Content marketing for nonprofits is creating and sharing relevant and valuable content that attracts, educates, motivates, and inspires your participants and supporters so that they can help you achieve your mission.
Nonprofits have always embraced content marketing. We just didn’t call it that. All that stuff you’ve been creating for years – newsletter articles, direct mail letters, press releases – is content.
But now, with the variety of ways to communicate both offline and online, the sheer volume of content that nonprofits are expected to create can feel very overwhelming. If you’ve been working for nonprofits for more than 10 or 15 years, then you’ve always relied on good ol’ print marketing and in-person events, plus media relations. Now, you’ve added (or for younger organizations, started out with) a website, blog, email, Facebook, Twitter, video, texting, and more.
If you are trying to create content for all of these channels without a plan for how it all fits together, it can feel like you are on a racing treadmill that’s not taking you anywhere fast.
With a content marketing plan in place, you can get off the treadmill and onto a real path that leads to results. You’ll still be busy, and often running down that path, but you’ll be getting somewhere.
I compare content marketing to running a busy restaurant in my new e-book, “The Nonprofit Content Marketing Cookbook: Your Guide to Creating and Curating Content that Educates, Motivates, and Inspires.”
You are a master chef responsible for feeding your participants and supporters. You need to feed them regularly, and it better be good, so they keep coming back for more, and so they spread the word about you.
But fabulous meals don’t just miraculously appear. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes.
You need to figure out what to feed them (your content) and where to feed them (your communications channels). You need to plan your menus ahead of time (using an editorial calendar) and then stock your pantry (create and curate the content).
As you go along, you’ll want to reheat and remix some meals and recipes (repurpose your content) so that you are both efficient and responsive. You’ll need to know who’s cooking (staffing your content strategy) and how to equip your kitchen with the right tools (like style guides and software that make it all easier).
Finally, you’ll want to invite new people to dinner and show them how they can get fed too (by creating natural connections between your communications channels, so people can follow a path to you, no matter where they begin).
This 81-page e-book shows you how.
Let’s get cooking!
