Education vs. Engagement: Strike a Balance in Your Marketing

Nov 9

Every supporter has their own reasons for giving. Some have read the data and understand the factual importance of your cause, while others were moved by an impacted individual’s story. Others might just enjoy the annual holiday party your nonprofit throws for the community.

Your nonprofit marketing strategy needs to account for all of these unique groups of existing supporters and help you acquire new ones. To inspire all supporters to contribute to your cause, your marketing plan must balance education and engagement.

To help your fundraising efforts cater to all of your audiences, we’ll walk through the importance of education and engagement as well as tips for integrating these factors into your marketing strategy.

The Importance of Education in Marketing

By educating your audience, your nonprofit can establish trust. Start building credibility for your cause by highlighting why it matters and specifying how you’re using funds to improve your community. When you communicate the problems your nonprofit is working to address, you’ll inspire donors to be part of the solution.

Some basic ways you can incorporate educational content into your marketing include:

Developing engaging, shareable materials that lay out the history of your cause, why your target issues are worth addressing, and what your nonprofit is doing to help.
Creating blog posts about your work, including your triumphs and the challenges you face.
Producing YouTube videos that introduce viewers to your nonprofit’s story, mission, and beneficiaries.
Posting infographics with statistics related to your cause and impact.
Adding detailed pages to your website that describe your nonprofit’s programs and how they improve your beneficiaries’ lives.

The more context you provide about your nonprofit’s mission, the easier it is for donors to understand where they fit into the puzzle. This paves the way for strong, lasting relationships that lead to valuable support down the road.

The Importance of Engagement in Marketing

Donor engagement involves more than just soliciting gifts. Making donors feel valued for more than just their money by leveraging data-driven, personalized communication boosts donor retention and increases the chance they will donate again.

Depending on your nonprofit’s goals and resources, consider engaging audience members through:

Events. Beyond your annual fundraiser, consider organizing tours of your facility, arranging for supporters to meet beneficiaries or experts within your organization, or hosting a donor appreciation event. Along with engaging your current supporters, events have the added benefit of helping you reach new supporters and bring in additional revenue.
Surveys. Regular surveys show supporters that you care about their input and experiences with your nonprofit. Their feedback can highlight ways to improve your engagement efforts and your nonprofit as a whole, like better understanding what topics matter most to your mission supporters.
Social Media. Social media has made it easier than ever to connect with supporters around the world. Nurture meaningful relationships by directly responding to messages and comments. Consider creating social media challenges and hosting live Q&A sessions to encourage users to get more involved in your nonprofit’s work.

A successful marketing strategy accomplishes more than just bringing attention to your cause. By creating engagement opportunities, your nonprofit can convert one-time donors into monthly donors, loyal advocates, and committed volunteers.

5 Tips for Balancing Education and Engagement

To achieve the right balance between education and engagement in your marketing, you need to be informative while also facilitating personal connections. Follow these tips to enhance your traditional and digital marketing strategies.

1. Understand Your Audience

Your nonprofit’s supporters each have differing interests, preferences, and levels of knowledge about your cause. When planning your marketing content, ask yourself the following questions:

How much do potential and current supporters already know about our cause?
What could supporters learn from our existing resources?
What key details do donors and volunteers need to make a decision about supporting our nonprofit?
Which communication channels do our supporters prefer?
What engagement opportunities can we add to appeal to more supporters?

For example, let’s say the majority of your donors belong to younger generations and prefer hearing from your nonprofit via text. With this in mind, you might focus more on building your audience of opt-in mobile phone numbers and promoting advocacy opportunities or your text-to-give campaign, emphasizing how easy it is to contribute to your mission.

2. Leverage Storytelling

Storytelling enables you to interweave facts about your cause with emotional narratives to simultaneously engage and educate supporters. Try incorporating stories into your website, social media pages, direct response fundraising efforts, including direct mail, email, and more.

Consider telling stories like:

The origins of your nonprofit
How beneficiaries overcame challenges thanks to donors’ support
Volunteer experiences
Why individual donors choose to give

Across all of your content, be sure to maintain consistent branding so supporters immediately associate each unique story with your nonprofit. Engage supporters further by encouraging them to create user-generated content (UGC) about your cause and post it on social media, turning them into ambassadors for your nonprofit. This is an excellent way to reach new potential donors through the power of social proof.

3. Take an Omni-Channel Approach

Most supporters need a mix of educational and engaging content to maintain their trust and passion for your cause. Ensure supporters receive personalized content that gives them a complete donor journey by taking an omni-channel marketing approach.

Allegiance Group + Pursuant’s (AGP) guide to omni-channel marketing provides an explanation of this strategy: “Omni-channel marketing is a communication strategy that integrates various communication channels to create a unified, consistent experience for your audience of supporters… This approach focuses primarily on the user experience, addressing your supporters’ preferences and past behaviors.”

Essentially, omni-channel marketing takes into account where each supporter is in their unique donor journey and engages them with content on a variety of channels. In contrast with multichannel marketing, which involves putting the same message out across all channels, omni-channel marketing integrates all channels, making each subsequent message feel more natural to the supporter.

For example, a new supporter might attend a community event your nonprofit hosts. You would then follow up with them via a letter thanking them for attending. Then, you would send an email welcoming them to your nonprofit’s community and linking them to educational resources about your cause.

Omni-channel marketing can be used to balance educational and engagement-focused content, nurturing new supporters and improving donor retention. After a prospective supporter starts building a personal connection to your nonprofit, you might direct them to educational resources and vice versa.

4. Vary Content Format

You can make your educational content more engaging by changing up the format it’s presented in.

Many nonprofits often stick to blog articles and reports when it comes to sharing educational information. However, you can engage your audience and educate them at the same time by:

Sharing short, attention-grabbing fun facts on social media
Creating a decorative infographic that explains a complex process
Issuing donation call-to-actions through videos

When experimenting with new content types, ensure your branding remains consistent. This ensures a supporter will connect an event they attended with a video they see online, with an email in their inbox.

5. Analyze Your Data

Just as no two nonprofits are identical, there is no definitive ratio governing how you should balance education and engagement in your marketing efforts. Therefore, it’s important to be on the lookout for opportunities to refine your strategy to get the best results for your organization.

Analyzing data allows nonprofits to identify patterns among their donors, track changes, and spot opportunities for growth. Keep an eye on metrics related to your website traffic, social media engagement, and email marketing. Use these insights to adjust your focus on education and engagement over time.

For instance, you might determine that the vast majority of your donors flock to your website’s blog to learn the latest happenings about your nonprofit. As a result, you might focus more on blog content creation and direct your social media followers and email subscribers to check it out.

Regardless of whether people read the educational content on your website or attend one of your fundraising events, be sure to promptly and consistently thank them for their support. By establishing robust recognition practices, you’ll be able to cultivate a base of committed supporters who are informed about your mission and eager to play a long-term role in it.

Ashleigh Lambert

Ashleigh Lambert is the Vice President of Client Strategy at Allegiance Group + Pursuant, a full-service nonprofit marketing agency that aims to drive growth through integrated fundraising strategies. Ashleigh has over 21 years of marketing and fundraising experience, using this knowledge to effectively turn creative ideas into a strategic reality. She works to develop comprehensive strategic roadmaps that help nonprofits identify, cultivate, and retain donors through innovative engagement tactics.