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Finally, a newsletter designed for marketing and communications pros at community foundations.
Choosing the Best Social Media Platforms for Community Foundations
In the age of digital connectivity, social media is a vital tool for community foundations seeking to amplify their mission and engage with donors and community members. However, navigating the social media landscape can be overwhelming, especially with the temptation to establish a presence on every platform.
Spoiler Alert: You don’t have to be on every platform!
For a community foundation marketing teams, the key to success lies in strategically selecting the few platforms that will have the most impact. Here’s how to make that crucial decision and why prioritizing one, two, or three platforms is the smartest move.
Understanding Your Audience
The first step in selecting the right social media platforms is understanding where your donors and community members are most active.
To gain valuable insights, conduct surveys, analyze website traffic, and review past engagement metrics.
- LinkedIn: Are your donors primarily working professionals? LinkedIn might be their preferred platform.
- Facebook and Instagram: Does your community engage more with visual content? Are your donors retirees? These platforms might be better choices.
When in doubt, ask your donors and community members where they get their information. This direct feedback can be invaluable.
Evaluating Platform Strengths
Each social media platform has unique strengths and caters to different types of content and audiences. Here’s a quick overview of some major platforms:
- Facebook: Ideal for building a community and sharing a wide range of content, from text posts and photos to videos and live streams. It’s great for engaging with an older demographic (age 55 and up).
- Instagram: Perfect for visually-driven content. Highly effective for storytelling through images and short videos, attracting a younger audience.
- X (Twitter): Excellent for real-time updates and engaging with your audience through quick, concise messages. A hub for trending topics and discussions.
- LinkedIn: Best suited for professional content and networking. The go-to platform for connecting with other organizations and professionals in your field.
- YouTube: The place for long-form video content and answers to question in Google. If your foundation produces educational videos, documentaries, or event recaps, this platform is worth considering.
The Power of Focus
Why prioritize just a couple of these platforms? The answer lies in the power of focus.
- Quality over Quantity: By focusing on fewer platforms, you can produce higher quality content tailored to the specific audience of each platform. This ensures that your message is clear, engaging, and impactful.
- Consistency: Managing too many platforms can lead to inconsistency in posting and engagement. Concentrating on a few allows for a more consistent presence, crucial for building trust and a loyal following.
- Resource Management: Most community foundation marketing and communications teams operate with limited resources. By narrowing your focus, you can better allocate your time, budget, and manpower, ensuring that your efforts are more efficient and effective.
- Data-Driven Decisions: With a focused approach, it’s easier to track and analyze your performance. This allows you to make data-driven decisions to continually improve your strategies and outcomes.
5 Step Approach
Here’s a step-by-step approach to deciding which platforms to prioritize:
- Identify Your Goals: What are you trying to achieve? Whether it’s increasing donations, raising awareness, or engaging the community, your goals will guide your platform selection.
- Analyze Your Audience: Use data and insights to understand where your audience spends their time online. This can include looking at your website analytics, social media metrics, and survey results.
- Evaluate Your Content: What type of content does your foundation excel at creating? Choose platforms that align with your content strengths, whether it’s visual, written, or video content.
- Consider Your Resources: Be realistic about your capacity. Select platforms that you can manage effectively with the resources you have.
- Test and Adapt: Start with a focused approach and be open to adapting based on performance. Monitor your results and be willing to shift your focus if needed.
By focusing on the platforms that offer the best opportunities for engagement and aligning with your resources and content strengths, you can create a more impactful and efficient social media strategy.
Remember, in the realm of social media, quality and consistency are the keys to building a meaningful and lasting connection with your audience.
5 Best Free Tools for Community Foundation Marketing
Community foundations often operate with limited resources, aiming to maximize every dollar to support those in need.
Creating daily content for donors, producing inspiring videos about grantmaking, and sharing personal stories of the individuals your foundation supports can be challenging without breaking the bank.
Fortunately, there are several free tools available to help you achieve your marketing goals without compromising on quality.
1. Canva
You’ve likely heard of Canva, the free, template-based content creation tool. Over the past couple of years, Canva has partnered with more designers, making it easier to create even better content.
Pro tip: You don’t have to scour through thousands of options.
Here are a handful of portfolios from designers that work well for the needs of community foundations:
- Social Media Posts and Quotes: Ideal for engaging your audience with eye-catching visuals.
- Informational Videos: Great templates for creating compelling video content.
- Instagram Reels and Stories: Perfect for sharing impactful short-form content.
2. Adobe Firefly
Searching for non-copyright images can be time-consuming. That’s why AI image generation has become a reliable option for blog images or social media photos.
Adobe Firefly is currently the best free tool for image generation, though it limits the number of searches you can perform each month, so be selective with your searches.
As a backup, Craiyon offers free options, but their results can be hit or miss.
3. CapCut
While Canva is excellent for video editing on a computer, CapCut is our go-to for on-the-go video editing on your phone.
With an intuitive user interface and easy navigation for first-time users, CapCut makes video editing simple and effective, ensuring you can produce high-quality videos wherever you are.
4. Google Trends
Improving your SEO is crucial for reaching a wider audience. Google Trends is a quick and easy tool to enhance your SEO strategy.
Before publishing a blog or creating a new landing page, input your headline or topic into Google Trends. This tool helps you identify the best keywords and phrases to boost your content’s visibility.
5. Grammarly
Regardless of your writing proficiency, having someone else review your work is essential. However, in the fast-paced world of community foundations, this might not always be possible.
Grammarly can act as your virtual copy editor, ensuring your content is free of errors.
Pro tip: Always double-check donor names and proper nouns. A misspelled name can upset donors who are excited to see their names on your website.
Create Great Content
Don’t be afraid to rely on free tools to create great content.
While there might be times when spending a little is necessary to achieve your goals or when you may need to partner with an agency to develop your messaging, these free tools can significantly enhance your marketing efforts.
These recommendations will enable you to create inspiring content that motivates your community to act.
Why Lead Generation Collateral is Worth the Effort
Attracting prospective donors to open a donor-advised fund (DAF) requires more than just compelling messaging—it demands a strategic approach to lead generation.
While your development team is usually at the forefront of donor engagement, marketing can significantly bolster their efforts.
Even the smallest teams can benefit from a marketing-first strategy for donors, and here’s why.
Understanding Lead Generation
Lead generation content can be invaluable. These are documents, reports, webinars, or other types of collateral that interest potential donors. For community foundations, this collateral is tailored to the interests of potential donors.
Consider a “Donor-Advised Fund How-To Guide.” While staff at community foundations discuss donor-advised funds daily, most new philanthropists and first-time donors have little knowledge about them.
This is where marketers play a crucial role.
Marketing Advantage
Instead of relying solely on your development team to have individual conversations with potential new donors, marketing can nudge donors along their giving journey.
At its core, lead generation is about identifying and attracting individuals interested in your cause and nurturing them into potential donors.
Imagine this: A donor hears about your community foundation and wants to learn how to give their charitable dollars. They might search your site, but without guidance, they might leave without connecting.
That’s a potential donor lost.
Now, imagine they see a sidebar or pop-up offering a “Donor-Advised Fund How-To Guide.” Curious, they provide their name and email to access the 3-4 page document you created. Not only do they gain valuable information, but you also capture their contact details for follow-up.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
You might think, “I don’t have time to create something like that and incorporate it into our website.” But consider the cost-benefit analysis.
Creating lead generation content may take extra hours to perfect the message and design the document, but the alternative is time-intensive, one-on-one conversations that add up quickly.
If a development team member spends 30 minutes per conversation and has 10 such conversations a year, that’s five hours spent. Is it worth five hours of your time as a marketer to strengthen the new donor pipeline?
Over multiple years, the benefits become even more significant.
A lead generation tool can live on your site indefinitely, passively generating new leads for the development team. Once created, your heavy lifting is done, and you reap the rewards.
While you’ll need to make tweaks and improvements over time, the initial investment can yield significant returns.
Getting Started
So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to start creating. And if you need any help, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Whether you’re looking to bring in more donors or improve your network of professional advisors, we can help you begin the process or build a lead generation tool from scratch.
What is Your Storytelling Process? 6 Strategies for Discovering Compelling Narratives
As marketing professionals at community foundations, finding engaging narratives can sometimes feel like searching for a needle in a haystack.
With hundreds of nonprofits and countless people benefiting from our grantmaking, how do we find that perfect story that will inspire the next major gift?
Here’s are six strategies we’ve proven over a decade to identify changemakers and emotional stories that capture the essence of our work.
1. Dive Deep into Data Streams
Numbers, statistics, and data can be potent catalysts for storytelling.
Start by analyzing demographic insights of donors, scouring keywords from grant applications, or examining community needs assessments. These data points provide a clear picture of themes to focus on in the coming months.
For instance, check if your city or county has a key performance indicator (KPI) dashboard measuring community health, education, etc. Use this data to highlight areas of high need or success.
A simple keyword search (or better, AI prompt) can reveal the most common keywords used by grantees, leading you to potential story topics.
2. Access Your Grant Management Software
Ensure you have ongoing access to your community foundation’s grant management software. This access allows you to skim applications regularly, gaining insights from a marketer’s perspective rather than relying solely on program managers.
This proactive approach can uncover hidden gems that might otherwise be overlooked.
3. Schedule Regular Meetings with Development and Program Staff
Your colleagues often have a wealth of stories but may not know how to communicate them effectively. Monthly meetings with development and program staff can be invaluable.
Ask questions to uncover content for your stories: Have they met a new donor with an interesting backstory? Is a nonprofit tackling an old problem in a new way? When did they last encounter a story that made them proud to work at a community foundation?
Over time, you’ll train your colleagues to think like marketers, and they’ll start bringing stories to you.
4. Harness the Power of Human Connection
Behind every statistic is a human story waiting to be told.
Take time to connect with nonprofit leaders and partners in person. These interactions are potential treasure troves of narratives, offering insights into the challenges, triumphs, and aspirations of those you serve. Join your development colleague or program manager on site visits once a month.
Building these relationships can lead to a steady stream of inbound stories as trust and familiarity grow.
5. Leverage Partnerships and Collaborations
You don’t always have to find stories alone. Partner with local nonprofits, funders, and community influencers with strong marketing capabilities.
Do some nonprofits post great videos on social media? Is a donor particularly active online? Collaborate with these organizations to access a wider network of stories, resources, and expertise.
These partnerships can offer deeper access to content that might otherwise remain hidden.
6. Embrace Diversity and Inclusion
Every community is a tapestry woven with diverse threads of culture, identity, and lived experiences.
Actively seek out stories that amplify marginalized voices and underrepresented perspectives. Connect with new partners and emerging nonprofits rather than relying on familiar sources.
By championing diversity in your storytelling, you honor the mosaic of your community and foster a culture of belonging and empowerment.
Can ChatGPT Build a Marketing Strategy for a Community Foundation?
For those of us in the marketing and communications field, Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming the way we communicate, strategize and connect with audiences.
Many of us who work for nonprofits are just scratching the surface of the possibilities with this new technology and the new tools that seemingly hit the market each day. Often, I find myself trying to stretch the limits of the most popular GenAI tool – ChatGPT.
While large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have many well-documented shortcomings, I want to share how helpful ChatGPT could be in the initial phases of building a marketing campaign strategy for a business.
In this case, I’m using a fictional community foundation.
Why? Because it’s a complex nonprofit model many are not familiar with (again, stretching the limits).
Community foundations are place-based nonprofit organizations that act as philanthropic hubs for immediately surrounding communities. More than 900 community foundations across the U.S. connect donors to local nonprofits and initiatives that address need – mostly within a defined geographic area.
Donor-advised funds (DAFs) are the primary charitable vehicle for community foundation donors. In short, DAFs are charitable giving accounts that are invested for growth and used for grantmaking at a donor’s discretion.
With that limited knowledge and some high-level audience insights, I wanted to see what ChatGPT could create for me (and other community foundation communicators and marketers).
So, I started prompting… and prompting… and re-prompting ChatGPT until I reached a point of satisfaction (and dare I say admiration) at the responses ChatGPT provided.
Rather than detail each prompt and rewrite, I’m sharing where I landed with my first five prompts (I added many more to dive in deeper!).
I hope other community foundation professionals can benefit from this knowledge sharing. Enjoy!
(For the record: All of the above was written by me, a human.)
My 10-Step Approach
I approached prompting ChatGPT like I would normally approach building a marketing campaign, beginning with the following:
- Attain a solid understanding of the business model and core product offering (in this case, community foundations and DAFs)
- Collect demographics of the target audience
- Hone in on a goal aligned to a standard marketing funnel (i.e. awareness, conversion, retention, etc.)
- Target marketing channels based on the audience insights, goal and budget
- Allocate budget to paid media channels accordingly
- Assign applicable key performance indicators (KPIs) that align with high-level goal
- Define a SMART goal to measure overall campaign success
- Uncover additional audience insights
- Perform a competitor analysis
- Research industry trends that may impact audience behavior
Below are my five prompts that tackle most of the work numbered above.
Prompt #1
Intent:
- Begin prompt with an “Act as” or similar statement to have ChatGPT take on the persona I want (i.e. You’re a Chief Marketing Officer with 20 years of experience)
- Enter a task or responsibility for the bot
- Provide details about my organization and core product offering
- Input parameters and details to strengthen the response
- Include audience insights for targeting
- Specify how I want the information formatted in the response (Please present your outline in a table format…)
Prompt #1 – Response from ChatGPT:
Prompt #2:
Intent:
- Identify a campaign goal that is SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound)
Prompt #2 – Response from ChatGPT:
Prompt #3:
Intent:
- Use the bot to uncover audience insights for target demographic
Prompt #3 – Response from ChatGPT:
Prompt #4:
Intent:
- Use the bot to retrieve a competitor analysis
Prompt #4 – Response from ChatGPT:
Prompt #5:
Intent:
- Use the bot to retrieve a industry trends and research
Prompt #5 – Response from ChatGPT:
Diving Deeper
Not a bad start!
From here, I dove into using ChatGPT for keyword research, writing a creative brief, content recommendations based for assets and more.
While ChatGPT’s responses weren’t perfect, after refining my prompt writing, I found the responses quite helpful. Getting the first prompt right was really the key.
Most importantly, prompting ChatGPT cut out the normal chunk of time it would have taken me to accomplish this work on my own.
While it’s evident this work still needs a human touch and experience to be refined and perfected, it’s nice to have help getting started on campaign building.
Overall, I’m encouraged by these responses and what they could mean for other marketing and communications professionals at community foundations. We’re truly just at the tip of the iceberg.