During uncertain economic times, nonprofits like yours must shore up your resources and identify strategies to bolster financial stability. One of the best things you can invest in is your relationship with your donors, and the best way to secure long-lasting donor support is to capture and maintain their trust.
Of course, trust takes time to build up, and requires a consistent marketing plan. With a cohesive messaging strategy enhanced by compelling tactics like storytelling, you can cement your nonprofit in supporters’ minds and ensure they associate your organization with reliability and impact.
This guide explores nonprofit messaging and marketing approaches that will help you generate trust and build strong relationships.
Share true, emotional stories.
Emotional stories inspire action in a way that facts alone can’t. By incorporating storytelling strategies into your marketing materials, you can raise more during your fundraisers, build supporter relationships and demonstrate your nonprofit’s impact.
However, when it comes to storytelling, strong emotions and good writing aren’t the only factors to consider. To maintain your supporters’ and beneficiaries’ trust, you should aspire to be an ethical storyteller. A few principles to keep in mind when crafting stories include:
- Consider who you interview. The first step of nonprofit storytelling is deciding whose story you’ll tell. Will you focus on a supporter, staff member, or beneficiary? While the people involved with your mission aren’t a monolith, you can only tell so many stories. This means carefully weighing what experiences you choose to present to your supporters, as your stories will impact how wider audiences view your community.
- Maintain plot accuracy. Part of constructing a story is editing. This means after a long interview, you will need to choose what parts to summarize, what direct quotes to share and what to exclude. Avoid inventing details, such as making up quotes, creating composite characters, exaggerating situations or merging multiple people’s experiences into one narrative.
- Prioritize safety. Some types of nonprofits will need to consider their interviewees’ privacy and safety when constructing their stories. For example, a nonprofit that provides mental health services may need to use pseudonyms or omit identifying information to protect beneficiaries’ identities.
- Ensure the stories you tell are strength based and depict people the way they want to be represented. The best way to do this is to ask the subjects of your stories to review, edit and ultimately approve them before they are published.
Additionally, be sure to obtain informed consent from all participants before conducting interviews, which involves explaining the purpose of the interview and how you plan to use any details provided.
While many donors are moved to give based on emotions, some also need hard facts and evidence to justify their support. Communicate the effects of your work by presenting your nonprofit’s work truthfully and in an easy-to-understand format.
By continually showcasing your impact, you present your nonprofit as an active organization that responsibly uses donors’ gifts. To inspire trust, highlight your impact by:
- Sharing statistics. Bold statistics simultaneously intrigue potential audiences and demonstrate your nonprofit’s commitment to research. Conduct your own studies, review work done by others in your field, and share scientific reports to educate your audience. Additionally, you can practice data-driven donor stewardship by customizing your thank-you messages and impact updates to align with donors’ interests and acknowledge past support.
- Using visuals. When it comes to showing impact online, photos and videos grab attention and provide evidence of your nonprofit’s work. Film your volunteers at work, take pictures of beneficiaries, and share full recorded interviews with various community members (again, with their consent).
- Creating thorough annual reports. Annual reports provide an opportunity to dive deep into your nonprofit’s impact. Many nonprofits create multiple annual reports catered to different audiences. For example, you might create a short version that provides the year’s highlights and send it to all supporters via direct mail, post a full digital PDF on your website, and develop a technical variant that goes over all of your data so supporters interested in raw numbers can draw conclusions. We are also big advocates for creating reports that are intended not just for your donors and supporters, but also for your constituents and beneficiaries. After all, they are the stakeholders your nonprofit ultimately exists to serve.
One word of warning: while many nonprofits have adopted AI tools to aid in their marketing efforts, be very cautious when using generative tools in your research-gathering efforts. AI has evolved rapidly in the past few years, but many popular platforms are still guilty of inventing facts (a phenomenon known as “AI hallucinations”) or retrieving accurate statistics from the internet but misinterpreting them.
Maintain your audience’s trust by ensuring all facts and statistics your nonprofit presents are verified by a human subject matter expert.
Leverage social proof.
Who are you more likely to trust: a close friend you’ve known for several years or an organization you’ve never heard of before? If you said the former, then your views align with approximately 88% of consumers who trust recommendations from people they know above all other sources.
For nonprofits, this means a key way to earn trust is to leverage their current audience who already trusts them to create social proof. Allegiance Group + Pursuant’s digital marketing for nonprofits guide defines social proof as “the phenomenon that occurs when an individual looks to the behavior of others when making a decision. Leverage this concept by highlighting the tangible impact of your nonprofit to show new donors that you have a large audience of other supporters and that your work has an impact.”
In other words, new donors are more likely to support your nonprofit if they see you already have a committed audience. You can leverage social proof by:
- Launching a peer-to-peer campaign. Peer-to-peer campaigns involve asking your supporters to fundraise on your behalf by securing donations from their friends and family. This strategy ultimately provides prospective donors personalized messaging about why they should support your nonprofit.
- Asking for donor testimonials. Ask donors to share why they believe in your cause and support your nonprofit. You can use these testimonials in marketing materials or jumpstart word-of-mouth marketing by asking supporters to share them on their social media accounts and link to your nonprofit’s profile or website.
- Sharing facts about your donor base. Provide statistics about the size of your donor base, such as how much your supporters collectively gave in a previous year. If a prospective donor hears that many other donors already trust your nonprofit, they are more likely to as well.
You can continually generate positive word-of-mouth and build trust by providing a strong donor experience. This means the more impactful and reliable your nonprofit is, the easier time you will have generating social proof.
Maintain consistent branding.
People tend to trust or at least feel more comfortable with brands they are already familiar with. When supporters see a logo from a nonprofit they recognize, they will likely be receptive to the organization’s messages and begin their interaction with some level of trust already in place.
To achieve this for your nonprofit, you need to build brand awareness by maintaining consistent branding across all communications. As Kwala’s guide to nonprofit branding explains, a strong brand can help spread awareness about your cause, increase donations, encourage repeated support, and unify your marketing efforts. Here are the three main types of style guides your nonprofit should consider creating:
- Cheat sheets are short, one or two-page documents that provide a high-level overview of your brand basics, such as your logo, typeface, and color palette and basic key messages.
- Style guides vary in length but are a happy medium between cheat sheets and brand books by providing examples and explanations of various brand choices but without getting into details.
- Brand books provide precise specifics about every aspect of your nonprofit’s branding, and it’s not uncommon for these style guides to be ~100 pages or even longer. However, this length allows you to explore branding-related edge cases and can serve as your go-to source of truth for any style questions. Remember that you’ll need to update this resource any time you complete a brand refresh or full rebrand.
These types of style guides can help you maintain cohesion across different marketing materials, presenting your nonprofit as a professional, trustworthy organization. This also helps you maintain visual consistency across different media.
Marketing and messaging directly impact how supporters view your nonprofit’s brand. Strong marketing that presents true stories and facts, showcases your nonprofit’s brand, and highlights the stakeholders who already trusts you are all critical elements of building a trusted and effective nonprofit.
