Though sometimes deprioritized among nonprofits, marketing is a key way to connect with donors — and a great focus area to stretch your dollar. It’s one of the hallmarks of nonprofit organizations to use resources wisely. But it’s more than a once-a-year donor event or the occasional tweet. True marketing know-how can make all the difference between barely meeting your goals and continually growing awareness for your cause.
Sure, there’s plenty of pricey software and exciting gadgets for marketers today. But these 5 quick wins are easy changes you can make to your marketing processes for a bigger bang for your buck.
#1 Automate Important Nonprofit Documents
It’s almost 2020. Do we really need more paper documents floating around? It’s time to meet donors and patrons where they live in the digital world with automated letters that save time and money. Stop sifting through spreadsheets of donor information and manually inputting data into countless volunteer letters and sponsorship proposals. Instead, automate your most important nonprofit documents with customizable nonprofit templates for a seamless process. Populate your documents with just a few clicks, so your team can focus on the larger mission.
Try these nonprofit document templates >>
#2 Personalize Communications
Appealing to donors happens when you help them make an emotional connection between their passions and your organization — which is never going to happen if you keep sending the same blanket letter. A solid marketing strategy calls for regular communication with your audience, whether through email, social media, mobile, or other digital platforms. But it also means focusing on quality over quantity. Instead of blasting donors and friends with impersonal information, take the data you already have and put it to good use. Make sure the form they fill out when making a contribution gives you enough detail (e.g. name, location, organizational interests, communication preferences, etc.) to send a letter that’s highly personalized so they feel special, valued, and more compelled to make future contributions.
Read More: Check out this tutorial to start sending automated, but personalized emails to your event attendees.
#3 Integrate Systems for Easy Data Population
Marketers in all sectors often fall prey to the curse of disparate systems, forcing them to waste time moving in and out of software that doesn’t play well together. But choosing tools that offer integrations with your favorite systems saves you time, money, and a whole lot of headache. No matter what systems you useacknowledgment to house your donor data (even spreadsheets!), it's easy to extract it to automatically populate and personalize the communications you send on a regular basis. From there, you can export your documents for easy sharing in event management systems, document storage, your website, and more.
#4 Send Documents Digitally
Leave the printing, folding, stamping, and mailing behind! Digital delivery offers a more efficient and cost-effective method for reaching donors, volunteers, and sponsors. Plus, as more people spend time on their devices, their preference for digital delivery increases. Once your nonprofit documents are created, they can be exported for whatever purpose you need, whether sending to sponsors for eSignature, emailing donors, storing in the cloud, or adding to your website. Don’t let your organization be limited by how many mailers you can afford to send out. Instead, keep patrons abreast of your organization’s latest work with letters and reports they can peruse digitally at their own convenience.
#5 Streamline Donor Management
The best connections for your organizations are made after donors see that their gift is valued and being put to good use. However, if your organization is lucky enough to receive donations on a regular basis, keeping up with the receipts, thank you letters, and donor updates may not be feasible. But you can’t afford to skip it. Document automation helps streamline nonprofit donations so you can take in even more contributions without falling behind in the follow-up. “But isn’t automation impersonal?” On the contrary, automated letters act on the data you’ve collected about donors to populate more personal thank yous than you could ever create manually.
And the more timely, the better. Nonprofits are required by law to send a formal acknowledgment letter to anyone making a donation over $250 so they have proof of contribution to claim a tax deduction. Making them wait or hunt around for it doesn’t give a great impression. Automate your follow-up to trigger a donation receipt immediately after they’ve filled out your online form.
Read more: Get tips on sending better acknowledgment letters.
Formstack Documents Takes the Legwork Out of Nonprofit Marketing
Don't let messy paperwork or manual data entry get in the way of growing your cause. Formstack Documents allows you to automate the mundane tasks that normally take up your time so you can get back to executing on your organization’s vision. With customizable nonprofit templates to personalize everything from donation acknowledgment letters to sponsorship proposals (as well as dozens of integrations and delivery options that seamlessly connect with your favorite apps), Formstack Documents is the nonprofit marketer’s secret weapon to keeping board members happy and donors close.
Check out the video below to learn more about leveling up your document generation process with Formstack Documents.
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