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Creating a Strong Digital Content Strategy for Your Nonprofit

By Alyssa Conrardy

Picture this: 

  • Jasmine, a woman who is very passionate about animal welfare, sees a local animal shelter’s posts on her Instagram Explore page. 
  • She’s intrigued by the post and follows a link in the organization’s Instagram bio that leads to their website. 
  • She reads the nonprofit’s “About Us” page, looks at their list of upcoming events, and sees a call to action encouraging donations to the organization’s annual fund. 
  • She signs up for their email newsletter. 
  • And after receiving emails for a few weeks, Jasmine donates! 

That is the magic of content strategy—your secret weapon to attracting new audience members and converting them into dedicated supporters.

With a strong digital content strategy in place, you too can connect with individuals who are interested in your cause and are eager to assist you in driving greater impact for your beneficiaries. 

But how can you create a winning digital content strategy? In this post, we’ll walk you through three best practices you can employ, whether you’re hoping to beef up your presence on social media, send more attention-grabbing emails, emulate your favorite nonprofit websites, or do all this and more! Let’s begin. 

1. Understand your audience.

A strong digital content strategy is rooted in a full understanding of your audience and their needs, interests, and preferences. While you likely already have a good idea of who your audience is when it comes to marketing, you should take the time to solidify your knowledge ahead of designing your strategy: 

  • Review your supporter data. Use your constituent relationship management (CRM) system to review the data you’ve collected about your supporters, including their giving and involvement histories, demographics, communication preferences, employer information (so you can promote matching gift opportunities), and any affiliations with organizations similar to yours. If you find gaps or inaccuracies in your data, consider investing in data appending services to ensure you have high-quality information to reference.  
  • Analyze previous marketing efforts. There’s no need to wonder about how previous digital content and marketing campaigns have been received—turn to the data! Which campaigns, channels, and tactics have been most successful? Which have been least successful? These answers will give you a better idea of your audience’s preferences and motivations that can be harnessed in future campaigns. 
  • Create an audience persona. A persona is essentially a conglomerate of typical traits of your audience members. For instance, your audience persona might be a young mom in her mid-twenties who lives in the Midwest. She cares deeply about high-quality mental health support for at-risk youth, and she uses TikTok and Instagram regularly. With this persona as your guide, you start creating content that would appeal to this typical supporter. Depending on your nonprofit and the level of diversity among the supporters you hope to reach, you may need to create several different personas. Remember that personas are fictional representations of your supporters  intended to help you get into the audience’s frame of mind when developing content. They shouldn’t be used to overgeneralize or stereotype your audience.
  • Ask your supporters. The best content strategies are rooted in direct insights from your supporters about what sort of content they want to receive from your organization. That’s why it’s important to share power in the content strategy development process. 

Understanding your audience prepares you to meet them where they are as you create and share digital content. 

2. Select your channels.  

Next, it’s time to select the digital channels you’ll use to share your content with your audience. Using what you know about your audience and taking into consideration current marketing trends, you might select any or all of the following: 

  • Your organization’s website: Your website should be well-designed and feature intentional content, like a regularly updated blog, and easy-to-use tools and resources, landing page that align with audience interest areas and search terms, and a donation page. You should also ensure that your website is optimized for search engines so that when people search for terms related to your organization or cause, your website is visible in the search results. 
  • Various social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), TikTok, and LinkedIn popular social media platforms your organization might want to use to spread the word about its cause. Note that every social media platform has its own “genre” of content that you’ll need to familiarize yourself with. For instance, posts on X are limited to 280 characters while you can write as much as you want on Facebook. Be prepared to adapt your content to the requirements of the different platforms you use. 
  • Email: Email is a popular digital marketing tool that gets results. According to Hubspot, the return on investment (ROI) for email is extremely high, at $36 for every $1 spent. While your organization probably already sends solicitation emails at key times of year, such as Giving Tuesday, consider how email could be used to support the awareness and consideration phases of your supporters’ journeys, not just the action phase. How can email be used to educate your supporters about your organization and cause, so that when the occasional ask is made, it’s an easy sell?  

Every individual has different digital channels that they use and prefer. To ensure you’re placing your content strategically, consider choosing a target segment for each of your content channels, based on shared demographics.

For instance, those in an older demographic might prefer receiving your emails while those in a younger demographic might prefer to see videos about your cause on TikTok. While you may not send emails exclusively to your older audience members, you can write them with this demographic in mind, knowing that they’re likely to be the best represented among all groups that open and read your emails. 

3. Create compelling content. 

To create high-quality content that works well on your chosen channels and meets your audience’s needs, employ the following tips: 

  • Plan well in advance. To engage your audience with your content, you need to consistently create and share it. Create a content calendar that outlines ideas for new content and helps you keep your messaging and priorities consistent across channels. The more you can align content across channels, the more likely your message will be to get through to your audience.
  • Use your organization’s branding. Whether your brand has been the same for years or you’ve recently updated it, it’s important to include brand elements in your content so that your audience recognizes it as coming from your organization. Use elements like your logo, brand colors, typography, and more to ensure the content will feel familiar, trustworthy, and tied to your cause. 
  • Use high-quality visuals and multimedia. Give your content further flavor by incorporating visuals and multimedia. These might be engaging infographics, photos, image carousels, or videos. Cornershop Creative also recommends sharing before-and-after photos and recording video interviews with beneficiaries whose lives have been changed by your work. 
  • Encourage a two-way conversation. The most effective content strategies are those that prioritize community and discourse. For instance, you might make a point to respond to as many comments on your social media posts as possible, or provide a contact form at the bottom of your blog posts so readers can connect with your team to share insights or ask questions. 

4. Test and measure

As you create your digital content using your new content strategy, you may find it helpful to test some of it out before you share it. For example, you could ask a few dedicated volunteers to provide feedback on a series of planned Facebook posts or an email. Doing so will give you the chance to gauge how well your content will help you connect with your audience and give you the chance to make any changes before sharing it with the world. 

Then, once you begin implementing your content strategy, be sure to put a measurement framework in place so that you can evaluate the impact of your content. The exact objectives and key results you choose to measure will depend on your individual strategy. Many organizations we work with choose to measure metrics like website users, bounce rate, content engagement rate, and referral to action (donation, volunteering, advocacy action etc.) Tools like Google Analytics, social media analytics platforms, and your email marketing platform can provide great insights into metrics like email subscriber growth or engagement with your social media posts. Once you have a consistent measurement framework in place, you can make informed adjustments to your content strategy based on how various approaches are performing.

With a strong digital content strategy, you can more easily spread awareness of your cause and encourage passionate supporters to get involved with your work. Use the best practices above to begin building or refining your digital content strategy. 

You’ve got this!