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How to create a digital marketing strategy
Learn how you can document a digital marketing strategy for your charity
In today’s digital-first age, having a strong online presence is essential for charities to raise awareness, engage supporters, and drive donations. A well-crafted digital marketing strategy helps to streamline efforts, making sure that every campaign aligns with your charity’s goals. There are more reasons why you need a digital marketing strategy in this article.
This guide will walk you through how to develop an effective digital marketing strategy specifically tailored to the charity sector.
1. Understand your charity’s mission, goals and objectives
Every successful digital marketing strategy begins with a clear understanding of your charity’s mission. Why does your organisation exist? What impact are you aiming to make?
Your organisational strategy should be a key influence on what you do with your digital marketing activity, so make sure you use this to help frame and guide it.
Define clear goals
Break down your charity’s broader mission into measurable digital marketing goals. Are you focused on raising awareness, increasing donations, or recruiting volunteers? Each of these objectives will require a different marketing approach.
For example:
- Increasing donations: Focus on storytelling and emotional engagement, ensuring your calls to action are clear and consistent.
- Building awareness: Invest in content that explains your charity’s mission and impact.
- Recruiting volunteers: Use community-driven platforms and focus on local engagement.
Define specific objectives
When you have your goals agreed, then take a look at what specific objectives you can set against these. Objectives should have more detail than the goals and ideally should contain some numerical ‘targets’ and a timeframe (if relevant).
For example:
Goal = Increasing donations
Objective = Increase the website donation revenue by 200% within the next 12 months
Goal = Building awareness
Objective = Increase website traffic by 100% over the next 6 months
Goal = Recruiting volunteers
Objective = Increase application levels of volunteers by 100% and appoint an additional 10 volunteers within the next 12 months
Once you have your objectives, you then need to assign a set of ‘key results’ against them. These are the typical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that you will use to gauge how you are performing against your strategy. See more on this below (‘7. Track and measure success’).
Doing this means you now have a set of measurable ‘OKRs’. This is a recognised strategy model (similar to SMART Objectives) and provides you with the clarity and transparency around what you are trying to achieve.
2. Identify your target audiences
Understanding who you are trying to reach is crucial for crafting relevant content and digital marketing activity. Your charity might have multiple target audiences, including:
- Donors (both individual and corporate)
- Volunteers
- Beneficiaries
- Partners and stakeholders.
Gain insights from internal stakeholders
Start off by documenting the relevant (and recent) insights that you as a charity have in relation to these audience groups.
A great way to do this with your internal stakeholders is to carry out an empathy mapping session. This is where you use a tool called an ’empathy map’ to build up a quick picture of who the typical audience person is, by stating:
- Their goals
- Their needs
- Their actions
- Their touchpoints
- Their feelings
- Their pain points.
You can read more about this in our guide to empathy mapping.
Gain insights from external stakeholders
You might find from doing your empathy mapping that you have gaps in your knowledge of your audiences (or certain groups). Or you might feel that the views held internally may suffer from some forms of bias and therefore should be validated, rather than taken as the whole truth.
This means you can then carry out some simple audience research, to understand more insights about who your audiences are, what their behaviours are and what their attitudes are.
To do this you can arrange to interview a sample of them, using a set of defined questions. This can be done via a video call (Zoom, Google Meet etc) or even face-to-face. And you only need to interview a relatively small number of them – 5-6 people from each audience group.
Create audience personas
A good practice is to develop detailed personas for your target audiences. For example, one persona could be “Emma, a 35-year-old professional who donates to causes that support children.” Another might be “Sam, a university student who has time to volunteer.”
Knowing your audience’s demographics, motivations, and challenges helps you create content that resonates with them.
You can create these using the insights gained from internal and external stakeholders (empathy mapping and research).
3. Perform a digital audit
Before implementing new digital strategies, it’s essential to know where your charity currently stands online.
- Website: Is your website user-friendly and optimised for mobile devices? Does it have clear navigation and easy-to-find calls to action (donate, volunteer, etc.)?
- Social media: Review your charity’s social media profiles. Are they active and engaging? Are you using platforms where your audience is most active (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn)?
- Paid media: Do you use paid search or paid social ads? How are they performing for you and are they contributing to your conversions?
- SEO and content: How well does your website rank on search engines for key terms related to your charity’s work? Consider performing an SEO audit using tools like Google Analytics or SEMrush to identify opportunities for improvement.
This audit will highlight the strengths and weaknesses of your current digital efforts and guide the next steps. If useful, you can summarise your findings from the audits in a combined SWOT framework.
4. Craft compelling content
Content is at the heart of any digital marketing strategy. The stories you tell, the blogs you post, and the videos you create are key to engaging your audience and communicating your charity’s impact.
Content types:
- Storytelling: Share stories about the people you help, the changes you’re making, or the challenges you’re facing. These stories can be shared through blog posts, social media, or even video campaigns.
Example: Charity: Water uses powerful storytelling in their video campaigns to show how donations transform lives by bringing clean water to communities.
- Educational Content: Write blog posts or create infographics that educate your audience about your cause, the issues surrounding it, and how they can get involved.
Example: Greenpeace often shares detailed blog posts and reports on environmental issues, helping their supporters stay informed.
- User-Generated Content: Encourage your supporters to share their own stories about why they support your charity. This not only creates content for you but also strengthens community engagement.
5. Choose the right digital marketing channels
There are several digital marketing channels you can use to connect with your audience. The key is to choose the ones that align best with your objectives and where your target audience spends most of their time.
- Social media: Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X are great for engaging with supporters and sharing updates. LinkedIn can be useful for connecting with corporate partners or professionals who might volunteer their skills.Tool: Tools like Hootsuite or Buffer can help you schedule posts and manage multiple platforms from one place.
- Email marketing: Despite the rise of social media, email remains one of the most effective channels for charities to build relationships with their audience.Tool: Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor can help you segment your lists and send personalized emails, ensuring that your messaging is targeted.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Ensure your website is optimised for relevant keywords so that when people search for issues related to your cause, they find you. Invest time in writing blog content, optimising page titles, and improving load times.Tool: Google Search Console and Ahrefs can track your website’s performance and provide insight into areas for SEO improvement.
- Google Ad Grants: Charities in the UK can benefit from Google’s Ad Grants program, which provides up to £7,000 per month in free advertising to help non-profits reach new audiences. Using Google Ads effectively can significantly boost your charity’s visibility.Tool: Google Ads and Google’s Keyword Planner can help you make the most of this valuable resource.
6. Set a budget and allocate resources
Your digital marketing strategy will need a budget, even if your charity is working with limited funds. Paid social media advertising, for example, can significantly increase reach. Allocating resources effectively can help you get the best return on investment (ROI).
- Free vs Paid tools: While many charities may rely heavily on free tools, it’s important to assess the potential impact of paid options.
Example: Many charities use Facebook’s paid advertising to target specific demographics, ensuring that their campaigns are seen by those most likely to engage. - Outsource vs In-house: Depending on your team’s expertise, you may need to outsource certain tasks like paid media, website optimisation, or analytics.
7. Track and measure your success
The final step in creating a digital marketing strategy is to ensure you can track and measure the success of your campaigns. Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge whether your efforts are effective and list these as ‘Key Results’ against each objective, to create a set of OKRs.
Examples of these might include:
- Website traffic (volume, sources)
- Email open rates or click rates
- Social media engagement (shares/reposts, comments)
- Donation or volunteer sign-ups
Use analytics tools: Google Analytics, social media insights, and email marketing reports will give you the data you need to track your progress. If something isn’t working, you can adjust your strategy accordingly.
By following these steps, your charity can build a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that raises awareness, engages supporters, and increases impact. The digital landscape offers countless opportunities for non-profits, and by focusing on the right channels and creating meaningful content, your charity can effectively tell its story and achieve its goals.
Looking for support on creating your digital marketing strategy? We’d love to help
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