The Digital Marketing Processes NGOs Need to Engage Key Target Audiences
By: Ashley Pettifer, Director of Client Experience and Operations, Ryelle Strategy Group
Elevating your digital presence and leveraging tools to enhance your work can be daunting, but all it takes is starting sometime, somewhere. The good news is, there are many digital tools available to help your NGO get the right message to your target audiences.
Communicating your organization’s key messages and brand story and choosing the appropriate channels to facilitate that communication are important in engaging key audiences in your mission. These three tools can empower NGOs to deliver on their mission and impact the communities they seek to reach:
Email Marketing
There’s a long-standing debate on the effectiveness of email. For NGOs, email marketing is a staple in creating opportunities to engage stakeholders, building profile recognition and supporting solicitation, to name a few. Organizations can personalize communication, for instance by populating the first name field, to encourage open rates, creating more intimate touchpoints with their stakeholders
Establishing a regular cadence of communication enables NGOs to cultivate and steward stakeholders and build and strengthen their affinity to the organization’s mission. At minimum, a monthly newsletter is a great vehicle to deliver timely updates and milestone recaps, with additional email marketing pieces sent out for urgent developments. Include a call to action in your communications—such as a donation ask, an invitation to volunteer, or an awareness/advocacy initiative—to reinforce your organization’s core messaging and fundraising efforts.
To make the e-mail marketing process even easier, we recommend creating email templates and keeping up-to-date contact lists for specific audience segments—donors, government contacts, community partners, etc.—in your email marketing platform. That way, you can easily send out communications tailored to specific audience segments.
Social Planning and Collaborative Platforms
The performance of social media profiles has become an increasingly useful tool. Social media offers a regular touchpoint with an NGO’s target audiences to educate and raise awareness about the organization, support revenue generation, creates space for thought leadership and amplifies the organization’s profile. It’s important to consider which social media channel(s) will help you reach your target audience. Through social media channels, an NGO can tailor messages to different stakeholder audiences and cultivate brand recognition.
A populated content calendar should reflect the organization’s message and values through sector-wide promotional days, program delivery updates and relevant advocacy, to name a few. Leveraging social planning and collaborative platforms such as Planable and Canva enable users to collaborate on the design and planning of content, ensuring consistency in messaging, etc
Online Collaborative Design Tools
How is content produced? Effective digital engagement requires visually interesting content in line with an NGO’s brand identity. With a wealth of free graphic design platforms such as Canva that provide templates for various types of content, virtually anyone can be a designer these days, making it easier for over-burdened NGOs to keep up with regular content production.
Well-produced content is a powerful tool in raising an NGO’s profile and attracting followers to their cause. Plus, with the abundance of free tools and cost-effective subscriptions available, NGOs are relieved of the pressure to hire in-house designers in the early stages of capacity-building and instead can allocate costs smartly to plug-and-play platforms.
Are you communicating your message effectively? Ryelle Strategy Group is here to support you if you’d like to review the look, feel and content of your organization’s communications and strategize how to resonate with your target audiences.
