How Do I Reach Different Audiences for my Nonprofit?

The unique thing about Nonprofits is the fact that they can reach a whole range of audiences. Different ages, races, genders, countries, the list can go on. Some nonprofit marketers have trouble creating content for that reason. We, however, invite you to look at your marketing this way. Among your Nonprofit, you are so fortunate to have such diversity for one reason. The reason? You're all passionate about the same cause. We encourage you to remind yourself this when you are feeling stumped on what to use for content.

Before we go fully into our digital marketing advice, we want to make sure to mention that there is still a big market of those who prefer direct versus digital marketing. This means paper. It's important your organization evaluates when the right time to use direct marketing versus digital marketing is. This is a major way to reach other audiences you may not always reach. Some ideas are mailings, printed calendars and flyers to hang at local businesses.

Now onto reaching different audiences digitally. Even though your organization has a group of people there passionate about your cause, it's important to still recognize when you need to split up your marketing materials. If you have the ability to create tags and lists in the platform you use for communication, do so. This gives you the ability to send out different marketing materials to different groups. For example, if you are a Nonprofit that is multigenerational, and you have an event coming up, you can use different marketing materials on different groups. Your different pieces of marking materials will have appeal to every group. It seems like double the work, but the results show. Tags and lists also give you the ability to limit who you are sending materials to. If you are doing an event meant for young families, you wouldn't want to send that out to everyone at your organization.

The more you send unrelated marketing materials, the less your emails will be read.

Now that we've talked emails, it's time to talk social media. At this time, we invite you to take a quick overview look at your organization's social media. What do you see? Do you see diverse photos, captions and content? Or do you see very similar of the three? Here are very important social media tips from our experts on how to appeal to a wide-ranged audience:

1. Everybody loves to use smiling kids on social media. They tug our heartstrings and we feel an instant obligation to the post. If your nonprofit is a kids based organization keep the cute kids coming! If your organization is multigenerational, it's time to switch up your photos. Use photos of different aged members, post memes, post articles- get creative! You could be turning a prospect off to your organization by only posting alike generations.
2. As we spoke about in our last post, What Goes Where When it Comes to My Nonprofit's Social Media,  different social media platforms call for different types of posts. If you're having trouble reaching the right audiences, we suggest posting different content on each platform.  Although there are users of all age on both, Instagram tends to lean younger and Facebook tends to lean older.
3. Use split testing. In split testing, you can test captions, content and photos. We suggest only changing one variable at a time. If you change the photo and the caption, and see better results, it'll be harder to tell for the next time you do this.

Right now we are undoubtedly in a unique time. Social media platforms are being used over a wide variety of age because most states are still under stay-at-home orders. People have more time on their hands and they are looking for ways to keep themselves occupied. A great example is Tik Tok. During this pandemic, Tik Tok gained 12 million active users. Because of this unique time, it is a great time to be experimenting. Test your content across different platforms, and see what works for your organization. By experimenting, you will reach different audiences you never knew you could.

If you're our client, let's talk about how to maximize all your marketing materials for different audiences. If you're not our client, we'd love the chance to talk with you about how we can help you reach a variety of audiences.