The Challenges of Nonprofit Marketing (and How to Convert Them into Opportunities)

Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are being challenged by a lot of factors in winning support for their causes. This is why even NPOs take an effort in engaging in nonprofit marketing to attract potential donors, raise funds, and other support they need. 

So how does nonprofit marketing really works to keep an organization and a cause running in the game?

1. Promote cause and raise awareness. 

Members and volunteers need to know what the organization is doing and what awareness it promotes. Same to its audience and potential members and donors, the organization must let everyone know what awareness they are raising. 

2. Encourage membership.

This is one of the first few sources of funds of every nonprofit organization. The organization itself must attract people to sign up and become members. And when in every organization there is, there should be a fund or membership fee or donation.

3. Fundraising.

This would include activities and events that could attract not only members but donors. These events would help the organizations take the pedestal of shouting to the world what they are fighting for. 

4. Volunteers.

One way to gain popularity is to increase the organization’s number of volunteers. By social constructs and patterns, if an organization or a cause has many supporters or volunteers, many people would take time to learn about the organization and the cause and would lead to the three mentioned above.

These four are the main how’s on working and running a nonprofit organization. There are way more than can be listed, but everything just basically falls down to these four. Easy right? But nonprofit marketing is way not that easy. Like other marketing techniques such as restaurant marketing, SaaS marketing, social media marketing, and others, nonprofit marketing ses the same tools and techniques in marketing the organization and the cause.

The only difference is that nonprofit marketing has way more challenges than other types of marketing simply because it’s a nonprofit and it should be aligned to an organization’s values all throughout the marketing strategy and action. Here are major challenges nonprofit marketers face and some tips on how to turn the tables in favor of the organization.

Resources

And by resources, I meant, funds and cash. Nonprofit organizations source their money from donors, membership fees, and fundraising events. They then spend their money on activities that would help their cause to change some social or environmental problems. 

This is among the reasons why some organizations might fail in allocating enough budget to boost up their marketing plans and strategies. Organizations, sometimes, only have enough for the volunteers, members, and the activities themselves. Hard to swallow, but nonprofit organizations should allocate funds in marketing plans if they want their organization to prosper and to gather more support from external people. 

The nonprofit marketing team should create a budget that is set to hit marketing goals at the lowest possible cost. Marketing teams should be able to come up with activities with high efficacy to ensure the organization’s survival.

The Message

Basically being run by different people, avoiding toxic tactics, and getting the right amount of message and planning is a challenge some organizations don’t deny facing from time to time. By statistics, some nonprofit organizations have less time and less manpower to create unique messages that could potentially attract more donors and interested parties. 

This in turn could cause some skeptical audiences. With these kinds of challenges, some organizations fail to generate positive emotional responses from the people, which then leads to fewer donors. 

In order to turn the table on this one, integrated planning should be incorporated to create a well-versed marketing plan that goes by the book of the organization. One example is to create a team that could focus on gathering and creating stories that could potentially increase positive emotional responses from the people. This could lead to an increase in interest from potential donors. 

Expansion

Some organizations, after feeling a decline in raising funds and generating leads and members, are most likely inclined to the possibility of expanding, hoping for greener pastures. This, most of the time, doesn’t work at all. By expanding a not-so-ripened cause and organization would make the message dilute and eventually difficult for people to catch interest in. 

Since we are already in a digital scene today, a digital expansion is possible and most likely going to succeed than a physical expansion. Creating more internet-friendly marketing plans has a higher chance of success. This is something that marketers should know by now. 

Hopping in.

And the last biggest marketing challenge for nonprofit organizations is getting everyone especially the leadership on board whatever marketing plans the team has. Without the big “yes” of the board, every marketing plan would only stay as plans. There should be one solid communication within the teams and the leadership running the organization. 

For marketers, this would be a challenge but easy to solve with just a good presentation of marketing strategies and plans. Also, one great idea for marketers is to gather certain data every marketing effort put into action. This way, statistics, demographics, and analytics will be created to make a better marketing plan in the future. This would help the organization build a bigger platform or make a bigger noise to let the people know that they are making efforts to create change in this world.