Branding, Fundraising, and Event Promotion
Inflation, economic and political uncertainty, an increasing need for services, Armed Conflicts, government cuts to assistance programs, competition between the 1.43MM 501(c)(3)s and Private Foundations for a shrinking donor pool, scammers, and competition for human resources with for-profits are making this a particularly tough time for fundraising.
With all this, you must be smarter about spending your fundraising dollars. Gone are the days of “spray and pray” Direct Mail programs. Your available donor pools are more digital, more selective, busier, and less tolerant of time sucks than ever before. They also seek authenticity, a good story, and positive outcomes. These trends are only getting stronger
Branding
Check your brand. Is it fresh? Do people know who you are and what you do? Do they know your why and the value of your mission? Have you given them a story that demonstrates the power of your brand? If not, working on a cohesive brand strategy is the first step in a successful marketing campaign. Creating an easily recognizable foundation people can relate to is key in raising awareness, and in turn, money
SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a must. SEO is not lead generation. SEO is positioning yourself to be found when people are looking for someone like you—making it easy for Google to index and crawl your site. On-page SEO uses keywords and phrases, useful and original content, deleting outdated pages and content, and optimizing your crawl budget. Technical SEO includes page loading speed, having a current XML sitemap, no broken or toxic backlinks, and optimizing your pages for crawlability.
Marketing and Advertsing in the Right Places
It is critical to be adept at digital marketing to capture the attention of Boomers, GenXers, Millennials, and GenZers. You need to reach people where they are, or you need to take them where you want them to go. People are online, most often on their phones. Where you want to take them is your website, more specifically, to a landing page where they can make a donation as quickly and easily as possible. Believe it or not, Direct Mail is the most effective way to take them there. By combining data analytics, direct mail, email, and digital marketing, Kymera can boost your landing page traffic and donation conversions by double digits. As a bonus, you expand your known giver database by triple digits. Add to this to Google AdWords and Social Media Management and you’ll have a much better chance of increasing your share of the donor pie.
Event Promotion
What if you gave a party and nobody came? The nightmare of every fundraiser. The best way to ensure that doesn’t happen is to treat every event like its own fundraising campaign, with schedules and budgets, marketing, and advertising. Create an identity for the event, make it unique, and sell it like you mean it. If you have a brand and a history, you simply plug it into the marketing and advertising machine you’ve already created, then turn the volume up to 11. We’re good at that. We can help.
Google Grants for Search Advertising
Google Grants is a fantastic chance for 501(c)(3) non-profits to get up to $10,000 in free monthly Google Ads. This can significantly boost traffic, raise awareness, and broaden your audience. However, managing Google Grants has its own rules and challenges. Google has a very strict set of guidelines that must be followed to be able to get and keep the grant. Many non-profits find hiring someone like Kymera to manage their Google grants from application to daily management is much cheaper, easier, and far more practical.
Some of the requirements Google places on its grant program include.
- Before ads go live, you must submit a form and await approval.
- Google limits daily spending to around $330, so effective budget management is crucial.
- Keyword usage is critical too. Google Grants accounts have specific rules, like avoiding single-word keywords.
- Maintaining a healthy click-through rate (CTR) is crucial, aiming for over 5%.
- Your average cost-per-click (CPC) must stay below $2.
- You’ll need to conduct thorough keyword research aligned with your mission.
- Optimize ads and landing pages, continuously monitor and analyze performance, and leverage Google Analytics and conversion tracking for insights. With careful management and optimization, non-profits can make the most of Google Grants to support their causes.
