Guest post by Patrick Schmitt

Let’s say your nonprofit is launching a giving program. It’s been a big investment of your time- you’ve done the research, set up a new giving tool and created a new web page explaining the process. You’re confident several audience segments will be interested and make strong prospects for the program. Great!

Then, you launch the program with minimal fanfare, just a quick email blast to donors announcing the new option and providing instructions to get in touch if they’re interested.

Weeks pass- nothing. Your investment is in jeopardy.

This is a dramatic example, but it underscores the importance of nonprofit marketing for promoting giving programs. 

Communication is critical. After all, donors are busy. And new giving methods may be unfamiliar or confusing.

In our example, it’s definitely not the end of the line. Marketing can and should be iterative, fueled by continual analysis and improvement. Despite the disappointing launch, you can improve! If anything, you’ve learned a new lesson to carry forward as you work to strengthen relationships.

Let’s walk through a version of this example nonprofit marketing scenario in greater depth to illustrate how to create a more robust promotional strategy that supports your goals.

A professional edits her busy calendar on a laptop while sitting at a table with a cup of coffee and a clipboard of notes

The marketing scenario

Imagine that your nonprofit has revamped its planned giving program. Your biggest priority is strengthening your prospect pipeline, increasing the volume and qualification of planned gift prospects.

Last year, you created a planned giving microsite designed to educate your audience about their gift options and to encourage this kind of donation.

The microsite (and getting more eyes on it) is the real linchpin of the strategy. It’s the digital home of the giving program, a resource repository and an active marketing tool that funnels readers toward giving. It even includes tools to facilitate the giving process itself- a real asset that needs promotion to drive maximum results for your mission. 

So how do you do that?

Building your nonprofit’s marketing strategy

There are many elements to consider in a marketing strategy: audience, channels, distinct campaigns and messages, methods for tracking results and more. Let’s combine them into a complete marketing plan for our planned giving example:

An example nonprofit marketing plan for the goal of increasing traffic to a planned giving website, fully explained in the text below


Starting in the top-left “goals” section, we’ll walk through the steps for developing your marketing framework.

1. Set your priorities and goals.

Start by defining your:

  • Priority: what you need to accomplish with this marketing push
  • Objectives: measurable accomplishments for the marketing strategy that will support your priority

In this example, the overarching priority is strengthening the planned giving pipeline. The objectives are to:

  • Increase web traffic to the planned giving website
  • Increase the number of information requests that the website receives from prospects
  • Increase the number of prospect conversations about planned giving that begin in the weeks following the launch of the website and marketing push

Each of these objectives could easily have its own granular marketing strategy. For this example, we’ll hone in on the first, increasing web traffic. To ensure success, we need to make this goal specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART). By looking at past analytics for the website and making a few educated assumptions, we land on a SMART goal: increasing traffic to the website by 150% year-over-year.

2. Review past performance.

Before the marketing strategy can take shape, we need an idea of where it should be headed. Review the performance of past marketing campaigns and any intentional pushes you’ve made towards this or similar goals. Answer questions like:

  • Who are our target donors for planned giving?
  • How have we successfully connected with this audience in the past?
  • What channels did we use to reach them?
  • Were any outreach strategies particularly effective or ineffective at reaching them?
  • Did we have concrete goals for past marketing pushes? Did we reach them?

These insights will guide all the next steps in developing your marketing strategy, so it pays to ensure your nonprofit has a reliable data infrastructure in place. You need to be able to keep track of your campaign decisions and measure their performance across channels.

3. Consider your audience.

Next, characterize your audience more specifically based on what you’ve learned, your goal for the marketing campaign and your industry research.

In this case, our core ask, visiting the planned giving program’s website to learn more, is a fairly broad, top-funnel request for general awareness raising. There’s no need to limit ourselves too much here- we can target a large audience of active donors.

So let’s narrow it down to identify a subset of the audience that could be targeted more specifically. Who is most likely to become a viable planned giving prospect? These are the donors who we most want to visit the website, so they warrant the extra effort. Based on your past program performance and extra research on planned gift prospecting, we can more specifically target a sub-audience of donors ages 45 to 65 who have long histories with your nonprofit.

4. Pick your marketing channels.

With a clear vision of your objectives, goal, and audience, you can lay out a plan for reaching them. Start by identifying the most effective marketing channels. Common choices include:

  • Email
  • Social media
  • Direct mail
  • Phone calls
  • Text messages
  • Online and print advertisements

For our scenario, we’ll go with email and social media. Email is a highly flexible option that reaches readers very directly and it can be endlessly customized and targeted to very specific audiences. Social media provides an ongoing layer of engagement and interaction that supports our goal of raising awareness and directing attention to the planned giving microsite.

We’ll also add in a quick direct mail postcard campaign for our sub-audience. This group is more likely to engage with direct mail, so while it’s a little costly to print and mail postcards, the mailing list will be very focused. Putting in extra effort to reach this audience can pay dividends down the line as they become interested in planned giving, giving your direct mail a long-term positive ROI.

Always remember to pick your marketing channels carefully. Look at past data for your chosen audience- which channels have they engaged with or ignored? This will be your best point of reference when clarifying your marketing plans.

5. Draft a core case for support.

Draft the core message that will compel the audience to take the target action, learning more about planned giving by visiting the website. This message or case for support will infuse all the individual emails, social posts and mailers you send as part of the marketing push.

For this example, we might draft two different versions, one core message for the broad audience of active donors and another more tailored to the interests of the older sub-audience:

  • Broad audience: Planned giving is a highly impactful way for anyone to make a difference in our community.
  • Sub-audience: Planned giving is a highly impactful and mutually beneficial way to create a lasting legacy with our organization.

Take your time to think through your core case for support—consider the motivations and interests that draw your donors to your mission. As you refine your messaging for outreach, think of your target action as the bridge that connects them and facilitates engagement.

6. Craft messages for separate outreach campaigns.

Using your case for support and the marketing channels you’ve identified, begin crafting the individual per-channel campaigns and messages you’ll send to encourage donors to take your target action. For this example, you might try:

  • An email blast to all active donors announcing the planned giving microsite and providing general background about the impactfulness of this form of giving. Add mentions of the program and a link to the website to your monthly newsletter to further boost visibility unobtrusively.
  • Draft a more targeted email campaign to your sub-audience that walks through the benefits of planned giving and continues to promote the website.
  • On social media, lay out a plan to post a series of “Why I Choose to Give” stories about existing planned gift donors along with a link to the program’s website.
  • For your direct mail campaign, design an eye-catching message that reiterates the case for support’s core message and includes clear instructions or a QR code to access the website. To boost results, send it during National Make-a-Will month with a headline like “Are your estate plans serving you and your passions?”

As these messages and campaigns come together, use a scheduling tool to lay out a clear marketing calendar that ensures you send messages at the right frequency.

7. Execute and track your performance.

With the hardest work behind you, it’s time to execute your campaign and watch visits to your planned giving microsite grow!

Even at this stage, you should still feel free to make improvements to the strategy. Note that this requires having visibility into real-time performance.

As you launch your marketing efforts, double-check that you have reliable ways to measure how your digital channels perform. Check that you’re collecting the right data on conversions, or the number of completed target actions as a result of the marketing strategy. Use tools like Google Analytics to track visits and engagement with your planned giving website.

This data will be essential not just for measuring the overall success of your marketing strategy but also for informing future outreach.

Adapting your nonprofit marketing plan

This seven-step framework should give you an easy-to-replicate structure for your own unique marketing strategies. Adapt it to suit your nonprofit’s needs and audience. Just be sure to hit all the essentials:

  • Clearly defined objectives and goals
  • Analysis of audience and past marketing performance
  • Carefully chosen marketing channels
  • Cases for support to guide all messaging
  • Data collection for real-time and post-campaign improvements

With these must-haves accounted for in your strategy, you’ll be ready to connect with your audience more effectively than ever. Start small if you need to, study your results and keep improving over time.

Patrick Schmitt and co-CEO Jenny Xia founded FreeWill at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 2016. FreeWill’s charitable giving platform makes it easier for nonprofit fundraising teams to unlock transformational gifts and to date has generated over $6.6 billion in new gift commitments for thousands of nonprofit organizations. Patrick hosts FreeWill’s popular webinar series, educating thousands of nonprofit fundraising professionals each month about planned and non-cash giving strategies.

Before FreeWill, Patrick was the Head of Innovation at Change.org, where he helped grow the organization to 100 million users in four years. Prior to that, he ran email marketing for President Obama and served as Campaign Director for MoveOn.org.