Digital Marketing for Charities 2015

A review of the latest digital marketing approaches for charities and not-for-profits

Digital marketing is now a core communications method for Charities and Not-for-Profit organisations (NfPs). Charity websites give a great platform as a vital communications channel to inspire and engage people, raise funds, provoke discussion and explain the benefits and use of services provided through fundraising.

Trends in digital marketing  for charities?

The future direction of Digital Marketing for charities was discussed by Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights at a recent keynote delivered to the Comms Rewired conference organized by The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO) - the membership organisation for Scotland’s charities, voluntary organisations and social enterprises.

[slideshare id=39786189&doc=digital-marketing-trends-for-nfp-davechaffey-scvo-141002024327-phpapp01]

You can see in the Slideshare that Dave reviewed examples of how charities are using digital communications across the Smart Insights RACE planning framework. Dave recommended that content marketing should be a the heart of charity marketing. As our Inbound marketing blueprint suggests, this requires these 6 key actions Dave described in the workshop:

• 1. Create personas to define audience content needs.
• 2. Develop a content marketing strategy to define the most relevant evergreen and news content that meets persona needs and business audience objectives - we ran an activity in the workshop based around the content marketing matrix to help with this. Put in place the agency or in-house resources to produce high quality, shareable content to feed the content marketing machine.
• 3. Create a blog or charity news section as a content marketing hub. An open source blog platform like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal is preferred by most charities.
• 4. Publish to a regular, agreed schedule based on your editorial calendar  and seed content to influencers and share to social media to boost reach from advocates.
• 5. Develop the right signposts and calls-to-action to engage blog readers that meet your campaigning goals.
• 6. Use Google Analytics and testing tools to Test, Learn and refine your approach through techniques like backwards and forward path analysis.

Content marketing Blueprint

Lucy Conlan, a charity digital marketing specialist has developed these guides giving more detailed recommendations and examples of best practice to inspire your approach:

• Charity website design
• Email marketing for charities
• Social media marketing for charities