15 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Indian NGOs During COVID 19
In this period of COVID 19 pandemic, your nonprofit organization is hit with the biggest financial challenge of all time. Having no money to operate, survive, and raise awareness for the cause you work, it seems impossible for you to compete and thrive in a world of bigger, louder, and more financially equipped competitors. In this pandemic, your donor’s income has substantially gone down. They don’t have money whether they are businessmen or salaried employees. Another challenge that your NGO is facing is that you can’t meet your donors personally or can organize any of the fundraising traditional activities.
The financial challenges that your NGO is facing sound momentous. and as such digital marketing has become an essential tool for your nonprofit organization. Today NGOs of varying sizes can survive and grow by capitalizing on technology. Digital Marketing has become a reliable means for nonprofit organizations like you. By Digital marketing you can increase your brand awareness; builds global reach and track your results. It is more cost-effective than traditional marketing tactics. You can use email marketing, social media, and other inexpensive ways to resonate with potential donors. Thus implementing digital marketing strategies in your organization is essential for its growth. In this article, we are going to look at how non-profit organizations can do digital marketing successfully?
Build a Robust Digital Marketing Plan for your NGO
Making a perfect digital marketing strategy for your nonprofits organizations is the first digital activity that you should do. Digital Marketing activities are very crucial for your sustainable fundraising system. We are going to discuss various steps that will help you in generating an Effective Digital Marketing Plan for fundraising. You should know your goal before directly jumping into the digital marketing strategy. You have to always do background research and know your goal, this will help you to systematically start working on its achievement. These are a few pointers that need to be considered while making a Digital Marketing Plan for your NGO:
»What does your NGO want to achieve?
»What is your current digital marketing strategy?
»Who are the competitors NGOs and what are their digital activities?
»What are the digital platforms you are concentrating on?
»Who should be your ideal donors and where are they digitally available?
Build A Responsive Website for Your NGO
Around the globe, NGOs invest both time and money in developing their websites. But while building the website for your NGOs you need to keep in mind that an effectively designed website will be great for collecting donations, engaging supporters, and increasing awareness for your NGO and the cause for which it works. Almost all the NGOs have limited budgets for their activities, but a strong online presence of your NGO is the most suitable cost-effective and efficient way to spread your mission and raise funds for it.
Develop A Blogging Platform for Your Non-Profit Organisation
Your NGO should craft compelling stories as a blog post and engage with its audience and prospective donors. Blogging is one of the most versatile digital marketing tools and your NGO should use blog posts as part of its content marketing strategy. Blogging provides a unique position to your NGO to leverage its efforts by sharing engaging stories that will speak directly to your target audience and donors about your mission and cause for which you work, without relying on outside agencies to help spread the word for you.
Set Up Google Analytics in your NGO website
We recommend making sure your site is equipped with Google Analytics (or Adobe Analytics if that’s more your style) and Google Search Console. Google Analytics and Google Search Console are both free – making them ideal tools for your nonprofit. In fact, this should happen before you start acting on any marketing tactics.
Google Search Console Setup in NGO’s Website for Search Engine Performance Tracking
GSC (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) is a free platform for anyone with a website to monitor how Google views their site and optimize its organic presence. That includes viewing your referring domains, mobile site performance, rich search results, and highest-traffic queries and pages. Thus setup of Google Search Console in your NGO website for search engine performance tracking is a must recommended tool.
Build your NGOs Local Presence through Google My Business (GMB)
Setting up a local presence through Google My Business (GMB) is a great (and free) way to engage with people who use your services, as well as donors and volunteers.
Explore Pay-Per-Click Advertising for a quick turnaround result in the NGOs Fundraising Program
PPC advertising is a crucial tool for you to drive user engagement, increase donations, and build brand recognition. PPC will allow your nonprofit to target potential donors, volunteers, or advocates while they browse search engine results, explore a website, or watch a video. Best of all, non-profit businesses are eligible for the Google Ads Grants program. Benefits of Using PPC Advertising are.
»Quick Results
»Measurable Results
»Neither dependency on Google Algorithmic changes nor on SEO.
»Crack Business opportunities.
»Visibbrity and brand recognition
»Outreach to the exact audience
»Doors opened to local customers
»Affordable Budget
»A great tool to test marketing strategies for other platforms
»Rich in Functionbraty and
»Easy to report
Have a Strong Presence in Social Media Like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn
Facebook with about 2.6 billion monthly active users worldwide, is one of the most popular platforms, not only for personal use but for business as well. For businesses, Facebook is a place to share photos, updates, and general news with those who follow or “like” you. Followers of your NGO come to your Facebook page to find out what’s going on in your company see pictures of events, products and explore future events and products. Your Nonprofit organization can best use Facebook for showcasing their activities and keep people engaged and active towards the propagation of their cause and mission.
Twitter is a fast-paced, concise, and easy way to connect with your audience. There are 330 million monthly active users and 145 million daily active users on Twitter. Twitter is a sea of information of 280 characters or less content waiting to be read, clicked, followed, and re-tweeted. Twitter is one of the best platforms for your NGO to propagate its cause and keep its donors informed about the activities for which they have donated.
LinkedIn is different from the rest of the social media outlets because it’s specifically designed for business and professionals. Users mainly go to LinkedIn to showcase their job experience and professional thoughts, making it one of the more important platforms to use for those in B2B. Your NGO can best utilize the platform of Linkedin by posting articles and posts which can create debate on the issues on which they want the people to become aware.
Instagram is more than just a mobile photo and video sharing social network, it provides a perfect opportunity for businesses to reveal insights into the core of their brand identity in a visual, creative and engaging way. Instagram is the fastest-growing of the big social media platforms, with 1 billion users, more than 200 million+ active business profiles and two million advertisers. Instagram can help your NGO to post the photographs of your activities and also those photos which sensitize the people towards your cause and mission.
Regular Small Investment in Paid Social Media Advertisements
media ads can go a long way. Your nonprofit can use social media to create targeted ads based on your prospect’s demographic. You can even localize posts to have the biggest reach within a designated community. Before investing some of your nonprofits marketing Rupee into social media take some time to review your organization’s Google Analytics account to see which social media profiles are delivering the highest conversion rates. If you are not tracking conversions, then your nonprofit should set up goals in your analytics profile. Here are a few key benefits of social media advertising:
»Social ads can be used for market research.
» Segment your audience and ad copy by demographics.
» Increase your organization’s traffic and leads quickly.
» Boost or promote your organization’s top-performing organic content.
» Easy access to social media analytics.
» Options for minimal investment.
Display Donate Button Prominently in All Digital Platforms like NGO’s website and Facebook
Facebook recently released a feature to allow nonprofit organizations to add a “donate” button to their organization profiles. Adding this CTA to your nonprofits page creates a great fundraising enticement and can drive in new donor prospects for your brand. The process of applying for this feature could not be easier. There are a few requirements that you must meet to be eligible.
Plan Your Digital Calendar for Content, Donor & Marketing Activities
The audience, competitive, and keyword research you’ve performed is about to have a big payoff. Rather than guessing what content will resonate with your target audiences, you have data to drive your content strategy. You know what message resonates with your audiences, how competitors are positioning these messages, and the keywords that they’re typing to find this content. But the most important point is that how do you keep all this great information and all the ideas that will inspire your organization? You can do it by creating a marketing calendar.
Engage Your Audience Through Segmented and Personalized Mailers
Taking the time to analyze and segment your nonprofit’s email lists can lead to higher open rates, more clicks and less unsubscribes. Segmenting your lists also can create a more personalized experience for your target prospects. Personalization leads to higher campaign success rates. On average, emails that are personalized to a prospect receive 41 percent higher click-through rates and boost open rates to 29 percent. Segmenting your email lists does not have to be challenging. Here are a few ways to segment your lists today to get better campaign results:
»Ask your audience how often they want to hear from you and segment by communication preference.
»Segment by volunteer or donation patterns.
»Create a nurture campaign to segment leads that have gone cold or do not yet meet qualifying criteria.
»Segment by email campaign engagement (clicks, opens).
»Segment by content that visitors are most interested in based on specific web visit patterns.
»Segment by prospect location (localize email content to create more engagement).
Collection of Testimonials from Donors, Volunteers, and Beneficiaries that Tell Stories
One of the best ways to encourage people to act – whether to buy something online or to donate time or money to your NGO great cause – is through identifying with others. User-generated content and people telling their stories will increase micro goal completions, remove barriers towards completing end results, and facilitate a quicker buying cycle. This becomes even more compelling in the remit of non-profit situations, although in part due to the very personal reasons that can drive people to donate, act, and get involved in charitable operations.
Perform Search Engine Optimization to build Organic Traffic to your NGO website
Optimizing your website and its content for search engines allows people to discover your organization when they search online for relevant queries. SEO for nonprofits is practically the same as SEO for any other organization, except that local-focused nonprofits should double-down on their local SEO efforts.
Your ultimate SEO goal is to appear in the top three Google search results for search queries relevant to your cause or brand name. You want to aim for the first three Google results because they get 75.1% of all clicks, with the first result getting an average click-through rate of 31.7%, which is 10x more likely to receive a click compared to a page in the tenth position.
Without proper SEO, websites generally struggle to get discovered unless somebody searches with a site-specific or branded query. But a full-throttle SEO campaign is resource-intense and never-ending. Instead of tackling all 200 ranking factors, I suggest you focus on the following eight areas of improvement. These tasks are among the most important ranking factors and can significantly improve your website’s chances of ranking well:
»Secure your site with HTTPS
»Make your site mobile-friendly
»Improve page load speed
»Produce quality content
»Include the correct schema markup
»Promote your site on social platforms
»Establish a strong local SEO strategy
»Earn quality backlinks
Build your Youtube Channel for Video Marketing
With video ruling the digital sphere, having some strong video campaigns can make a world of a difference.
Not only is video good as a permanent post on your home page or as a vlog, but you can also use them in direct marketing initiatives. Using video in your emails can double or triple click-through rates, boosting landing page conversion rates by 80%. Just including the word ‘video’ in a subject line improves email opening rates by 19%.
The example from the Rainforest Alliance is an example of a campaign that still tops the lists of best charity campaigns 7 years later due to its humor and simple messaging.
The most important thing to remember when creating videos is to inspire emotion in viewers by using strong imagery. After all, close to 60% of people who watch non-profit videos go on to make a donation.
How is Muniwar Technologies best suited for Non-Profit Organisations?
As a digital marketing agency for NGOs, Munawar has helped Non-Government Organisations, to be digitally active through responsive websites, social media, and other digital platforms. Our efforts have increased awareness for all the organizations with which we have worked, and thus helping them create Digital presence.
At Muniwar, we know that powerful stories can inspire change. And we are committed to telling your story to your target audience and potential donors through digital platforms to the world.
Benefits to the NGOs by using Digital Marketing Services by Muniwar Technologies
Truth is, a non-profit organization also reaps the same benefits from incorporating a digital marketing strategy as a profit organization. Some of the benefits of Digital Marketing for Non-profit organization are:
»Low-Cost Method of Promoting the Organization’s Objectives
»The Non-Profit Group Becomes Available 24/7
»Measure Performance in Real-Time
»Adapt to Changes in Consumer Behavior
»Time to market is faster, and the pool of prospects is based more on expressing interest than on your best guesses.
In fact, few organizations have benefited from the shift to digital media quite like nonprofits. They save thousands on mail costs, and unlike telemarketers and volunteers, their websites can promote their causes all day, every day,