Nonprofit Content Marketing: The Ultimate Guide

“Nonprofit content marketing” is a far-reaching term that encompasses all of the written and multimedia assets you put into the world in an effort to educate your stakeholders and activate them in service of your mission. This content can include social media, blogs, emails, videos, case studies, white papers, infographics and so much more. While investing in content marketing may not seem as critical as, say, your annual fundraising campaign, high-quality, consistent content is essential to the success of today’s nonprofit organizations. That’s because of the way stakeholder behavior has changed in recent years. Your donors, program participants, funders, supporters and even prospective employees increasingly expect to be able to spend time learning about your nonprofit online before they ever come in contact with you personally, and they expect that the content you make available to help them through that educational journey will be engaging and high quality. 

Nonprofits are, of course, taking notice. In fact, research from the Content Marketing Institute found that almost all — 92 percent — of nonprofits use content marketing in some way. However, only about a quarter of those organizations said they had a documented content strategy or felt like they used content marketing effectively.

While nonprofit content marketing is, most simply put, the culmination of the tactics you use to put information in front of your audiences, there absolutely must be a clear content strategy behind everything you create and promote. That strategy should not be just a laundry list of the content marketing channels your organization will use. It should clearly outline the themes and topics you want to own in the minds of your audiences, the best tactics and messages to reach your target stakeholders, and exactly how each tactic aligns with your overall marketing goals and your organization’s big picture strategic goals.

A good nonprofit content marketing strategy can help your organization increase general awareness, appear closer to the top of search engine results and ultimately attract more donors, volunteers and other supporters. It can also help more people who could benefit from your programs and services find and access them. An excellent nonprofit content marketing strategy will ensure your stakeholders can engage with your organization on a deeper level and drive them to take action that will advance your mission.

If you’re ready to take your nonprofit content marketing strategy to the next level, this is the post for you. We’ll cover why you need a nonprofit content marketing strategy, what you should include in your strategy, how to establish content themes, how to choose content channels, and how to measure the success of content marketing for your nonprofit.

Why you need a content marketing strategy

Yes, you can put content into the world without a clear strategy or established brand voice, but it’s likely to fall flat. With a cohesive, goal-oriented nonprofit content marketing strategy, your content and communications efforts are much more likely to directly impact your marketing goals and the goals established in your nonprofit’s strategic plan.

A content marketing strategy is also one of the best ways to make sure you’re effectively utilizing the time and talents of your nonprofit’s marketing and communications team. An effective nonprofit content marketing strategy will ensure that you have the right people creating the right types of content at the right time, rather than simply keeping everyone busy developing a lot of “stuff.”

What you should include in your nonprofit content marketing strategy

While you’ll undoubtedly want to customize your content marketing strategy based on your nonprofit’s needs and team structure, there are a few essential elements every nonprofit content marketing strategy should include. They are:

• Content marketing goals
• Key messages
• Content positioning
• Content themes
• Target stakeholder information
• Content channels
• Measurement practices

In the following sections, we’ve included tips for developing each of these elements of your nonprofit content marketing strategy.

How to develop a content marketing strategy for your nonprofit

Step One: Establish nonprofit content marketing goals (or objectives and key results)

Every content marketing strategy should address an essential question: why are we investing time and energy into creating and promoting content for our nonprofit? The answer should come in the form of clearly outlined content marketing goals. To develop yours, consider this cascade:

• First, study the goals laid out in your nonprofit’s strategic plan.
• Then, ask how do those goals carry through to the goals in your marketing plan? If there isn’t a clear line between the two, you might want to spend more time on your general marketing strategy before developing a content marketing strategy.
• Finally, aim to develop nonprofit content marketing goals that have a direct connection to the goals in your general marketing plan, and thus the goals in your strategic plan.

In an ideal world, your content goals will be time-bound and measurable. That’s why, rather than using simple goal statements, we suggest using the same objectives and key results model we use across all our strategic planning and marketing planning activities.

Step Two: Develop or revisit your key messages

Every nonprofit needs a key message framework to guide all communications, and this includes content marketing. If you don’t already have a key message framework, you can learn more about developing one here.

Step Three: Figure out your content positioning and themes

Next, reflecting on your key messages, work to establish what we call a content positioning statement that describes big idea you want to own for your audiences. This should be a brief, 1-2 sentence statement that articulates the “point” of your communications. For example, the content positioning statement for a nonprofit that hosts creative writing workshops for students in Chicago might be something like: “we have a deep appreciation of the ways creative writing can unlock the potential of young people and are dedicated to exposing more kids and families to its power.” A content positioning statement like this one will keep your team focused on the “why” behind its content and serve as a north star once content creation begins.

Once you’ve established your content positioning statement, you should identify the themes that will help you convey it. Ideally, these themes will also relate back to the pillars of your marketing plan and your strategic plan. For example, the creative writing nonprofit might establish themes such as:

• Analysis of data about student challenges in Chicago
• Creative prompts for students, teachers and parents
• Published creative works by the students themselves
• Stories about students whose creative writing have had a positive effect on their lives and their communities
• Inspirational ideas about the power of creativity

Step Four: Determine your content tone

It’s critical to clearly define the tone you want your content to take, especially if you are going to have multiple people writing and creating assets. What are the feelings you want to evoke when your audiences come in contact with your organization’s content? Energized? Empowered? Empathetic? Maybe you want them to feel fired up and ready to create change along with you. Maybe you want them to feel hopeful about the solutions you present to challenges in your community and encouraged to join a movement that you’re part of. These nuances should be clearly identified and codified with specific examples in your nonprofit content marketing strategy. Your voice and tone will need to be carried through every single one of your content channels by everyone who writes and creates assets for them.

Step Five: Include details on your target audiences

When developing your overall organizational strategy and/or your marketing strategy, you should have developed target stakeholder profiles or descriptions of your audiences for your organization to use. These profiles are most often personified descriptions of the “average” person in a specific stakeholder group — informed by research — and they help you and your team understand that group’s demographics, psychographics and communication preferences. When they’re used in a nonprofit content marketing strategy, these stakeholder profiles should be viewed as describing the target audiences for your content.

For your nonprofit content marketing strategy specifically, you should document:

• Each stakeholder’s “primary driver,” or the biggest reason why they’d get involved with your organization
• The communications channels that are most effective for reaching this stakeholder
• The messages or themes that will resonate with them most on each platform and at each stage in their relationship with your organization

For example, if you’re seeking to influence lawmakers, you may leverage an op-ed or open letter about why the community you serve needs their attention. In this piece, you may discuss the economic or overall community benefits of supporting policy that impacts the people you serve and share statistics that highlight those benefits. For another piece intended to educate donors about what you do or your focus area, you’ll likely communicate the needs of your communities and how you serve them in a different way, perhaps with more personal stories. You should document all of these nuances and preferences in your nonprofit content marketing strategy.

Step Six: Choose your channels and tactics

Now, it’s finally time to choose your content marketing channels and tactics based on stakeholder preferences and content marketing goals. High-level content marketing goals include raising awareness, increasing engagement and encouraging action across audiences. In this chart, we’ve outlined some of the most common channels and tactics to achieve each of these goals:

As you select your content channels and tactics for each of your audiences, messages and themes, don’t forget to consider specific campaign goals and how the information shared on each of those channels can complement the others. For example, upon release of a research report or a white paper, you should consider how that information can be shared on social media, in newsletters and in direct mailings.

Depending on the organizational or marketing goal your organization aims to achieve through content marketing, like recruiting more volunteers or donors or building a pipeline of talent, leveraging content for inbound marketing can be impactful. Inbound marketing is the method of using forms to capture information in exchange for content the reader finds valuable. It’s most commonly used when sharing thought leadership or proprietary content like research reports, white papers or e-books. Once a reader provides their contact information to receive your content, you can continue to communicate with them and engage them through email or other channels.

Step Seven: Establish measurement practices

Ultimately, the effectiveness and overall impact of your content marketing strategy should be constantly measured. We recommend including a OKR dashboard in your content marketing strategy that is consistently updated and accessible by everyone on your team. This dashboard should include a set of metrics that is based on your objectives. While these metrics will vary greatly based on the objectives you set, they could include things like social media engagement, whitepaper or e-book downloads, website visits and email engagement rates. Then, make sure you’re tracking your OKRs closely so that you’ll be able to take notice when something isn’t working and needs to change (or when something is working great and deserves more investment).

Is your nonprofit committed to content marketing?

We’d love to hear about your successes, challenges and learnings in the comments!