Multichannel digital marketing keeps your organization on supporters’ minds, increasing the chances that they’ll stay engaged, donate, attend events, and volunteer. This strategy works best when your touchpoints occur in different places and at different times, meaning the old marketing maxim holds true—content is king.
Tried-and-true content ideas, such as newsletters, fundraising texts, social media shout-outs, and blog posts, certainly work for this purpose. However, even the best-run content strategy can grow stale in a time of high online competition.
In this guide, we’ll explore several newer and more unique content ideas that can help your nonprofit stand out to supporters.
- Video interview series
Video content catches attention, and using it to highlight the real people behind your mission can be a highly effective way to bring your organization’s work to life.
Consider shooting short interview series with constituents, donors, staff members, and community partners to create an engaging oral history of your nonprofit and its impact. You may be familiar with StoryCorps—use their work as inspiration in developing your own unique interview and storytelling traditions!
You might structure your interviews as traditional sit-down Q&A sessions or leave them more open-ended so interview subjects can speak freely about their experiences. Note that editing and finalizing the videos may take extra time. However, once you upload them to your website and social media feeds, they’ll be handy resources you can expand upon and reuse to support your content marketing efforts well into the future.
No matter your approach, this content idea works because it taps into two key benefits: the engaging nature of video and the power of social proof to show broader audiences your active, thriving community.
- Interactive infographics and brochures
Although more technically complex than static infographics, creating dynamic, interactive digital graphics will help you stand out and make a smart impression on your supporters and funders.
These can take several forms, like infographics that display key trends and information with animated effects, click-to-expand sections, and rich details, or full digital brochures or annual reports.
For small shops, easy-to-use design tools like Canva and Genially offer basic tools for creating dynamic designs. If you’re confident in your web design skills or have access to a designer, consider creating a dedicated web page to serve your needs. This example, National Geographic’s 2023 “Impact Snapshot,” strikes an accessible middle ground, combining striking web design with embedded videos for an engaging flow of information.
Plus, if your organization puts a lot of work into maintaining a robust database, especially an integrated system like Salesforce, these kinds of visualization techniques let all that valuable impact information, engagement records, and donation data pull its weight by helping to tell your story and engage audiences.
- Casual livestream events
Livestream events came into the nonprofit mainstream in recent years. During the height of pandemic lockdown restrictions, this method was often rolled out for larger-scale gatherings and celebrations like virtual gala experiences.
However, when using livestreams to enrich your content strategy, thinking smaller brings unique benefits. Livestreaming via free social media tools and focusing on subject matter that doesn’t require additional investment of your time or resources allows this format to really pack a punch. For example, you might livestream:
- Behind-the-scenes visits of your operations
- Q&A sessions with organization and program leaders
- Visits from experts to discuss the problems your mission addresses
- Announcements of mini-contest winners
Get creative to give audiences a reason to tune in, and let them know when it will be happening. Record your livestream events so that you can repurpose the footage later, and always make a quick fundraising appeal.
- Social media takeovers
This strategy has existed for a while now and still works well for many missions because of the various reasons discussed above—it’s free, engaging, and generates real social proof.
To pull off a social media takeover, follow these general steps:
- Think about which unique perspective on your work would be most engaging for social media audiences to see and identify who could provide it—a constituent, volunteer, etc.
- Recruit someone who can share their perspective and take the reins on your social media accounts.
- Work with your social media volunteer ahead of time to prepare and lay out a posting schedule. Provide them with any unique data or insights that you think they’d like to share or reflect on.
- Ask your volunteer to draft a few posts that highlight their unique stories and perspectives. Work with them to fine-tune the posts so that they’ll encourage maximum engagement from followers.
- Briefly promote the takeover ahead of time so that followers will understand what’s happening day of, then let your volunteer take control!
Creativity helps this content idea to shine. Even if an engaging approach doesn’t immediately come to mind for your mission, there’s likely a way to make it work. For instance, a resident cat or dog in an animal shelter could lead the takeover with prewritten posts.
This idea can also be combined with peer-to-peer fundraising to boost donations by tapping into supporters’ networks—just confirm that your tech can support peer-to-peer campaigns before diving in.
- Personalized newsletter options
Personalization can make a huge difference in the effectiveness of a content strategy. If you already run a newsletter to keep subscribers updated about your organization’s activities, upcoming events, and more, consider how you might make it even more tailored to your donors.
Here’s how this strategy works:
- Come up with a few variations of your newsletter (a reasonable number, just two to three). Each variation will be tailored to a specific segment of your subscribers—for example, donors, volunteers, constituents, or people interested in a particular program or aspect of your work.
- Consider how you’ll split subscribers into these groups. Use your CRM to automatically filter subscribers based on how they’ve engaged with your organization, or provide a self-reporting option for new subscribers to choose what kinds of updates they’d most like to receive.
- Then, on a monthly basis, create the different versions of your newsletter. You don’t need to draft them all from scratch—create a central newsletter that covers all your most important updates and announcements, then draft additional sections and stories tailored to each segment that you can swap out between versions each month.
Although extra work goes into this content strategy, it can pay off. It’s a relatively easy way to personalize the content that your organization delivers to subscribers, tailoring their experiences and ensuring that what they see will be relevant to their interests and relationship with your mission.
Proper data management will be key to success with newsletter personalization, both initially and over time. Your technology should be able to record subscriber preferences and then make it easy for you to use this data to generate segments and mailing lists. Integrated solutions will be your best bet, connecting your central database to your website’s embedded signup and donation forms and your email newsletter tool.
By diversifying your nonprofit’s content strategy, you can reap several benefits: Increasing engagement, driving donations, deepening relationships with your audience, generating powerful social proof, and more.
The sky’s the limit in terms of types and formats of messages, and there are creative ways to stand out online for any organization regardless of budget or available time. The tactics in this list can help you impress audiences as a modern, dynamic organization, but don’t be afraid to experiment with your own content ideas—build upon your successes and keep innovating.
Author: Shannon Scanlan, Solutions Engineer at Jackson River. Shannon has been helping nonprofits grow their digital and direct marketing programs and use technology to reach new audiences, raise more, and improve efficiency for over 17 years, working for organizations such as the ACLU, The Clinton Foundation, and The Metropolitan of Art among many others.