Making Sense of Online Marketing

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Hello, everybody, welcome to Making Sense of online marketing a simple checklist for success for nonprofits. My name is Matthew Montoya. I am channel marketing and Engagement Manager with constant contact. Read More

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Hello, everybody, welcome to Making Sense of online marketing a simple checklist for success for nonprofits. My name is Matthew Montoya. I am channel marketing and Engagement Manager with constant contact. And I’m really excited to be joining everybody today. So let’s begin. So for small to medium nonprofits, 13.4% of total fundraising came from online giving. For larger nonprofits. 7.8% of total fundraising came from online giving, you’re not alone. If you’re like many ConstantContact nonprofit customers who want to use digital marketing to promote their community initiatives. We know you’ve got a lot on your plate, you’re wearing many hats, and don’t have the luxury of time to figure out how to navigate the cluttered world, especially in these difficult times. So let’s talk about what we’ll cover today, we’re going to talk about how people find you online, how to set yourself up for success and how it all comes together. Let’s start out with how people find you online. Now some of these things may be something you’ve thought through already doing. Some may be missing some key items. Many small nonprofits tell us that they engage in a lot of word of mouth, fundraising, and friend raising to garner support from everything from annual appeals and events to campaigns to launch new programs, or purchase special equipment. Face to face guest solicitation of course in normal times would be a top priority for your fundraising history and fundraising Best Practices tell us that people to people relationships even digitally remain the strongest strategy for securing leadership level gifts and building major gifts programs. But successful fundraising programs also focus on building a pipeline of prospective donors, bringing new friends into your circle of supporters. And increasingly, especially in this time, word of mouth is happening online. When done correctly, online marketing expands opportunities to extend your organization’s reach. As you know, a nonprofits organizational success is built on relationships. Online Marketing allows you to strengthen existing relationships with current supporters and build connections with new ones. People give to organizations they know and trust because they have used their services or because they know someone who has, as the old saying goes people give to people. This is where social media comes in, the more you can do to keep your organization top of mind and make it easy for others to ask about you. The more you can increase the chances of people recommending you or seeking you out when they need what you offer. Beyond being part of the conversation, you must understand what people may find when they go looking for your organization specifically by name or for something that your organization offers. And of course, be aware that if they don’t find your organization when they go looking online, it begs the question, Does your organization even exist, it’s no secret that people are turning to search engines like Google to get more information about the community services they’re investigating. Let’s take a look at some of the things that may show up on a search engine results page or S E RP. When someone searches for an organization by name, what they’ll find are often paid ads, organic, non paid search results, and Google My Business Listings. They’ll also find social media accounts, reviews, and information from other sites. In the example on the previous page, we searched for a specific business Constant Contact by name. But people don’t always search by name. Sometimes they know what they need or a particular service, but they don’t know where to find it. They type in a more generic search term like services for the elderly, or how to help the environment. Let’s look at a couple of examples. For one example of someone who wants to adopt a new puppy or kitten, they may type rescue pet adoptions into a search engine, which would result like something we see on the left a family planning for some socially distance safe event to do with the kids. Let’s say in New York City might search for cultural activities for kids in New York City, which might lead to the results on the right notice that the searches bring up the listings in Google Maps first, this information comes from Google My Business profiles, and we’ll talk a bit more about that later.

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Beyond the map listings, you may find websites, social media accounts, reviews, and listings of organizations near your location in the search results. If we apply these results to what may show up for your organization, that means you need to be paying attention to your website, social media accounts, review sites cause specific listings and competition. So here’s some action steps search for your organization. What information shows up? Is that what you were expecting? Is there anything that surprises you? Is there something missing? Search for generic terms about your organization? Is your organization there either in an organic or paid perspective? Make a list of results to show up on the first page in both scenarios. But what do you do after they search? If you’re online, and I’m assuming you have a site. We’ll talk about how we can help there too, with an understanding of how people may find you online. What should you do to make sure you have a strong foundation in place? Let’s

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Talk about the tools you should use and some tips to get you started. The five steps to online marketing success include a mobile friendly website, an email marketing tool, a primary social channel, up to date cause specific listings, and a way to easily create content. Yes, your nonprofit should have a mobile friendly website. It’s at the center of all your online activities. It’s the hub you’ll want to point people to in order to ensure they have access to your programs and services. And to provide volunteer support and contributions. You shouldn’t rely solely on social media sites, you want to have a place of your own. Think about the first thing you do when you want to investigate an organization. Typically, you’ll go looking for a website to learn more, your potential constituents are doing the same. And they’re frequently doing it on a mobile device, which is why having a mobile friendly website is so important. Now, when we say mobile friendly, what we mean is mobile responsive. A mobile responsive website provides a great experience for visitors regardless of how they’re viewing it. Because it adapts to the device being used to access it. The site is key, nearly everything we do is going to point back to it. So let’s talk about what we must make sure is on our site. Now, first and foremost, if you have a site, make sure it’s mobile friendly. As I said, you’ll likely get very few donations and other activity if it’s not. If you don’t have a site yet, I’ll talk to you about how easy it is to set one up. So let’s break it down your homepage, what questions should you answer on it? Well, what are your programs and services? You don’t have a lot of time. So be clear. Be specific. Who are they for? The visitor to your homepage is asking, Is this for me? Who is your ideal client volunteer donor? Make it clear who your programs and services are for? Why should the visitor choose you? Is there something about your programs and services that make your organization unique? Answer that address it What should visitors do next, enroll in a program or plan a visit contact you give an email address for resources, make it clear what action they should take from your homepage as their next step. Now for your about us page, make sure you share what your story is, what problem you’re trying to solve. What’s your organization’s vision is for a better world? What are you doing to solve this problem? Why is your work important to the community? Make sure you’re addressing all of these on your about us page? So what question should you answer on your programs and services page? Well, what services and programs do you provide? Here is your opportunity to tell people what you do? Do you offer classes or performances emergency services, social or health services? How can people access these programs? Make sure to address it on this page. Now the all important support is page the questions you need to answer how can they make a gift right now? All right, so this is a no brainer. With so many people giving online through fantastic tools like DonorPerfect, you definitely want to give them an opportunity to make a gift. You also may want to make it easy for people to set up monthly giving make sure you address how they can participate in other ways. If your organization relies on volunteers list the different ways someone can help you by donating time. Or maybe your work benefits from donated items such as clothing or electronics let people know how they can contribute. So let’s break down this all important page. the donate button, consider including a donate button on every page of your website. Many of you are probably already doing this, make it easy to make your gift potential donors. Chances are you’re probably already in relationships with people who are most likely to make a major or legacy gift. But it doesn’t hurt to mention to every potential donor how important a bequest can be to your organization honoring active donors. There are donors who will request or require that you list their names and logos in your organization’s materials, including your website. Use this as an opportunity to celebrate those who support you and tell the story of why they became involved with your work. Your donors will feel honored and many more will be inspired to give. So what questions should you answer on the Contact Us page? Where can people find you? Do you have physical locations? Where is your organization based? Where are your social channels? Where can people find you? And what are your hours? What happens if someone visits your site but doesn’t engage by enrolling in a program making a donation or requesting more information? Well, it’s hard to say if they’ll ever come back but what have you had a way to contact them, then you can encourage them to come back and eventually become involved in some way. This is why you’ll want to collect email addresses from people who visit your site. Also, in addition to your website, you should think about collecting emails in print and hopefully one day in person again, offer something of value to a visitor in exchange for their email address like helpful information about an issue your organization addresses to get more people joining your list. Once you have someone’s email address, you’re able to reach out in a consistent basis to encourage them to engage with your organization by sharing a combination of helpful and promotional messages. And that of course leads us to email marketing. Why is email marketing important today? Simply because it works and yes, email is still ranked as one of the most effective marketing channels according to a since 2019 digital marketing strategy summary report like your website email marketing also creates an asset you

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own, the contacts on your list are yours. And if you’re doing it right, these are people who have said yes, I want you to contact me. Email marketing also allows you to automate much of the communication so emails your contact receive feel timely and relevant. Automation ensures that you get the right messages to the right people at the right time. When someone signs up to receive your emails, they are actively demonstrating an interest in you and your organization. Take advantage of this time when a new contact is highly engaged and automate a couple of emails to continue the conversation. Whether they sign up today or a week from today, they won’t have to wait for you to manually send them an email to hear from you. One of the most important things you can set up when you’re doing email marketing is a welcome email. You need to engage new contacts with that welcome email. You want to send this welcome email immediately after someone signs up, deliver what was promised Welcome new subscribers and reiterate what they should expect in the future. send another email a few days after you send the welcome email. Let your new contacts know the other ways in which they can engage with you. This will most likely be on your social channels, so invite them to connect with you there. This email is important because once your subscribers connect to you in other locations, you’ll have multiple ways to engage and stay top of their mind. And if your subscribers engage with you on these public forums, your nonprofit gets exposed to their contacts who are likely also to make excellent prospects for your organization. Consistency is key in any form of marketing. Write down the potential opportunities you have to reach out to your email contacts. These opportunities could mean national holidays, upcoming events, and events specific to your cause, like breast cancer awareness month, or the sector in general, Giving Tuesday, share a combination of helpful resources and promotional emails with your donation requests to provide the most value to your contacts. Use your presence in the community to grow your list. Take advantage of every opportunity to encourage people to join your community by joining your mailing list. With constant contacts Text Join feature, you can include this information on every flyer brochure handout, even business cards. If we think about it, even in this trying time, people are still interacting with your organization likely some way in a physical presence, meaning they’re seeing signage, they’re seeing handouts, they’re seeing flyers, they’re getting snail mail, we want to make sure we have an opportunity to get those folks into our email marketing funnel so that we can promote our organizations, and we can promote an opportunity for them to donate. Well, how do you get them from the physical place into the digital place? Well, with constant context Text Join feature, it can be all automated, meaning that they’ll text, Constant Contact and Constant Contact automatically behind the scenes will add your contacts to your database. So great. They’re joining our lists. But how do we build that regular email? Well, here’s some important things to remember. Remember that in the inbox, the subject line is what’s going to entice them to open the email. And of course, in the email, you may be soliciting for donations or volunteers, you want them to open the email. So my first tip is to keep your subject line short, no more than about eight words. That’s about 35 characters. Remember, most inboxes aren’t going to display any more than that. And if you haven’t hooked them in the first eight words, you’re likely not to hook them with anything else. You want to include the name of your organization in the from name text, and that’s probably very common for you very common in the nonprofit sector. But you want to make sure you use a recognizable from name. And that’s generally going to be your organization’s name. Now, some of you may say, well, but sometimes we send emails from the executive director or from a board member, well, that’s great or even from a staffer, that’s great. But you have to remember, if a board member retires now that name recognition has gone with them. If executive director leaves now they’re taking that name recognition with them, your organization name shouldn’t be changing, and it should be the from name in most of your emails. preheader text is a little bit of text that appears beside or below the subject line. You want to utilize that little bit of text to make sure that people are enticed to open your email. I can’t speak for all email solutions, but Constant Contact gives you the ability to edit that little bit of text to further entice people to open your email. So what makes a great subject line? Well, of course, it’s going to be related to your content. But here’s some high level ideas. First questions. Turn your subject line into a question questions are great because the only way to answer the question is by opening your email. alliteration. Alliteration is using the same letter to begin every word not only is it singsong and fun to read, but all of those similar letters create patterns in the inbox and when you create a pattern in the inbox, the AI is more likely to notice it. illusion. Illusion is alluding to something pop culture something most of your audience would recognize a famous song title, a famous movie title, some kind of quote that most of your audience would know the power of illusion is that because it’s so familiar, people will slow down in the inbox and notice it chunking chunking is purposely not writing your subject line as a sentence. Most subject lines are sentences. There’s no rule that says you have to write a subject line is this

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sentence by purposely not writing your subject line as a sentence, it looks different because it looks different, more eyes are going to notice it in the inbox, numbered lists. Numbered Lists are a real powerful way to improve your subject line. Of course, your content has to be numerically based. But it’s so powerful because it’s finite, because if you give people a few steps, they’re more likely to open the email because they know they don’t have to spend a lot of time in the email. On top of that it piques curiosity, a couple of tips around numbers three gets the highest open rate five, the next highest and seven, the third highest. Try to keep numbered lists when you’re listing them in the subject line under nine, any more than nine and you could be actually hurting your open rates. Emojis. Now, emojis are a bit of a hot topic for some folks, but they are proven to work because they look different. They get more opens. If you use Constant Contact, we have an emoji picker built right into the subject line area. Now here’s some things to avoid. Try to avoid the word free. I can’t imagine too many folks in nonprofits would be using that word anyway. Act now fast guaranteed. Those are all usually words that are tied to spam. Basically, don’t use a word you commonly see in spam. Don’t use the reply or the forward trick. People are smart. And as soon as they open the email, they’re going to realize you trick them. And they’re going to mark you as spam and at least not have a pleasant taste in their mouth about your organization. Avoid things like spam terms, like the ones I mentioned before anything you see in a spam. Make sure you check your spam folder, not only to see what kind of subject lines spammers are using, but if your email goes into spam when you send yourself a test, well, it’s very likely your subject line was the cause. Avoid all caps. Spammers often use all caps and you want to avoid all caps. And lastly, don’t use excessive punctuation. Meaning don’t use triple question marks triple exclamation points. Spammers often do that and you don’t want to do that. My next tip and proving that regular email you send out is to apply your brand colors. Be consistent with your brand colors. Don’t switch it out to celebrate holidays or special events stick to your brand colors consistently. Because color increases brand recognition 80%. The reality is people don’t spend a lot of time in an email only a few seconds. So the quicker they recognize your brand, the better. By having your brand colors laid out in the email, you’re more likely to have them recognize you and remember their association with you. A couple more tips always include a clear call to action as high up above the scroll line as possible. When you’re building an email, make sure to send a copy of it to yourself and check where it lands on your mobile device. You want to keep your call to action pretty high. Because people want scroll too many times in a phone, make sure your logo is clickable in any image you put in your email, most people actually try to click on an image to go somewhere, and we want them to go somewhere. So we want to make it easy for them to do. When we make our logo and other images in our email clickable, it’s more likely to get a click because it’s so big, because on a smartphone, it’s going to be easy for people to click on. Communicate through those images. The old saying image speaks 1000 words is really valuable when we’re trying to keep our email short and concise. Speaking of short and concise, keep your content down to about 20 lines of text or less. The more texts you put in the email, the longer the email gets, the more scrolls people are going to do. And the less likely you’re going to get the call to action response that you’re looking for. Now, when it comes to call to actions, you also want to limit those keep your calls to action to no more than about three. Now that doesn’t include something like a clickable image, because that’s not as noticeable. But what I’m talking about in this example is the donate button, or the RSVP today button. By giving people fewer choices, you’re actually going to get higher responses. To reiterate, you don’t want to have any more than about three articles, no more than about 20 lines of text any more than that. And people aren’t going to be paying attention to your email as much as you deserve. Keep it to about three images or less not including your logo, and no more than about three calls to action. Why am I talking so much about clicks and links? Well, first off, as you can see here, the more links you have in the email, the less the response, you’re giving people too many choices. Given the short attention span, people have an email, if you give people too many choices, they’re not going to choose anything. Remember, we want to get that donation we want to get people to our events, we want to get people to pay attention to our news. If you need people to do that. Less is more when it comes to metrics, the metric people are most obsessed with open rate is the wrong metric to hang your hat on. If we think about it, somebody may have received an email from you opened it, read it top to bottom. But if there was no clear call to action or links in the email, we have no proof they read it. On top of that they may be using an email client that has a preview window like Gmail or Outlook. It can be zipping up and down their inbox multiple times that emails opened up every single time even though they’re not reading one word, and that counts is an open note the metric we want to be obsessed with is our click through rate. Our click through rate proves they got the email proves they open the email and proves they read it not only that, but with a tool like Constant Contact. You can see who clicked on what giving you some insight into what content specific people found most valuable. Now that’s going to be useful if you

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Want to do follow up with them later. Additionally, it drives people to your site to your blog to your donation page, it drives people somewhere else, and we want to drive people somewhere else. Remember, people only spend a limited amount of time in an email, but they spend more time once they get to your website. Because they took action. Because they clicked on a link, they’re now willing to spend more time, you’re more likely to get the behavior you want. By making sure you have limited numbers of calls to action, but have links as calls to action in your email. It also helps you determine the best date best time to send. For instance, let’s say you send your email Monday morning. But you notice most people are clicking on links Monday night, that may change how and when you send your email. For nonprofits, your click through rate on average is 7%. I encourage all of you after you finish today’s call, take a look at your click through rate. If it’s under 7%, you may want to use some of the tips and advice I’ve shared so far. So that leads us to social media, it doesn’t have to overwhelm you. If you’re like many of the nonprofit professionals and volunteers we talked to social media marketing can feel overwhelming, and it often feels like you’re spinning your wheels doing a lot of activity across many channels with little to show for it. Ultimately, social media should allow you to generate awareness, action and engagement that you wouldn’t have gotten elsewhere. You should reserve your organization’s name on important social channels, so you have it, but you don’t have to be active everywhere. That’s why we recommend starting out with one channel that makes sense for your organization. Again, claim as many social sites as you can, but focus on the primary channel based on the people you’re trying to reach. Also, consider what channel you’re most comfortable using, and how it fits with the personality of your organization. Keep focused on how your social media can help you with engagement goals such as growing awareness, and driving action, connect with people on social media to ultimately move them again to your website and building your email list. So you have a list of contacts that you own to drive engagement. Remember, each social channel also has its own personality too. Now that said you should not be posting the exact same thing on every channel. You can use the same theme but modify your post to suit the channel. So let’s break down each channel, Facebook. In the newsfeed you’ll be competing with friends, family and local and world headlines. Make sure to grow awareness post your content the audience may want to engage by liking, commenting or sharing drive action. Let people know how they can help or alternatively, how they can benefit from your programs. Engagement. begin building relationships with your audience. For LinkedIn is more of a professional network which could make sense if your nonprofits work includes marketing to professionals. It could be a great channel for finding volunteers to serve in a variety capacities. For awareness posts stories about how your work creates a positive impact in the community to drive action on LinkedIn. Let people know how they can help or alternatively, how they can benefit from the programs and services you provide. And to engage on LinkedIn. begin building relationships with your audience. For Instagram, obviously, it’s a highly visual network let people see what’s happening in your organization. To raise awareness on Instagram, let people know the latest news. drive action by responding to direct messages from people in your community and engage on Instagram. By sending people to your website with a link in your bio Twitter is a public newsfeed of what’s happening now to grow awareness on Twitter. Let people know what’s going on in your other social channels. drive action by letting people know how they can help and engage by using the platform to start a conversation. For Pinterest. Raise awareness by letting people know about upcoming events. To drive action provide links to resources on your website to help the audience you’re trying to reach and to engage. Make sure to engage with those taking time to thank you on YouTube. It’s obviously video content that’s often educational. To create awareness on YouTube create video content to let people know about new programs to drive action show the positive impact your organization is having in the community via video, and to engage respond to questions and provide additional resources in the comments. Regardless, you want to connect with people on social and ultimately move them to your website and help build your email list so you have a list of contacts you own to drive engagement. Don’t forget social media isn’t the only place where people may find and engage with the organization. And that leads us to our next subject. Today, people use a variety of apps and websites to find the information they’re looking for. Sometimes these listings are automatically generated and other times your constituents may create them. You’re able to take control of these listings by claiming them for your organization, which is often as simple as clicking a button and submitting requested information that proves you are a legitimate representative of your organization. Make sure all the information is correct and up to date across the sites. The last thing you want is for someone to find incorrect information about your organization, as this can cause you to lose audience members program participants, clients, donors and volunteers. 84% of consumers are more likely to take action based on personal recommendations from a family member or a friend. When referred by a friend people are four times more likely to make a donation. At the very least claim your Facebook

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page, Google My Business listing and Yelp page. If there’s anything that’s important in your particular vertical, make sure to claim that too. And again, make sure all your information is up to date when it comes to content content is what people search for, consume and share online. If you produce relevant content on a consistent basis that aligns with what your audience is searching for, you’ll have more people finding you and sharing your content. You’ll also make more connections for your nonprofit and reach more people who will also share your content and ideally make donations this content helps search engines like Google find your organization and can result in free traffic to your website. Yes, there are some technical aspects to consider for search engine optimization or SEO. But at its core, it’s about delivering relevant and meaningful content to people you’re trying to reach. A blog is a functionality that makes it easy to add content or posts to your website on a regular basis. Whereas a website contains information about your organization’s programming services, a blog gives you the ability to answer more specific questions about your mission for your supporters. Speaking of blogs, let’s go ahead and dive in a little bit deeper into the importance of blogs and how to manage them, you get the most benefit when your blog is connected directly to your website and not often some other platform, consider rotating your topics to focus on the interests of those who participate in and benefit from your programs, volunteers and donors. Choose a publishing frequency that works best for your organization. While a weekly blog would be awesome, don’t commit yourself to more than you can handle and enlist the aid of volunteer guest bloggers. Get good mileage out of this content by posting it on your social and email channels to lead people back to your website. So here are eight things you need to consider when starting a blog. Firstly, why are you creating a blog? You understand now what a blog can do for your organization? But what can a blog do for your organization? In particular, more importantly, what benefit? Will having a blog for your organization bring to the people who are reading it? Identify your goals from the start and let that guide the rest of your decisions? Who are you going to be speaking to what you decide to talk about on your blog will depend entirely on who you’re creating content for? Who are the people who are going to be reading the blog? What type of knowledge can you share with them? What are some of the questions that need answered? What are you going to talk about? Every blog is built on certain Cornerstone topics. These topics derive from a number of key elements, the most important of which are your audience, your organization, and in the community you work, how frequently will you be able to post as I said, like with all the stuff you’re already doing to market, your organization frequency will need to be an important consideration starting your blog. stick to the rules to making sure you can commit to the frequency of content that you’re putting together. What type of content do you want to create? One of the biggest misconceptions people have about blogs is that a certain level of writing expertise is required to create one. But the fact is, for a lot of people writing isn’t something that comes easy, nor is it something that they particularly enjoy doing. For those people incorporating other kinds of content, like photos and videos may be a better alternative. Where will your content come from? For a lot of people the thought of blogging conjures up images of being stuck alone in a room staring at a blank computer screen. But creating content for your blog doesn’t need to be a one person show. In fact, encouraging other members of your staff and your community to get involved can help keep your content fresh and give your readers varying perspectives on the topics you’re talking about. How will your blog fit into other marketing efforts? Chances are, you’ve already been creating content for other sources for some time, whether it’s coming up with stuff to put in your latest email, or figuring out what to post on social media. Having a blog should make those efforts easier, not more difficult. If you commit to writing one blog post a week for an entire month, you’ll have four valuable pieces of content to fuel your online marketing. And lastly, where do you want your blog to live. One of the hurdles that keeps organizations away from blogging is the challenge of picking a service that will be right for their business. Much like when picking the right email marketing provider or figuring out which social media sites to sign up for. You’ll want to choose a platform that makes sense for your organization. And that offers you the tools you’re looking for. Now I just want to note here that the online landscape has changed over the years. Once you have foundational elements in place, you can add some guests the fire by using paid tactics, it may make sense for you to add search engine marketing, so you show up in the page search results. You most definitely want to experiment with Facebook lead ads so you can reach the right people and build your email contact list. Also think about paid search tactics where it used to be enough to be there to reach your potential constituents. Most things are driven by algorithms that limit the access you have to your audience. This is another reason why email marketing is so important. You control how you communicate with an audience that wants to hear from you. You own the channel and you don’t have to worry about the tweaks and changes to algorithms to the extent you do beyond the inbox. So in many cases online, you’ll have to pay for something to reach more people. Now that’s not bad. You just want to do it in a smart way. We’ll talk a bit more about that later. There are a lot of people on Facebook and Instagram which makes social ads very powerful. social ads also give you the ability to get very targeted with your audience. You can target based on location, demographics, interest, behaviors and connections. Plus you’ll have the ability to create look alike audiences which help you find people who look like people who are already

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On your email, social ads can be very cost effective when done right. Google ads are another option because people are searching Google every day Google Ads display your information at the top of search results based on keywords and location. These ads are pay per click or PPC. So you only pay when people click on your ad. When you’re first getting started, we suggest you set aside $100 To help you test into what paid ads can do for you. You’ll want to test to see what works and what doesn’t. Once you get your feet wet, you can invest more money on ads to bring more audiences. But again, you’ll want to focus on the basics. First, have that site, have your social presence flushed out, have a plan to respond, have email marketing setup, and claim your listings and update them. Let’s pull it all together. Now that you have a better sense of how people are using online sources to find services offered by your nonprofit organization, you’ll need to position yourself for success. How do you bring it all together to drive new and sustained engagement? The reality is if you’re not top of mind, people likely forget about your organization. And that can cause you to lose ground and building and sustaining a foundation of support. So let’s see how this all comes together. The first step is to connect. It’s all about getting people to your door or mobile responsive website. You know now that happens through word of mouth referrals, searches online, paid advertising, mobile searches on apps, and through listing sites experience or ever your prospective audience are engaging with you, you should provide a positive experience and that in my experience comes easily with nonprofits. That’s often as simple as making sure people are finding answers to your questions that you’re responding and engaging people and are genuinely being helpful entice at this stage is when somebody’s feeling good about your work, and it’s time to entice them to stay in touch with you. This could mean following you on social channels or even better joining your mailing list, engage, engage. Next, your job is to engage with these people who have opted in to connect with you on a regular basis. This engagement is at the heart of the relationship between the nonprofit and its constituents. Engagement keeps you top of mind and put you on a path to creating loyalty referrals, contributions of time and money and increased exposure of your work. Simply engagement creates more awareness for your organization and brings more people to your digital door and eventual front door. When your connections engage with you on social media for read your emails, or share your content with their contacts. Those interactions create those interactions create more visibility for your organization. In turn, this engagement brings new people to your organization and feeds into the way people find your organization in the first place. So now let’s put it into action. Let’s review what we’ve talked about. Firstly, create a mobile responsive website as a resource for potential clients, participants, volunteers and donors. If it’s a resource for your audience, people will share it. The content you create is what people search for consume and share. By answering questions and creating content that’s helpful you increase the chances of people finding you through search, consuming the information you provide and sharing those resources whether connections, email, offer a promotion, or exclusive content to entice people to join your email list. Then you’ll have a way to follow up and encourage people to interact with the organization. And remember and remember, your contacts and your content are yours

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when it comes to email once you get their email address. Email marketing allows you to build more meaningful constituent relationships because people have opted in to receive information from you. They’re more engaged with your organization’s work than the typical social media follower. provide those subscribers with perks and information that they won’t receive other places. Email can also drive action on your social channels. Just make sure you follow those best practices.

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When it comes to social social works best when you’re not just asking people to give you money for your cause. Use social to generate awareness, educate your community and drive action. Ultimately try to get social followers to take the next steps by visiting your website and joining your email list.

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With listings and reviews, make sure to say thanks when a constituent takes time to say positive things about your organization. Also be sure to attend a negative reviews as well. People are looking to see how you’ll respond. Sometimes the feedback is legitimate. Sometimes it’s not respond professionally to see if you can rectify the issue. People watching can tell if someone’s being unreasonable. Amplify all your efforts with paid advertising. Once your fundamentals are in place, you can drive traffic to your website, expose your organization to more people collect more email addresses to grow your overall audience.

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But how do you know it’s working? Well, what are the simple things you can track to see what’s working? The key thing here is to pay attention to the things that are meaningful for your organization. Are they joining your email lists? Are they contacting you? Are they making donations? How long does it take to work from an organic perspective? You want to think in months but once you build that foundation and have strong relationships with your constituents, that timeframe shortens

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at this

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point I want to start to wrap up so we can get to the q&a. You can be successful at getting your nonprofit online if you’re not already, but you do need to be there when people are searching, provide information and answer their questions. You also want to engage with people to stay top of mind and build credibility by following some of the ideas I gave you here today, you’ll be able to see success from your online efforts, you have the foundations in place, it will be able to execute on the things we’ve talked about. I do want to share a bit about Constant Contact. Constant Contact is built to simplify the confusing task of marketing an idea and constant contact we can help bring your ideas to life Constant Contact has all the tools and tips you need to get your online marketing and track whether that’s creating a great looking email campaign with welcome emails, lists join tools and automation easily building an awesome website with all the essentials we talked about running Google, Facebook, or Instagram ads to get more website traffic, finding new customers on social media or building your email marketing list. You can even manage your social media making posts replying and viewing deep analytics. To help you make the right steps. You can create a beautiful logo for your organization if you haven’t or even for special events. You can even build an online store through constant contact promoting products and tracking inventory even across multiple digital storefronts. We’ve got all the tools, features and expert guidance you need to be successful in one place. Speaking of success with the power of constant contact and owner perfect we provide you the right tools for your nonprofit. Get all the tools you need to market your nonprofit with constant contact and DonorPerfect. Together they increase the reach of your donation campaign and help you stay top of mind with your supporters. You can start today and save as a nonprofit. You can prepay for your service and get a great discount, or sign up for 12 months and get 30% off visit Bitly slash d p underscore offer for more information. And with that, I’ll wrap up and thank you. I’d love to see you over in the q&a panel. That’s going to be in another room so make sure you leave this room. Go check out the question and answer for this session. I’ll see you there in just a second.