A nonprofit marketing plan is a comprehensive document for all the goals and strategies of a nonprofit organization and how it will work to achieve them. A nonprofit marketing plan for social media can be developed with comparative advantages and disadvantages of various online marketing strategies and tools. Nonprofit organizations work towards various goals that includes helping communities and individuals, serving society, preserving cultures and nature; upholding religious ideals; educating the community; maintaining human rights; promoting social welfare causes; etc.
Marketing tools for nonprofits make the job quick and easy for you and your team. This will enable you to focus on what matters: raising money and awareness. There are plenty of free marketing tools for nonprofits 2020 and beyond to take advantage of, and many can be implemented immediately after reading about them.
Project Management
Problem: Projects are dragging on and tasks are getting overlooked because your team is unsure of who’s doing what and where projects stand.
Free solution: The basic version of Asana is free. The project management and collaboration tool can help you more easily organize, plan and manage nonprofit marketing projects from start to finish. Get your whole team using it so that you can coordinate projects with multiple people, so everyone knows who’s doing what, what’s been completed, and what you have left to tackle. Set deadlines for yourself and share files and status updates within each task.
Email Service
Problem: You’re still sending emails to your nonprofit’s list from a personal email account.
Free Solution: MailChimp offers a free tier, where your nonprofit can send up to 12,000 emails to up to 2,000 subscribers a month. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that we’re recommending MailChimp here. We use them for our company emails and recommend them to all of our clients. MailChimp allows you to create professional and well-designed emails that produce results.
Online Advertising
Problem: You want to advertise online and appear in search engines, but you don’t have the budget to pay for digital ads or search engine optimization.
Free Solution: Google Ad Grants offer a Google Ads account with a $10,000 monthly cap to all eligible nonprofits at no cost to you. With Google Ads, you can create text-based ads and associate them with different keywords to appear within the search engine. When someone searches for a keyword you’ve chosen on Google, your ad could appear above or below the organic search results for that phrase.
And, if you’re struggling to build out or keep up your account, consider participating in Google’s Ad Grants Online Marketing Challenge. You’ll be paired with marketing students (along with a faculty member) looking for experience on the platform.
Customer Relationship Management
Problem: You have too many supporters to properly manage them all. Your fundraising processes are not streamlined and require lots of data entry. You’ve looked at donor management software, but it’s all way too expensive for your budget.
Free Solution: The Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack is a free customer relationship management (CRM) software for nonprofits. It has built-in tools to help you manage programs, donations, volunteers, and supporters in one location. Plus, it integrates with lots of other tools (like your website or email service) to prevent all of that mindless data entry.
Collaboration Tool
Problem: You need a way to connect your staff for marketing projects. We’re talking about securely sharing documents, circling up for video calls, synching up your calendars, etc.
Free Solution: G Suite for Nonprofits provides nonprofits with free access to G Suite Basic, which can be set to use your nonprofit’s website domain. It includes Gmail (for staff emails), Docs (so you can forget Microsoft Word), Calendar (that can you can share with the whole team) and Hangouts Meet (for video calls). It also includes Google Drive, which lets your team write, share, edit and leave comments or feedback within documents, spreadsheets, presentations and other files.
Peer-to-Peer Fundraising
Problem: You think your supporters would be willing to fundraise for you, but you don’t have the budget or staff capacity for managing another fundraising platform.
Free Solution: Facebook Fundraising Tools can easily be integrated into a social media fundraising strategy. Facebook’s Fundraisers let your supporters (or staff) fundraise for you by creating fundraisers with their own pages and donation capabilities. Use our Facebook Fundraising kit template to let your supporters know how to set these up and provide a few resources to help them along.
Social Media Management
Problem: You want to keep your social media accounts active, but who has the time or energy to login and post that often?
Free Solutions: Schedule posts in advance with Hootsuite or Buffer. Both tools have free plans and integrate with all of the big social media channels, like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram. You’ll be able to link three social media accounts through each free plan. Explore both services and decide which interface you prefer.
Website Analytics
Problem: You guess about the effectiveness of your nonprofit’s website and digital marketing projects when strategizing or making decisions, but aren’t able to use real results.
Free Solution: Google Analytics provides a free look at who is visiting your website, how they’re getting there and what actions they’re taking once they arrive. Set up dashboards to take a more focused, bite-sized look at your website data on a regular basis.
Bonus Free Solution: Hotjar for Nonprofits offers a free business account to dig a little deeper into how visitors are behaving on your website. The tool allows you to look at heatmaps and recordings of user sessions to see exactly which sections of your website are working as you hoped and which sections could use some improvement.
Graphics and Photos
Problem: You want to be better about including graphics in your social media posts and on the blog, but don’t have a designer on your team. The photos on your website could use some love in general.
Free Solution: Canva is a free and easy-to-use tool for creating graphics or editing photos for your website and social media channels. Drag and drop elements like text boxes, frames, backgrounds, icons, or uploaded photos to add intrigue to your graphics. Plus, see how to use the free tool for editing photos to use on your website.
Community Forum
Problem: You don’t have the capacity or budget to build out a custom online forum for your community, but think they’d enjoy and benefit from communicating with each other.
Free Solution: Facebook Groups are a free and easy way to encourage discussion and connections in a place where your supporters are already spending their time. Should your nonprofit start a group? Nonprofits can use Groups to facilitate support, connect volunteers, plan events, give board members a way to communicate informally and open communications for any other subsets of your organization, both big and small groups of people.
Volunteer Management
Problem: How you promote and organize volunteer opportunities is disjointed and incredibly manual. You’d like a way to promote volunteer opportunities on your website and easily communicate with volunteers once they sign up.
Free Solution: Our Volunteer Management plugin for WordPress makes organizing opportunities and managing volunteers easier. Quickly create and promote opportunities, accept applications and send reminder emails—all from your website.
Password Management
Problem: You can’t keep track of all of your passwords, and some of your accounts use unsecure or repeated passwords.
Free Solution: We like using LastPass to store and manage all of our passwords. Remember one password to log in and have LastPass keep track of the rest. The free tool will automatically add usernames and passwords to any password protected site that you visit. You can also use it to generate strong and secure new passwords and share them with other staff or volunteers at your nonprofit.
Stock Photos
Problem: Your nonprofit deals with sensitive subjects, and you don’t have many photos that you can share online.
Free Solution: Use stock photos. Photos add intrigue, visually break up a page and draw the eye to your content. To start, check out Pexels and Unsplash. Both sites allow you to search for stock photos and download them for free.
Webinars
Problem: Your audience is interested in webinars, but you’d need a free platform through which to share them.
Free Solution: FreeConferenceCall.com allows for free video conference calls with up to 1,000 participants. The screen sharing, recording and chat capabilities through these calls can be a great free tool for conducting webinars for your nonprofit.
For professional development, check out our list of great free resources. However, not every problem has a free solution. For these situations without available free marketing tools for nonprofits, check TechSoup for a wide variety of discounts on technology products. And if you find something that meets your needs elsewhere, it never hurts to ask about a discount for nonprofits! The worst they can do is say no.
Which free marketing tools for nonprofits do you use? Did we miss any on our list? Tell us how you work to solve marketing problems on a tight budget in the comments below.
Buffer: social media scheduling and management.
Buffer is a social media management tool that consists of three platforms: Publish, Analyze, and Reply.
Publish enables you to schedule social media posts, see your content schedule, and republish old evergreen content.
Analyze measures your own social media profiles’ performance and gives you insights on your social media strategy. Here you can also create reports to show to your colleagues and stakeholders.
Reply lets you monitor and interact with people who are reaching out to you in the comments or through direct messages.
Buffer supports all the major social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram (including Stories), Pinterest.
How can nonprofits use it
Your social media presence is incredibly important in keeping people aware of your work and the issues you deal with. With Buffer, you can schedule updates, respond to questions and comments, build your social media strategy and analyze what works and what doesn’t.
Nonprofit discount
You can use Buffer Publish for free to queue up to 10 posts.
There’s a 50% discount for nonprofits on all Buffer plans making the Basic plan $7.50 a month.
Hubspot
Hubspot is a giant marketing and sales platform that includes a lot of different tools. It aims to optimize and streamline your sales and inbound marketing efforts. It covers all the digital marketing channels: websites, emails, social media and consists of four major components: Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Service Hub, and a powerful free CRM.
Basically, the platform provides you with anything you need to run a successful inbound marketing strategy.
How can nonprofits use it
Hubspot’s inbound marketing model works for nonprofits too! With the tool, you can increase your organization awareness and attract new audiences by using SEO, social media monitoring, and blogging tools Hubspot offers. You can engage with your supporters, volunteers, and donors through emails and social media and personalize your communication with them by using the tool’s powerful analytics.
Nonprofit discount
Hubspot offers a range of free marketing tools that includes a CRM, free automated emails, a marketing analytics dashboard, a contact database and more.
Later: social media management with the focus on Instagram.
Later is another social media management tool, but it puts a big emphasis on visual-first platforms, specifically, Instagram. It allows you to schedule your posts, manage content calendar, aesthetically organize your Instagram grid and organize your content library for quicker access. Its user-generated content feature allows you to find, repost and save to your library the content that you were tagged in.
It also gives you access to a vast pool of Instagram analytics and provides you with actionable tips.
It’s an official Instagram Partner so you don’t need to worry about using an unverified tool.
How can nonprofits use it
Visual storytelling is a powerful tool and Instagram is the best place to apply it. Share your nonprofit’s day-to-day work or launch a campaign to raise social awareness by publishing posts and Stories.
Nonprofit discount
You can use Later’s basic features for free.
There is also a 50% nonprofit discount. You can choose from three plans that cost $8, $12, and $20.50 a month respectively.
Zapier: integration and automation software
Zapier allows you to integrate all your other tools and apps and automate their work. Basically, it enables you to automate all the processes (including the marketing ones) with workflows called Zaps. You can connect Facebook Leads Ads, Slack, Google Docs, Mailchimp, social media apps, task management tools, messengers and more. If there’s a process that needs automation, Zapier is the tool for you.
How can nonprofits use it
Zapier offers a range of integrations with nonprofit tools such as GivingFuel and Donately, as well as a bunch of integration for email marketing, ads, social media marketing, and event marketing.
Nonprofit discount
You can use Zapier for free for up to 100 tasks a month.
Nonprofits are eligible for a 15% discount on any paid plan which makes the cheapest plan $17 a month.
Conclusion
Marketing for nonprofits can be challenging. Entrepreneurs don’t always realize the needs of the nonprofit sector. I know, because I used to work at a nonprofit non-governmental organization. And I have spent the last few years helping to develop marketing tools for other nonprofits. I have worked on free marketing tools for any nonprofit who needs them, and tested their effectiveness with small businesses owned by nonprofits.