaigns, that run in the background. Then reinvest your time on special topic or time based campaigns to support particular initiatives.
Step 6: Monitor and measure your results:
Use analytics tools to monitor the success of your marketing campaigns. Measure metrics such as website traffic, email engagement, social media performance, and donor retention rates. Use this data to refine your campaigns and improve your results. Your marketing automation software should have robust ease to use reporting built in to its core functionality.
It's hard to overstate the value of measuring and watching your campaigns performance. It provides a huge amount of valuable data for step 7.
Step 7: Refine your strategy:
Continuously refine your marketing strategy based on your results. Experiment with different tactics, messaging, and channels to find what works best for your organisation.
No one ever gets it all right first time. Even if you did, circumstances are always changing and your campaigns should always be tweaked accordingly. Trimming the sails and rebalancing your approach is the best way to incrementally achieve optimum results and drive up the return on the investment you have made.
Whilst implementing marketing automation in non-profit organisations can be challenging, the benefits far outweigh the costs. By investing in the right tools, developing a clear strategy, and finding a good partner to help, non-profits can successfully implement marketing automation and achieve greater efficiency and effectiveness.
If you haven't yet considered marketing automation for your non-profit organisation, now is the time to explore the possibilities and take advantage of the many benefits it offers. We are always happy to discuss your organisations circumstances and make some recommendations, (gratis of course.)
Alternatively download our comprehensive guide to marketing automation for non profits.
