How to Do Nonprofit Marketing the Right Way & Get More Funds
46,136 for-profits crossed the annual $50 million revenue barrier from 1970 to 2009. Guess how many nonprofits crossed that barrier in the same period.
Just 144.
That statistic was cited in Dan Pallota’s 2013 TED Talk, “The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong.” In his talk, Pallota introduces the double standard that we, as a society, have when it comes to nonprofits.
CEOs of for-profits can earn million-dollar salaries to generate profits for their shareholders and no one bats an eye, yet it somehow feels wrong for the CEO of a nonprofit to earn the same salary to make the world a better place.
Pallota argues this shouldn’t be so. The nonprofit sector should operate like the for-profit sector. It should compensate its workforce competitively, invest in advertising and marketing, take risks, and think long-term and at scale.
Now, that doesn’t mean abandoning your mission or compromising your values. It doesn’t make your work less meaningful but instead gives you the tools to scale your impact while staying true to your purpose.
We should encourage nonprofits to scale and grow like we do for for-profits because, at the end of the day, nonprofits are wholly focused on influencing positive change. Don’t we all want to see more of that in the world?
As a digital marketing agency, it’s the advertising and marketing piece of the puzzle that interests us the most and the one we’re discussing here. We agree with Pallota’s take on nonprofits. We believe that if your nonprofit’s marketing isn’t working, it’s probably because you’re thinking like a nonprofit and not a for-profit business.
Let’s talk about how you can flip that script and the nonprofit marketing strategies that will help you overcome fundraising challenges.
Why You Need to Think Like a For-Profit Business to Do Nonprofit Marketing
- Nonprofits Are Businesses Too (Even If You Don’t Have Anything to Sell)
- What Does Thinking Like a Business Look Like?
- Budget Woes and Overcoming the Fear of Overhead
- Creating A Solid Nonprofit Marketing Strategy
- How to Approach Nonprofit Marketing
- Thinking Bigger Starts with Thinking Differently
Nonprofits Are Businesses Too
(Even If You Don’t Have Anything To Sell)
As Pallota mentions, there’s this idea floating around that nonprofits shouldn’t spend too much money on marketing. As if promoting your mission somehow cheapens it. As if investing in growth is wasteful. Because as a nonprofit, all your dollars should be spent on your cause, no?
Let’s put that myth to bed.
Nonprofits are businesses. You’re not chasing profits, but you’re still in the business of changing lives, improving communities, and solving big problems. And like any business, if people don’t know about you, they can’t support you.
Being a business also means you’re competing against for-profit businesses with massive marketing budgets. They may not be your direct competitors in the traditional sense, but you’re competing with them for people’s attention.
So, here’s a little tough love:
If you don’t invest in your marketing, you’re leaving impact (and donations) on the table.
We’ve seen it time and time again. The more a nonprofit invests in its digital marketing, the more it grows. You need to spend money to make money, or in this case, spend money to grow donor lists, volunteer pools, awareness – you name it.
Spending money on marketing will help your nonprofit raise more funds. Full stop. Funds to expand your mission. But you need to be strategic. Spending smartly means being able to increase your impact and affect more change.
Isn’t that what you’re after?
What does thinking like a business look like?
If your nonprofit had a product and nobody knew about it, how long would you last?
Not long.
That’s how businesses think, and it’s how your nonprofit needs to think as well. It doesn’t mean adopting a corporate mindset or abandoning your values. It means setting clear goals, knowing your audience, and building a system that drives sustainable growth.
Thinking like a business is about:
- Investing in long-term solutions instead of cheap fixes;
- Making data-driven decisions instead of guesses;
- Treating marketing as a driver of mission success, not an afterthought;
- Planning ahead instead of reacting in panic mode.
In business, marketing is fuel. It shouldn’t be any different for your nonprofit.
Budget Woes And Overcoming The Fear Of Overhead
Let’s talk money.
For businesses, more money usually means more profit, more growth, and more opportunities. For nonprofits, more money means something different – more people reached, more awareness generated, more education spread.
But no matter the mission, the bottom line stays the same: everyone wants more money. It doesn’t matter if you’re driven by purpose or profit; financial resources fuel your ability to do more and make a bigger impact.
Imagine what you could do with $10,000.
A lot of good, no doubt. Chances are you’d be reluctant to spend that money on anything but your cause. But what if investing that money in marketing helped your nonprofit raise $50,000 in donations? Then you could do 5 times as much good!
As we’ve mentioned, you can’t think of spending more on nonprofit marketing as taking money away from your cause.
Think of it as investing to generate even more money for your cause.
Regardless, sometimes the nonprofit marketing budget just isn’t there. That’s fine, we’re not here to shame tight budgets. We know the reality. But you can still market effectively without spending a fortune, and you should spend something. We also want you to challenge the scarcity mindset that we all have. In truth, there’s plenty of money to go around, you just need to bring it into your organization. That’s what smart marketing helps you do.
So, let’s talk about two common scenarios:
- You’ve got a small budget and need to stretch it as far as possible;
- You do have money, but it’s tied up in other areas, and you need to rethink how you allocate it, especially when it comes to marketing and overhead.
Doing More With Less
Spent wisely, even a few hundred bucks a month can go a long way.
The first step is setting a clear goal and creating a plan. Do you want to increase donor retention? Recruit volunteers? Boost awareness? Decide what you want to achieve, focus, and work backward. Your nonprofit marketing budget will go further if you know where you want it to take you.
The next step is to prioritize high-ROI activities. If you’re working with a limited budget, you may have to ignore our advice below about taking a multi-channel approach. Not all channels cost the same to market on or bring in the same results. And you can’t spread yourself too thin. Focus on what delivers the best results for your organization, and go from there.
Once you’ve decided on where to spend your money, track it. Tracking your results will let you know what’s working and help you justify your budget. It’ll also let you know what’s not working and needs to be optimized or reconsidered. Use Google Analytics, email open rates, or social insights to get the data you need.
Every dollar counts, so spend each one like it matters!
Finally, when you’re working with a small budget, don’t be afraid to ask for help. As a nonprofit, you can appeal to people’s moral compass. Use that to your advantage! Thinking like a business means using every single tool at your disposal and being smart about when and how you ask for help.
Many professionals and agencies are eager to take on pro bono work to support causes they care about. Heck, we do it ourselves! But no one can support what they don’t know exists. If you need help, don’t be afraid to reach out to writers, designers, marketers, and developers in your network. (This should already be obvious, but when we say “network,” we mean your professional network – just because your brother’s kid built a website once in high school doesn’t mean he should be in charge of yours.)
On top of asking for help, there are also programs and grants out there to help you. Remember those $10,000 we talked about? That’s how much Google offers as part of its Google Ad Grant program – $10,000/month in free search ads just waiting for you. Considering that search ads offer the best ROI for nonprofit paid advertising, this is definitely something you want to take advantage of!
Related: Will Your Nonprofit Benefit From A Google Grant?
Building Internal Buy-In To Get Your Team On Board
All too often, nonprofits hesitate to invest in marketing. Not because it’s unimportant but because it’s misunderstood. It takes a backseat. It gets lumped in with overhead, and board members and senior staff are reluctant to get on board.
Unfortunately, nonprofits feel immense pressure to keep their overhead low, and it keeps them from reaching their full potential. They get stuck in what’s called the nonprofit starvation cycle: the pressure to keep overhead low leads to underinvestment in marketing, staff, and technology. That, in turn, limits growth and reduces the effectiveness of their programs. As the authors of the Nonprofit Starvation Cycle article put it, “decreasing already austere overhead spending (also called indirect expenses) may jeopardize organizations’ very existence—not to mention their ability to fulfill their missions.”
A five-year study conducted by the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University demonstrated just how true this is. After examining more than 220,000 IRS Form 990s and conducting 1500 surveys with organizations with revenues greater than $100,000, the researchers found that many nonprofits were letting their organizations crumble just to keep overhead low.
Charity watchdogs like Charity Navigator have even updated their approach in recent years, acknowledging that a narrow focus on overhead misses the bigger picture. The emphasis is now shifting toward impact and transparency rather than simply how lean a nonprofit’s operations appear on paper.
For too long, overhead spending has been used as the marker of a nonprofit’s effectiveness. The lower a nonprofit’s overhead is, the greater its spending on its mission. So goes the traditional logic. But it’s not so simple.
Not all overhead is the same. It’s true that overhead typically refers to administrative and fundraising costs that aren’t programs themselves, but overhead is necessary infrastructure. It’s what keeps your nonprofit running smoothly, reaching more people, and doing better work. You can think of it as the foundation of a house: no one sees it from the outside, but without it, everything collapses.
This brings us to marketing.
Make the Case: Marketing as a Program Investment
If your marketing efforts directly drive fundraising, increase awareness, and boost community engagement, should they really be labeled as overhead?
We don’t think so.
Marketing that fuels your programs and enables more people to benefit from your services isn’t overhead. It belongs in the same bucket as program delivery because it increases your capacity to serve. So, if you need to get teammates on board, remind them that marketing is a smart, scalable investment.
If your marketing campaigns directly support program delivery by raising funds or reaching beneficiaries, they should be seen as a program investment, not a line-item expense. Share this perspective with your team:
- Show the connection between marketing efforts and real-world outcomes. Share real success stories from other nonprofits who invested in marketing and saw growth.
- Create a short presentation or one-pager that frames marketing as part of your program strategy and not separate from it.
- Break down how even small investments in email, ads, or storytelling can lead to major returns.
- Use data and projections when possible to illustrate potential ROI.
- Involve stakeholders early. Ask for their input. Show how marketing supports their goals too.
This helps reposition marketing not as “optional overhead” but as core to your mission’s success.
Once you have a marketing budget, big or small, you need to be smart about how to best spend it.
Creating A Solid Nonprofit Marketing Strategy
Having a clear goal, knowing your audience, and tracking/improving goes without saying. Let’s venture a little deeper.
Segment, Segment, Segment
Not everyone your nonprofit speaks to should get the same message.
Donors, volunteers, activists, and beneficiaries all have different relationships with your nonprofits, and you should segment them as such.
Segmenting your digital campaigns can boost revenue by as much as 760% compared to campaigns that aren’t segmented.
Like businesses, you need to make sure the right people are getting the right message. Start by dividing your contacts by:
- Donors vs. volunteers vs. program participants
- First-time donors vs. recurring givers
- Age, location, or communication preferences
The more you segment your audience, the more you can personalize your content. And these days, personalization matters: 81% of consumers prefer companies that deliver a personalized experience. It increases engagement and helps build deeper relationships. In the case of fundraising emails, the average open rates of personalized emails are 82% higher than generic emails.
Even the frequency of updates you send will be determined by the audience receiving them. For example, the majority of Gen Zers prefer monthly updates, while Boomers prefer quarterly updates.
Get Your Story Straight
Your mission matters, but how you talk about it matters just as much.
Sharing a heartfelt story is far more powerful than listing statistics. While it’s tempting to highlight how many people you’ve helped or how many pets you’ve placed in loving homes, those numbers don’t stick. Stories do. People are about 22 times more likely to remember a story than a standalone fact.
Stories are relatable and make it easier for people to understand. We create narratives for every aspect of our lives, so spreading your nonprofit message needs a powerful narrative to be well received.
Businesses spend time honing their messaging. They clarify who they are, what they do, and why it matters. Your nonprofit should, too.
Ask yourself:
- Can someone understand what we do in 10 seconds?
- Is our story consistent across our website, email, and social media profiles?
- Whether it’s urgency, hope, or pride, are we making people feel something?
Does your nonprofit marketing strategy inform? Great. Does it inspire? Even better!
The Importance of A Multi-Channel Approach
Nonprofits often rely too heavily on one platform, usually email or social media. While those are the most effective channels to encourage giving, with 32% and 30% of users being inspired to give via social media and email, respectively, they’re not the only channels. People interact with causes across multiple touchpoints.
Thinking like a business means spreading out your efforts and making them work together. Use:
- A strong, mobile-friendly website – this is a non-negotiable
- Email campaigns tailored to audience segments
- Social media that drives engagement and action
- Google Ad Grants to boost visibility
- Paid ads when possible to amplify high-performing campaigns
A multi-channel approach increases your reach and reinforces your message, leading to better results.
How to Approach Nonprofit Marketing
Don’t worry if you’re feeling a little overwhelmed – we’ve thrown a lot at you! To help you feel less overwhelmed, let’s take a look at some actionable steps you can take to get the ball rolling. This quick nonprofit marketing guide outlines what we’d recommend for any small or mid-sized nonprofit ready to get unstuck.
Step 1: Define 1-2 Clear Goals
To start, choose one or two focused, measurable goals to guide your strategy. We’ve already talked about this so we won’t go into too much detail here.
Step 2: Audit Your Existing Marketing
Take a hard look at what you’re currently doing. What channels are bringing results? Which ones feel like a black hole? Look at your website, email, social media, events, anything that communicates with your audience. Identify what’s working, who is doing the work, and what needs to be retired or refreshed.
Step 3: Clarify Your Messaging Across All Platforms
Keep your story simple, clear, and consistent wherever you tell it. Make sure your elevator pitch is compelling. Align your tone, visuals, and messaging across your site, emails, and social media. If someone lands on any of those touchpoints, they should instantly understand who you are, what you do, and why it matters.
Step 4: Fix Your Website
Your website may not be the number one channel for convincing people to make donations, but it’s still your digital home base. And it needs to work hard. Is it mobile-friendly? Fast-loading? Easy to navigate? Can someone donate in under 60 seconds? If not, it’s time for a tune-up. Prioritize your donation page and any action-oriented content that drives results.
Step 5: Pick Your Top 2–3 Channels
Don’t try to be everywhere. Choose a couple of marketing channels based on where your audience spends time and what aligns with your goals. That might be email + Instagram. Or a blog + Facebook. Or Meta ads + newsletters. Whatever it is, commit to showing up consistently with high-quality content.
Step 6: Use Free Tools
You don’t have to break the bank to use professional digital marketing tools. Here are some ways you can stretch your budget while still making a great impression:
- Apply for a Google Ad Grant to cover your search ads;
- Use Canva for branded design work;
- Send out emails with Mailchimp or ConvertKit;
- Leverage Meta’s fundraising tools and solutions.
Step 7: Track Your Data
Marketing without measurement is just guessing. Start simple: track open rates, click-through rates, page views, and donations. Use tools like Google Analytics and your email platform’s built-in reports. Learn what works and do more of it. Learn what doesn’t and pivot.
Step 8: Rinse and Repeat
With your data and insights from step 7, start the process over. Set new goals, keep the fundraising money flowing in, and increase your nonprofit’s impact.
We help our nonprofit partners walk through this process one step at a time so it never feels overwhelming. You don’t have to do it all at once, you just have to get started. If you’re looking for a helping hand, feel free to schedule a free consultation to discuss your nonprofit’s digital marketing efforts.
Thinking Bigger Starts with Thinking Differently
Nonprofits exist to change the world, but changing the world requires more than passion. It requires strategy. It requires investment. It requires thinking like a business.
Marketing is a lever you can pull to amplify your mission, but you need to approach it with the right mindset. Abandon the outdated idea that successful nonprofits are those that keep overhead low. Instead, adopt the mindset that it’s the impact you create that defines your success. To that end, marketing is mission-critical, not mission-adjacent.
Start thinking differently. Invest wisely. Tell your story boldly. Reach your audience where they are, and keep showing up. Start thinking like a business.
