Don’t Roast a Hen for Every Meal: Making Nonprofit Marketing Doable

Your cause is worthy. Your work is courageous, compelling, groundbreaking. Your nonprofit is thriving and bursting with activity that should be shared with the world through any and every marketing channel available. But finding the staff time and creativity to come up with fresh, original content for every channel on a regular basis can be exhausting. It's like preparing a feast worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting at every meal. It's just not realistic.

I recently attended an Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) webinar led by Kivi Leroux Miller, author of “The Nonprofit Marketing Guide: High-Impact, Low-Cost Ways to Build Support for Your Good Cause”. Miller gave some great tips and techniques to help nonprofits meet the marketing challenge by planning ahead, utilizing all available resources, and getting creative with marketing ingredients.

Miller's idea was that you don't have to be Martha Stuart or Julia Child to put together an enticingly delicious presentation of your nonprofit. Basically, you don't have to roast a hen for every meal. It's okay to serve spaghetti with sauce from a jar or even frozen pizza now and then. Every marketing piece you put out there doesn't have to be completely original. Use the content you've already created and reheat or remix it over time and across channels. Miller used this food framework to help the busy nonprofit professional:

• Be less frazzled
• Have more time
• Focus on creating great marketing content
• Achieve consistency across channels

Here is Miller's specific advice for the overwhelmed nonprofit:

Plan out your editorial calendar: It's like planning out your menus for the week or month.

• Organize the work by staff person, topic, channel, audience, or some other topic. Do what makes sense and flows logically for your organization.
• Use tools like Google Calendar to assign work and plan publishing in whatever time frame is realistic for you -- week, month, or quarter.

Try pushing through writer's block by using some alternative writing and methods:

• Lists
• How To's
• Reviews - books, movies, other organizations' strategies
• Tips
• Opinions
• Q & A Interviews

Generate ideas from outside your current frame of reference.

• Become an active social listener using tools like Google Alerts, HootSuite, Social Mention, or others.
• Survey target audiences using SurveyMonkey or some other survey tool to find out what content they want.
• Use aggregators like alltop.com to stay on top of the latest news in your field.

When writing content, go from cakes to cupcakes.

• Create something really robust, informed, and complex (like a delicious cake).
• Share it in different pieces.
• Observe reactions to those pieces. What do people like the most? Gather comments, observe newsletter subscriptions and social sharing, etc.
• Later, when you have something new to say about that topic, make cupcakes out of the best pieces. There's not much new brain work required, just re-packaging. You use the same ingredients and recipe, but you can reheat / remix the ingredients by creating a short and scannable piece with a few new insights mixed in. This give you an entirely new take on a great topic.

These tips are doable and can be initiated now without a lot of hoopla. So I challenge you, readers who feel like you're too busy or lack the creativity to be gourmet marketing professionals, put on your hairnets and start cooking!