In another blog post, we discussed how simple nonprofit audience research really is. That’s great! It’s not complicated. It takes time, but nonprofit market research isn't complicated.

I wanted to take a few minutes to examine exactly what we can do with that research, with a few examples. 

What is a content strategy? Like, specifically? In this post, I want to show you how to bring together lots of individual items to create an annual Communications Calendar. Most of your strategy gets embodied and realized in that calendar.

The basic idea of branding is very helpful: Branding is just thinking through your nonprofit’s identity. How do you want to be perceived by the public? This is more straightforward for an individual than for an organization, because an organization has multiple people involved. That’s why you need organized branding.

There are four basic goals we can try to achieve with nonprofit communications:

1.Fundraising Goals

2. Programming Goals (such as community education, etc)

3. Recruitment Goals

4. Brand Leadership Goals

Recent research from Hootsuite puts numbers to an insight that you probably already knew intuitively: a third of social media audiences have a negative view of organizations that “promote themselves too much.” Maybe you feel that way, too.

But uhm…isn’t it literally your job to promote your nonprofit? If you work in nonprofit communications, isn’t promotion literally your job? How can you be expected to promote your nonprofits brand if people have negative views of that sort of thing?

Here’s the trick:

Don’t promote your nonprofit directly (at least, not much); promote your nonprofit indirectly.

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