The post Celebrate International Grant Professionals Day | Nonprofit Blog appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.

Today, we’re breaking it down further into the most common communication tools used in integrated marketing. Whether it’s direct mail or advertising, each marketing tool has a unique purpose and a place in your integrated marketing plan.

Direct Mail

When you’re looking to create a more personal touch with your communications, consider direct mail over email. In this technological age when our inboxes are often flooded, sometimes it’s a nice surprise when we receive a personal, traditional piece of mail.

Direct mail is also useful for a number of things, like promoting an upcoming fundraiser and for getting some feedback. Additionally, if you operate mostly through an online blog or email newsletter, the print source is a good way to break up all the online communications.

When it works: Personal touches are important when you want to add something special. It’ll need to be different enough to avoid the junk pile. Also, make sure you have a specific call-to-action on the direct mail piece.

Advertising

Advertising is very broad in nature, because while advertising itself is a communication tool, it is usually used in conjunction with another tool, such as the Internet. However, don’t forget about traditional forms of advertising, like print news sources and television. These could be especially useful if you are a small organization that relies on local support.

Be prominent on your local channels, newspapers, newsletters, etc. If you’re a bigger organization with a more sizable budget, don’t be afraid to go beyond the borders of your local community. Overall, use advertising when you need to educate your audience on something, like the start of a new project or an upcoming event.

When it works: While advertising doesn’t always have a cost, it very likely can. Use advertising when the return on your investment is projected to be worth it. That return doesn’t have to be just about the money. Factor in the time and effort you’d be putting into the finished product.

Internet Marketing

If there is any communication tool that you should be using, it’s this one. Marketing your brand and cause via email or on a number of social media networks is not only low-cost or free, but it’s also a really great way to reach several different populations at once. Additionally, people are increasingly using the internet to search for information before making decisions, which makes internet marketing the perfect tool to make your first impression.

Whether you are participating in #GivingTuesdsay or hosting your very own nonprofit conference (like Cause Camp!), internet marketing is a tool that should have a primary spot in your marketing plans.

When it works: The Internet was made to reach people quickly, and to target a large quantity of people. When you have something that you need to get out fast and to a lot of people, use Internet marketing.

Special Promotions

As a nonprofiteer, you might be wondering how sales promotions are useful for your NOT-for-profit organization. However, we all know that you must have some sort of revenue in order to sustain your mission. Most of this comes in the form of donations, but if you have some sort of product or service that you are offering your audience, consider using a sales promotion to boost your marketing.

For example, we provided a Cause Camp early-bird registration fee that was a reduced price from the regular registration fee. Not only were we plastering our social media and email campaigns with all-things Cause Camp, but pairing our marketing efforts with that sales promotion helped increase recognition and registration of the event.

If you can afford to take a small cut in revenues, offer up some sales promotions to reel in your audience.  

When it works: Special promotions are merely that—for special occasions. They’ll lose their luster if you use them all the time with your marketing strategy. Use them to boost hype for a special occasion that needs an extra kick.

Public Relations

Much like advertising, public relations is a very broad and widespread communication strategy. There are a number of benefits to utilizing this economical tool, but perhaps the most important is the control it gives your nonprofit.

Public relations allows you to control the image that you want the public to see, creating a more positive perception of your brand and cause. A great way to do this is by using press releases with local news sources to get the word out about upcoming events or new opportunities at your organization.

When it works: When you have an event or something exciting that directly impacts the community. Send out a press release to news outlets, always keeping in mind that you’ll get press coverage if you can convey that it directly impacts the community.

Personal Selling

When you think of personal selling, you might think of door-to-door salespeople. While you don’t have to be going door-to-door, nonprofits are certainly in the business of sales.

This is a communication tool that utilizes one of your best resources: your human resources. You can roll out beautifully designed mail and social media posts, but nothing will woo your donors like someone who can build a unique relationship and cater to their needs.

When it works: People trust people they know and love. That’s why people are the best advocates for your brand. Encourage anybody and everybody at your organization to spread positive light around your organization.

_________________

As we’ve talked about this past month, integrated marketing is all about conveying one consistent message across all your communications platforms. Whether you choose one or a combination of these tools, make sure that they always work together, not against each other. Are there any tools that you’re a fan of and think should be included in this list? Let us know in the comments.

The post Marketing Tools for Your Nonprofit and When They’re Effective appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.

If you’re looking for what exactly integrated marketing is or how it can be useful to your nonprofit, we’ve got you covered here. Today, however, we’re talking about a different side of integrated marketing.

Don Schultz, one of the pioneers of integrated marketing communications, has presented many different ways for organizations to adopt and implement integrated marketing. Here are the 9 guiding principles of integrated marketing communications, broken down into simpler terms.

When you begin planning your communications, start from outside your organization and plan inward. What this means is that, rather than starting within your organization and planning messages internally, start with your audience in mind.

Whether you’re reaching out to donors or potential volunteers, make sure to understand them first and then plan your message. You may choose to create a short survey or interview current supporters. The key is to find how they like to be communicated with and plan your message around that.

Within the organization, many may see different types of communications as working separately from one another. Typically, there is some sort of hierarchy among these departments: your organization may prioritize social media over direct mail. However, your audience won’t see it that way.

Encourage integration between departments of your organization and especially between different types of communications. Think of this as a more horizontal type of hierarchy, where all communications work together to convey a consistent message.

In simplest terms, segmentation is the act of taking your entire audience and dividing it up into subgroups. This is huge because, as you might have guessed, donors will not respond in the same ways or to the same messages as volunteers.

However, segmentation does not have to be based on the type of supporter. You may even break up your subgroups into more defined groups based on location, lifestyles, income, etc.

This one is tricky and it completely depends on your audience and scope of reach, but it is extremely important in making sure that you are reaching the right audience and tailoring your message to their needs.

When it comes to marketing, especially in the nonprofit world, we often focus on changing the minds and attitudes of our supporters and on raising awareness for our cause or upcoming event. However, according to Schultz, the key driver behind integrated marketing communications is impacting behavior.

What we should be trying to do is understand how and why our audience acts, or why it isn’t necessarily jumping to action. Think about what exactly you want your target audience to do and build your message around that. And if you are able to, create easy two-way communication between you and them. That means a call-to-action that is truly worthy of action, and landing pages that are visually appealing and easy to navigate.

Much like attitudes and awareness, the efficiency of your media tools should not be your main measurement of communications success. As an organization, you have a brand that relays a message and you want to get your target audience in contact with your brand, rather than just recognizing it.

Bring your audience in contact with your message in as many ways as you can that are beneficial to your organization. This doesn’t mean that you should blast them with emails every day, but make sure your audience comes in contact with your message on your site, social media accounts, newsletter and any other consistent communication tool that you use.

While encouraging action is important, it’s not the only thing. Getting your audience to react and change how they feel about you is major. Word-of-mouth is a powerful communication tool in itself, so you want to do all that you can to have people talk positively about your organization to their friends, coworkers and families.

Not only does integrated marketing create consistency in your communications, it can build trust among your audience and generate some positive reactions to your content.

Rolling out communications only make up one small part of the overall picture. You must also think about the other departments or people that are doing their own thing to make sure your nonprofit’s communications are effective.

As you plan your communications and the message you want to relay to your audience, don’t be afraid to talk out your plan with others in your organization, such as your graphic designer or even the social media intern. Not only does this boost collaboration and the potential for fantastic ideas, but it creates unity among your nonprofit and ensures that no one accidentally puts out a message that goes against yours.

Basically, what worked on your last donor or your last fundraising campaign may not necessarily work for the next. This goes for your budget, visuals, copy and even audience segmentation. Each marketing campaign should begin from scratch, using the most appropriate communication tools and tailoring the message for its current purpose.

That’s not to say that you won’t have some overlap from campaign to campaign, but the fresher the material, the more likely it is to be noticed.

This one is simple, yet it’s something that you may find yourself forgetting about after you roll out a marketing campaign. Do you have any numbers on the click-through rate of your email blasts? How about the return on your investment in your communications for a specific event?

These are just a couple of ways to measure the success of your communications, but regardless of how you choose to measure the value of your communications, make sure you actually do it. You won’t know what to continue or improve if you don’t measure results.

The post 9 Ways to Take Integrated Marketing to the Next Level appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.

The post Nonprofit Communications: Are They Helping You Build Relationships? appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.

The key is for nonprofits to identify the Founders’ unique traits and engage them in ways that tap into their individual work ethics.

What Makes the Founders Unique?

This generation is often confused with the Millennial generation, due to their closeness in age and the ways they were raised.

A majority of Generation Y, which typically consists of people born between 1977 and 1994 (although this often varies), have been surrounded by technological advances and rising diversity. The same can be said of Generation Z, which is anyone born after 1995.

The 90s is the decade that truly blurs the line that separates these two generations, but there are characteristics that can help an organization identify which generation they are working with.

For starters, the Founders are connected across many more screens than Millennials. While Millennials communicate mostly via phone and computer, the Founders prefer to multitask across 5 screens: TV, phone, laptop, desktop and any portable music player.

Don’t be surprised to find them using YouTube or other social media for content and research. This is certainly an asset for nonprofits whose social media communications may be a little outdated.

And unlike Millennials, who merely grew up with the World Wide Web, the Founders have never had to live without computers or the internet, making them that much more savvy with these tools.

Nonprofits should avoid assuming that this generation has loose spending habits. In fact, because they witnessed the Millennials struggle through the Great Recession, the Founders are more financially conservative. Growing up in an uncertain time period post-9/11 and the recession, and this generation likes to be acknowledged for being fiscally mature and resourceful.

Additionally, they are not all that interested in working for corporate America. Nonprofits organizations can really reap benefits from the unique workplace cultures that they offer.

It’s also important for organizations to consider the personalities and work ethic of this generation. Founders have a deep entrepreneurial spirit, even more so than their predecessors.

While Millennials like to share things, Founders are more industrious and prefer to create things. They are also more motivated by opportunities for advancement than they are by money, making them ideal young candidates for the nonprofit sector.

They are very forward-thinking and have a head-start on thinking about job and volunteer opportunities that may advance them in their future careers. That’s where your nonprofit comes in.

How to Engage Them in Your Cause

When Beth Kanter was on the blog, she made several great points on how nonprofits can adopt the Founders generation’s mentality, including tapping into its members’ entrepreneurial spirit and communicating with them in visual “snackable” content.

Nonprofits can reap the benefits of this innovative spirit by assigning Founders projects that require creativity and allow for autonomy. Members of this generation will be more willing to provide their services to a cause if they feel like they are improving the cause, not just merely upholding it.

Additionally, Generation Z enjoys using those five screens previously mentioned as much as possible, so any efforts to communicate with them should be done visually and interactively. Nonprofits, make sure your emails and websites are mobile-friendly.

However, once you have them interested in your cause or organization, do not make the mistake of avoiding traditional forms of engagement. When it comes to speaking with management or authority, the Founders prefer face-to-face communication (51 percent) as opposed to e-mail (16 percent) or instant messaging (11 percent).

Last, but not least, this is an increasingly diverse and and aware generation. They have grown up around changing norms, including increased racial diversity and shifts in gender roles. So rather than feeding them information about these causes that they already know, acknowledge their diversity and invite them to use their knowledge for social good.

The oldest bunch of this generation is barely out of high school, yet it’s definitely not too early to start planning for the future as they take over the workplace and the community as volunteers and social entrepreneurs.

Tell us—how is your organization planning to engage the Founders?

The post The Founders Generation: Who They Are and How Nonprofits Can Engage Them appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.

Volunteer recruitment is a great way for your organization to gain support and get the needed services for your cause, which in turn provides a sense of personal satisfaction and accomplishment for the volunteers. Along the way, great connections and a genuine difference in the community are made.

However, recruiting volunteers requires much more than a phone call or having someone show up and get to work. Consider the who, what and why of volunteering as you recruit people to support your cause.

Who Are You Looking For?

Core values are something that you should strongly consider as you look for potential volunteers. If you are an organization that supports breast cancer, find the people who are passionate about this cause. These people often have a story to share or are easily driven to action, making your cause that much more impactful in the community.

Whatever your potential volunteers are interested in, help them identify those causes and choose the ones whose passions align with your organization’s cause.

Interests and passions are often very broad and hard to define and pinpoint, and they are usually changing.

Values, on the other hand, tend to grow and develop rather than change. If your organization’s cause is all about education, seek those who value knowledge and altruism. If you are a religious organization, connect with people whose faith is a core value. There are plenty of people looking to volunteer, but the key to enjoyable volunteerism is finding people who feel your cause truly resonates with them.

Ask open-ended questions and get to know potential volunteers’ passions.

What Should They Offer?

These volunteers likely have many skills and talents, but not all of them will be relevant or helpful to the work that you need done.

Think about what specific strengths you want volunteers to have that will be beneficial to the cause that you’re mutually passionate about. For some volunteers, this step will happen before they find their dream cause, but if you run across a volunteer who is truly crazy about working with your organization, continue asking those questions and find the qualified volunteers.

If you’re an organization that supports animals, you probably won’t need Volunteer A’s amazing auditing skills, so take some time to reflect on what needs to be done and what talents are required to get these tasks done.

Why Are They Qualified?

Typically, volunteers don’t offer their services for money-driven reasons. So why DO they want to volunteer? That’s a question you should certainly be asking before you bring a volunteer on board.

While “making a difference” isn’t a bad or wrong reason for wanting to volunteer, it’s not as specific as it could be. Just like you ask questions to find volunteers’ passions and strengths, dig a little deeper and try to find a more meaningful purpose for their work.

Some reasons may be simple, like needing to fulfill a class requirement or wanting to develop certain skills. However, transparency from both ends will help foster a strong relationship, and who knows, you just might run into some great storytelling material for your cause.

Different causes need different people with unique passions and skill sets. The more aware you are of these potential volunteers’ talents and interests, the better suited they will be to meet your organization’s needs and vice versa. Before you jump into a volunteer relationship, ask yourself these questions to strike up an effective conversation and, hopefully, snag yourself the perfect volunteer.

The post The 3 W’s of Volunteer Recruitment appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.

There are several types of marketing research that organizations can implement to gain some insight into their targeted customers. Big corporations may opt for fancy databases and software, but don’t let this intimidate you if you are a small organization. Data-gathering methods such as interviews and surveys are easy to implement and interpret at little to no cost with software such as Qualtrics or Google Forms.

However, a successful questionnaire requires much more than just a variety of questions relevant to your topic and some demographic questions to categorize the respondents. Use the following format to ensure that your respondents stay engaged and to get the best out of your market research.

1. Introduce Yourself

Start with a small introduction that lets your respondents know who you are, why you are conducting the survey, how the information will be used and roughly how long the survey may take. Being transparent will put respondents at ease and help retain the ones who are willing to participate.

Bonus tip #1: Keep up the transitions before starting new sections. Always begin with a brief (1-2 sentence) explanation of what the next section will cover.

2. Explore General Behaviors

This section is useful in asking behavior-related questions that are not too specific to the topic you are researching. For example, if you are trying to figure out your target market’s satisfaction with your volunteer opportunities, ask respondents to look at a series of statements and indicate where they stand on a “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” spectrum. These statements should NOT be specific to your organization, but instead ask respondents about general volunteering preferences and behaviors. This helps ease them into the survey.

Bonus Tip #2: As a rule of thumb, the number of answers should be four to seven, and the number that you choose DOES matter. This is where forced or non-forced responses come into play. A question with five answer choices has a neutral middle choice, so if you want to force respondents to pick a side, stick to four or six answer choices. This is useful for any question throughout the survey.

3. Ask For General Opinions

While the previous section is helpful in exploring the different behaviors of your respondents, this section delves a little deeper into their opinions and perceptions. For example, you may now move onto asking about respondents’ willingness to volunteer in general. Keep in mind that you should save the questions that are specific to your organization for later.

You may also choose to split this section into two, with the first set of questions being about perceptions on volunteering, and the second section exploring perceptions on volunteer opportunities in your area. At this point, you may choose to include yourself in the answer choices for comparison purposes, but it is still subtle enough to keep the respondent engaged without asking questions that are too specific.

Bonus Tip #3: Another general rule to follow—allow for “none of the above” or “other” responses. Maybe some of your respondents don’t volunteer on a weekly basis, so a question asking how many times they volunteer each week is not relevant to them. However, this does not mean that the same respondent wouldn’t have some useful insight about the type of volunteer opportunities or conditions they look for.

4 & 5. Get More Specific

The following two sections will work much like the first two sections in terms of flow, but now is your chance to ask some questions that are more specific to your organization or research purpose. If you want to know about satisfaction with your specific current volunteer opportunities, ask about those. If you want to test out new ideas or concepts, ask respondents for their thoughts. This section is ideal for open-ended questions, and although they are harder to quantify, they allow for much deeper insight than if you limit the answer choices.

Bonus Tip #4: Try to avoid asking questions with different formats in the same section. For example, if you begin this section with a question that asks the respondent to rank a set of answers with one being the most favorable and five being the least, make the rest of the questions in this section follow this question format. This takes some of the effort away from the respondent, making the survey experience more enjoyable and effortless.

6. Classify Your Respondents

There are a near-endless amount of classification questions you may ask your respondents. Most of them will fall under demographic questions, such as age, sex, income, education, etc. Although there are many ways to classify your respondents, make sure that the classifications are relevant. For example, avoid asking for things like annual income or marital status if it’s not useful to your research.

These questions should help you figure out who your respondents are and if they fit the criteria that you are looking for. Just remember to make the questions pertinent to your intended audience.

Lastly, end with a genuine thank you statement and, if you wish, add in some sort of incentive or online gift for participating, like a drawing for a gift card.

Whether you’re a rookie or a pro at questionnaires, funneling your questions so that they start broad and get more specific as you go is a great way to ease respondents into the survey without too much probing too soon. So tell us, have you ever created and implemented a survey for research for your nonprofit?

The post How to Create the Perfect Questionnaire (AND Get Responses) appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.

The idea is that a short summary about your organization should be limited to the length of an elevator ride and should compel your audience to continue the conversation after the ride is over. However, if not done effectively, your pitch can cause more harm than good to your organization.

Here are a few tips for optimizing your elevator pitch and rocking it the next time you choose to deliver it.

Be Specific

Treat your elevator pitch much like your mission statement. Your mission statement describes the reason your organization exists, and your elevator speech should do the same with some extra information about the who, what, where and why:

• Who: What is your name and what is your relation to the organization?

• What: What is your mission statement and how can you adapt it?

• Where: Where are you located and where is your impact focused on?

• Why: Why should the person speaking to care about your organization?

Keep it Short

Did you know that the average adult’s attention span is about eight seconds? That’s shorter than a goldfish’s, so you don’t have much time to work with.

While your elevator pitch should answer all of the questions mentioned above, it should be concise and brief enough that your intended audience remembers key words. When you are putting your pitch together, time it and make sure that it is no more than 30-60 seconds. Longer elevator pitches may be appropriate in more formal settings.

Remember, a little ambiguity is good; it can help make the other person more curious about who you are and what you do. Just make sure that you save the long details for when they inquire further.

Practice Your Pitch

Just like those high school classes that made you give speeches, a good grade and positive feedback requires that you practice and perfect your pitch. The difference here is that you don’t get notecards or a podium to hide behind, so make sure you put in some extra practice into delivering your pitch.

However, avoid being stiff and robotic. That goes for body language, too—be aware of your nonverbals and the message they might relay. Bad nonverbals, like slumping or crossed arms, can overshadow your pitch.

Say your pitch often, say it clearly, but remember to speak naturally. Memorize the main points and be conversational by adding your personality into it.

Leave a Lasting Impression

Your elevator pitch should work much like a call-to-action. It should be impactful and make people want to know more about your purpose and organization.

Consider ending with an open-ended question that invites the other person to talk further. You may also have something on you that you can leave with the other person, like a small flyer or a business card. This will show your professionalism and your desire to keep in contact.

Keep in mind, however, that one size does not fit all. As you become more comfortable with approaching others with your pitch, it’s okay to customize it to fit your audience’s needs. This will help you make a more unique connection with each person you encounter.

Still wondering what a bad pitch looks like versus a good one? We’ve got you covered. Nonprofit Hub’s staff recently had a little fun crafting good and bad elevator pitches. Check it out in the video below.

Video edited by Devin Thomas.

The post How to Craft a Successful Elevator Pitch appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.

In simplest terms, integrated marketing communications, which we’ll call IMC, means that all of your communication tools work seamlessly together to create a consistent image and message. These tools include social media, direct marketing, advertisements, public relations and everything in between.

So how is this relevant to your nonprofit organization?

Nonprofits can greatly benefit from adopting many business practices. If your organization is struggling to engage volunteers and donors, it may be helpful to take a look at the messages you’re sending out and whether your marketing tools are working together or against one another.

Refine Your Brand Identity

If you have a name, logo, design and mission, plus you provide some sort of product or service, you are a brand; with a brand comes a brand identity.

Your brand identity has to do with how your target audience, donors or volunteers associate your brand in relation to others. This also encompasses your audience’s awareness and knowledge of your nonprofit.

When you exercise IMC and have a consistent image across all platforms, people begin to recognize your identity and associate it with the specific good that you do.

Avoid Duplicate Messages

Nonprofits must see these marketing efforts in the eyes of users—as one big, endless flow of information from many indistinguishable sources.

When your organization allows all of its communication tools to operate too autonomously, they can send out contradictory messages or run into duplication. Let’s be clear—sending out a consistent and reliable message is the goal, but each tool you use should craft and deliver this message in a way that engages your audience in different ways.

Take the Share a Coke campaign, for example. Coca-Cola used Twitter hashtags, Facebook pages, interactive kiosks, TV ads, email marketing, YouTube videos—you name it. Of course, your NPO likely doesn’t have a multi-million dollar marketing budget, but the message in this campaign was clear and consistent across all of these media channels.

And anyway, according to a recent survey by Convio, organization size and integrated marketing sophistication do not correlate, so the size of your nonprofit does not mean you can’t have successful IMC.

Increase Your Return

ROI, or return on investment, is yet another jargon term that we have all heard from the business world. Regardless, it’s probably one of the most important factors in an organization’s success. Obviously, if you are going to invest time and money into a marketing campaign, you want to see a high return both in terms of money and awareness of your cause.

If done right, integrated marketing does better than the sum of its parts, and the proof is in the numbers. In a 2009 campaign, the American Red Cross achieved an 11:1 ROI and increased the average donor gifts by 43 percent with an integrated campaign. Cool, huh?

Get Started

After you have crafted your organization’s message and the image you want to be associated with your brand, start by choosing a small campaign to pilot integration, such as your next seminar, webinar or networking event.

Formulate different ways to deliver your message and create a content calendar for the duration of this campaign. This allows you to keep track of duplication or contradiction, as well as assign when and through what channels to launch your campaign.

Measuring the success of integrating your marketing tools can be as simple as seeing increases in attendance, click-through rates or social media interactions. If you want to get fancy, use a central CRM tool to manage your content and get some end-of-month insights on your audience interactions. With practice, you can soon integrate your communications like a pro for your next big fundraiser or donor cultivation event.

Integrated marketing communications seems like a complex practice for large business with large budgets to make these large campaigns happen. However, as we saw, size does not matter, and your nonprofit can start as small as sending emails and Facebook posts that collaborate on a message. So tell us, has your organization ever launched an integrated marketing campaign?

The post Why Integrated Marketing isn’t Just a For-Profit Practice appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.

There is a variety of email marketing software available to help you create an effective and visually-appealing email template, but not everybody has a budget for this. Check out these email marketing basics and fundamental steps to ensure that your efforts aren’t overlooked.

Pay Attention to Your Subject Line and Headline

According to Vertical Response, over 50% of readers will open an email based solely on the subject line. Although a subject line seems small when compared to the rest of the email’s content, this one line is the first impression that you have on your readers. If you don’t do it right, it could also be the last impression. Make sure that the subject line you choose summarizes the content of the email or highlights the most important piece of your newsletter. Consider including some sort of call-to-action or a clever play-on-words, and avoid vocabulary that will make readers think that you are only interested in selling them something.

If readers open the email, the headline will make a large difference in whether they read the entire email or not. On average, 8 out of 10 people will read headline copy, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. Allow the headline to be as attention-grabbing as the subject line, and have it complement the rest of the email’s content.

Embrace the White Space

Content is obviously important and you will want every important word to be read. However, too much text can completely turn a reader off, even if they are interested in what you have to say. Rather than using lines or borders to separate your content, just simply leave some white space to create distinction throughout the email. Not only will it make the content easier to scan, but it will also make the overall email look more readable, resulting in more reading and less deleting.

Communicate with Visuals

I have received way too many newsletters that include all text and maybe one or two photos towards the top of the email. I can tell you that I almost instantly send those to the trash. Aside from the headline, images are the first thing readers see as they glance at the email. Many will actually look to the images to get clues about what they will read, so make sure the images are relevant and linked to your website or some call-to-action.

Additionally, consider finding a ratio that works for you and stick to it. If you can get your message across in a more visual way, then perhaps use a 60/40 ratio. If images are becoming irrelevant to your message, bump the text up to 70%. Just keep in mind that some browsers or settings may block images, so make images complementary and not the sole focus of your email marketing.

Less is Definitely More

Some of the best and most visually appealing email marketing efforts include the simplest designs. Although software like Adobe Creative Cloud allow for endless creativity and complex graphics, basic fonts and flat design are very much “in” right now. While you may lean towards fancy fonts to make a statement, timeless fonts like “helvetica” and “garamond” are expert favorites and will make any design look great.

Show Your Commitment

Another way to boost your reach is with a professional email address, such as @nonprofithub.org. Using a professional and consistent address that represents your business will allow readers to know that the email they’re receiving is credible. Sites like Zoho allow you to host your business email for free.

Consistency goes beyond a professional email and signature. Whether you send an email once a week or once a day, make sure readers know when to expect it. According to Hub Spot, companies that send 16 – 30 messages a month see a click rate more than 2X greater than the click rate of companies that send 2 or less each month. This will change depending on your organization’s mission and scope, but finding that sweet spot and sticking to it is important to creating reliability.

Email communication is crucial to engaging your audience in this age of technology, whether your organization seeks to educate with newsletter subscriptions or attract volunteers and donations. It’s a process that requires commitment and being meticulous with your choices. If you’re new to email marketing, don’t sweat it. Start with the essentials and adjust them to fit your organization’s and your audience’s growing needs.

The post Back to Basics: 5 Essential Steps to Email Marketing appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.