In a world where it seems there is a not for profit on every corner, it is imperative that you utilise the online tools that can help your NFP to stand out. It is an extremely hard landscape to stand out in when you are a smaller NFP without the large marketing budgets of major NFP organisations. However, it is not impossible to take on these big guns by utilising a variety of tools without the need to outlay a huge amount of money.

While there is a combination of tools you can use, the main one that can drive traffic to your website and showcase your NFP to the world is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is the use of specific keywords and phrases (long tail keywords) in your blog posts, website copy and articles that your prospective site visitors are looking for. Rather than writing your content simply because a topic seems relevant, it is important to structure it so that you are writing about what people are looking for and therefore what will help you to rank higher in the search engine listings.

The big marketing budgets work on attracting lots of people through their efforts, but you can be just as effective by writing your content to speak to a specific group (niche) of people who will become your loyal supporters. Think of it like this; if you had pink boots to sell you wouldn’t try to sell them in a male dominated environment. This is what it means to find your niche. Who will respond to your NFP the most? Are they parents, grandparents, carers, business people, etc? When you have that as a clear picture and structure your copy using specific keywords to speak specifically to those people, you begin to gain traction in the search engine rankings and subsequently gain new followers.

To give you an example of how to create your SEO rich copy and/or blog post titles, consider the following example:

Your NFP is to raise awareness for breast cancer research. When you write your copy, you need to use the relevant words that people refer to when talking about or looking for anything to do with breast cancer. For example; breast cancer diagnosis, breast cancer symptoms, what is breast cancer, etc. As there are a lot of NFPs who are targeting this market, you then need to go even deeper with your strategy by using long tail keywords (phrases) to allow you to rank well in different areas relating to breast cancer. For example, to compete on the term “breast cancer” would be extremely difficult without a massive marketing budget but writing copy on “the best head scarves for breast cancer patients” or “how to talk to your family about breast cancer”, would allow you to rank a lot higher for specific phrases that people are actually looking for.

When someone is looking for an NFP to support it is usually because they have a family member that has been through the situation or illness or it has impacted their life in some way. When you use SEO, you begin to rank, and therefore come into the awareness, of a far wider audience than those just looking for “breast cancer”. It is this widespread infiltration of the rankings through SEO optimisation that begins to give your NFP the upper hand in the marketing stakes without outlaying the big dollars.