How can marketing automation help your charity?

In this article, we look at how charities can nurture relationships with donors and volunteers using marketing automation. There has been a massive shift towards more personalised stakeholder engagement, especially when so many charities and other non-profit organisations have had to turn to digital channels to reach their audiences during the lockdown, including volunteers, donors, community members and advocates. This article will explain how marketing automation can help you attract, inform, inspire and engage your audiences – while taking some of the hard work out of marketing. 

It’s all about better relationships

As SharpSpring partners, we’ve seen first-hand how marketing automation helps our clients hold more meaningful, personal conversations, foster long-term relationships and encourages stewardship. Stewardship is a big focus for charities right now as it centres around the way a charity communicates and engages with supporters to give them the best possible experience, deepen relationships and encourage further involvement in the long-term. 

When communicating with supporters, charities must engage emotions and build an affinity for their cause. Understanding why people are engaged in your charity is an essential starting point for winning hearts and minds. And marketing automation can help you maintain continuity in your narrative across different audiences as well as make your supporters feel valued.

Increasing donations through marketing automation

Donations are the lifeblood of charities, using marketing automation you can:

1. Deliver high-impact stories
2. Connect donors with your mission at regular intervals 
3. Encourage timely increases in donation levels
4. Improve participation levels at fundraising events
5. Answer frequently asked questions
6. Gain valuable feedback
7. Suggest new ways they can get involved
8. Integrate with any content management system to easily share value-added content 
9. Thank donors them for their support
10. Free up your staff to do other work.

Increasing volunteers and volunteer onboarding through marketing automation

Many charities would be utterly lost without their volunteers. With marketing automation you can: 

1. Share volunteer leader contact information and welcome new volunteers
2. Reduce time by using emailers and social media to explain the who, what, when, where and why of volunteering with you
3. Efficiently communicate goals and expectations
4. Deliver volunteer orientation and training
5. Adapt messaging for different types of volunteer
6. Recruit new volunteers using emails, videos, landing pages and sign-up forms
7. Create a nurturing campaign to thank volunteers for their ongoing support
8. Preview the volunteer experience to attract, inspire and engage
9. Update volunteers on new fundraising initiatives
10. Enable staff to focus on other areas.

Marketing automation using a tool like SharpSpring costs from around £120 per month. It’s similar to HubSpot, but costs considerably less. It enables charities to target donors and volunteers with behavioural based communications to inspire action. You can also easily monitor the performance of your campaigns, integrate with a variety of content management systems and the interface is easy to navigate.

In this case study on Charity Digital, you can see how disability charity, Sense, used video and email automation to help tackle loneliness. The results show that it’s all about having the right content and delivering it at the right time.

Preface Studios are SharpSpring partners. SharpSpring is the marketing automation platform of choice for more than 1,000 digital marketing agencies and their 5,000+ clients. If you’d like to know more about marketing automation for your charity, please get in touch with Arps on the form below…