Tech advances have changed the way we interact with one another, which has had a profound effect on how we reach out to others and market our NFP’s brand. The following three trends have been gaining in popularity over the past few years.

Use our tips to continue to use these trends in a fresh way to improve your performance in 2018.

Using a Human Touch

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a growing emphasis on creating an emotional connection with supporters. Adding a human touch to our messaging is useful because it helps us to think about how we feel about a specific issue.

With an emotional appeal, we see the human aspects of impact rather than focusing just on numbers and dry statistics. We understand what is truly at stake if we fail to reach our fundraising targets and other goals and we care more about the results.

Continue to find unique ways to create content that your supports find relevant. Segment your audience, and message them in the ways that they prefer. Personalise all of your messages, and create customised content that’s designed to meet the needs of each segment of your supporters

Micro-Tweaks of Campaigns Based on Real Time Results

This marketing strategy is also known as “growth hacking.” While it’s more commonly used in the for-profit industries, some nonprofits are beginning to jump on this emerging trend.

Rather than creating a single marketing campaign and leaving its success or failure to fate, growth hacking focuses on running multiple, smaller tests of specific aspects of a fundraiser.  For example, you might create various appeals during a campaign that target different segments of your audience, and run each of them simultaneously, measuring the results.

As the results come in you would then take this data to make tiny adjustments in each one and rerun the newly updated messages. The goal of this form of marketing is to keep tweaking your messaging the entire time.

Essentially, you are creating numerous mini-campaigns and using their results to continually improve things. Over time, these tiny improvements really add up.

Recruiting Key Influencers to Share and Spread Your Messages, Including Micro-Influencers

Word of mouth advertising is a long-established strategy for recruiting support for a brand and is the founding principle upon which influencer marketing is built. Gaining the support of a key influencer can be an enormous benefit when they share your NFP’s stories with their own connections via social media.

Now, new attention is being placed on the role that micro-influencers can play in brand building and increasing awareness.  Micro-influencers traditionally have around 1,000 to 100,000 connections that interact with their social media posts on a regular basis. Recruiting several of them to your cause can have just as much impact as receiving an endorsement from a wildly popular, big-name celebrity.

To identify micro-influencers, take a good look at the individuals who are already reading your posts and sharing your messages. Do you have a few fans?

What does their digital footprint look like? Do they have a lot of followers, and, do their followers interact with and share their content? SocialRank is a tool you can use to evaluate your current followers and locate the ones that already have significant social followings.

Work on building a personal relationship with micro-influencers to convert them from a fan to a full-fledged advocate of your brand. Invite them to tour your facilities, meet with you one-on-one and talk about your organisation, your cause and the ways you can increase your impact.

If are able to identify and recruit multiple micro-influencers to your cause, create an influencer team and task them with coming up with new ways to share their passion about your cause with their own followers.