Nonprofit Strategy Series: 3-Step Marketing Approach to Boost Donations

As a nonprofit organization, your goal is to promote your cause, influence people and generate donations.

As much as this sounds easy in theory, it requires a clear strategic plan. Luckily, you can follow Lúgh Studio’s 3-step marketing approach. It will help you create a clear roadmap, define your goals, and ultimately win donations for your nonprofit. 

Step 1 — Attract and Narrow Your Audience

Assume your audience has no clue you exist. Your goal in this stage is to attract a large enough pool and make them aware of your presence. Once you’ve accumulated enough eyeballs, you can begin to narrow down the audience to those who genuinely care.

At the end of the day, your donor’s final destination is your website. Drive as much traffic as possible by frequently publishing blogs and promoting on social media. In addition, improve your SEO strategy. This will help solidify other promotional efforts and allow you to appear higher in search rankings.

Last but not least, Lúgh recommends creating a Google Analytics account for your nonprofit website. With the help of Google Analytics, you can dig deeper into traffic and consumer behavior data, segment and then target.

Remember: the more narrowed your audience is, the more likely you will achieve meaningful action on your nonprofit website.

Step 2 — Encourage Ongoing Engagement

So you’ve thrown enough bait out into the ocean and found your ideal target donor. Welcome to the second phase called engagement. This is where you must persistently prove why your cause is worthy of their attention, time and money.

Fortunately, you are well aware of who’s interested and who’s not. You pinpoint those who stick around, comment on a blog, submit an inquiry or like your social media content.

Your task is to encourage and maintain this engagement. Be reciprocative, follow up on time and remarket with new and engaging content. In addition, measure activity and performance on email sign-ups, social media follows or learn more requests. Keep your potential donors top of mind and they will sure to do the same.

Step 3 — Seal the Deal

You’ve grasped a good understanding of your consumer behavior. You know how to stimulate and measure engagement. What’s next? The last and probably most important step in converting donor leads is to capture and cultivate interest. 

At this point, don’t just expect actions like donations, event registrations, volunteer submissions, and service requests. These all take time. Successfully implementing steps 1 and 2 of this overall strategy will provide a good foundation for you to thrive in step 3. 

When attempting to seal the deal, go beyond your normal promotional efforts. Establish even more awareness and engagement than you previously had. Develop and strengthen your call-to-action and overall selling point. Over time, you will justify the value of your cause, establish a sense of trust, and initiate prompt and meaningful action on your donation page.

Always put yourself in the shoes of your donor and ask: what would it take for me to press that donate button?

How can I win more donations?

Lúgh Studio has partnered up with Fundraise Up, an AI-assisted fundraising solution for nonprofits. 

Through sophisticated AI-driven design, Fundraise Up delivers a flawless and efficient checkout experience for your digital donor. At Lúgh Studio, we will strategically place the Fundraise Up tech across multiple areas of your website. By upgrading your donation process and improving your user experience, we’ll turn all your site pages into a “donation page”.

Whether it’s a total website redesign or creation of a high-impact landing page, Lúgh Studio can help you more than double your online revenue. Check out what we did for The Partnership for the Homeless.

Contact Lúgh Studio for a free consultation.