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So You Want to Market to Nonprofits? How to Find Them

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There are 1.8 million tax-exempt organizations in the United States alone, from Harvard University to your local homeless shelter.  This is a huge market that many businesses don’t know how to tap.

Do you want to sell your services or products to nonprofit organizations?  First you have to find them.  Here are a few tips on how.

  1. In your local community, find a few organizations doing work you admire. Reach out to them via social media by retweeting or sharing their content.  Attend their events.  For that matter, sponsor their events.  Ask for an informational interview with the Executive Director, and if you really want to build a long-lasting relationship, volunteer!
  2. Seek out organizations that serve the nonprofit community.  The Association of Fundraising Professionals is one. State associations like the Massachusetts Nonprofit Network are good too. Go to their conferences and meet their constituency: it could be the audience you’re trying to reach. Let them know where they can find you online. Share useful information written in a way that speaks their language.
  3. Read nonprofit journals, like The Nonprofit Quarterly or more specialized publications like the Chronicle of Philanthropy. See what their readers are interested in and make those a centerpiece of your social media presence.

I also recommend becoming active in LinkedIn groups such as Social Media for Nonprofit Organizations. You can learn a lot by listening to conversations in these groups and build your own presence by genuinely getting involved.

Nonprofits, what other advice would you give to vendors who want your business?

Is Your Audience Hungry? How to Produce Great Content

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They like you.  They really like you.  Now what?

Let’s say you’ve worked patiently to attract an audience on your blog, Facebook page, Twitter feed, etc., and you’ve succeeded.  Congratulations.

Now, you’d like to keep on sharing great content with your followers.  That’s what brings them back, hungry for more.  But you have only so many hours in the day.  How do you feed them every day?

Here are some great resources on creating content that satisfies. Content can be:

  • Visual.  Small Screen Producer advises you on how to use photos and videos.
  • Curated.  You don’t have to create everything you post.  Content Marketing Institute points you toward 6 Strategies to Add Value With Your Own Commentary.
  • Generated by your followers.  Edelman Digital gives you Five Ways to Obtain Rich User-Generated Content.
  • Quick–if you’re prepared. ProBlogger tells you how to combine quantity and quality.
  • Translated from business for a nonprofit audience.  (That’s one of my specialties.  If you’d like to know more, look for the hashtage #ispeaknonprofit on Twitter.)

How do YOU sate your audience’s content craving?

How Do You Say That in Nonprofit? 3 More Translations

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Nonprofits can find a lot of good advice about communications on the web–but we have to translate it from business-speak before we can use it.

I hope you enjoyed my previous post, “How Do You Say That in Nonprofit? 13 Translations.” and the sage advice in the comments section.  Here are three more translations–because I Speak Nonprofit!

  1. Landing page: Not the home page of your website, but the page you send people to when they want to do something specific: join a campaign, download a document, sign up for a class, register for an event.  Here are some examples.
  2. Marketing automation: Despite the cold name, this can be a hot way to nurture relationships with new contacts.  Using software, you automatically send messages keyed to the contact’s interests, typically at set intervals after he or she signs up.  Why? To speed them through the cycle of becoming your loyal supporter.  You can use tools you already have: that will cost time instead of money.
  3. Social media automation: When you try to keep up with social media, do you feel overwhelmed?  Using tools like Hootsuite to pre-schedule your posts will let you spend your “live” time on social media actually having conversations with the people you want to attract. 

What are some other communications terms you’d really like to understand?

 

 

 

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