We're about halfway through 2014, and it's time to check in about where you are with your goals for the year. Have you accomplished any of your organization's goals yet? Have your communication goals changed? What are your priorities for the rest of the year?
In January, the Nonprofit Marketing Guide released the 2014 Nonprofit Communications Trend Report, alongside an infogrpahic to break the data into easily digestible chunks. 2,135 nonprofits responded to this online survey, and at the beginning of this year the top communicaton goals were (in order of priority):
- Acquiring new donors.
- Engaging the community.
- General brand awareness.
- Retaining current donors.
If your goals were similar, have you acquired new donors? If not, there's still time, but you'll need to come up with a strategic project roadmap. Remeber planning for year-end fundraising will be here before you know it.
Who is your target audience? How will you reach out to those new donors? Have you invested in an organic and paid recruitment strategy via social action networks like Care2.
Have you been engaging your community? Make sure you're talking with them and not at them when you are using social media. It's important to remember that social media is like a cocktail party. It's a place to be social not like a bot posting press releases. That is the fastest way to bore your community and have them NOT pay attention to you.
If you're acquiring new donors and engaging your community on social media, make sure your email communications tells your donors how their actions and support are generating impact even if it's incrementally like I discussed last week in my article Why Email Still Rules.
Nonprofits believe the six most important modes of communication are:
- The website
- Email marketing
- Social media (other than blogging)
- In-person events
- Press releases and media relations
- Print marketing
If these are your top avenues of communication, how are you tracking their success? It's important to track the success of your communication in an effort to effectively reach your audiences. What works for one audience may not work for another. It's important that you tailor your outreach to meet your constituents where they're at anytime, everywhere (for more on this, check out the book Social Change Anytime Everywhere I co-authored with Amy Sample Ward of NTEN).
Be sure and check out the full infographic below for more about nonprofit 2014 communication trends:
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