Are you looking for a basic template or pattern to follow when creating a nonprofit marketing strategy?
When creating your nonprofit marketing strategy, we recommend that you choose from these 12 marketing goals, 12 marketing strategies, 12 marketing objectives, and scores of tactics, including both types of content and the channels through which you’ll distribute that content.
If sorting through those choices sounds overwhelming, you can start with what we consider a default or basic plan and then tweak it from there.
Let’s tackle this using cards from the Nonprofit Communications Strategic Planning Card Deck. You can get your own card deck to play with on Amazon.
If we look at the most common goals, strategies, objectives, and tactics based on years of research for the annual Nonprofit Communications Reports, you get an outline that looks like this:
There’s no special meaning to where the cards are placed within each row, but this is the collection of cards that I’d consider the “default” for a nonprofit communications strategy. Of course, you’d need to adjust based on several factors, most importantly:
The importance of fundraising as a goal for your communications. About half of nonprofit communicators are NOT responsible for fundraising goals and about half ARE responsible, at least in some way.
The size of your team. That impacts the number of total cards, especially objective and tactic cards, that you can successfully manage.
Your primary target audiences and messages. Who exactly you are talking to and what you talk about can also greatly influence the elements in your strategy.
I hope this helps you move your planning forward!
P.S. The card deck includes definitions for each card if you aren’t sure what the terms mean.
