Our Charity Dynamics retained strategic services clients receive weekly status updates that allow us to plan and track initiatives that help our clients reach their digital communication and fundraising goals.
Each week, we share the most innovative ideas we see in the industry and look for ways to keep our clients on the cutting edge. Here are three of our favorite ideas from the last month:
1. Are You Paying to Play? Social Media Ad Spending Set to Overtake Newspaper Ad Spend…
Despite political and economic concerns, advertising agency Zenith Optimedia predicts global advertising spending on social media will continue to grow to account for 20% of all Internet advertising in 2019 and should take over newspaper ad spending by 2020.
Marketers continue to shift spending to social media networks, where the near native-advertising format easily blends into news feeds as opposed to lower performing, more interruptive display advertising. With declining engagement and reach on social media identified as a 2017 nonprofit technology trend, the era of free is over.
Algorithms, the high volume of brands, businesses, and nonprofits using social media for marketing, and slowing “Like” and “Follow” rates have lessened the power of the Big Three (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) – unless your nonprofit has an advertising budget.
To continue to have positive results on the Big Three, your nonprofit will need to make financial investments in staff, advertising, and premium tools.
2. Get Visual: Translate Impact in Winter Cultivation Efforts
Most NPOs are kicking off 2017 on the heels of an intense and lengthy end-of-year (EOY) campaign. If you don’t have it on your radar yet, consider a pure cultivation touch in your communications slated for January/February.
This is the time to say thank you, translate impact from your massive EOY series, remind everyone why they should be passionate about your cause and share goals for the New Year. Since you’re likely slammed catching up from the holidays and getting other 2017 initiatives off the ground, remember that you can easily build this cultivation message off of existing content like an annual report, printed newsletter or donor update.
Once you find the content you want to share, take those EOY stats or annual report paragraphs and turn them into compelling visuals. The Charity Dynamics design team can help! An info-graphic is a great way to translate campaign performance, re-educate constituents or get them to visualize your goals for 2017.
3. Advocacy in 2017: Are You Prepared to Move?
With the President-elect expected to take office on January 20, 2017, nonprofits are keeping an eye on what impact the administration’s proposed tax plan will have on charitable giving.
Take stock of your advocacy platform and communication plan to be sure you are ready to mobilize your constituent base to engage in advocacy at all levels and branches of government. This will ensure that elected officials understand the impact policy proposals will have on the communities you serve.
For clients on Luminate Online, here are some highlights from recent Advocacy tool upgrades to keep in mind as you enter the New Year:
- Luminate Advocacy includes specific ways to contact federal agencies for public comment on specified regulations, proposals or other items.
- The tool now supports county alerts.
- Luminate tracks if additional steps are necessary to contact individual legislators (like solving a logic puzzle before hitting submit or going directly to a legislator’s web form). It serves these options up automatically to constituents based on the constituent’s legislator.
- Luminate can recognize if a legislator already has a position on an issue and allow for different messaging based on that position.
- Using Advanced Options, you can associate alerts with issues, helping to organize alerts for organizations and constituents.
- You can select a “constituent only” option to stop people from outside a state/district from weighing in on specific alerts.
While these are just a few options from the Luminate Online platform, your Charity Dynamics team can help you explore further possibilities in your advocacy tool and assist in in getting the word out!
About Charity Dynamics Strategic Services Retainers:
Charity Dynamics Strategic Services Retainers are planned, hours based, ongoing engagements where project teams collaborate on the short and long term needs of the client. A strategic retainer allows for flexibility and access to the full diversity of expertise on the Charity Dynamics team including consultants, web developers, analytics, designers and UX experts. Raise more money, reach more donors and make a bigger impact by leveraging our team to meet your digital fundraising and communication goals.