Your nonprofit works tirelessly to advance your mission. From spotlighting fundraisers on your website with dynamic event landing pages to creating educational social media campaigns, marketing can take up a significant chunk of your time and energy.
What if there was an around-the-clock tool to help you increase your marketing efficiency and reach, engage, and retain supporters?
Fortunately, there’s a tried-and-true solution: automation. By leveraging automation, your nonprofit can streamline your digital marketing efforts, reduce your manual labor, and free up plenty of time for your nonprofit to focus on higher-level tasks.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through how you can leverage the power of automation on the following marketing channels:
- Text Messaging
- Social Media
Make sure you’re working with the right marketing technology so you can leverage easy-to-use automation tools. Backed by solutions like a dedicated nonprofit text messaging platform and a social media management tool, you’ll be in great shape to take your marketing strategy to the next level.
Text Messaging
Text messaging is a direct and efficient way to reach your supporters, and with a 90% read rate within just three minutes of sending, you can feel confident that your messages are seen. Whether you’re hoping to collect mobile donations to advance your fundraising progress or promote your upcoming fundraising campaigns and events, pairing automation with your texting strategy will make messaging your supporters a breeze.
Tatango’s guide to nonprofit text messaging outlines the following ways that you can use automation to enrich your communication strategy:
Schedule Automated Messages
With the right text messaging platform, you can automate a variety of messages to your supporters, nailing down exactly when these texts will be sent out and to which segment of your supporter base. For instance, you can send:
- A welcome text as soon as supporters opt-in to your text messaging campaign. You might give an overview of your mission and share links to your website that go over ways to get involved.
- Thank-you messages right after donors give. eCardWidget’s guide to thanking donors recommends creating a template that will automatically populate donors’ personal details, like their preferred names, gift amounts, the campaign they donated to, and how this will make an impact on your mission.
- Follow-up messages after a big event to spark continued engagement. This might include photos from your event, links to your social media accounts where supporters can find more event content and keep up with your mission, or a survey requesting attendees’ feedback.
Manually creating these messages for every supporter would be nearly impossible and eat up way too much of your nonprofit’s time, making automation the perfect tool to keep donors tapped into your organization.
Add a Personal Touch
When connecting with your marketing audience, personalization is key. Sending a text with “Dear Donor” or “Dear Supporter” might not garner much attention and lacks the personalization needed to emotionally connect with your supporters.
With automation, you can add a personal touch to all of your messages, ensuring each text begins with the recipients’ first names. This increases the likelihood of supporters opening, reading, and acting on your messages, such as by donating.
Sync Your Donation Page with Your Text Messaging Platform
When donors submit a gift online and enter their phone number on your donation form, their information should automatically sync with your text messaging platform. This way, you can opt supporters into your campaign with no added effort and encourage them to stay connected with your mission. Plus, text-to-give is an easy way for supporters to continue to give to your organization and play a rewarding role in your cause.
Social Media
Social media is another top marketing tool at nonprofits’ disposal. However, it can quickly get stressful to lead a successful promotional campaign across multiple platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Here’s how automation can help:
Create a Publishing Schedule
With the right social media management tool, you can easily manage all of these accounts at once with an automated publishing schedule. This allows you to prepare content drafts in advance of major fundraising campaigns and promotional campaigns, where these posts will simply go live at the time and date you set.
Respond to Interactions
If you’re a medium or larger-sized nonprofit, it’s likely that you have vast comment sections under your posts. Rather than leaving these supporters hanging, you can leverage automation to answer simple supporter questions. For example, responses to questions like “How do I donate?” or “When is the deadline for donating to this campaign?” can be automated with the right social media management tool.
Collect Data and Key Insights
Creating manual reports to track metrics can quickly get overwhelming. Instead, automation can help you generate data reports so you can collect important insights about how to best reach your audience. For example, let’s say you’re promoting your text-to-give campaign on social media. With automated reporting, you can see what type of content related to your text-to-give campaign is performing best and use this to inform your content strategy in the future.
Email is a useful tool to communicate important information to your supporters and keep them in the loop. Automation can help streamline your email strategy in the following ways:
Send Triggered Messages
Automation allows your nonprofit to create a response triggered by donors’ specific actions. Let’s take a closer look at a few use cases for how automation can fine-tune your email strategy:
- Automated welcome series: Engage new subscribers from the get-go with an automated welcome email series that introduces them to your nonprofit’s mission, ongoing projects, and ways they can contribute.
- Donation acknowledgment: Implement automated emails to promptly acknowledge donations, express gratitude, and illustrate the impact of donors’ contributions.
- Segmented outreach: Use email automation to segment your audience and tailor messages based on their interactions, ensuring your communications resonate with your existing donors, volunteers, or new subscribers.
When donors immediately receive an email after completing an action, it signals that your nonprofit is a credible organization that seeks to emotionally connect with supporters. As a result, you’ll be able to steward strong supporter relationships.
Develop automated drip campaigns
Drip campaigns are a stream of emails that supporters will automatically receive to move them along their donor journey. For example, you might set up a welcome drip campaign that is triggered after supporters give to your nonprofit for the first time. This can include introductory information about your nonprofit and its impact.
You can also personalize these emails with the donor’s first name and reference the specific actions they took that triggered this series of emails. For example, a church could set up a drip campaign after donors give online for the first time to help retain their support.
Share Donation Receipts
After donors give, having an emailed copy of their donation receipt will give them the confidence that their donation went through for the correct amount. Plus, they can then use these receipts to claim tax deductions. You can automate this process so supporters will receive this just moments after giving.
Wrapping Up
Automation, when harnessed correctly, is a powerful tool to keep donors engaged while saving your nonprofit time. Do your research to find the right marketing solutions that align with your nonprofit’s needs and come with simple automation features. Remember, investing now will help you maximize your fundraising and donor engagement efforts in the long run.
