A guide for marketers
Today’s marketers at nonprofit organizations are under a lot of pressure. Their role has changed dramatically. Marketers are expected to deliver exceptional and personalized experiences. They have taken the reins of complex data segmentations. They are on the front lines of data privacy and compliance. Fundraisers turn to marketing colleagues to help them measure and attribute the impact of marketing activities on dollars raised.
Of course, technology is behind everything we do today. Almost every aspect of marketing is now digital and to keep pace, nonprofit marketers are making more strategic choices about technology.
In this guide we outline key trends impacting the way nonprofits are thinking about technology needs, key data considerations, and how to address the evolving role of a nonprofit marketer. We will make the case for starting marketing technology decisions with a strategy. Starting with business objectives and creating a blueprint will allow you to thoughtfully build out your tech stack.
The Next Big Thing: Customer Data Platforms
There are different approaches to building out organizational technology, from single applications that solve specific needs to best-of-breed ecosystems connected through a powerful foundational layer with ever-growing libraries of applications and programs that are built to integrate.
Decisions about the digital tools that will fold into your overall tech stack are critical. Every interaction shapes how people relate to your organization’s brand. While they do not see the systems behind the scenes that deploy the email or post to social media, it is up to you to ensure a smooth and seamless experience. Having a strategy that guides your tech stack and implementing your digital tools so that they play nicely with your organization’s existing technologies will help you achieve this. Our advice is to carefully consider upfront how the different technologies will connect to exchange information.
Here are some commonly used functionalities in the nonprofit technology space that would influence digital tool decisions:
Growing Trend: Online Communities and Portals
Interest in online communities is growing and nonprofits are beginning to view online communities and portals as an essential part of how they do business to help them deliver services, connect with volunteers, build communities, and conduct donor prospecting.
An online community or portal that is part of or connected to your customer relationship management (CRM) system offers the benefit of being able to expose some of the data to your constituents to allow them to securely manage their donations information, sign up for relevant volunteer opportunities, and more. In a community, it’s also common for supporters to interact with each other and your organization. An example here might be a community of leadership volunteers who are planning and executing a large event so that they can collaborate on marketing collateral and event logistics. In the higher education space, an example is communities connecting alumni with college classmates.
Journeys: Are you maximizing the value of marketing automation?
Marketing automation opens up incredible possibilities for nonprofits to meet many objectives across organizational functions to engage stakeholders in a variety of ways. Nonprofits are starting to recognize opportunities and putting powerful systems in place to support automations, but too often these digital tools are woefully underutilized. To maximize the value from your marketing automation technology system, it is important to have a sound technology strategy, a coordinated system design, and strong data integrations between the systems so that you can deploy relevant communications reflective of your donors’ past engagement or giving history.
Data management is complex. Do you have a plan?
Data informs our communications and engagement strategies making touchpoints more relevant and effective through thoughtful segmentation. Data points allow us to measure and attribute impact of marketing activities and mission delivery so that we can make better decisions.
Data management is complex. Is your data secure? Do you have privacy safeguards in place? Is your data accurate and complete? In laying out the groundwork for your technology ecosystem, consider how you are connecting data across different systems.
Creating Exceptional Audience Experiences
Here are just a few reminders to help you approach interactions in a thoughtful way:
Leveraging Social Media Data to Improve Constituent Interactions
Social media is a treasure trove of information about constituents. It can provide a window into what your audience cares about and who they know. Folding this data into your CRM can help you supplement your existing data and use your data more effectively.
Integrating social media requires effort, the right technologies, and clear governance around privacy, but it may be well worth it. This information shared by individuals themselves can give you deep insights that lead to bigger fundraising, marketing, and program delivery success.
A world without cookies
With changes coming from companies like Apple, customer privacy features are having huge impacts on nonprofit marketing campaigns and reporting metrics. It’s now critical to rely upon first-party data instead of third-party data. Having a sophisticated CRM in place to manage your first-party data (like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics) will future-proof your technology investments as you continue to evolve to meet privacy requirements.
To make data-driven decisions, your organization’s data must be accessible and answer your strategic questions. Through reports, dashboards, and by combining data you can make better decisions, optimize user experience, deepen engagement, and evaluate mission impact.
When mapping out your technology strategy and implementing tools, consider what reporting and analysis will be helpful to inform your organization’s work.
Combining data from different systems is not a novel concept. However, creating and automating systems that quickly and easily deliver the information you need without manual analysis requires significant skills and bandwidth and can only be done episodically, will allow you to make data-driven decisions.
Here are just a few of the benefits that organizations garner from thoughtfully combined data:
Matt Mastrangelo, Director of Annual Giving and Donor Engagement, Second Harvest of Silicon Valley
In selecting technology and configuring your ecosystem, security and privacy are incredibly important.
Establish a strong data governance policy to define what data is being collected, how it is stored, and what is considered to be personal. When using multiple systems that may be collecting different data points, it is critical that supporters’ preferences are observed across the platforms.
People are your nonprofits’ most important asset. As the approaches to digital strategy and technology are evolving, nonprofits’ staffing needs are also changing. Whereas in the past, nonprofit marketers were sought out more for their creative skills, today’s most successful candidates combine strategic thinking, tech savvy, creativity, and soft skills.
Whether you are a hiring manager seeking out the right talent for your organization or a professional looking for ways to hone your skills, here are our observations about skills and qualities of a successful nonprofit marketer today.
Strategic Thinker.
Today’s more advanced strategies leverage complex segmentations, marketing automations, and cross-channel efforts, all of which rely on sophisticated technology ecosystems. The marketers at the center of it all play a strategic role. They have access to more data and nimble reporting that allows them to establish clear plans and experiment to improve performance in a fast-moving environment. The most successful hires are individuals who embrace this strategic role. They are comfortable making decisions and are proactive.
Problem Solver.
Marketing today is not always a prescriptive process. Nonprofits are seeking out marketing staff with critical thinking skills to identify creative approaches when there is no playbook, making decisions and implementing solutions.
Creative Brain.
Changes in strategies have redefined creativity. Marketing used to mean catchy taglines and creative direction for graphic design. Today’s creative marketers are the ones who can apply that same outside the box thinking to segmentation, channel selection and innovative use of technology.
Technology Power User.
In the past marketers leaned in on marketing strategies, while data and technology were siloed and managed by others on staff. More accessible technology has democratized access to information. Successful marketing efforts are data driven. It is vital for marketers to be comfortable using technology and understanding data, from hands-on use of new tools to quickly accessing information, making necessary adjustments, and understanding capabilities to inform their thinking and planning.
They Have Soft Skills.
Collaboration is central to the work of today’s nonprofit. Marketers able to understand pain points of their colleagues and audiences and have the finesse to work well with others are an asset.
Technology transformation is a significant investment of resources and time. The senior nonprofit leaders driving these changes are staking their organizational capital on these important decisions. The potential payoffs of technology transformations are significant. The right combination of tools and solutions, configured in a thoughtful way, can transform your business and propel your organization into the future.
But we have also seen digitals implementations fail to meet expectations when quick fixes do not operate well within the context of other organizational tools. With rushed transitions, tools are not configured to meet organizational needs leaving expensive technologies underutilized. The failure to manage through change and train staff is another contributing factor.
We understand how much is at stake for your organization and your mission and wholeheartedly believe that most of the risk factors can be managed and mitigated. There are a few basic principles we apply to our projects that are essential to success:
Planning the future of your technology takes imagination. This is a bold step of envisioning what the future looks like and mapping out a digital ecosystem that will help you get there.
Most organizations do not stand up their entire technology ecosystem overnight. The initial technology strategy planning process will help you ensure that tools and solutions you put in place over time support your business objectives, integrate with each other, and take in consideration the needs of different business units across the organization.
Benefits of a digital roadmap
One size does not fit all. Unless you are a very small organization or have very modest and typical technology requirements, odds are you will be building an ecosystem of tools, applications, and solutions. It is important that those solutions operate in a holistic way and are built to be scalable for the future to allow your organization to grow and flourish.
● Having a digital roadmap will help you make the best possible decisions for your organization to support your mission delivery, marketing, and operations.
● Tools that adequately solve the challenges today may not be enough to support your evolving business. Having a blueprint helps you look beyond the immediate needs to envision and anticipate the future state and what technology will be required to support it.
● Planning saves organizations money by ensuring that you are investing in technologies and configurations that work together.
● Disconnected tools can create data silos impacting both your constituents’ experience and potentially creating privacy and compliance challenges.
● Planning is an opportunity to bring your stakeholders together, to consider the needs across the organization, and to build buy-in. A defined roadmap will provide you with guidance for a more cohesive ecosystem.
Good planning looks like
Discovery
Experts will take the time to audit your current technologies, meet with stakeholders, and ask questions to understand challenges and desired outcomes.
Identify the Gaps
Based on the information we gather and with your strategic objectives in mind, experts will identify gaps and help you anticipate where new needs are likely to emerge.
Define & Prioritize Requirements
Implementations do not happen all at once and we often have to make trade-offs. We want to help you get the most value out of your investment.
Develop a Digital Roadmap
We will help you imagine the future state and translate that vision into concrete recommendations. The typical roadmap includes:
HSSV’s CRM and online marketing solutions could not keep pace with the organization’s long-term goals for constituent engagement and growth. Incomplete view of constituent data due to poor integration among solutions made it difficult to personalize and target constituent engagement and fundraising campaigns. The organization recognized the need to scale marketing and fundraising activities but lacked technology to support these goals. Difficult to use tools created inefficiencies across the organization.
