Maximizing Impact: 6 Strategies for More Effective Nonprofit Marketing
Insights, delivered.
If you work in marketing or communications at a nonprofit, you know that your budget can often be one of the smallest line items for the year. And making every dollar stretch can be a seriously daunting task. How do you prioritize your efforts and know with confidence that these strategies are worth prioritizing?
Just as we suggest that the nonprofits we work with focus on research and data, we also make research and data the basis of everything we do. That’s why we created The Mighty GPS marketing maturity assessment and its accompanying 2024 Marketing Benchmarks for Nonprofits report. The Mighty GPS helps you see where your marketing stands today, and our benchmarks provide you with insight into where the most effective nonprofits are spending their time.
After analyzing our nonprofit report data, we’ve compiled 6 strategies to consider prioritizing in 2025.
First, some housekeeping.
The results and date you’ll see are based on responses from nonprofits who took The Mighty GPS™—a self-assessment for measuring marketing maturity for mission-driven organizations. We use the following scales for marketing maturity stages and scores in this report:
Crawling stage: 0-39
Walking stage: 40-59
Running stage: 60-80
Soaring stage: 81-100
Ok, let’s dig in.
1. Make research a top priority.
We saw nonprofits score pretty low in the research department. Only three out of seven questions in this category saw an increase in marketing maturity from last year, and more than two-thirds reported they never conducted audience interviews or focus groups to inform marketing decisions.
Research is not just for big-time corporations with big profits. Good research yields good data, and nonprofits could benefit greatly from putting more of a focus on it. If you don’t know who you’re targeting or what they care about, how can you successfully reach your donors? Here are some ways your nonprofit can improve research:
Quick wins:
Research doesn’t need to be overly complicated or formal. Begin by listening to where your potential donors and other audiences already engage. Pay attention to comments or discussions on your nonprofit’s social media pages. Or, attend community events or fundraisers, where you can gather insights through informal conversations.
Invest in success:
Nonprofits, like any organization, can fall into the trap of basing key decisions on their assumptions. To better understand your audience, take time to conduct surveys, interviews, and focus groups. These insights will allow you to create detailed audience profiles. Once you have this clear understanding of who you’re reaching, your outreach becomes more targeted—reducing guesswork and improving results.
2. Set concrete, measurable goals for your marketing campaigns.
Almost a third of respondents say their nonprofit never sets specific, measurable goals for their marketing and communication efforts. So, how can nonprofits improve when it comes to marketing strategy?
Quick wins:
Use Google Search Console to see which pages on your nonprofit’s website receive the most traffic. With that information, determine how to adjust your marketing efforts—do you need to add more call-to-action buttons to direct users to a donation page? Are supporters struggling to find their way to the action you want them to take? Once you’ve identified these issues, set a goal and create a plan to boost conversions.
Invest in success:
Develop an omnichannel strategy. That’s a big word, but what it really means is making sure you consider not only your website strategy but also emails, chatbots, apps, signage, social media, and other touchpoints together. Write down your plan and the steps needed to achieve it.
3. Keep content & SEO top of mind.
Of the nonprofits who took The Mighty GPS in 2023, 60% reported never following a documented content governance plan, and 37% reported only sometimes maintaining a content plan or editorial calendar.
Nonprofits that did have a strong content strategy and structure in place tended to score 29 points higher in marketing maturity on average—indicating that a strong content strategy is key to increasing your nonprofit’s marketing maturity. However, 38% of respondents report their nonprofit never uses keyword research to guide the content they produce online. There are a few opportunities here.
Quick wins:
Schedule regular meetings to discuss upcoming content and make sure the person in charge of content or your digital presence is identifying keywords you can target for effective SEO. Soaring organizations that use keyword research to guide their content creation, on average, see 1.99 million monthly organic clicks from search engines and rank for 1.28 million keywords. (Newsflash: that’s a lot).
Invest in success:
SEO has only become more complicated as AI moves in, making it extra important for nonprofits to work with an expert who understands the ways search engines are leveraging AI. Analyzing where your nonprofit stands today against similar organizations and optimizing your existing content with AI in mind can help you get more clicks to your site and more visibility.
4. Create and follow a messaging platform.
We found that, of the nonprofits who took the assessment, more than a quarter don’t use a messaging platform as a guide for creating content, and 27% percent report their nonprofit doesn’t follow a documented communications strategy at all. While nonprofits did tend to score better on this front this year as compared to last year, there are still many areas where nonprofits are falling short.
Messaging platforms provide a script that helps you and your teammates distill your nonprofit’s message, elevator pitch, and easy-to-understand and share content. It allows everyone in your nonprofit to share your mission and talk about your work cohesively and consistently. Without it, your brand messaging is likely a patchwork of one-off headlines, leadership whims, and inconsistencies.
Quick wins:
As messaging and editorial questions come in (Do we use the Oxford comma? Do we speak with a friendly tone or a more serious one?)—start jotting them down. It doesn’t have to be a formal document but a starting place that anyone who writes for your nonprofit can reference when creating content.
Invest in success:
When you have the resources to really drill down, a larger messaging document can be extremely beneficial for your overall marketing strategy. It should be accessible to everyone—from leadership to new hires—ensuring that you have fully considered how and why your nonprofit speaks to its audience. It will come in handy when creating social media copy, marketing emails, landing pages, and more.
5. Develop a documented marketing and communications plan.
A key trend indicated that while nonprofits are making the most out of their often-limited resources, they are struggling with where to prioritize their efforts to help fuel better marketing decisions—highlighting the need for more concrete planning.
If you focus on tactics without connecting them to an overall communication strategy, you waste time and energy pursuing tactics that aren’t returning enough organizational value. Planning allows you to clearly lay out what you’re going to do and how you’re going to do it.
Quick wins:
As professional communicators, writing down our plans is really the only way to ensure they happen. So, if you’re strapped for time, start with an outline of your plan. The information can’t live in our heads forever! A written plan, even an outline, helps keep you on track, helps you say “no” to unexpected diversions, and can help make the case for your budget.
Invest in success:
If you could only prioritize one thing in the new year, we would recommend it be this: a written marketing and communications plan. Our data shows that nonprofits who follow a documented marketing and communications plan see on average, up to 18 points higher in marketing maturity. To make it easier for you, we have a comprehensive annual marketing and communications plan template that is free to download! Filling out this template is a great way to develop your team’s detailed action plan with measurable business objectives for next year so that you can accurately organize, track, and iterate. Take a look through it and get to work—you’ll be glad you did.
6. Take a closer look at all your tech.
Nonprofits saw an overall drop in the Technology category compared to last year, with only two out of the five questions increasing in their marketing maturity.
A few key areas contributing to those drops were how nonprofits are maximizing their use of tech platforms and how well all the platforms are working together. The data shows us that organizations that use their marketing automation platforms (MAP) to their fullest potential and have seamlessly integrated tech systems see a much higher marketing maturity score overall. If you’ve not considered prioritizing your tech in 2025 and know it’s a sore spot, it may be time to add it to the list.
Quick wins:
Ok ok…we know this isn’t necessarily a quick win, but it is an easy win: Audit your CRM bi-annually to ensure data integrity. If you want to target your audiences properly, you need to get rid of that dirty data! Additionally, make time and space for learning and researching on the platforms you already have, like your MAP. Many offer a version of free training and even certifications.
Invest in success:
Seamless tech integrations are critical to providing a smooth and consistent online experience for your audiences, regardless of what technology they’re using. Consider planning a marketing tech stack audit to analyze how they integrate and to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.
What now?
Nonprofits are making small improvements but still have a long way to go. Start your journey to improvement by taking The Mighty GPS assessment and reading through the 2024 Marketing Benchmarks for Nonprofits. You’ll be able to see where your nonprofit stands in relation to similar nonprofits and position yourself for success in 2025 with actionable recommendations.
If your nonprofit is struggling to amplify its message to the world, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re in the business of making sure you’re set up for success and can catapult you into better marketing results in the coming years. Because when you improve, the world improves, too.
