As announced previously, our focus for the next installment of Monday blog posts here at Blue Sky Factory will be on the non-profit world. Email marketing for non-profits isn’t substantially different at a strategic level than it is for for-profit companies. After all, to build a successful email marketing program for a non-profit, you still need:

• An audience of people who want to hear from you.
• Delivery of your message to that audience.
• Audience members need to open your message.
• Audience members need to take action after reading your message.
• Metrics that measure the effectiveness of your message.

Where non-profits tend to be different than for-profit organizations is in step 4, where the audience takes action. For-profit companies generally just want you to take an action that leads to a business transaction of some kind. Non-profit companies tend to have a larger palette of actions to choose from. For example:

• Donation to the non-profit
• Advocacy for a particular piece of legislation
• Encouragement/recruitment for volunteering
• Donation to other allied organizations
• Delivery of services to constituency

As with all forms of marketing, the most important place to start is with SMART non-profit business goals. SMART is an acronym coined by George Doran back in 1981, and means:

• Specific. What is the end goal for your non-profit marketing program?
• Measurable. What concrete, observable, trackable metrics will you use to let you know you’re achieving that goal?
• Attainable. Do you have the actual capability to achieve that goal?
• Relevant. Is the goal valuable?
• Time-bound. When will you achieve the goal?

Once you know the overall goal of a marketing program – for example, using digital channels, run a fundraising campaign over 3 months for a net increase of $250,000 in the general fund – you can begin to reverse engineer how email will play a part in achieving that goal.

Next week, we’ll look at building your audience from a non-profit’s perspective. You’ll be surprised to learn that your audience is much larger than you think it is.

Christopher S. Penn
VP, Strategy and Innovation, Blue Sky Factory

At Blue Sky Factory, we strongly believe that, if used properly, email marketing and social media go together like Batman & Robin. If effectively implemented, email marketing can power social media and social media can power email marketing.

Good news! We have an eBook that provides 16 tips to use email and social together.

What are you waiting for? Download the eBook now!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 4th, 2011 at 5:58 am and is filed under Best Practice, Non-profits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.