Where the focus is everything about online marketing, including key business strategies, innovative marketing methods, effective online advertising techniques, emerging advertising trends in technology and much more.
Nonprofits are raising their performance and hitting the high notes.
If you think getting people to shop online
is tough, consider the plight of nonprofit
organizations. They ask people for their
time and/or money, but instead of receiving
goods, these donors simply get the satisfaction
of doing good.
Although nonprofit organizations may have a different
agenda from the for-profit online marketers,
many of the goals (building relationships, income,
brand awareness, etc.) are the same.
During the early part of the Internet era, many
charitable organizations limited their Web activities
to maintaining a website that accepted donations
and member registrations, but over the past few
years these groups have expanded to leverage many
of the leading marketing tools.
Donations to nonprofit organizations are growing
but remain only a small part of overall giving.
Online donations in the U.S. doubled between 2003
and 2005 to $4.5 billion, but that is just 1.7 percent
of the $260 billon in total donations, according to
the GivingUSA Foundation.
Most people prefer to give off-line, so organizations
establish different objectives for online activities
and combine their direct marketing initiatives.
In addition to getting people to donate, nonprofit
online marketing goals also include increasing
membership, encouraging activism, making resources
available to those in need, issue awareness,
building community and promoting word of mouth
marketing. However, nonprofits typically operate
under tight budgets where success is measured in
lives affected and their experiences can offer useful
lessons to all marketers.
Tools of the Trade
Employing search engine marketing and banner ads
may be critical for many businesses, but nonprofits
are selective if they choose to participate at all. Todd
Whitley, vice president of e-marketing for the Leukemia
& Lymphoma Society, is a proponent of SEM
and display ads if the right audience segment is targeted.
Whitley focuses his group's search marketing
plans on reaching caregivers who might need the
organization's services and "to find people who have
relevancy to your mission." Purchased keywords
should be as specific to the target audience (such as
"treatment") as possible, Whitley says.
Joel Bartlett, marketing manager for People for
the Ethical Treatment of Animals, bought banner
ads on social networking sites such as MySpace but
wasn't satisfied with the traffic generated. However,
when the group made its display available for posting
on individuals' personal pages and encouraged
members to share them with their friends, traffic
greatly increased. "The value of word of mouth
goes further than any banner ad we could afford," Bartlett says. As
with commercial enterprises, customers (in this case organization
members) are the best salespeople, and giving them the tools to
increase brand awareness online can be very successful.
PETA is selective in its search marketing spending, limiting the
scope to the related terms that have proven to be cost-effective.
The PETA website has high natural search rankings for many of
the terms related to protecting animals because of the abundance
of links to the site, so Bartlett doesn't see a need to participate in
SEM for obvious keywords. "We're already the No. 1 search term
[for animal rights] so we don't need to buy ads."
Bartlett says that instead of using contextual or display ads
on general interest sites, PETA advertises with advertising service
Blogads.com to reach influential Web participants. Blogads
works with bloggers who have loyal readership and are more
likely to get involved and to spread the message to others, enabling
PETA to reach a smaller but more receptive audience than
mass media sites.
While search is not a major component of many nonprofits'
online marketing strategy, another performance marketing staple
has proven successful –
email marketing. Through newsletters and
issue-specific alerts, PETA encourages people to forward the information
from its website (including images of animal abuse) to
their friends that will prompt action.
When it's an email from a trusted friend, "people get outraged"
about how animals are treated, Bartlett says. During PETA's offline
events, the organization collects email addresses to expand the
audience of its newsletter and outreach activities.
Habitat for Humanity purchased Google AdWords for a time but
cut back on online advertising recently, according to Senior Director
of Direct Marketing Timothy Daugherty. The best-performing
words were derivations of the organization's name, and since the
website could be found with natural search, search marketing was
deemed unnecessary.
The group, which builds affordable housing for lower-income
families, now focuses on increasing communications with people
who have previously donated to maximize their marketing dollars,
Daugherty says. Habitat for Humanity received about 10 percent
($8 million of the $80 million) of its total 2006 donations online,
according to Daugherty.
The group has been successful in increasing awareness by getting
list appends (email addresses for previous donors) for their
direct marketing databases to reduce costs and open another line
of communications, says Daugherty. Contacting donors via email
is also effective in stimulating activism online and off-line, and is
part of the organization's effort to integrate marketing efforts, he
notes. For issue-oriented campaigns, email works well in getting
people to write letters and emails to public officials, he adds.
The National Council of Churches has collected more than
100,000 email addresses by getting members to forward information
to friends and by requesting addresses on donation forms. "We
ask people to share our email blasts with their friends," and those
who respond to forwarded emails are automatically added to the
distribution list, says Daniel Webster, the organization's director of
media relations. The frequent communications about issues in the
news help to build a virtual community and enable two-way communication,
according to Webster.
In addition to most donations being made off-line, most word
of mouth marketing occurs off-line as well, but email can be effective
in spurring people to talk off-line with friends about an organization
or contributions. Nearly 90 percent of people who have
donated to a charity say they have urged others to give in person,
but just 19 percent had done so by email, according to a 2005 Donor
Trends survey by Craver, Mathews, Smith & Company and The
Prime Group. Email has proven successful in promoting off-line
activism that inspires people to attend and volunteer at events that
are an important component of nonprofit activities.
Creativity Key for Tight Budgets
Operating within tight marketing budgets forces many nonprofits
to be creative in their programs and partnerships, according to the
Leukemia & Lymphoma Society's Whitley.
While working for the American Lung Association, his group
created a significant revenue stream by connecting for-profits to its
members who voluntarily participate, according to Whitley. Continued on Page 2...
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